Book Review: Towards the Abyss
Ukraine from Maidan to War by Volodymyr Ishchenko
“Meanwhile the moderate part of the citizens perished between the two, either for not joining in the quarrel, or because envy would not suffer them to escape.” - Thucydides [3.82.8]
Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War by Volodymyr Ishchenko
Published by Verso Books. 2024. 197 pages.
Volodymyr Ishchenko is a Ukrainian sociologist who was born in 1982, putting him of a generation that remembers the Soviet Union but whose childhood was more defined by its decline and fall. Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War provides a collection of his essays spanning the crucial 9 years of Ukrainian history from early 2014 through 2023. In this period Ukraine saw revolution, civil war, Kiev lost control of much of its land and population, and the country was ultimately invaded by Russia, starting the largest war in Europe since WW2. Ishchenko identifies himself as part of “the new left,” but in terms of Ukraine’s internal conflicts of the last decade he is a moderate, as someone who is not an ethnic partisan and wants Ukraine to forge an independent path recognizing its economic and cultural ties to both Russia and “the West.” Ishchenko’s main theses are that Anglophile Ukrainian intellectuals have created a toxic combination of Ukrainian ethnonationalism and liberal internationalism, that this obfuscates the fact that the regional differences in Ukraine are primarily a class conflict between groups with competing economic interests, and that this is all part of a process of “de-modernization” taking place across the post-Soviet countries. This view is perhaps imperfect, but it is leagues better for understanding the situation than what many Ukraine supporters want us to believe: that the only thing to understand is that Russians are evil and don’t want Ukrainians to exist. It is also better than the opposite, that Russia is a great traditionalist power keeping the Gay American Empire at bay. Overall, in these essays Ishchenko gives us a clear picture of how he became an alien in his country which has been ripped apart and will never be the same, or in his own words, “One of my first thoughts when I read the news in the early morning of 24 February 2022 was that no matter how this war ends, I will no longer have a homeland. I feel the same today” [xv.]
To start, I will quickly go over the book itself as a product before getting into the content. It is of high quality printing, and clearly professionally made. The cover design is simple but attractive and the peeling paint over concrete works as an easy to understand metaphor for the decay of the post-Soviet countries. I noticed no serious typographical errors though a couple of times I wondered if an aspect of formatting was intentional. The acknowledgements provide a guide to which articles are in each chapter, though within the chapters there are only dates and not the original headlines, as would have been my preference. Still, the whole thing is well organized and accessible. There is a good endnotes section providing citations, but no index; it is a small book and is more focused on themes than personalities, so a reader is unlikely to need an index. One inherent challenge to this genre of book- essays written over time- is the balance between including updated information and providing a snapshot of the author’s thoughts at the time. Ishchenko explains that his views have evolved as events unfolded includes endnotes marked with brackets for updates made at the time of final submission; footnotes would have been more suited to this purpose, as it is not obvious on the page if an endnote will be a citation or an update note. For the same reason, that the essays were written to stand alone, some of the material seemed repetitive, but I also read it in one day for work. The $24.95 price point is somewhat high for a small book of previously published materials, but book sales aren’t what they used to be and it is fortunate that important books which many would find controversial continue to be published for the general public, so it isn’t an unreasonable amount to pay.
In introducing his book, the author gives a sort of admonition to those who would read it. He writes,
“You should not read it looking for some objective Truth about the war in Ukraine. You should not read me as a sympathetic ‘Ukrainian voice’ with whom you can repent your ‘Western privilege’. I also hope you will not see the book in precisely the opposite way: as an attempt to ‘sell’ you a superficially sympathetic position that pushes the right buttons for an international audience but, if anything, serves the interests of reactionary political forces” [xiii]
The first two of these don’t apply to me so much, but the third does more so, especially as I’m probably “reactionary” compared to the author, who is some sort of Marxist, at least in the academic sense [though I often feel as if I hardly have political views anymore, and just want life to be calm and reasonable with a government that isn’t excessively troublesome.] While I am under no obligation to read the book how the author wants me to, I think it is most useful to read it as he desires, which is basically the story of how class interests went haywire in the post-Soviet era. I am also sympathetic to the author as a person, because the same people who have destroyed his country’s society drive me crazy, and this all hardly impacts me besides personal annoyance. The salience of his third point comes in the fact that people who are in various ways critics of Ukraine’s post-Maidan government are saying things which are much closer to the truth than the narrative promoted by the nationalist “liberal internationalists.” Among some examples of truths that they don’t want us to believe are that the far right, including outright Nazis, were a major part of the Maidan Revolution while the leaders have been more concerned about people noticing Nazis than the threat they pose [18-19], that any future Russian President would see Ukraine in NATO as a threat [69], and that there was no valid justification for Zelensky’s crackdown on opposition parties he claimed were “pro-Russian” [75-76.] Of course, to shut down discourse a wide variety of views were lumped together as being “pro-Russian,” in Ukraine just as in America. He writes,
“The pro-Russian label became very inflated. It started to be used to describe anyone calling for Ukraine’s neutrality. It has also started to be employed to discredit and silence sovereigntist, state-developmentalist, anti-Western, illiberal, populist, left-wing,and many other discourses…because they all criticized and raised questions about pro-Western, neoliberal and nationalist discourses, which have dominated Ukraine’s political sphere since 2014, but do not really reflect the political diversity of Ukrainian society” [75.]
As ever, all non-“mainstream” views are pro-Russian, despite those “mainstream” views primarily being the product of an unpopular elite class and their sycophants. In the United States anyone resistant to the ghoulish policy of supplying the weapons to send ever more Ukrainians to their death is accused of being “pro-Russian,” so in this instance I also experience what he describes.
Still, it is easy to see the risk someone would use his honesty in a way different then he intends, but as he wrote in 2014, “it is necessary to break with the ‘it might be beneficial for Putin’ logic and start to think about what is beneficial for all the people living in Ukraine” [19]. In short, this Westernizing neoliberal class that Ishchenko and I both seem to consider class enemies lie a lot, on the grounds that admitting any fault helps Putin. While I wish to avoid to using this review to promote things I already believed, it is remarkable the extent to which the author and I agree on key points, despite coming from totally different places and that I wouldn’t expect to agree with a Marxist social scientist.
My interest in reading Towards the Abyss arose when I was writing my prior article, “Russian Maiden, European Bride,” about Ukraine’s attempted move from East to West over the last 10 years. I was fortunate to see part of the introduction shared on Unherd, which helped a great deal to with that article, which it turns out mirrored several of Ishchenko’s arguments in this book. I had not heard of Ishchenko before, or at least didn’t remember the name, though I have probably encountered his work, especially as I sometimes read the foreign policy writing at The New Left Review where he writes somewhat regularly [TNLR is the parent of Verso, which published this book.] It seemed as if the text might answer my long-running question, “Why does this seem like an entire nation of Democrats?” In many ways it did not, other than to reinforce what I knew: a class of liberal internationalist “intellectuals” have been ascendant, and are the most represented in the Anglosphere because they speak English, use Twitter, and are the most likely to have gone to university abroad. Such a class of people exists in almost every country, but their degree of prominence in Ukraine is unique.
At EuroMaidan in 2014 this faction came to power. Protesters were waving EU flags at a time when anti-austerity protesters in Europe were more likely to be burning them [29.] It has been framed as the result of Russian propaganda that anyone in the West could be hostile to Ukraine, but the dominant faction of Ukrainians have aligned themselves with the West’s overeducated, secular, cosmopolitan, internationalist managerial class that many Westerners, myself included, despise. To show how well they would fit into the West, they are making themselves class enemies of much of the population, and seem completely oblivious to the weak popular support for Western neoliberal institutions; Ishchenko seems to be as mystified as I am that they could fail to understand this. There is no doubt that for various reasons Russia finds it useful to amplify dissatisfaction and dissension within the West, but hatred of the Mandarin class that some Ukrainians so admire is largely genuine, organic, and well-deserved.
In many ways this book is similar to another I reviewed, Broken Camel Bells by Abukar Arman, which is on the modern history of Somalia. It is the same type of book in being a collection of essays over the years, but more importantly, the author is a rare sane and competent person in a society that has gone mad, trying to tell his people how to find a shared thread that holds them together. In Somalia’s case, besides the clans you hear more about, the country is divided between nomads and sedentary peoples: in Ukraine, what we hear about are ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians. Ishchenko sees himself as of a third group, a “Soviet Ukrainian,” by which he means he is of mixed heritage but from the Soviet Republic of Ukraine [xv-xvii.] He explains his family history and the diverse mix of Slavic peoples from which he comes. I sympathize with this as I have no meaningful heritage but “American” and though it is different, a lot of Americans have another identity to fall back on.
I must admit he has been the first to sell me on the idea that there is a legitimate difference between a native Russian speaking ethnic Ukrainian Ukrainian national and a native Russian speaking ethnic Russian Ukrainian national, but this shouldn’t be a significant difference, and of course such identities are socially constructed anyhow. Ukrainians who have made hostility to Russia their national identity say that oppression is the only reason ethnic Ukrainians spoke Russian, though as I have pointed out a lingua franca is necessary to run any large, multinational state and otherwise linguistic minorities would be totally marginalized and unable to participate in much of society. Ishchenko explains that in the past people just thought of Ukrainian as the rural language and Russian as the city language, or as a home language and a work language, because “Ukrainian and Russian are not that different anyway” [xvii.] It should be mentioned here that national languages becoming more uniform is an ongoing process throughout the world and 100 years ago it was common in much of Europe to speak a regional language at home. The Russian Empire and then USSR usually had reasonably inclusive laws in this regard compared to many countries such as France. As Ishchenko writes, “To overcome the illiteracy of the peasant majority, the Bolsheviks introduced mass schooling and promoted cultural development in national-minority languages” [xvi.] He further says of his ancestors, “For them, it was not a language of oppression, but of advancement. As for millions of other Soviet Ukrainian families. Our ‘Russification’ was part of a modernizing transformation of revolutionary magnitude” [xix.] It seems to me that at best it is harmful historical revisionism to pretend that learning standard Russian to advance in society was some sort of great trauma. Along with lamenting the loss of statues to the victory in The Great Patriotic War and the renaming streets which were named after Russian authors in an ill-conceived anti-Russia campaign, Ishchenko continues to refer to Ukraine’s capital as “Kiev” throughout the book. His refusal to hate Russia and its culture is surely his cardinal sin to the Ukrainian nationalists. [For the record, it is my view that there is a neither a Russian nor a Ukrainian spelling of Kiev in English, only an English spelling, which is “Kiev.”]
Ishchenko views the differences between east and west Ukraine as primarily one of class interests, with the population in the east being an industrial proletariat working at factories inherited from the Soviet Union and deeply integrated into post-Soviet supply chains, both for production and sales. At the same time, these industries have been taken over by “political capitalists,” the looting oligarchs, who have been so hard to get under control. This system was expensive for impoverished states and only possible due to the inherited industries and welfare institutions [101.] In the less industrialized west, the public looked to Europe for opportunity. Ishchenko writes,
“The alliance between transnational capital and the professional middle classes in the post-Soviet space, represented politically by pro-Western NGO-ized civil societies, gave a more compelling answer to the question to what exactly should grow on the ruins of the degraded and disintegrated state socialism” [102.]
This is the same kind of conflict going on throughout “the West” as countries become deindustrialized with the oligarchy selling the idea that we can have a “service economy” which of course means financial services for some and food service for others. What I find curious is how anyone thinks this can work in Ukraine starting from poverty, though the EU funneled vast wealth into Poland for the purpose of tricking people, and I suppose it worked on some. Regardless, this class analysis of Ukraine, which I barely go into here, is much more useful than the Ukrainian nationalist position that the root cause is that Russians are evil and hate Ukrainians and there is little more to understand. The author mentions that even talking to anti-Putin anti-war Russians is under attack, and one Ukrainian politician said “Good Russians do not exist” [112.] [It is a great irony that Zelensky’s new Commander-in-Chief, Syrsky, is a Russian who just happened to be stationed in Ukraine when the USSR collapsed.] Though I am not a Marxist by any means, something I have learned over the last few years of studying history and political theory is that until people started refuting Marx, no one throughout history seriously denied the role of class interests and class conflict in human affairs, and it remains the most likely thing to tear a country apart; the idea that you shouldn’t have class consciousness is a scam for financial interests to oppress you.
Ishchenko sees the post-Soviet process as one of de-modernization and atomization. In many ways this is a useful perspective, because despite the portrayal by Ukrainian nationalists, “backwardness” was never what was wrong with communism. What’s more, despite all we hear, Russia under Putin is a pretty historically normal government. It is silly to pretend that because of Russia’s historic conquest of Siberia and Poland hundreds of years ago its goal is always expand everywhere. However, by the global standards of 1900, modern Russia is a government like any other: the ruler has a lot of power but there are other power centers, closeness to the state is the easiest way to wealth but there is much private industry, state agents shake you down but not too much to live, you can mostly live your life in peace if you don’t cause the government any problems, et cetera. This is the most disappointing to those with an ideology about government and who believe humanity is always moving forward. The form of government could fairly be called less “modern” than communism, though that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Ishchenko recognizes several causes of Russia’s invasion, the most fleshed out is that the elites have over-looted Russia’s own industry and need more captive space, which I do not find convincing, but the author makes a thorough and interesting argument. What he does recognize though is that “Putin is neither a power hungry maniac, nor an ideological zealot…nor a madman” [98.] This is another moderate and reasonable viewpoint that is blasphemy to most supporters of Ukraine’s government.
Unlike the Russian government, the nationalist intellectuals in Ukraine did develop an ideology, “Europeanism” you could call it, and went full bore. The middle class of western Ukraine saw strong reasons to move towards Europe,
“These people’s main opportunities for incomes, career and developing political influence lay in the prospects of intensifying political influence lay in the prospects of intensifying political economic and cultural connections with the West” [102.]
To me, personally, one of the most frustrating things has been the constant discussion of Ukraine’s “freedom” and “sovereignty” when they functionally want to cede control of their country to Brussels and international capital and hordes of NGOs. In short, “sovereignty” is a red herring, as neutrality was Ukraine’s best option if that was the goal. One of the biggest weaknesses in this text is in the section “The Post-Soviet Vicious Circle” [56-63] where the role of foreign powers in what are commonly called “Color Revolutions” is almost completely ignored, despite being clearly discussed at other points in the book. I am sympathetic, however, to the fact that local conditions are often ignored by Western authors in favor of looking at everything as an international struggle, so I understand the decision regarding focus but it still feels incomplete. Such NGOs are a major feature of Western soft power and key source of employment for useless neoliberal hacks with more education than integrity, and it is these men and women who have been promoted as “Ukrainian voices.” These NGOs are obviously tools of foreign imperial power, but he notes that for this faction, “the problem is Russian imperialism, not imperialism in general. Ukraine’s dependency on the West tends not to be problematized at all” [112.] Resisting Russian imperialism has mostly taken the form of cultural destruction and a denial of Ukraine’s past. There is also an enormous contradiction, in that the nationalists are obsessed with recovering Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders, but those populations in Donbass and Crimea would be a huge obstacle to their goals of transforming Ukraine and it is their exclusion from the political process which has been a primary factor in making Ukraine seem so much more attracted to NATO [89.] It has long been my opinion that Kiev wants to take back these regions primarily out of a desire to oppress the people who live there, and nothing in this book changed my view, though Ishchenko doesn’t make that argument.
I remain fascinated with why so many Ukrainians want to be a Western-style country when that system is clearly failing. Ishchenko writes, “There has indeed been something of a legitimacy deficit in the West.” [114] I am not only deeply in that camp but a long-time promoter of hatred towards our ruling classes who indeed lack the moral authority or competence to rule, and anyway seem to hate their subjects. Of course, like in Ukraine, in the United States all problems are blamed on Russia; the alternative would be our rulers doing a good job, and that’s never going to happen. At least in Ukraine it’s somewhat plausible to blame Russia.
The patent unreasonableness of the whole thing notwithstanding, they want us to believe that Ukraine and only Ukraine can save the West from the Russkies,
“Ukrainians turn out to be not just the same as Westerners, but even better than them. Defending the frontier of Western civilization, dying and suffering for Western values, Ukrainians are more Western than those who live in the West” [112.]
This line of discourse has only drawn my animosity as Zelensky begs for my nation’s money and they present it as if I am being done a favor. Ishchenko sees a parallel between Russia’s elites trying to take control over eastern Ukraine’s industries,
“Ukrainians are presented as fighting and dying for what too many Westerners do not believe in anymore. The noble fight brings (literally) new blood to crisis-ridden institutions, wrapped in increasingly identitarian ‘civilizational’ rhetoric” [115.]
All they will get from this is being “Shock Doctrine’d” into oblivion, those of them who live that long, that is. Everything that Ukraine’s government has presented as their new and bright future is the worst sort of dystopia, or at least would be in practice. Early after the invasion Ukraine made major economic changes that few noticed besides a certain camp of leftists,
“Ukraine is proceeding with privatizations, lowering taxes, scrapping protective labour legislation and favouring ‘transparent’ international corporations over ‘corrupt’ domestic firms. The plans for post-war reconstruction read not like a programme for building a stronger sovereign state but like a pitch to foreign investors for a start-up” [110.]
Indeed they do, but like a shitty startup that makes some product I don’t understand where you waste all your time in HR meetings about diversity, and then the owners abscond with the money and it turns out it was always a scam: Ukraine can be the FTX of states, if it follows these people. If you don’t believe me, it’s now more or less been admitted that Kosovo has been picked clean and is no longer of any use.
Overall, I found Towards the Abyss to be a great text about the modern history of Ukraine; of course I did not cover every point it makes here, but got to those which I found most important. I perhaps learned less than I expected, but I write about international relations and have devoted tens of thousands of words to the subject of Ukraine. A normal reader with an open mind would find a relieving break from the propaganda of both sides and a thorough account of what has happened in the last ten years. I am somewhat perplexed by how I came to so many of the same conclusions as a leftist Ukrainian sociologist when I am none of those things. I did not read the book for the purpose of having my own views reinforced, though it worked out that way. I imagine a different person would have found many of his views controversial, or even infuriating. Volodymyr Ishchenko’s writing brought me little closer to understanding why so many Ukrainians so badly want to be like a class that is hated in the West- but to this group anyone who doesn’t love them is but a victim of Russian propaganda, for how else could their virtue be questioned? The truth seems to be that with the help of a swarm of NGOs, the CIA, the removal of entire regions from the political process, and post-Soviet malaise, one faction in Ukraine became entirely too powerful, and now will make the country follow the West’s dying elites off a cliff- into the abyss. For some reason an independent path honoring Ukraine’s past and forging a new future wasn’t the option which was chosen. For my part, I need to continue to do my best to remember that these people who would be my enemies were they from any country do not represent all Ukrainians. As Ishchenko says,
“Are we really meant to believe that the English-speaking, West-connected intellectuals, typically working in Kiev or Lviv, and who often even personally know each other, represent the diversity of the 40-million-strong nation? [116.]
Yes, that is exactly what we are meant to believe, but its extreme stupidity does become obvious when it is said out loud in such clear terms.
Towards the Abyss: Ukraine From Maidan to War by Volodymyr Ishchenko is available now from Verso Books
Thank you for reading! The Wayward Rabbler is written by Brad Pearce. If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. My main articles will always be free but paid subscriptions help me a huge amount. I have a tip jar at Ko-Fi where generous patrons can donate in $5 increments. I am now writing regularly for The Libertarian Institute. Join my Telegram channel The Wayward Rabbler. My Facebook page is The Wayward Rabbler. You can see my shitposting and serious commentary on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.
“Ishchenko seems to be as mystified as I am that they could fail to understand this.” There is a benefit in this not understanding. The PMC class in the U.S. and Ukraine, socially, economically, and by education are aligned with the “looting oligarchs.” They benefit from dispossessing the rabble, and are not its deplorable victims. Yet.
I wonder how Ishchenko is incorporating the NYT CIA dump and their (very expensive) meddling in the fomenting of Ukraine’s civil war and the ongoing disaster.
Note the strong working men in the glowing presentations on wondrous rebuilding are pretty much dead or gone. So they’ll just put everything online. The FTX of states indeed.” Opportunity knocks for the ghouls of war:
https://www.sir.advancedleadership.harvard.edu/articles/digital-transformation-in-ukraine-before-during-after-war
https://features.csis.org/enabling-ukraines-economic-transformation/#section-1-fw6R6f9ZRF
I don't normally enjoy book reviews, but this was a banger. Great read, thanks.