The political logic of Russia’s imperialism
Beside my interrupted fieldwork in Ukraine (2021), this contribution to the war debate is based on my fieldwork in Belarus (2015-2017) and my conclusions on how Lukashenka’s ‘Caesarist regime’ mutated when faced with popular and geopolitical challenges to its ‘passive-revolutionary strategy’ (Artiukh 2020, 2021), to use Gramsci’s vocabulary. Drawing on my insights from Ukraine and […]
Destruction of signs, signs of destruction
Russia’s president justified his attack on Ukraine by referring to denazification, while Ukrainian inhabitants and authorities compare the behaviour of Russian soldiers with that of German Nazi occupiers. The memory of the Second World War shared by the citizens of both countries could not avoid instrumentalization, especially around the Day of Remembrance and Reconciliation celebrated in Ukraine (May 8) […]
The war on workers? What is wrong with labor regulations under martial law
After February 24, as Ukraine was showered by deadly Russian missiles, employees faced an unprecedented crisis. Continuing to work became risky in every sense of the word[1]. It was not difficult to predict the reaction of employers to the new challenges. According to business and human rights expert Olena Uvarova, companies put financial survival first. […]
Six cats, thirty people, four mortar shells. Two weeks in the occupied Kyiv suburb
For almost two weeks – from February 24th to March 10th – me, thirty other people, and six cats were living in the dormitory of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in the township of Vorzel’, an administrative part of neighbouring Irpin’, so a suburb of Kyiv’s suburb. The majority of the building’s denizens moved out throughout the first […]
The war in Ukraine and the Global South
On March 10, 2022, The Guardian published an article titled “The west v Russia: why the global south isn’t taking sides,” by David Adler, the general coordinator of the Progressive International. In essence, the author of the text tries to justify the position of that part of the Western Left which refused to support the resistance of the […]
Murky future. What would Putin do in case of his military defeat?
The tenth of March, at 5 a.m. marked exactly two weeks since the start of a full-fledged Russian invasion of Ukraine, shamelessly dubbed a “special operation” by the Kremlin. The war continues right at this moment with countless civilian deaths in Kharkiv, Mariupol, Izium, and other Ukrainian cities, and with Russian tanks burning at the […]
To Help Ukraine, Cancel Its Foreign Debt
In recent days, numerous governments have announced financial as well as military support for Ukraine, as it faces a devastating Russian invasion and an exodus of refugees already counting well over 1.5 million. Such reliance on outside help is not new. Since the 1990s Ukraine’s economy has lagged badly behind other former Eastern bloc countries, […]
Notes from Lviv in times of war
I am writing this text on the night of 7-8 March in Lviv. This is the fourth year of my living in Lviv, and I met the war here. It seems that my whole life has passed since my mother's morning call. She told me that “we are being bombed.” My life and the lives […]
US-plaining is not enough. To the Western left, on your and our mistakes
Here in the post-Soviet world, we learned a lot from you. By ‘we’ I mean atomized or loosely organized communist, democratic socialist, left anarchist, feminist scholars, and activists from Kyiv, Lviv, Minsk, Moscow, Saint-Petersburg, and other places that are plunging into the horrors of war and police violence. After our own Marxist tradition underwent sclerotization, […]
Hillel Ticktin: I have not met any Marxist in the Soviet Union
Among the many Western Marxists who have attempted to understand and politically define the Soviet Union, Hillel Ticktin is perhaps the most interesting. Unlike many other theorists, whose reflections on the subject were often deductive speculation based on fragmentary data, Ticktin set out to thoroughly analyze the political economy of "real socialism" based on what […]
