UKR-TAZ

Forensic Architecture — which has done tremendous investigative “counter-forensics” work in Palestine/Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Myanmar, Colombia, Brazil’s Yanomamo territory, and Louisiana’s “Death Alley,” among other zones of war and human rights violation — has been working with the Center for Spatial Technologies on the March 2022 bombing of Mariupol’s Drama Theatre.

This 20-minute video presents the first part of their investigation. Their investigation of the Russian bombing of Kyiv’s Babyn Yar is also excellent, and viewable from their website. (See co-founder Eyal Weizman’s writings, including his co-authored volume on Investigative Aesthetics, and the “Methodology” section of their extensively documented web site for further information on their approach.)

“Before it was destroyed by a Russian airstrike, the Mariupol Theater was a key refuge in the besieged city, a unique site of solidarity and resistance. With Forensis & Forensic Architecture, the Center for Spatial Technologies interviewed survivors to tell the story of a self-organized commune: a city within a building.”

Since Timothy Snyder is such a key figure in today’s debates over the Russian invasion of Ukraine (and over the larger global context in which they figure), and since I had intended to write something about him and his critics but have not done that yet, I was happy to see Robert Baird’s long-form article about him, which appeared in today’s Guardian. In “Putin, Trump, Ukraine: how Timothy Snyder became the leading interpreter of our dark times,” Baird covers all these things and more.

On the debate between “realists” and those I previously called “culturalists“, Baird writes:

This emphasis on ideas has led Snyder to be criticised by some in the realist school of international relations. Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a thinktank, counts herself an admirer of Snyder’s historical work, but she also says that his “understanding of world affairs is almost indelibly shaped by what he thinks are the big important ideas, whereas I would say that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was motivated as much by trying to prop up its falling security in the region”. The dispute is not academic. If you believe, as Ashford does, that Russia is motivated by strategic fears, then every additional degree of western involvement risks exacerbating the original causes of the war and prolonging the conflict. By contrast, if you believe with Snyder that the war’s roots lie in Putin’s fascist worldview, then victory on the battlefield becomes imperative. “A lot of smart people have said it before me, but fascism was never discredited. It was only defeated,” he says. “The Russians have to be defeated, just like the Germans were defeated.”

The article provides an intellectual biography of Snyder including his work as a historian of Eastern Europe and of the Holocaust, as well as his writings as a “public intellectual” analyzing Trumpism, Putinism, and much more.

It can be read here.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS/SUBMISSIONS: Creative writing, theoretical/scholarly writing, experimental text/image works from Ukrainian writers/artists and humanities scholars

Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth

Creative visions from Ukrainian artists and humanists articulating what in the world is worth fighting for

In an Anthropocenic context of intensifying climate change, exploding migration crises, and anticipated future wars over land, resources, and borders, Ukraine’s recent experience is hardly peripheral. It is in fact central to geopolitical, economic, and sociocultural processes at large in the world, and becoming more pressing year by year. Just as the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear accident placed Ukraine on the map of the world’s socio-ecological “sacrifice zones,” so has Ukraine’s invasion by Russia—an authoritarian petro-state poised to decline as its fossil-fuel economy depreciates—made it central to the global crises expected to arise on a climate-destabilizing planet.

Putin, yesterday:

The West started to turn Ukraine into anti-Russia. This project started back in the 19th century, started by Austria-Hungary Empire and Poland.

Putin, Feb. 21, 2022:

modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia.

Voltaire, in 1731 (in his Histoire de Charles XII):

“Ukraine has always aspired to freedom.”

Žižek, “The Dark Side of Neutrality” (responding to Roger Waters, last week, also readable here):

As an independent voice who follows Russian media very closely, I am well acquainted with what Putin and his propagandists “actually say.” The major TV channels are full of commentators recommending that countries like Poland, Germany, or the United Kingdom be nuked. The Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, one of Putin’s closes allies, now openly calls for “the fight against Satanism [to] continue throughout Europe and, first of all, on the territory of Poland.”

Indeed, the official Kremlin line describes the war as a “special operation” for the de-Nazification and de-demonization of Ukraine. Among Ukraine’s “provocations” is that it has permitted Pride parades and allowed LGBTQ+ rights to undermine traditional sexual norms and gender roles. Kremlin-aligned commentators speak of “liberal totalitarianism,” even going so far as to argue that George Orwell’s 1984 was a critique not of fascism or Stalinism but of liberalism.

[. . .]

Those who would claim neutrality forfeit their standing to complain about the horrors of colonization anywhere. […] It is obscene to blame Ukraine for Russian acts of destruction, or to mischaracterize the Ukrainians’ heroic resistance as a rejection of peace. Those, like Waters, who call for “an immediate ceasefire” would have Ukrainians respond to redoubled Russian aggression by abandoning their own self-defense. That is a formula not for peace, but for pacification.

Since late May of this year, Posle/После (Russian for “After”) has been publishing wide-ranging leftist perspectives on the continuing Russo-Ukrainian war, in both English and Russian.

The web site calls itself “a platform for political reflection on this criminal war, its preconditions and consequences,” and welcomes “everyone who seeks to understand the present and to imagine the future.” To that end, it has published several dozen articles that, as the editors put it, collectively “examine the structure” of the invasion, its relation to “immense social inequality and powerlessness,” and the “imperialist ideology” that “feeds on the militarist discourse, xenophobia, and bigotry” — and help to “imagine the way out.”

Editorial details are hard to find, presumably because many (or most?) of those involved are currently in Russia. The web journal’s coverage of Russian dissident voices is good to see (though it can feel a little abstract given the lack of real-world presence they seem to have). But it also includes coverage of the global left and its responses to the war (including the American, Swedish, and German lefts), the “ecological scars of war,” Russian regionalism, and nuanced analyses of Russian shame, discourses of the “brotherly peoples,” and much more.

An interview with Ukrainian artist Mykola Ridnyi includes some perceptive comments about the on-the-ground situation in Ukraine. Here’s one:

[A]lthough it is believed that wars inevitably lead to an increase in conservative sentiments, I try to stay optimistic. This war is engaging an unprecedented number of people with very different political views and backgrounds. Organizations such as Solidarity Collectives and the Unicorn Battalion support many left-wing activists and LGBT people who are serving in the army. Right-wing groups played a big role in 2014, because the Ukrainian professional army was weakened and undeveloped, but today the situation is different. 

The journal can be followed on Telegram and Instagram, in addition to its main web site.

Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, an Australian-based journal that calls itself both a “journal for a post-Cold War left” and a journal for “Socialism of the 21st century,” has been publishing excellent material on the continuing Russian war on Ukraine.

Most recently, they have featured a video interview with political economist Yulia Yurchenko, urbanist Alona Liasheva, and cultural and political activist Ilya Budraitskis, and a lengthy article entitled “Ukraine, Self-Determination, and the National Question.” The authors of the latter — Bill Fletcher, Jr., Bill Gallegos, and Jamala Rogers — debunk some leftist myths about Russian aggression and develop a rigorous argument in support of “the Ukrainian struggle against aggression and for self-determination, including for self-defense.” “Standing with Ukrainians,” they conclude, “is an act of international solidarity of the oppressed.”  

An interview with Hanna Perekhoda, a University of Lausanne Ph.D. candidate in history who was recently featured on Democracy Now!, has also just appeared at Links’ ecosocialist “sister publication,” Green Left. Federico Fuentes’s interview with Perekhoda, entitled “Ukraine: Peace in Donbas ‘requires the complete withdrawal of Russian armed forces’,” is one of the most thorough yet concise summaries of the entire conflict and well worth reading, especially for its insights into the Donbas region.

The Links web site devoted to “special coverage” of the war includes an exhaustive listing of links to articles from the Ukrainian left, on Russian resistance to “Putin’s war,” and covering global and historical dimensions of the current crisis. It is an excellent resource.

A promising new initiative, entitled SONIAKH Digest, was launched this week by an editorial collective “of artists, curators, journalists, editors, media experts and academics” from Ukraine and beyond. It describes itself as

a platform amplifying voices and visions from Ukraine and those of Ukraine’s allies and neighbors — by artists, activists, and scholars — in response to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, and its worldwide propaganda machine.

The title references the anonymous woman handing out sunflower seeds to invading Russian soldiers, described here.

The About page continues:

The online publication and affiliated think tank seeks to counter misinformation, disinformation, negative stereotypes and propaganda that obfuscate, relativize and undermine the efforts of Ukrainians to defend themselves against the Russian colonial invasion. The initiative is embedded in the context of contemporary art, using the artistic medium to enhance strategies of public communication. The curatorial strategy merges a variety of media with academic analysis and journalistic integrity to reach diverse audiences. SONIAKH digest reincarnates and mutates the archaic journalistic tradition of the “digest” as an outlet where information, propaganda, analysis and artistic production are collated, summarized, illustrated and amplified for a general audience. 

Among the platform’s first text publications are Oleksiy Radynski’s excellent “Russian Fossil Fascism is Europe’s Fault” and Yevheniia Butsykina’s “Motherhood in War, Bodily Experience.”

Click here to go to the journal’s opening announcement, and here (or below) to go to its front page.

The journal Spilne/Commons is continuing to publish incisive and probing left-wing commentary on the Russian war on Ukraine. A collectively written editorial, “Support Ukrainian Resistance and Disempower Fossil Capital” (Sept. 27), takes on and debunks the arguments of a group of German leftists who recently argued (essentially) for an “anti-militarist” capitulation to Russian goals. Meanwhile, Vladislav Starodubtsev’s “International Solidarity: How Foreign Leftists are Helping Ukraine in the War” (Oct. 4) identifies several organizations on the global left who are appropriately supporting Ukrainian resistance, and who therefore make up a kind of pro-Ukrainian alternative within the international left.

The journal is also organizing a conference to take place October 21-23 on “Reconstruction and Justice in Post-War Ukraine.” Topics will include socio-economic development in the post-war context, energy sustainability, labor rights, housing, the role of the Ukrainian left in the Russo-Ukrainian war, and “the crisis of hegemony, imperialism, and challenges to world security.” The international, online conference will be open to the public. Conference details can be found at the journal’s Feuerbach 11 conference web site.

While the war continues, it may seem premature to discuss the reconstruction of Ukraine, but that is precisely what several of Ukraine’s leading cultural institutions feel is needed. It will be the topic of an online symposium entitled “The Reconstruction of Ukraine: Ruination / Representation / Solidarity. A Symposium of Ideas and Strategies,” to take place this week on September 9 through 11:

Over 40 expert Ukrainian and international speakers – architects, artists, historians, economists, poets and others – will gather this September to discuss Ukraine’s past, present and future in light of Russia’s ongoing invasion. The overall theme of the conversation will be reconstruction: broadly-conceived to refer to the rebuilding of architecture and infrastructure, but also of institutions, social bonds, individual and collective bodies and minds.

The symposium is organized by a network of institutions, including the Центр міської історії / Center for Urban History, Urban Forms Center, Kyiv Biennial / VCRC, ReStart Ukraine, UCL, and Yale University.

The symposium will take place virtually over the course of three days from September 9−11. The official website for the symposium, along with more information about the event, can be found here: https://reconstruct.in.ua/. To register, please follow this link. Accompanying links to the symposium’s Instagram and Telegram channels can be found here. 

The round table discussions held over each of the three days will range from housing, preservation, masterplanning, the political and economic challenges of reconstruction, the impact of gendered and sexual violence, remediation of the country’s psychological trauma, among many other subjects. 

You can register for it here.

I find Kinga Dunin’s conversation with Ukrainian filmmaker and intellectual Oleksiy Radynski refreshing — not because Radynski is a nuanced, scholarly thinker, but because he is a creative, provocative, connective thinker, more Deleuzian in spirit than anything else, which is a missing element from so much thinking on the present Russo-Ukrainian crisis.

Scholars, for instance, will debate whether and how democracy functions in Ukraine (Mikhai Minakov’s and Matthew Rojansky’s 2018 piece was good on that, and here’s one attempt to update that), and whether and how Putinism fits the label of fascism (Cain Burdeau’s recent overview of those arguments is helpful). Radynski simply uses the terms to think with and beyond them.

On democracy, here’s an exchange between Dunin and Radynski:

KD: It’s turned out that the Ukrainian state is quite well organized, efficient, and works surprisingly well despite the war.

OR: This is not the power of the state, but of democracy. February 24 completely changed our vision of what democracy is. It was not the state that organized resistance, but the people who self-organized. Nothing in my life has brought me around more to people’s democracy. I think this is why Russia lost the battle of Kyiv, which one day, with hindsight, may turn out to have been a breakthrough moment in this war. They had a completely vertical and nondemocratic way of managing their military. The commanders of various ranks weren’t allowed to revise their action plans; they were supposed to march ahead, encircle Kyiv, and seize it. Perhaps it’s a weak argument for democracy, but as far as I know the Ukrainian army is fighting democratically, which means it’s in total disarray. It was so especially during the first weeks, when the territorial defense forces were forming and an incredible number of people wanted to join. This story is yet to be written, it was … Makhnovshchyna [referring to Nestor Makhno’s early twentieth century anarchist militia]. A kind of people’s army. There was something Cossack about it.

Radynski describes Russia as fascist in part due to its “blocking” of “the development of culture” (“What they use is some kind of newspeak, a necro-language,” whereas “we,” Ukraine, “are the only country where free speech in Russian exists for the time being”). He replies to Dunin’s question “So Russian culture should not be boycotted?” with the following:

This would be too big a favor to Russian imperial culture. Russian culture deserves a punishment much more severe than a boycott. It deserves a deconstruction. [. . .]

Deconstructing Russian culture means challenging the existing pantheon, now headed by “Tolstoyevski”—Tolstoy, the “good Russian,” and the mad right-winger Dostoevsky. And not by, let’s say, truly radical writers, such as [Nikolai] Leskov. After the deconstruction of this culture, we will also look in a completely different way at Ukrainian literature, for example at such a decolonial revolutionary as Taras Shevchenko.

He also mentions Vladimir Sorokin’s dystopian futurist novel Telluria. Radynski’s future Russia is a “deconstructed” one that has effectively “decolonized” and “disintegrated” into regionalist movements that can no longer constitute the kind of imperial power we see in full force today.

There’s an idealism here that ignores the potential violence of this “disintegration” as well as its impacts on global geopolitics. But it is a kind of “creatively deconstructive” thinking that’s needed to balance out the “realism” of the Mearsheimers, Chomskys (despite the latter’s anarchist ideals), Kissingers, and others who cannot see a future beyond present configurations.

Radynski has shared the following backgrounder on his Facebook page:

e-flux published an interview on the decolonization of Russia that I gave to Kinga Dunin around three months ago. In the meantime, the idea to decolonize Russia kind of skyrocketed. It’s no longer a niche thing: it’s actively debated at international forums, popular magazines and even at panels organised by the State Department. It’s been picked up as a scarecrow by Russian propaganda, which increased its visibility by a multiple.

But we have to be careful with the popularity of this idea in the West. The Russian Federation should be decolonized (read: dismantled) as a result of its own internal contradictions, and not as an outcome of external meddling: this would only lead to a stronger fascist reaction in Russia. What we should do is take advantage of those internal contradictions to help the oppressed peoples liberate themselves.

We in Ukraine are best positioned to take this advantage. Our post-colonial situation allows us to understand the Russian system much better than it understands itself. In addition, we know how to use Russian language and are able of freely doing this, while the total majority of people in Russia are not.

Radynski’s conversation with Dunin can be read on e-Flux Notes.