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.
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.
A new issue of the London Ukrainian Review examines culture as a matter of national security in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian war. The Review, which is an open-access publication of the Ukrainian Institute London partnering with the Vienna-based Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Academic Studies Press, and INDEX: Institute for Documentation and Exchange, has been publishing excellent work since 2021. Editor-in-chief Sasha Dovzhyk explains that this issue “highlight[s] the voices of cultural figures who defend Ukraine with arms” and “examines culture as a tool of Russia’s imperialist expansion, all the while insisting on a bond between cultural familiarity and political solidarity.”
Had the long history of Russian colonial violence against Ukraine been better understood by a public familiar with the canon of Ukrainian culture, Ukraine and Crimea might not have been perceived by so many in the West as obscure parts of Russia’s ‘backyard’ in 2014. Ukraine, of course, is not alone in this sense: how different might our reactions to events in Gaza or Sudan be if we all read novels by Palestinian and Sudanese writers in our schools and universities?
In “How Fascist is Putinism?“, German political scientist and veteran Ukraine watcher Andreas Umland thoroughly examines and assesses the arguments and counter-arguments for considering Putinism to be a form of fascism. If there’s a single scholarly article to recommend on this topic, it is probably this one.
Umland shows that while it’s still quite possible to argue that Putinism is not fascism, this requires either a rather strict definition of what fascism is (and an eagerness to highlight the ways it still fails that definition), or a nuanced empirical eye that sees Putinism not as one thing but a hodgepodge, and therefore not only fascist. To argue that it is not fascist at all, however, seems to be stretching credulity. The answer is, at best, a matter of degree.
Among his conclusions:
“Russia’s armed forces and occupational administration in Ukraine behave, especially since 2022, in a manifestly terroristic, genocidal, ecocidal, and sometimes even sadist manner. Against this dreadful background, it seems strange to insist that Russia’s policies and the ideas behind them are clearly, absolutely and unquestionably non-fascist.”
On the other hand,
“An exclusive explanation of Russia’s motivation for its policies in Ukraine and elsewhere with ultra-nationalist maximalism limits understanding of the motivations behind the so-called ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine. [. . .] The initial impulse for the full-scale invasion was, nevertheless, less growing ultra-nationalist fanaticism than misinformed power-political cynicism within Putin’s regime.”
More to the point, however:
“The longer and the more successful Russia’s war against Ukraine is, the more prominent and influential fascist Russian actors, ideas and networks will become in Russia as well as beyond.”
The book features the work of 30+ Ukrainian authors and artists that together articulate “what in the world is worth fighting for” — a world in which, in the face of history’s repetitions and the future’s uncertainties, we nevertheless persist, in Katya Buchatska’s words, in “plant[ing] a garden so that we have something to lose.”
Political philosopher Slavoj Žižek writes about it:
“Urgently needed, Terra Invicta focuses on the catastrophic environmental impact of the Russian aggression on Ukraine. It demonstrates how the genocidal Russian attack systematically destroys natural resources, renders large domains uninhabitable, and endangers nuclear power plants. New habitats are emerging where old forms of life were destroyed. Ivakhiv’s volume makes it clear that there is no choice between ecological concerns and struggle against military aggression: in Ukraine, they are the two moments of the same struggle. For this reason alone, Terra Invicta deserves to become an instant classic, a volume that everyone who wants to grasp the contours of our global crisis should read.”
And Andrey Kurkov, leading Ukrainian novelist and essayist, writes:
“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 today’s Ukraine and the impact of Russian aggression on your life, no matter what country you live in.”
Below is a brief description followed by a list of the contents and ordering information (which includes a 25% discount). In addition, the full-colour book features art by Katya Buchatska, Nikita Kadan, Kateryna Aliinyk, Arsen Savadov, Anna Zvyagintseva, Zhanna Kadyrova, Kateryna Lysovenko, and some of the authors listed. Deep gratitude to all of the authors and artists involved, and to the wonderful sprites at McGill-Queen’s University Press. Royalties will go to Ukraine’s defense for as long as the war continues.
