David Oks’s “Waiting for the Russians in Ukraine” is, while skewed in its bigger picture, true enough in most of its details. It also happens to be a microcosm of the world at large.
The dominance of personalistic parties, the thriving culture of corruption and retribution, the regional cleavage within Ukraine, and an elite formation process of economic privatization widely viewed as illegitimate have all conspired to cripple each attempt to establish a stable elite hegemony. Regardless of whether the attempts were of a patronal-regionalist character (Yanukovych or Medvedchuk) or liberal-nationalist character (Viktor Yushchenko or Arseniy Yatseniuk), they have resulted in a succession of ineffectual governments, which quickly lose their popularity as they are unable to deliver on much beyond symbolism. No single faction of the oligarch clans has been able to triumph over the others; neither have any of the liberal-democratic reformers managed to subdue the oligarchs as a class.
The repertoire of contention available to opponents of this system is narrow, and it centers on ideologically vague urban uprisings of a national-democratic character, always centered in the Maidan Square. These are the occasional flowerings of “democratic renewal” or “national salvation,” like the Orange Revolution in 2004 or the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, that briefly capture the liberal imagination. But this results only in some elite circulation. Ukraine’s political economy is largely unchanged, and business as usual eventually returns.
Ukraine is, in all these details, a basketcase. (And all the more so to an economic reductionist.)
But none of these features are unique to Ukraine, and many are more broadly, even globally, systemic. Business as usual is the problem of the world (which is why climate change, for instance, isn’t being solved). The oligarchic class works hard everywhere to retain its privileges, with occasional openings to new elites and new privatizations. (The radical privatization of industry marking the end of the Soviet Union was nothing compared to the privatization of datafied cognition marking the opening of the surveillance capitalism frontier.) Personalistic parties, or party-states, with varying degrees of authoritarian vertykal, rule kleptocratically in their own patronal-regionalist spheres (not always several in a single country, as in Ukraine, but sometimes quite singularly, as in Russia, China, and elsewhere).
The liberal imagination is captured by occasional bursts of democratic energy, and more often than not these defuse soon enough into business as usual. Democracy works mainly to shift the deck chairs around (to circulate elites, as Oks puts it) and to air out some views (and some flatulence), not really to redesign the architecture.
And life goes on: young people go on dates, people joke, drink, discuss Eurovision, muddle through. As Oks asks rhetorically, “what could they do?”
Not every city provides the space and background for life to go on as well as it does in Kyïv.
The piece is nevertheless worth reading, if only to remind ourselves what Ukraine is up against when Russian armies are not on the doorstep.
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