Left divergence, right convergence: anarchists, Marxists, and nationalist polarization in the Ukrainian conflict, 2013–2014

ABSTRACT

The article traces nationalist polarization and divergence within the Ukrainian new left in response to the Maidan and Anti-Maidan protests in 2013–2014, and the military conflict in Eastern Ukraine. The ideological left-wing groups in the protests were too weak to push forward any independent progressive agenda. Instead of moving the respective campaigns to the left, they were increasingly converging with the right themselves and degraded into marginal supporters of either pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian camps in the conflict. The liberal and libertarian left supported the Maidan movement on the basis of abstract self-organization, liberal values and anti-authoritarianism. In contrast, the Marxist-Leninists attempted to seize political opportunities from supporting more plebeian and decentralized Anti-Maidan protests and reacting to the far-right threat after the Maidan victory. They deluded themselves that Russian nationalists were not as reactionary as their Ukrainian counterparts and that the world-system crisis allowed them to exploit Russian anti-American politics for progressive purposes.

KEYWORDS:

• Euromaidan
• polarization
• anti-imperialism
• nationalism
• radical left
• liberal left

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the special issue editors, anonymous reviewers, Yuliya Yurchenko, and Oleg Zhuravlev whose comments helped to improve the article as well as to Savelii Barashkov for language proofreading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Volodymyr Ishchenko http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6145-4765

Notes

1 ‘Maidan’ literally means the central square of the city. Since 1990 Kiev’s central square was the starting spot for several mass campaigns ending in a change of the government. Because of this, ‘maidan’ acquired a meaning of a large anti-governmental protest campaign usually with nationalist-liberal pro-Western agenda.

2 At least up until president Petro Poroshenko’s devastating defeat in 2019 elections. Rhetoric of the new president Volodymyr Zelenskyi is less nationalist and polarizing, yet the direction of his policies is still not clear at the moment of writing.

3 For extended analysis of the events in Ukraine in 2013–2014, from leftist perspectives, and their historical, political economy, and international contexts see, especially, de Ploeg (2017); Ishchenko (2014a, 2015); Ishchenko & Yurchenko (2019); Yurchenko (2018).

4 I also draw on my earlier research (Ishchenko, 2011a, 2011b, 2016b, 2017) together with my personal participation in the movement since 2001 and multiple discussions with the activists.

5 See more on KPU and for the general mapping of Ukrainian left movement on the eve of Maidan events in Ishchenko (2016b, in press).

6 The only exception was the ‘Autonomous Resistance’ (Avtonomnyi Opir) organization, which originated in the extreme right milieu but completely transformed itself into a kind of left anti-authoritarian Ukrainian nationalism and used to be the most important group close to the ‘new left’ in the largest western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Noteworthy, cooperation with the ‘Autonomous Resistance’ used to be a very controversial issue among the new left before Maidan.

7 See analysis of Ukrainian new left discussions on nationalism-related issues during various campaigns in Ishchenko (2011a, 2011b, 2017).

8 The main points of criticism by the Anti-Maidan left were related to the immediate consequences for Ukrainian workers, futility of integration into the crisis-burdened EU, and the destruction of the economic basis for independent development. Analysis of the DCFTA consequences for Ukraine’s economy in 2016 largely confirmed these predictions (Kravchuk, 2016).

9 A group of Marxist economists started to publish a serious critical analysis of the EU association agreement with Ukraine but only since 2015 when the issue had been already decided (Kravchuk, 2015, 2016; Kravchuk, Popovych, Knottnerus, & van Heijningen, 2016).

10 According to Zhukov’s modelling (2016) economic factors were stronger predictors of separatist violence in Donbass than ethnic or cultural factors.

11 A very telling example are typical accusations of Ukrainian radical nationalists for allegedly professing ‘Russian world’ ideology only because Ukrainian far right are also conservative, sexist, and illiberal like Russian government, e.g. (AK19, 2018; Mrachnik, 2018).

12 For example, educational Marxist-feminist club Avrora organised by ex-Borotba activists in Donetsk.

Additional information

Funding

This publication has been produced as part of the research project ‘Comparing protest actions in Soviet and post-Soviet spaces’, which is organized by the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen with financial support from the Volkswagen Foundation. The article draws on the research ‘Ukrainian Left during Maidan and after’ commissioned by Die Linke group in the Europarliament.

Notes on contributors

Volodymyr Ishchenko

Volodymyr Ishchenko is a research fellow at the Institute of Slavic Studies, Technical University of Dresden. His research focused on protests and social movements, revolutions, right and left politics, nationalism, civil society. He authored a number of articles and interviews on contemporary Ukrainian politics, the Maidan uprising and the following war in 2013–2014. He is currently working on a collective monograph ‘The Maidan Uprising: Mobilization, Radicalization, and Revolution in Ukraine, 2013–2014’.