Ukraine’s Fractures

First published in: Ukraine’s Fractures. An interview with Volodymyr Ishchenko. In: New Left Review 87, May-June 2014 Since the start of the Maidan protests six months ago, Ukraine has been at the centre of a crisis which has exposed and deepened the fault-lines—geopolitical, historical, linguistic, cultural—that traverse the country. These divisions have grown through the […]
Ukraine has not experienced a genuine revolution, merely a change of elites

Volodymyr Ishchenko Two popular labels are being ascribed to events in Ukraine: it was either a democratic – or even social – revolution, or it was a rightwing – or even neo-Nazi – coup. In fact, both characterisations are wrong. What we have have seen is a mass rebellion, overwhelmingly supported in western and central Ukraine […]
Three Sources of Ukraine’s “Freedom”: Nationalism, Xenophobia and the “Social Issue”

Vitaly Atanasov In the last three years, the popularity of Ukraine’s right-wing party Svoboda (Freedom) has seen an eightfold increase. At the moment, the party is supported by 6% of the country’s population, though it seems unlikely that anything might prevent the party overcoming the 3% level in the parliamentary election next year. Until 2004, […]
About “Russian” trace in Odessa events

Andrey Ishchenko A tragic death, which took place on April 17 in Odessa, of Maksim Chaika, a right-wing football fan and one of the leaders of a radical nationalist organization “SICH”, has immediately lead to heated discussions on the Internet. Whereas everything is clear for the closest companions of the killed: “the white warrior” had […]