Review

Toward the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War

Ishchenko, Volodymyr. Toward the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War. New York: Verso Books, 2024.

The intensification of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict in February 2022 has been one of the most polarizing events in the field of Slavic Studies, impacting professional and personal relationships. Among the most polarizing topics are the causes of the full-scale invasion, the political implications of Russia’s actions, and the relative applicability of “decolonization” as a framework of analysis for post-Soviet states. As a personal anecdote, I was in Russia conducting PhD research with a Fulbright grant when the war broke out. That week, two of my best friends from Nizhny Novgorod were staying with me in my St. Petersburg flat. The first few days we had fun as usual, catching up on life and discussing politics. We periodically checked our phones for updates on escalating tensions, but on 24 February we were all equally floored by Russia’s invasion. We sat motionless in my apartment racking our brains with explanations, placing the Kremlin’s action in historical context, but we could not make sense of what was going on. One of my friends—the most politically astute, and, I used to joke, the most ‘Russian’ friend I had—at one point said, “I’m done trying to guess what my government is doing.” In the proceeding weeks, he packed his things and relocated his family entirely.

Since then, we have stayed in touch over Telegram, sharing our takes on events since then, including the recent death of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, the fate of a post-war Ukraine, and whether or not we can retrieve a semblance of justification for Russia’s actions and Putin’s rhetoric.

In the field of Slavic studies, academics have taken definite stances, and it seems like the majority of Western-funded NGO employees and professors with tenured positions at big universities have firmly positioned themselves as pro-Ukrainian at all costs, giving license to, or at least not challenging, the artificial comparison between Putin and Hitler. Some more progressive liberals have promoted a more complex analysis that recognizes Russia’s anxieties about NATO expansion as legitimate but sees the elevation of full-scale invasion and annexation as condemnable. Still, another position, pervasive in the left, is more sympathetic to Russia, and sees Ukraine as a victim of Western imperialism and aggressive NATO expansion, all of which are influencing the actions of Zelenskyi, the comedian-become war President and poster boy for the “new cold war.” A more astute analysis might say that the truth is somewhere in between all of these positions, recognizing Ukraine as a victim of tensions that have been present and boiling since the dismemberment of the USSR. The unfortunate truth is that the working class is virtually ignored by all positions.

This is precisely the position that Volodymyr Ishchenko takes in his new book, Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War. Ishchenko, a researcher at Freie Universität in Berlin, was born in Ukraine in 1982 to parents who were firmly members of the Soviet intelligentsia. His familial background, along with his history in Ukraine’s post-Soviet New Left movement, informs much of the analysis that he provides, but it also reflects a deeply personal analysis of what will likely culminate in, according to him, the disappearance of his home country.

The book is comprised of a collection of articles and interviews that span the history of the Ukraine conflict, from the annexation of Crimea to the full-scale invasion in 2022. Ishchenko is candid about what such a layout entails; with the benefit of hindsight, he (and we) can reflect on his interpretive errors and expectations, which if anything speaks less toward his fallibility and more toward the shifting, often unexpected, and wildly conjectural course of events. Indeed, no observer can claim to have guessed all aspects of the crisis from Maidan to today, even if some are unwilling to acknowledge their previous miscalculations. As my friends in Russia said about their government, there comes a point when even the most informed observer can be misled. Putin, Zelenskyi, and Western leaders are all rationally acting in their interests, intent on demonstrating the irrationality of their respective foes.

Ishchenko navigates this complicated game of victimhood, culpability, and condemnation with a sober class analysis of the position that post-Soviet people and states found themselves in in the 1990s, and how some of the aspirations for reconstruction failed or quickly dissolved. The first part of the book provides a detailed problematization of the approach that often sees Ukraine as the most “pluralistic” of the post-Soviet states due to an ethnic east/west divide. Instead, Ishchenko suggests that this pluralism arises from a central class conflict between, on the one hand, “the professional middle class allied with transnational capital and, on the other, local political capitalists (colloquially known as ‘oligarchs’) who could only rely on the passive consent of a segment of the working class” (3). These two poles divide Ukraine between a southeast close to Russian capital and influence, and a firmly Western-oriented western region. Indeed, Ishchenko’s description of the class dynamics is perhaps the most unique perspective in the book, choosing to see pre and post-Maidan (2014) Ukraine as a country deeply fractured by its class divisions and the competing interests of foreign and domestic capital.

A cursory survey of the articles published by major Western media outlets would suggest that Ukrainians have been overwhelmingly pro-European Union and anti-Russian for some time. Ishchenko demonstrates how these cleavages over allegiance were a political tool leveraged by the competing capitalists in the struggle for power. In 2014 the south and eastern anti-Maidan protesters were more plebian, working class, and decentralized drawing from a number of positions that were united only in their suspicion and rejection of the “Kiev junta” that was Maidan. On the other hand, the Maidan protesters were overwhelmingly more middle class, pro-EU, and to some extent co-opted by nationalists and foreign NGOs. Over time that co-optation became total, even in the south and east, where middle-class Ukrainians imposed a nesting doll of policies promoting anticommunism, anti-Russianism, and pro-EU positions all encapsulating a virulent nationalism, intensifying the process of rewriting historical memory.  

Rather than cutting the nationalists off, the government under Petro Poroshenko that came after 2014 saw some value in allying with them in its effort to position Ukraine away from Russia toward closer integration with the EU. Hence, the balancing act of appeasing the competing interests in Ukraine with laws that restricted the Russian language and cultivated anti-communist hysteria, while at the same time signing an Association Agreement with the EU. However, try as he may to balance the social contradictions, Poroshenko was as much a corrupt symptom of a degenerative political system as his predecessor, albeit with competing capitalist interests. Ishchenko is clear in pointing out that no matter how Ukrainian leaders tried to legitimate their position, they always evaded the more complicated task of actually addressing the demands of the working class.

Underlying the limitations of Ukraine’s popular elections have been the lingering requirements of the IMF, which played a major role in the early years of President Zelenskyi’s term. Despite promising a “new politics” Zelenskyi remained beholden to the balance of austerity requirements and the interests of Ukraine’s powerful oligarchies. In the early months of Zelenskyi’s term, Ishchenko expressed a kind of neutral optimism that recognized the young president’s ability to mobilize a previously disinterested group of voters, but he rightfully argues that they were motivated less out of enthusiasm for Zelenskyi and more out of disdain for Poroshenko. In that case, the political value of the “new politics” was tenuous at best, offering only a moment of mass disillusionment. The sad reality is that rather than following through with his promised anti-corruption campaign, Zelenskyi has allied with both the corrupt right and the corrupt center, fueled by Western finance that has prevented Ukranians from fully understanding that his time in office has been a massive political let down, with and without the war.

The final topic worth mentioning is Ishchenko’s discussion of identity politics and the “decolonization agenda” emerging from the Ukraine crisis. Since February 2022 the field of Slavic Studies has taken a decisive turn toward “decolonization,” which seeks to rid the Ukrainian public sphere of Russian influence and de-emphasize Russia in academic analyses of Soviet collapse. In fact, so powerful has the “decolonial” framework become that the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) conference themed their 2023 meeting “Decolonization.” Yet, as Ishchenko points out, decolonial theorizing in Slavic Studies is curiously devoid of social critique and almost completely dominated by identity-based arguments. In places like India, Algeria, and Ghana, decolonial theory was decidedly pregnant with Marxist categories of social welfare, anti-imperialism, and revolutionary praxis. It appears Ukraine is the place in which neoliberalism has successfully co-opted the decolonial framework, stripping it of its revolutionary potential and rendering it a tool in the interest of identity and nationalism. This is a dangerous process not only because it threatens to leave the capitalist status quo after the war, but because it legitimates the tokenization of select Ukrainians at the expense of the majority. Indeed, as Ishchenko points out, the majority of ‘Ukrainian voices’ being lifted are Western-connected English-speaking intellectuals, not that of the working class majority.

As far as critiques go, I would be remiss as an environmental historian if I did not express dissatisfaction with Ishchenko’s engagement with the role of natural resources in the conflict. Although passively dismissed at the beginning of the book, it is clear that the undeveloped oil and gas in eastern Ukraine is of interest to both the collective West, desperate to be free from Russian dependence, and Russia, determined to maintain its supply to Europe. One could argue that the war has destroyed Russia’s European market, but, as the US wars in Iraq, Kuwait, Vietnam, and other places demonstrate, the world has a relatively short-term political memory (something Putin keenly expressed in his interview with Tucker Carlson). What is more, it seems abundantly clear that the billions of dollars the United States has contributed to the war effort will condemn Ukraine to eternal debt, payable only by contracts to Exxon Mobile and Shell to develop Ukraine’s oil and gas reserves. As I like to quip, there is no such thing as a purely nationalist war in the Anthropocene—everything is about resources.

In the end, the real contribution of Ishchenko’s book is to remind readers of the class tensions that caused the conflict and have charted its course. It may be impossible to capture the multiplicity of voices that emanate from Ukraine’s east and west, but one thing is certain—and Ishchenko is clear— there are plenty of voices yet to be captured. As a proxy war between Russia and its enemies, the Ukraine conflict has become the central battleground for misinformation, miscalculation, misrepresentation, and misunderstanding, and there are well-funded analysts, with thousands of followers and corporate media appearances claiming to have a silver-bullet take on what is going on. If we continue to fail to understand Ukraine, or the post-Soviet world more broadly, without placing class at the center of our understanding, we will continue to see major geopolitical problems as “big man” confrontations, and we will continue to confuse the interests of corrupt capitalists with that of the real working class of Ukraine. Arising as they did from a political entity that inculcated class consciousness into its people, it would be foolish to believe that Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh, and Belarusian leaders, from Lukashenko to Zelenskyi, do not see and work for their class interest.