My own piece in the issue, “Chornobyl at 40: Times and Spaces of a Hyper-Event,” is a distillation of a much longer argument, some of which has appeared in print before and other parts of which are still in progress. The final paragraph distills the message into a single sentence:
So we have an event that is multiple things at once: an ‘error’ registering the shadowy underside of industrial modernity; the limit case of a bipolar Cold War order, now transmogrified into a multipolar geo-informational disorder; a cipher of contested narratives including those that would yoke it to Ukraine’s emergent national sovereignty; an emptied yet alluring terrain of the world’s shadow ecology; and a signpost on the accelerometer of the Anthropocene.
Related to this, I’ll be speaking on Terra Invicta and the ecopolitical continuum that connects Chornobyl to the Russo-Ukrainian war in New York City tomorrow, in Toronto next month (at the Munk School on April 20 and in Ukrainian for the Shevchenko Scientific Society on April 24), and in Montreal at the Jean Monnet Centre on April 22 (Earth Day) and at Concordia University on April 23.
Greek political analyst Sirantos Fotopoulos is one of the more insightful commentators I’ve read on the current Iranian predicament. (His “Open Letter to the Anti Imperialist Left” was published on Triple Ampersand (&&&) back in January.) Alas, much of his writing is restricted to Facebook posts. Two recent pieces, one from March 7 and the other from March 5, are especially lucid and helpful. The first discusses, in useful detail, western leftist responses to Iranian activism — a theme often broached here in the Ukrainian context; the second, the ambiguity of bedfellow-allies when a people is struggling against authoritarian rule.
A Left politics that instructs the Iranian feminist to defer her liberation to the requirements of the anti-Western imperial struggle is not offering her solidarity. It is offering her a transaction. It is saying, in the bluntest terms available, that her body, her autonomy, and her survival are negotiable instruments in a geopolitical calculus she did not author and was not consulted about — and it is saying this in the name of the very internationalism that is, on every other occasion, invoked as the movement’s crowning moral achievement.
There is a sentence circulating from Tehran — written, let us be precise about this, beneath active bombardment — that ought to discomfort anyone who has spent the past several years choosing camps rather than principles: “everyone wants peace, but no one dares to demand it.”
The people who should have made the demand for peace imaginable — the formations, the parties, the journals, the platforms — have instead spent years informing their supposed constituents that to call for an end to the theocracy’s war on women is to capitulate, to hand victory to the enemy, to become, by the alchemy of sectarian logic, objectively complicit in imperialism. This is the identical argument deployed by every warmongering government in the history of governments that make war. The fact that it now issues from people who would describe themselves as anti-war is not a paradox.
Between March 1917 and March 1921, the People’s Republic was the most prominent of the Ukrainian political formations that emerged in wartime and, for a while, fulfilled the function of an elected Parliament of a multi-party, social-democratic state. The Central Rada was a broad coalition representing workers, peasants, soldiers, and national minorities, whose dominant forces were the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (USDRP) and the Ukrainian Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries (UPSR), but which also included various local peasants’, military, and workers’ councils and minority (Russian, Jewish, and Polish) organizations. It was ultimately squashed by the Bolshevik Red Army, with many of its leaders killed, imprisoned, or exiled (the Wikipedia page lists their fate).
Four years into the full-scale Russian war on Ukraine, the line “Four years of destructive warfare have weakened our land and exhausted our people” resonates in a particularly appropriate way.
Much of what Paria Rahimi writes in “Why the Left Is Failing Iranians: Against Campism” (Jan. 15) resonates strongly with the experience of Ukrainians. And it points the way toward something that many Ukrainians I know have been wanting to work toward: a solidarity across struggles that has the potential to become genuinely global. (I write all this while acknowledging Rebecca Solnit’s point that liberal media critiques of “the Left’s deafening silence on Iran” has been a bit over-the-top.)
“This essay,” Rahimi writes, “does not seek to prescribe strategy or to speak on behalf of those engaged in struggle. Its intervention is diagnostic rather than programmatic. It is directed at left discursive formations” — those she calls “campist” — “that have repeatedly rendered mass uprisings unintelligible by subordinating them to geopolitical alignments or state-centred frameworks.” “Opposition to U.S. imperialism,” she writes, “is repeatedly mistaken for a politics of liberation.” And “when anti-Westernism becomes the measure of legitimacy, revolt itself becomes unintelligible.”
“The task posed here,” she continues, is “limited but precise: to reclaim internationalism not as alignment with foreign states, but as struggle wherever one stands, oriented toward a common emancipatory horizon, rather than outsourcing the fate of emancipatory politics to foreign states, geopolitical blocs, or so-called camps of resistance” [emphasis added].
Like Ukrainians, Iranians have risen up on multiple occasions over the last few decades. In Iran, these uprisings have seemingly become regular, more acute, and this time more bloody, its victims numbering in the thousands. What they rise up against is very specific: it is a hardline authoritarianism in an Islamist and anti-western guise — which doesn’t make it representative either of Islam or of anti-westernism (whatever that may mean). It is also an inept rule that has lost its ability to sustain a viable social contract. What they rise up for is also determined by their very specific circumstances. As Rahimi writes, “Revolutions do not arrive in the language we prefer; they arrive in the language people can speak under repression.” That language will not be identical to ours or anyone else’s.
For all those leftists still sleeping under the rock called “NATO Derangement Syndrome” (sorry, but if you still believe those tales, you either haven’t been reading anything informed about Ukraine or you are unreachable)…
Counterpunchhas published a piece by Andriy Movchan, “The Russian Idée Fixe,” that clearly outlines the flaw in the argument that NATO expansion is responsible for the Russo-Ukrainian war. The flaw, in a word, is that Putin himself doesn’t believe it. He is a Russian imperialist who believes in reconstituting a primordial Russkii mir (“Russian world”) that’s existed for over a thousand years and that trumps any modern notions of state sovereignty, democracy, political self-determination, and the like. He says so every chance he gets.
Of course if you believe in those kinds of historical myths, you’ll need to read elsewhere to see how poorly they line up with actual history. (Movchan doesn’t get into that, but any good history of Ukraine — like Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe and especially his Origins of the Slavic Nations, which you can read here — gets well into that.) But if you believe those myths, you’re not any kind of leftist, which is who Movchan is aiming to educate.
The US leftist journal Against the Current has just published Ukrainian historian (and soldier) Vladislav Starodubtsev’s “Retrieving History: Ukrainian People’s Republic.” The article presents a synoptic history of Ukraine’s first modern independent (and social-democratic) state. It should be required reading for anyone commenting on Ukraine today, especially from a left-wing perspective.
A few excerpts:
“USUALLY THE HISTORY of the 1917 revolution is told from the perspective of Russia. But its most radical and transformative currents emerged from the empire’s colonized peoples.
“Ukraine was first among equals. It managed to create a majority council based socialist and democratic republic, and provided an example of multi-parties, cooperative-based and decentralized socialism, that was later defeated by Russia. It was the forefront of a revolutionary shift — offering a bold vision of what politics could be.” [. . .]
The first online book launch for Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth was just held on Zoom, sponsored by the RUTA Association and University of Tallinn’s Institute of Humanities. It was facilitated by Professor Epp Annus, and featured seven author-contributors in addition to the book’s editor, me (Adrian Ivakhiv).
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek has written about the book that it “deserves to become an instant classic, a volume that everyone who wants to grasp the contours of our global crisis should read.” I think and hope that my overview of the book’s theoretical framework, and the rich diversity of author profiles and topics we covered — the Anthropocene, colonialism and decolonialism, the role of art in war, multispecies relations with land, the affective sensibilities and soundscapes of war and resistance, and more — captured why that might be so. My introduction focused especially on the question of why and how the Russo-Ukrainian war should be considered an “environmental war,” and why that is relevant to all of us.
Today marks the 34th anniversary of the national referendum in which 92% of Ukrainian voters approved the declaration of independence made by Ukraine’s Supreme Council (Verkhovna Rada) on 24 August 1991. To mark this date, a manifesto has just been published that was drawn up by a fairly diverse committee of co-authors, with prominent signatories including writers, activists, media people, and academics. (Apparently there was plenty of disagreement on the details, and in the end a certain tension between details and generalities is evident. There’s a venerable tradition of that sort of thing in the history of the Ukrainian People’s Republic with its four “Universals” and other declarations.)
The manifesto, entitled “Survive. Endure. Prevail!” (“Вижити, вистояти, перемогти!”), has been published by Ukraïnska Pravda and can be read in English here. It compares two concepts of Ukrainian victory — “victory at its maximum” and “minimum victory” — and calls for the latter, more attainable one to have three dimensions:
The military dimension: strategic neutralisation of the enemy
The political dimension: preservation of our sovereignty
The human dimension: a successful Ukraine
Each is spelled out in ways that sound reasonable, if it were not for the fact that the world they are aiming for — a world of sovereign nation-states, each of which is a land “of opportunity, based on the rule of law and an effective system of public governance” — is an ideal that has never quite existed in reality (at least at the world scale) and that, if it has (at regional scales), is already slipping out of our hands.
That’s not to fault the authors. It’s a vision worth upholding and orienting oneself around, especially when their country is engaged in an existential struggle for survival and is aiming to corral more support from the community of developed western nations on which that survival depends. If it lacks a certain acknowledgment of how the world has changed and the difficulties it is facing, it doesn’t lack them entirely. It acknowledges a “broader global crisis” that includes “the rise of a global coalition of dictatorships, an ambivalent U.S. foreign policy, crises of democracy in multiple countries, a devaluation of international law and of the world order as a whole.” At the same time, by introducing these as part of a “crossroads between exciting opportunities for development and unprecedented threats to human existence” (my emphasis), it fails to capture the actual state of the world.
I’m happy to share the news that Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth, the first English-language book-length anthology of wartime Ukrainian environmental humanities writing (and art), is out now — and that it’s available as a fully open access downloadable file thanks to McGill-Queen’s University Press and the Olga M. Ciupka Memorial Fund.
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek writes about the book that “Terra Invicta deserves to become an instant classic, a volume that everyone who wants to grasp the contours of our global crisis should read.” Writer Andrey Kurkov adds that “The war in Ukraine affects the ecology of nature and the ecology of consciousness throughout the world. This book is the best way to understand Ukraine today and the impact of Russian aggression on your life, no matter what country you live in.”
The book’s comprehensive introduction contextualizes the Russo-Ukrainian war within the historical processes — of politics, economics, culture, and ecology — that made it possible, and assesses it as the kind of environmental war that (sadly) presages wars likely to come as climate change intensifies. It then introduces the remainder of the book, with its 30+ authors and artists and rich array of topics, from place-based memory and trauma, ecocultural relations with amphibians, plants, trees, and fungi, and mappings of Indigenous (Tatar) musical landscapes and wartime soundscapes, to the role of art in war, ecological “war-rewilding,” decolonization of Europe’s last remaining empire (Russia), the possibilities of international solidarities across colonial contexts, and the tensions between extractive capitalism and democracy in the “full-scale Anthropocene.” To read the Introduction, see below.
Once you’ve looked at the open access PDF of the book, you just might decide to get yourself or someone else a print copy. (Or at the very least, to recommend it to libraries.) The book is available at a 25% discount until December 31, and it’s perfect for holiday gifts. All royalties from sales of the book will be donated to Ukrainian charities until the war is over and the country’s viable reconstruction is assured. See below for ordering information.
The first online book event, featuring several of the book’s authors and moderated by Tallinn University’s professor Epp Annus, will take place on December 8, 17:00-18:30 EET (GMT+2), hosted by the RUTA Environmental Initiative and University of Tallinn’s Institute of Humanities. Further information can be found here. Register for the event here.
Further Terra Invicta book events, which will double as fundraisers for Ukrainian charities, are being planned for Vancouver (late January–early February, details TBA), New York City (March 27-28), Toronto (April 20 and 24), Montreal (April 22), and elsewhere. Please sign up here to be kept in the loop or e-mail me for details.
The book can be ordered with the 25% discount code “MQ25” online or directly with the distributor in your area until 31 December 2025. Canada UTP Distribution: 1-800-565-9523 utpbooks@utpress.utoronto.ca. USA & Rest of World: Chicago Distribution Center 1-800-621-2736 orders@press.uchicago.edu. UK & Europe: Combined Academic Publishers +44(0)01423526350 enquiries@combinedacademic.co.uk.
Galina Rymbu‘s “Open Letter to Zarah Sultana,” ex-Labour MP and co-founder with Jeremy Corbyn of the new British left-wing political party Your Party, reads like a long letter from the Ukrainian left (certainly a large segment of it) to that poorly informed swath of the western left that continues to mouth platitudes blaming NATO for this war and seeking to ultimately placate Russia. (Irish president-elect Catherine Connolly is, unfortunately, the latest clear addition to that swath.) The letter trods over themes readers of this blog will be familiar with, and adds some more. Either way, it’s good to share with your leftist friends.
Rymbu writes about growing up as a working-class leftist and feminist in Russia, facing discrimination far exceeding what she has seen in eight years living in Ukraine; about the inauthentic Russian and Ukrainian influencers (like Alexei Sakhnin, Sergei Khorolsky, Andrei Konovalov, and some others associated with Mir Snizu, Union of the Post-Soviet Left, and Borotba) whose messages are all-too-readily embraced by old European leftists; and about the many reasons both to learn more about the Ukrainian left and to support Ukrainians’ struggle for self-determination from neo-imperial Russia.
This Ukraine is unknown and incomprehensible to most Russian leftists — and to those Ukrainians who now act as their protégés and “dependents.” This is an Ukraine with strong anarchist traditions of self-organization and radical democracy — traditions that always survive, despite occupations, colonizations, crises, and internal conflicts.
I believe that any international dialogue about resistance in Ukraine and about the possibilities of military and political support from abroad should begin with a story about these traditions—and about those who are fighting for them right now.
