Thinking through positionality in post-socialist politics: Researching contemporary social movements in Ukraine

ABSTRACT

This article argues that heterogeneity among leftist political activists in Ukraine creates new spaces for investigation of social movements in post-socialist spaces. It suggests that the researcher’s positionality impacts how this diversity is seen, interpreted, and analyzed. Drawing from scholarship on engaged anthropology and ethnographic research during the 2013–2014 Euromaidan mobilizations, I show how fragmentation among leftists had a dual influence, sometimes encouraging leftists to move beyond difference to avoid alienation, and other times creating greater fractures that limited the creation of alternative social projects.

KEYWORDS:

• Ukraine
• post-socialism
• social movements
• engaged research
• decommunization

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All names used in the text are pseudonyms unless otherwise noted.

2 One important aspect of this lack of presence is the limited mobility of many Ukrainians. While mobility to Europe has improved, especially since the implementation of a visa-free regime in the summer of 2017, at the time of my 2013–2014 research, many Ukrainians could not easily travel to Europe or the United States because of bureaucratic and financial limitations.

3 All transliterations are from Ukrainian according to Library of Congress rules, unless I am quoting someone else’s transliteration.

4 Throughout this article, I refer to events and activists being “on Maidan,” which indicates participation of various groups with a diverse set of goals throughout the protests; I do not see the protesters of Euromaidan as a unified political voice.

5 Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party in 1927 and exiled in 1929, suggesting that his role in planning the famine was quite limited.

6 In this context, the suggestion that Trotsky was a homosexual is meant to discredit Trotsky. Nationalists using homosexuality as a slur in this way intend for it to be linked with pedophilia (pederast is a slang word for homosexual that directly evokes pedophilia).

7 My reconstruction of this anecdote is taken from my own field notes, a reflection written by one of the presenters after the presentation (in English), and various posts on Facebook from leftists that I gathered following the presentation (in Ukrainian).

8 The authors of the Facebook posts agree that of the 60 attendees, about half were from far-right groups.

9 The group name “C14” evokes the Ukrainian word sich (СІЧ), which refers to Cossack settlements in the Ukrainian territory from the 16th to 18th centuries; Cossacks are major figures in Ukrainian nationalist historiography (see, for example, Popson 2001).

10 As Snyder has written, “We will never know with precision” how many people were killed during the famine of these years because of lack of documentation; however, “it seems reasonable to propose a figure of approximately 3.3 million deaths by starvation and hunger-related disease in Soviet Ukraine in 1932–1933” (2010, 53).

11 An American research colleague also present for much of the protests photographed and shared this sign. When I asked her if she knew where it came from, she said she did not, signifying to me that leftists had little to do with it hanging in the City Hall, and that other protesters probably also did not know its origins.

12 This article has disappeared from the Haslo.info website when I searched for it again in November 2017. It may have intentionally been removed because of its association with Borot’ba, which I suggest because other, older articles still appear in the archive. It may also have been erased because it was an announcement rather than reporting. I documented this announcement as a screenshot in January 2014, and this translation is my own.

13 This letter was translated into several languages, including English.

14 Most recently, the “Anthropology in/of Eastern Europe” roundtable at the 2017 ASEEES meeting and the closing roundtable at the 2017 Soyuz Symposium directly addressed these questions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fulbright IIE Student Research Grant: Ukraine.