UKR-TAZ

As terror continues to rain down on Ukrainians after the pseudo-effort of Donald Trump’s two real estate mogul “diplomats” to negotiate “peace,” it’s helpful to think of how this wartime might compare with the wartime of a century ago, and how culture relates to it.

The wartime period of 1917-1921 was messy, characterized by multiple proclamations of sovereignty and independence even as rival armies clashed across the countryside: the Ukrainian People’s Republican army, the Bolshevik Red Army, the Russian White Army, German and Austro-Hungarian forces, the Polish military, and the anarchist and Free Cossack units of Makhno, Hryhoriv, Nikiforova, Chornousov, Kotsur, Chuchupak, and others. When relative calm came to prevail after the Bolsheviks took control and proclaimed Kharkiv their capital, the cultural intelligentsia came, either enthusiastically or grudgingly (since some had been allied with the republican cause), to align with the Communist state-building project. Some of its leading figures became vocal and eager supporters of the building of a proletarian Ukrainian culture, with “Ukrainization” being temporarily allowed as part of the Leninist korenizatsiya policy (the “indigenization” or “rooting” of communism within national cultures).

The 1920s became a time of revitalization, a “Red Renaissance” by many assessments, with a variety of artist and writer groups contending for recognition at a time when state support for the arts was substantial. Groups like Hart, MARS (Workshop of Revolutionary Literature), ARMU (Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine), Pluh (Plough), Komunkult, and perhaps the most influential of them, VAPLITE (the Free Academy of Proletarian Literature), provided the organizational links supporting the creative work of a generation of writers, filmmakers, and visual and theatrical artists, only a handful of whom are widely known today: Oleksander Dovzhenko, Les Kurbas, Mykola Khvylovyi, Mykola Kulish, Maik Yohansen, Pavlo Tychyna, Vasyl Ellan-Blakytny, Mykola Bazhan, Valerian Pidmohylnyi, Kazimir Malevich, Oleksander Arkhypenko, Mykhailo Semenko, Vadym Meller, Dokiia Humenna, Mykhailo Boichuk, Viktor Petrov/Domontovych, and so many others.

The reason why they aren’t known is, of course, because by the end of the decade they were subject to the Stalinist strangulation of the arts, especially intense in Ukraine, which was carried out in tandem with the collectivization of the countryside. In 1932-33, the latter resulted in the artificial hunger known as the Holodomor, with its several million victims, and by 1938 the cultural intelligentsia was also decimated — not just physically destroyed (so many of them executed in the purges) but mostly erased from the historical record. The Red Renaissance became the Executed Renaissance, a term coined by Paris-based publisher Jerzy Giedroyc and popularized by emigré literary critic Yuriy Lavrinenko.

There is, as yet, no widely-known, general-audience, English-language historical account of Ukraine’s 1920s cultural renaissance and its nightmarish aftermath. But fortunately there is an excellent open-access essay that details the broad contours of it quite well. Published in 2021 by the Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien, Bohdan Tokarsky’s roughly 100-page volume “Un/Executed Renaissance: Ukrainian Soviet Modernism and Its Legacies,” should be required reading for anyone who thinks they know world culture of the 1920s or the early Soviet period, but who doesn’t know Ukraine’s contributions to it. (Note that both the above terms, including “renaissance” itself, get problematized in Tokarsky’s text.) More on the book below.

Thirty-five years ago today, Ukraine’s Parliament declared independence, “restoring” it, in the eyes of those who see its history in teleological, state-centric terms: the Kyïvan Rus’ state, the quasi-democratic Cossack Hetmanate of the 1600-1700s (whose progressive potentials even Marx noted), the Ukrainian People’s Republic of 1917-20, and so on. (Serhy Yekelchyk’s article “The Making of Independent Ukraine” is an excellent overview of the gaining of independence and its meaning since 1991.)

I was in Kyïv at the time, and while my memory is foggy (I lost my journal from that summer, in which I kept pretty detailed notes on daily life in Ukraine), I remember the week leading up to that declaration as an eerie lull between the beginning of the coup — launched by a cadré of Soviet hardliners in an effort to restore the Union as it floundered — and this surprising parliamentary pronouncement that came a few days after the coup had fizzled out.

I had returned to Kyïv from the enthralling Chervona Ruta music festival in Zaporizhzhia on the first morning of the coup. The entire bus ride, we passengers had to listen to state radio playing a monotonous alternation of classical music (the kind they played to mark the deaths of key Communist Party leaders) and a toneless male voice announcing our “new ministers,” and it wasn’t clear what would greet us upon our arrival in Kyïv.

Unlike Moscow, the Ukrainian capital was relatively quiet. Rumors circulated through the week about armed Soviet militia units encircling the city, but none ever manifested in the city itself, and by the time of the parliamentary vote, we were in that zone of knowing that something crazily new was emerging, but not knowing anything about how its emergence would play out. The previous two years (about half of which I had spent in Ukraine) had been a wild ride — exhilarating for me, a young Ukrainian-Canadian who was free (more or less) to travel and witness the excited optimism of so many young people, as well as the discombobulated confusion among many of the old.

Within the three months that followed the declaration of independence, which was to be ultimately decided on by a national referendum, Ukrainians rallied, and on December 1, over 90% of them voted to approve Ukraine’s independence.

Today, Ukrainians continue to fight to preserve what they fought for then, and what many fought for back in 1917-21 (and then some again in the 1940s, though that was more complicated): the hope offered by self-determination. The “self” part of that self-determination has always been a work in progress, as it is everywhere. Canadians, for instance, are never as united as they get when they are being economically attacked and verbally threatened by the bully to their south. Likewise, Ukrainians have grown much more unified by the vicious attacks they’ve suffered at the hands of their bully next door; and four and a half years of such violence can wear anyone down.

But the determination to withstand being bullied remains and is worth celebrating. Слава Україні.

Narodnyi Rukh (People’s Movement) deputies carrying in the Ukrainian flag on August 24, 1991, following the parliamentary declaration of the Act of Ukrainian Independence.

Commons (Спільне) Journal has issued a call for papers and written contributions for an upcoming print issue focusing on the Ukrainian Left Diaspora. Here is the call:

The long-awaited latest issue of East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies has finally seen the light of day, after suffering an extended bout of publishing limbo (the issue is dated 2024). Part One of two can be found at the journal web site, while Part Two is as yet only available in pre-publication versions, found here.

In the time it was being prepared — the editors began working on the issue in 2021, before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine — the Ukrainian environmental humanities have indeed taken off, with multiple conferences, online panels and seminars, and books (including Darya Tsymbalyuk’s excellent Ecocide in Ukraine, and the book I edited, Terra Invicta). Tanya Richardson’s and Darya Tsymbalyuk’s introductory article, “Beyond Anthropocentrism in Ukrainian Studies,” along with its companion piece, “Constellations of Ukrainian Thought and the Environmental Humanities” (in Part Two), are still wonderful jumping-off points for exploring that growing body of literature.

I’m glad to be included in this special issue with my essay on “Becoming ‘Tuteishyi’: Ukraine in the New Global Climatic Regime.” The PDF is here. I recommend all the others, which include Kateryna Iakovlenko’s “A Systematic Robbery: Transforming the Memory, Culture, and Landscape of the Ukrainian Steppe,” Anastassiya Andrianova’s “Sunflowers in the Ruins: A Multimodal Analysis of the Environmental Aspects of Ukrainian War Songs from February to May 2022“, and Iryna Zamuruieva’s “Gathering Ecofeminist Stories with Kateryna Hrushevs’ka.” Part Two includes work by Julia Malitska, Jonathon Turnbull, Iryna Skubii, Anna Olenenko, and special issue co-editors Richardson and Tsymbalyuk.

I’ve just published a piece at Terrestri(e)alism that summarizes the multiple ways in which the Russo-Ukrainian war is an environmental war, and the reasons why this should be important far beyond Ukraine — in fact, for everyone, as climate change intensifies and wars over land and resources can similarly be expected to get more frequent.

It’s called “How war is environmental: the Ukrainian case.” Read it there: https://terrestrialism.substack.com/p/how-war-is-environmental-the-ukrainian

It’s very nice to see Bernd Herzogenrath’s Spectral Futures anthology in print. Bernd managed to squeeze such a weird and wonderful mix of futuristic fabulations (that are colorful in every respect including type-face) from an entourage of luminaries like Claire Colebrook, Orit Halpern, Bron Szerszynski, and some 20 other authors.

It was a joy to work with Asia Bazdyrieva and Svitlana Matviyenko on a co-authored chapter entitled “Spectres of Solar Futurity,” that ranges across the wild fields and black soils of past and future Ukraine. Here are a few teaser paragraphs from our piece (broken into shorter bits for readability):

To gauge what futures might be envisioned in and on the sun’s yellow rays, we trace the movement of the sun’s white light, perceived as yellow, into the black earth of Ukraine, and back again to the yellow of that country’s possible futures. We do so through a historical detour in which Russian imperial science, and later Soviet science, contribute to making the earth what it has become for Ukraine: foundational, contested, coveted, resourcified, resistant.

Unlike the Russian and Soviet scientists who perceived the earth as resource, and specifically as “Russian chernozem,” Ukrainian artists, from Pavlo Tychyna (quoted above) and Oleksandr Dovzhenko to Fedir Tetianych, perceived it as poetry, as music, as clarinets of the sun. In this way, we follow the circuit of light as it exists in scientific, imperial, and ecopoietic realities: as object, resource, energy, process, movement, and even sound, circulating between the yellow sun (in a blue sky) and the yellow earth (over black soil), with life emerging as earth in formations within which we find ourselves today, at this moment of Anthropocenic, wartime, collective precarity.

Read the rest of this entry »

The London Ukrainian Review has published a special issue on “Legacies of Chornobyl” that includes a fascinating interview with historian Serhii Plokhy (who seems to be writing at the incredible rate of a book a year) alongside several articles on the muliple dimensions of the accident and its impacts.

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.  

Read the editors’ introduction here, my piece here, and the rest of the issue here: https://www.londonukrainianreview.org/

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.

I’m sharing these posts by permission of the author. You can follow more of his writing at facebook.com/sirantos.fotopoulos.

March 7 (by Sirantos Fotopoulos)

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.

Today marks the 108th anniversary of the proclamation of Ukrainian independence by the Ukrainian Central Council (Central Rada, or Tsentralna Rada) of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, in the document known as the Fourth Universal.

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).

Here are some excerpts from the Fourth Universal. You can read the entire text below (as translated by Oleh Fedyshyn, from Towards an Intellectual History of Ukraine: An Anthology of Ukrainian Thought from 1710 to 1995, edited by Ralph Lindheim and George S. N. Luckyj, University of Toronto Press, 1996, all of which can be read online at Diasporiana).

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.