Two Objections and Some Questions
by Ollie Power
In our previous issue, Rupture published an article by Paul Murphy on ‘Imperialism Today’ analysing the war in Ukraine and the approach socialists should take to it. Continuing our tradition of being a space for debate on the left, we are pleased to carry this reply by Ollie Power, a PBP member and trade unionist.
This is a response to Paul Murphy’s article in issue 8 of Rupture, “Understanding the Invasion of Ukraine”. It comprises two objections to that article and concludes with some questions about how PBP or, more generally, socialists in Ireland should respond to the crisis in eastern Europe.
My first objection is that the account given in the article of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people is too one-dimensional and fails to account enough for the deep divisions within Ukraine. In this article, I outline the historical/demographic schisms within the territory of the Ukrainian state and how these schisms have been reflected in and accentuated by (rather than resolved by) its electoral system. I also examine the thorny issue of Ukraine’s historical and current fascist movements and how their influence far outstrips their minor successes in mainstream elections. In unpacking the complexities of Ukrainian demographics, politics, and ideology, I hope to set out the challenges that these complexities pose for socialists both in Ukraine and internationally. It is imperative that we maintain a class-conscious criticism of Ukraine and this conflict. To paraphrase Karl Liebknecht, if we cannot identify the “enemies at home” in Ukraine, we will never understand this conflict.
Focusing on the details internal to Ukraine is important, however; the geo-political context must be kept in mind. As Paul points out, this conflict has many of the characteristics of an inter-imperialist war. My second objection is that while Paul mentions that the US is the “most powerful imperialist country in the world” he invokes Russian imperialism as its equivalent, and I argue that this is a false equivalence. In simple terms, I argue that Russian imperialism is very small scale, quantitatively and qualitatively compared to the US and our criticism should take this into account.
““I address the question of how, in the fraught climate of debate in media and social media, socialists can articulate criticism of Ukraine on the one hand, and, on the other, sustain criticism of Russian aggression that is proportionate to their culpability.””
In my conclusion, I address the question of how, in the fraught climate of debate in media and social media, socialists can articulate criticism of Ukraine on the one hand, and, on the other, sustain criticism of Russian aggression that is proportionate to their culpability. Finally, I argue that we should avoid using the trope of Vladimir Putin as a kind of pantomime villain because doing so infantilises the discussion at a time when we need cool heads and reason.
First Objection: One-Dimensional view of Ukrainian politics, culture, history, and people
Like any nation, Ukraine has its internal divisions. However, Ukraine’s divisions are deep and vicious in ways that would make the 1991 - 2014 borders unstable even if the current war were not taking place.
The 1991-2014 borders of Ukraine enclose a political entity that came into being when Boris Yeltsin and the leaders of the Ukrainian and Belorussian SSRs agreed to dissolve the Soviet Union in December 1991[1] despite a referendum in March 1991 where over 70% of the Ukrainian SSR voted to remain in the USSR[2]. Pro-western historiography points out that the referendum in March 1991 was boycotted in many regions of western Ukraine and that an independence referendum that followed in December 1991 saw 90% in favour of declaring an independent Ukraine[3]. Others point to the fact that this pro-independence “swing” fell back to two-thirds when it became obvious that the economic benefits promised to voters were illusory[4].
The “Ukrainian people” described in Paul’s article are not easy to identify. There are multiple Ukrainian peoples “marked by subtle gradations” as you travel from East to West, from city to village and between social classes[5]. Indeed, my personal experience of Ukraine over two decades has routinely taught me to check my expectations: the first time I ever heard Ukrainian spoken was in a bus station in Crimea (the most Russian of Ukrainian regions) in 2005; one of the few people I know from Ivano-Frankivsk (a stronghold of Ukrainian nationalism) is a native speaker of Russian.
For all that, these exceptions prove a rule of thumb; namely, there are clear demographic and political differences between east and west. Western Ukrainian regions, in particular the areas of Volhynia and Galicia, were historically speaking, under the control of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, later, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later still, the Second Polish Republic[6]. The city of Lviv, for example, only ever came under Russian control towards the end of the Second World War[7] and Ukrainian underground resistance against the Soviets endured well into the 1950s[8]. Ukrainian nationalism as it has developed since the late 1980s, points to these struggles against Soviet domination as the crucible for the emergence of the Ukrainian nation[9]. The crimes committed by the soviets – the purges of the 1930s, the three million famine dead in 1932-33, the NKVD and later KGB deportations and repressions, the Chernobyl disaster – form a persuasive narrative that Ukrainian nation-building is a struggle for freedom against the perennial threat of Russian domination.
However, the project of Ukrainian nation-building has not succeeded in uniting its people. In particular, the people of Crimea and the south-eastern oblasts of Lugansk and Donetsk have not bought into that project. While “separatism” was never a majority position in the south-east prior to 2014, there were “deep-seated grievances” in relation to NATO membership, alignment with Russia or the EU and the delegitimisation of the Russian language in education and when dealing with the state[10].
Competing national visions in the East and South
Demographically, Crimea is far more Russian than Ukrainian[11]. Its presence in the Ukrainian SSR comes from a re-drawing of boundaries by Khrushchev in 1954[12]. At that time, Russians comprised 71% of the population[13]. Ten years previously, however, the soviets had deported the entire Muslim Tatar population from Crimea, supposedly as punishment for having collaborated with the Nazis[14]. At independence, 58% of Crimeans were ethnic Russians with the Russian language universally spoken[15]. As early as 1992 and again in 1994 there were attempts by the Crimean parliament to secure independence[16]. The 2014 referendum in Crimea in which 96.7% voted to join the Russian federation was in direct contravention of Ukraine’s constitution[17]. Even if the official margin of victory is ridiculed as “reminiscent of Brezhnev-era polls”[18] or unrepresentative of the Tatars[19], it is still the case that Crimea, alone among all of the Ukrainian regions, was given its own parliament and a semi-autonomous status in recognition of its separateness eighteen years previously[20].
The demographics of the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk show a similar distinctness. Donetsk was established as an urban and coal mining centre by the British capital in the late 19th Century[21]. As such, the Donbass (the collective term for Donetsk and Lugansk) is an urban, working-class region, integrated closely with its Russian hinterland, whose people, though they consider themselves Ukrainian “of a special sort”[22], are very different from the largely rural, Ukrainian-speaking westerners. Post-independence, Donbas began to demonstrate this independence. Miners’ strikes in 1992 were undertaken in Donetsk and Lugansk with explicit demands for the recognition of Russian as an official language and political autonomy for the region[23]. The 2013-14 maidan revolution was not supported in the eastern regions of Ukraine: polling carried out in eastern Ukraine in December 2013 when the violence was at its height in Kyiv showed 81% did not support the protests[24].
The results of the 2004 and 2010 general elections both show the west-east divisions in stark contrast. Each was a run-off between a western-leaning and a Russian-leaning candidate. The 2004 general election had to be re-run after Yushenko (the western-leaning candidate) was poisoned and, it was claimed, the vote was rigged[25]. Thousands took to the streets of Kyiv in the “Orange Revolution” on that occasion in events that prefigured those of a decade later that would lead to the overthrow of Yanukovich and the installation of the pro-western regime. The 2010 election was the last general election that took place within the 1991-2014 borders of Ukraine, and it saw Yanukovich (the Russian-leaning candidate) become president in an election that was marked by vicious in-fighting between the main nationalist candidates, extreme levels of voter dissatisfaction with the whole political system, and the same regionalism in voting patterns[26].
““While Russia is rightfully criticised for its right-wing tendencies, socialists also must interrogate the current Ukrainian political class and its relationship with fascism.””
The Problem of Ukraine’s Fascist traditions
This instability does not give Russia any right to invade Ukraine. We must oppose Russian aggression; however, it is entirely legitimate for socialists to ask difficult questions about Ukraine. “Liberal” Ukrainian intellectuals have struggled to square the circle of Ukraine’s hard-to-resolve post-soviet demographic schisms. Some, for example, Taras Kuzio, make the case that “a programme of anti-colonial rectification is required to bend back the stick so distorted by centuries of Russian occupation”[27]. In other words, victimising ordinary Russian-speaking people for the crimes of Russia is just the cost of doing business. This is a staple injustice visited upon ordinary people in other post-soviet nations such as Estonia [28] and Latvia[29].
One of Russia’s war aims is to “denazify” Ukraine. This is almost universally derided in the west. Indeed, as Paul points out, there are extreme right-wing currents in the Russian military and body politic, most egregiously the Wagner corporation[30]. While Russia is rightfully criticised for its right-wing tendencies, socialists also must interrogate the current Ukrainian political class and its relationship with fascism.
One of the layers of conflict in Ukraine remains the unresolved tensions from the second world war. The Ukrainian state publicly celebrates the legacy of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Partisan Army (UPA). These groups were ideologically (not merely pragmatically) aligned to Nazi Germany.
These are traditions that socialists must oppose.
The OUN manifesto [31] declared, “we treat the incoming German army as the army of allies…it is legitimate to liquidate undesirable Polish, Muscovite and Jewish activists”[32]. They erected triumphal arches to greet the advancing Nazi armies in 1941 and wrote letters of appeal and declaration of statehood to Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Pavelic[33].
The OUN militia, the OUN-inspired peasantry, in collaboration with the SS, Ukrainian SS and Wehrmacht, took part in pogroms of Jews in Western Ukraine in July, August and September of 1941 that saw torture, abuse and death of about 230,000 Jews[34].
In 1943 the UPA were directly responsible for the extermination (Chystnya – “cleansing”) of between 70,000 and 100,000 Poles[35].
““The argument that the neo-Nazi elements have no electoral mandate - Paul gives the figure of 2% of the vote in the 2019 elections - is beside the point. “”
Unfortunately, these are living traditions. On 20th January 2010 president Yushenko declared the figurehead of the OUN and UPA, Stepan Bandera, a “Hero of Ukraine[36]. On 14th October 2022, president Zelensky gave 99-year-old Myrolsav Simchych the same state honour; the one-hundredth such recipient of the award from the OUN/UPA. This man led a detachment of UPA in exterminating 80 Poles in the village of Pysten in 1944[37].
Hundreds of streets and monuments, yearly festivals, novels, movies, postage stamps and pubs commemorating Stepan Bandera and other out-and-out Ukrainian Nazis are a commonplace sight in Western Ukraine[38].
The argument that the neo-Nazi elements have no electoral mandate - Paul gives the figure of 2% of the vote in the 2019 elections - is beside the point. Their influence on Ukrainian society is profound. In the immediate aftermath of the Maidan takeover, four government Ministers and the Attorney General of Ukraine were from neo-Nazi political groupings[39]. These groups really made and continue to make their presence felt through violence. From the Maidan takeover in 2014 where they functioned as a vanguard engine of revolution[40], through the long years of the frozen conflict, where they operated with complete disregard for the power of the state[41] and oppressed the pro-Russian locals[42], they have been setting the agenda out of all proportion to their negligible electoral mandate. In the aftermath of Zelensky’s election, they operated as a modern-day freikorps threatening to put a bullet in the new president’s head if he dared seek détente[43]. They have been instrumental in setting the content and direction of the government’s military policy vis-à-vis the ‘breakaway republics’.
Ukrainian class antagonisms
It is relevant too, to point to the absence of socialist or Marxist political perspectives from within Ukraine. Article 436-1 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code on the “Production and distribution of communist and Nazi symbols and Propaganda of communist and national socialist (Nazi) Totalitarian regimes” [44] simply outlaws socialism. This law equates socialism with Nazism and is part of the Ukrainian state’s assault on the left. The Socialist Party of Ukraine was banned in June 2022[45]. Marxist organisations such as the Workers’ Front of Ukraine have been reduced to a purely online presence[46].
Most importantly, as socialists we must seek to identify the internal class antagonisms at work in this conflict. As the Soviet Union dissolved, the oligarchic expropriation of state property that took place in Russia[47] also took place in Ukraine[48]. One hundred people control 80-85% of Ukraine’s wealth[49], oligarchs rule the roost in eastern and western Ukraine[50] and figures such as Tymoshenko, Yanukovich and Poroshenko[51] have built political careers alongside their accumulation of staggering private wealth that has done little to make a life for ordinary Ukrainians better.
So, what kind of war is taking place in Ukraine? In his article, Paul outlines a three-part typology of war: (i) Wars of national liberation that are “just” and “defensive”; (ii) Inter-imperialist wars, such as World War One and, (iii) wars between post-capitalist and capitalist states, such as the “Vietnam” War. It is clear from my reading that Paul ascribes an inter-imperialist character to the conflict, and I agree with him with the qualifications that I discuss as my second objection.
““Most importantly, as socialists we must seek to identify the internal class antagonisms at work in this conflict.””
In his conclusion, Paul asserts that we must support “the right of Ukrainians to exist” and that “we don’t blame Ukraine for getting weaponry from wherever they can source it”. This formulation takes no account of the complexities and tensions that I have outlined. If, by the “right to exist”, we mean the right of ordinary people to stay alive and have a decent life, then who can oppose that? If we are talking about the right to exist of the current Ukrainian regime, then we need to be very clear about who and what that regime is: a US-bankrolled, neoliberal plutocracy that celebrates Nazism, outlaws socialism and victimises millions of its own Russian-speaking people. Are we talking about the right of the people of Donbass and Crimea to exist? Do we support their right to bear arms?
Second Objection: False Equivalence between US and Russian imperialism.
I feel that Paul’s description of this war as an “inter-imperialist conflict which is taking place on Ukrainian soil” or as an “inter-imperialist conflict between western powers with US leadership, and Russia” deploys a false equivalence between the two geo-political forces. This is reinforced by repeated descriptions of Russia’s invasion as “the war on Ukraine” [my emphasis]; as “inexcusable, brutal and imperialist”; as an “unjust war of oppression”; an “imperialist invasion of a former colony”. I feel the overall effect of this is to create an equivalence between the US and Russia that is not supported by the evidence. This is false for two reasons: one is quantitative, the other qualitative. In quantitative military terms, there is simply no comparison between the US and Russia. The US has a globally preponderant military presence: estimates range from 750 military bases[52] to 830 [53] around the world. The Russians have bases in Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Syria, Tajikistan and now, Ukraine. In 2020 the US spent $800 billion dollars on its military; the Russians spent about 7.5% of that[54].
Look at the map. It is the Americans who are on the Russian border; were the positions reversed, it’s quite likely that we’d already have been incinerated in a nuclear holocaust. The Russians may want to be imperial, but they are far from realising this militarily.
Ukraine is, as Paul asserts, the location for an “inter-imperialist” conflict between the US and Russia, with the openly stated US war aim of weakening Russia. I expect that if this became a conventional, gloves-off direct confrontation between the US and Russia, the likely outcome – crushing defeat for Russia – would expose the asymmetry of these empires[55].
If the Russians do not have the tanks, they definitely do not have the banks. This is key. Paul asserts that getting hung up on the export of capital as the definitive feature of imperialism leads to a “tick box approach” that fails to grasp the fundamentals. Paul makes this argument to counter those who assert that Russia could not be imperialist as it does not export more capital than it imports. Granted, Russia is an imperial power. However, control of capital makes all the difference in the world. This is exactly how the US has exercised its will, year in and year out, since Bretton Woods and especially since neoliberalism replaced Keynesianism as the western orthodoxy.
The Russians have no equivalent means of exercising their will beyond their immediate ‘near abroad’. Indeed, the IMF played its usual “privatise, deregulate and cut” cameo in the months and weeks leading up to the violent, undemocratic overthrow of Yanukovich in 2014. As is par for the course in the export of IMF loan capital, the $17 billion offered to Ukraine that was bundled in with the EU Association agreement had other harsh conditionalities attached such as forbidding any parallel trade deals with Russia and requiring Ukraine to sign up to “military and security” policies aligning the country to NATO[56]. The Russians do not have the economic muscle to counter the US. Of course, the geopolitical realignment taking place is pitting the other global power – China – as a peer who could challenge the US in this way.
In conclusion, Paul asserts that the national liberation and inter-imperialist aspects of this war are “more evenly balanced” than was the case with World War One. This may be true. However, the two overall points I make in response seek to complicate and rebalance these aspects:
(i) The facts internal to Ukraine reveal multiple, mutually antagonistic, struggles for liberation (national or otherwise), very many of which socialists should oppose.
(ii) The inter-imperialist conflict is far more one-sided than Paul’s article suggests and while we must oppose both camps, we must oppose them in proportion to their respective power and reach.
The stakes could not be higher. We must seek to understand the details internal to Ukraine and the nature of the power imbalance between the US and Russia.
Public debate and the role of socialists
Public discourse in Ireland on the war in Ukraine cannot be called debate. A debate is, according to my dictionary, “a formal discussion on a particular matter in a public meeting or legislative assembly, in which opposing arguments are put forward”. There is very little debate in conventional or social media. Attempts to put opposing arguments forward are often greeted with the imbecilic charge of “whataboutery”.
In fact, opposing arguments have been structurally excised from the public space by means of crude war-censorship. From the outset, English-language Russian news channels were blocked en masse in the EU. This is not to say that Russia Today or Sputnik are paragons of journalistic objectivity; they are Kremlin-directed propaganda outlets. Or so I seem to remember; I don’t know now because they are blocked!
““Ukraine is not one-dimensional. It is a deeply divided and troubled part of the world with much that we would do well to avoid emulating.””
In Ireland, the two main daily newspapers and the national broadcaster are in lockstep in their editorial support of the western position. Socialists in Ireland have a huge challenge – attempts by PBP and others (such as Clare Daly) to articulate a balanced view on social media are excoriated by pro-NATO/US respondents.
So where does this leave PBP? In the minds of some, we are, as current groupthink might have it, ‘soft’ on Russia. In the context of building public support for the party, it could well be counter-productive to attempt any kind of ‘debate’ as to the causes of this war.
Ukraine is not one-dimensional. It is a deeply divided and troubled part of the world with much that we would do well to avoid emulating. We must not pass over Ukraine as a homogeneous “Ukrainian people”. We need to find a way of articulating criticism of Ukraine – in particular, their fascism, their suppression of left-wing views, the oligarchic clans that rival their Russian counterparts’ greed and venality, their total and utter subordination to US imperialism. Can we do these things without alienating what (if anything) remains of the left wing in Ukraine?
Can we criticise Ukraine without unintentionally giving support to the right-wing anti-immigration mob who are punching down at refugees in this country? That we must do this alongside sustained criticism of Russian aggression and its much smaller-scale imperialism should go without saying, but I do think we need to do this proportionately.
In nothing I have written here do I defend the Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, I want to make a final point about the danger of evoking in debate the figure of Vladimir Putin as some kind of bogeyman. Paul Murphy does not resort to this trope in his article, however, it has been used in debates by socialists and I think it is a conceptually risky move.
On one level I do understand why we use terms such as “Putin’s brutal and unprovoked imperial war” in public – at a really basic level it’s a good habit to have we want to avoid the ludicrous accusations of being “pro-Putin”. However, by doing so we are we not ‘sampling’ a discourse that reduces politics to pantomime? The goodies and the Russian baddies? Maybe it’s a necessary evil but if politics becomes pantomime, it infantilises discussion. We need adult, rational, balanced discussion to understand and remedy this crisis.
Rational, balanced, and above all, class-conscious discussion is needed too, in the debate about Irish neutrality. I agree with Paul that an “all-rounded understanding of what is happening in Ukraine arms us to effectively resist this militarisation drive”. I hope that this response to his article has added to that all-rounded understanding.
Article originally published in shorter format in Issue 9 of Rupture Magazine. Subscribe or purchase previous issues here.
Notes
Klein, N. The Shock Doctrine (Metropolitan, 2007) p. 221.
Menon, R & Rumer, E. The Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order (MIT, 2015) p. 21.
Plokhy, S. The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. (Basic, 2015) p. 365.
Wilson, A. Ukraine Crisis: What it Means for the West. (Yale, 2014) p.41.
Menon, R & Rumer, E. Conflict in Ukraine: the Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order (MIT, 2015) p.3.
Plokhy S. (2015) pps. 16-19.
Sakwa, R. Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands. (IB Tauris, 2016) p.16.
Plokhy S. (2015) p. 337.
ibid p. 357.
Sakwa, R. (2016) p. 45.
Ibid p. 47.
Wilson, A. (2014) p.100. A common myth expressed in Russia is that Khrushchev was drunk when he redrew the boundaries of the Ukrainian SSR to include Crimea.
Plokhy, S. (2015) p. 341.
Wilson, A. (2014) p. 100.
Ibid p. 105.
Ibid p. 105 & Menon, R & Rumer, E. (2015) p. 11.
Sakwa, R (2016) p. 195.
Plokhy, S (2015) p. 386.
Wilson, A. (2014) p. 124.
Ibid p. 44.
Ibid p. 45
ibid p. 45.
ibid p. 41.
Marples, D (ed). The War in Ukraine’s Donbas: Origins, Contexts, and the Future. (Central European University Press, 2022) p 11.
Plokhy, S. (2015) p. 378.
Wilson, A. (2014) p. 49.
Sakwa, R. (2016) 451
Amnesty Condemns 'Very Limited' Rights Of Estonia's Russians (rferl.org) https://www.rferl.org/a/1073274.html
According to Amnesty International 200,000 Latvians (mostly Russian-only speakers) hold the status of “non-citizens” https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/europe-and-central-asia/latvia/report-latvia/
Wagner PMC’s privatised-warfare business model and enormous style headquarters in Moscow make it a kind of Halliburton/Bond-Villain hybrid.
Rossolinksi – Leibe, G. The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Fascist (Ibidem, 2015) p. 183 & Hlimka,P. Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. OUN and UPA’s Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry (Ibidem, 2018) p 429.
Rossolinksi – Leibe, G (2015) p. 185.
Hlimka,P. (2018) p. 194.
Rossolinksi – Leibe, G (2015) pps. 237-238.
Ibid p. 269.
Ibid p. 518. & Plokhy, S (2015) p. 381.
Facebook page of Eduard Dolinsky: Director General of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee.
Rossolinksi – Leibe, G (2015) pps. 487 – 525.
Boyd-Barrett, O. Western Mainstream Media and the Ukraine Crisis: a Study in Conflict Propaganda (Routledge, 2017) p. 42 & p. 45.
Abelow, B. How the West Brought War to Ukraine (Siland, 2022) p.19. Marples, D (ed) (2022) p. 19.
Sakwa, R. (2016) p. 442.
Boyd-Barrett (2017) p. 46.
Abelow, B (2022) p. p.46
Wsws.org: “Ukraine bans Largest Opposition Party” https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/06/23/hxae-j23.html accessed on 23rd October 2022.
Klein, N (2007) p. 233.
Plokhy, S (2015) p. 376.
Sakwa, R (2016) p. 120.
The richest man in Ukraine, Rinat Akhmetov, ranked by Forbes as the world’s ninety-second richest person, is based in Donetsk.
Sakwa (2016) p. 128.
Prashad, V. Washington Bullets. (Monthly Review Press, 2020) p.122
Overseasbases.net
World Bank Statistics for 2020
Conventional defeat for Russia would, with a high degree of probability, lead to a global thermonuclear war.
Cohen, S. War with Russia?(Skyhorse Publishing, 2019) p. 30.