Without the Soviet Union: Fighting Inequality from the Left in Ukraine

Channel-Justice, Emily. Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine. Anthropological Horizons. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. 302 pp. $75.00. ISBN 978-1-4875-0973-6. What are the political and conceptual implications of reviewing a book about Ukraine entitled Without the State, for a journal devoted to “the peoples of the former Russian Empire and former Soviet Union,” in 2023? At first, I had doubts about writing this review. Not because of the book itself, which offers a keen ground-level analysis of a political event of profound significance for Ukraine and the world, but because I struggled with this question. As of this writing, Ukrainians continue to lay down body and soul to beat back an invading army propelled by the Kremlin’s spurious claims of an absence of “stateness” in Ukraine. Meanwhile, on both banks of the Dnipro, Ukrainians of all political persuasions are fighting on every possible cultural and other front to extricate themselves from “post-Soviet space” and be accepted as part of Europe. Considering the request for this review, I asked myself, “Why focus on Ukrainians’ efforts to compensate for the purported weakness of the Ukrainian state now, and why insist on continuing to analyze Ukrainian society as part of an historical and cultural space from which its people seek to free themselves?” As it turns out, Emily Channell-Justice’s ethnographic account of leftist protest on Maidan explores the specific terrain upon which these questions are contested. Any readers hoping to find in Without the State evidence of a lack of “stateness” in Ukraine should feel free to continue their search elsewhere. This is not that kind of book. Instead, Channell-Justice offers readers a compelling account of Ukrainian voluntarism and glimpses of a novel framework for thinking about state-society relationships. Even more, she and her interlocutors reflect upon the political challenges of broaching questions about neoliberalism in countries with a state socialist past. Without the State, anchored in events in Kyiv in 2013–14, offers insights relevant for other societies that were once part of the Soviet Union and that may be currently engaged in their own efforts to extricate themselves from Moscow’s grasp. The book also sheds needed light on the ideational struggles of people worldwide seeking participatory alternatives to the neoliberal economic order: if in the twentieth century Moscow’s ideologies played a significant role in anti-capitalist imaginaries, today’s Kremlin, with its embrace of oligarchic capitalism, its demonstrated indifference to the lives of working-class people at home, its pretensions to imperial expansion, and its depoliticized population, does nothing of the kind. Without the State explores themes familiar to scholars of contemporary Ukrainian society and politics: the conduct of protest; the salience of gender; the development of voluntarism. Channell-Justice offers perspectives complementing previous foreign eyewitness accounts of the 2013–14 protests on Maidan, such as Ioulia Shukan’s Génération Maidan: Vivre la crise ukrainienne (2016) or Marci Shore’s The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution (2017). But Channell-Justice’s most significant contribution emanates from her focus on the activities of self-described Ukrainian leftists, who face in former Soviet countries the difficult task of living and promoting the values of the Occupy movement amid a context of decommunization, vividly analyzed in such works as Oleksandra Haidai’s Kam'ianiy hist': Lenin u Tsentral'nyi Ukraiini (2018). As Channell-Justice so effectively shows, in Ukraine before Russia’s full-scale invasion, the grassroots political left struggled to define itself without reference to or association with the communist world or the Russian Federation, the Soviet Union’s self-appointed successor. Channell-Justice highlights this contradiction throughout: even as leftists see themselves as part of a global democratic and decolonial movement, others in Ukraine sometimes associate them with Soviet-era repertoires and ideas or see them as possible vectors of Russian influence. This dilemma is at the heart of a key contribution of the book: the experiences of Channell-Justice’s interlocutors illuminate challenges not only for peoples in places formerly governed by the Soviet Union, but also for communities across the globe searching for ways to dismantle capitalist logics while achieving escape velocity from the conceptual frameworks and alliances of the Cold War–all without succumbing to the gravitational pull of illiberal ethnonationalism. Channell-Justice details how her interlocutors tried, what obstacles they faced, and where they succeeded. An interesting example of this struggle can be found in a chapter on student activism in higher education. Recent reforms meant to make Ukrainian universities more “European” have also made them less accessible, reducing the number of seats available in university classrooms. Yet the long shadow cast by the Soviet past has complicated student activists’ efforts to work toward equitable access: in this context, alternatives to market-driven logics appear as throwbacks to the Soviet system. As was also long the case in Ukrainian national politics, debates about higher education as described in Without the State seem stuck in a conceptual paradigm, where the sole available alternatives appear to be either a restrictive market-based model or a Soviet-like welfare state. The war and its aftermath will likely change this situation, particularly if Ukraine is able to implement a version of the American GI bill for its veterans, but Channell-Justice’s narration of this debate highlights an abiding challenge for societies formerly ruled by Moscow that seek to democratize access not only to education, but also to decisional processes generally. Channell-Justice also calls attention to episodes in which other Ukrainians presume that her leftist interlocutors are acting on behalf of the Russian state–and respond accordingly. While representatives of Russian state interests have long been active in contemporary Ukraine, it is curious that some critics of leftist politics continue to associate decolonial, anti-neoliberal politics with present-day Russia. It is even more curious that some on the left do so themselves: for those disinclined to expose themselves to the details of the pseudohistorical narratives emanating from the Kremlin about Ukraine, historians such as Jane Burbank have shown persuasively that the ideas driving Russia’s current imperial ambitions first emerged from the wreckage of the Romanov empire; notwithstanding the Kremlin’s cynical manipulation of World War II memory to mobilize support among the Russian populace for the war against Ukraine, Putin’s model is Eurasian, not Soviet. The aim is not Soviet territorial restoration but an imperial space stretching, in Dmitry Medvedev's memorable 2022 formulation, from “Vladivostok to Lisbon.” And while the Kremlin’s current willingness to weaponize and destroy the calories upon which so many of the world’s poor depend does appear to draw on the logics of Soviet-era starvation campaigns in Ukraine, Moscow’s encouragement of vast social and economic inequalities at home and abroad seems far more characteristic of the current capitalist order than anything to do with the Soviet Union. But old habits of mind die hard, and Channell-Justice helps us navigate this cognitive terrain. A key concept motivating this book’s analysis is the idea of self-organization, or self-mobilization, a concept by now familiar to many. Channell-Justice describes it as “the idea that if something needs to be done and there is a person who has the capacity to do it, then it simply should be done, rather than waiting for someone else (particularly a state body or political figure) to do it” (p. 5). Although such practices are universally present in Ukraine today, as its society mobilizes to defend itself from an invading army, Channell-Justice locates the roots of self-organization, as her interlocutors do, in practices of the political left. With other scholars, such as Shukan, Channell-Justice describes the evolution of these practices as part of an extended process that began in 2013 on Maidan. Yet Ukrainian voluntarism also emanates from apolitical, society-wide practices born of necessity and continued in response to neoliberal reforms that left social institutions underfunded from the first years after Independence. Arguably, the habitus of Ukrainian self-organization has been visible for decades, its protagonists found most anywhere in the country: teachers who devoted weeks of their summers to repaint classroom walls; families who supplied and laundered bedsheets or cooked meals for hospitalized relatives. It may be that while practices of mutual self-help have not substantially changed, the shape and extent of the networks of people involved has. Although amid the fog of war it may be difficult to assess the nature and likely permanence of self-organization in Ukraine today, in analyzing self-organization on Maidan in 2013 and early 2014, Channell-Justice marks a juncture between the kinship- and community-based self-organizing that characterized people’s compensatory tactics in Ukrainian life from the 1990s, to the birth of the contemporary nation today, in which networks of self-organization include not only family, work colleagues, and friends, but all engaged in Ukraine’s fight to survive as a country. In Channell-Justice’s account, leftist activists feel conflicted about self-organization. As her interlocutors see it, their voluntarism compensates for gaps in social services provision created by the retraction of the state in neoliberalism. Framing their activities as a form of critique, her interlocutors see self-organization today as a “feature of neoliberalism,” not a consequence of incomplete state-building (p. 205). Further, they remind us that the move to outsource functions of the state to society helps politicians maintain power: as Channell-Justice notes, “bodies and institutions making up the state do not suffer from a lack of trust in these areas because they have removed responsibility for certain needs onto groups that are now perceived as trustworthy” (p. 208). At the same time, as Channell-Justice recognizes, much of that reduced state capacity in the years that follow Maidan is not the product of deliberate decision-making in neoliberalism, but rather proceeds from a constraining reality: Russian occupation of the Donbas drained the Ukrainian state of many of the human and financial resources it needed to provide for the rest of the population. Regardless, the critique Channell-Justice’s interlocutors express echoes staple arguments about the socialization of risk in capitalist societies more broadly. The idea that social responsibilities should be assumed by society, rather than by government, are longstanding features of both neoliberalism and political conservatism before its illiberal turn (American readers may recall President George Herbert Walker Bush’s “thousand points of light”). How should we think about the relationship between self-organization and state institutions? Channell-Justice acknowledges the presence of informal networks as a perennial feature of post-socialism. But in contrast to some of the literature on informal institutions in post-socialism, she frames networks of self-organization as entirely outside the state rather than in (sometimes awkward) imbrication with it. Of course, in many situations such networks are genuinely free of direct interface with state institutions: the networks of self-organization Channell-Justice describes are not the state-society hybrids that populate the literature on civil society in Ukraine before 2014. Other times, the boundary is not so clear, and networks of self-mobilization that fulfill or complement state functions sometimes do so with the direct or indirect participation of state institutions. The clear separation Channell-Justice draws between state and society allows her to articulate the problem in stark either-or terms. “That such networks are now being understood as more effective than official practices reflects a fundamental questioning whether the Ukrainian state is needed to ensure social well-being” (p. 46). Setting aside the ways in which Russia’s full-scale war has rendered such questions moot, another interpretation, and a different series of questions, are possible. Rather than imagining self-organization as a compensatory social mechanism arising amid neoliberal retraction from traditional state functions and existing entirely outside of the state, we might ask, “How might the presence of these networks and activities change our understanding of what the state is in a democratic polity?” The book leaves open other avenues for future research. Much of the book centers on activism in Kyiv, relying on broad strokes to portray experiences beyond the capital. In an analysis of political activism in a country as diverse as Ukraine, the use of signifiers such as “outside of Kyiv” or “a small town” may be required by research ethics (pp. 61, 48), but readers may want to know more: how did young people’s experiences in small towns in different regions of Ukraine differ when it came to exposure to ethnonationalist ideology or to leftist ideas? Going forward, how have regionalisms and extraterritorial solidarities forged by war changed how students think about their role in society? Thinking across time rather than space, how did previous meanings of “standing on Maidan,” whether in the multivocal protests against electoral manipulation in 2004 or in the movements that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, shape the various meanings that Channel-Justice describes on Maidan in 2013–14? Without the State draws our attention to the importance of immersion-based research, highlighting the need to understand as far as possible the contexts of people’s lives as a precondition for understanding state-society relationships. As a result, Channell-Justice threads an at times porous boundary between herself and her interlocutors: “These were the people with whom I stood on Maidan for seven months of protest, never knowing what might happen but knowing we had to be there” (p. 33). Amid longstanding debates among ethnographers about subject position, studying political protest in a country at the center of geopolitical contests for influence poses special challenges and prompts new questions. For researchers outside Ukraine, those questions likely will only multiply in the wake of war: As Ukraine reckons with its colonial past, who will be best positioned to analyze its politics? What will scholars writing about contemporary Ukrainian society need to know, and what skills will they need to possess, to do their work competently? What will participation-observation research look like, and what understanding will be possible for researchers of any national origin who worked from outside Ukraine during the full-scale war? Finally, Channell-Justice raises questions about the longer-term implications of the voluntarism now present in every part of Ukrainian society. “The actions of [this] generation, now seen to embody the honoured ideas of volunteerism and civic duty, are being translated into a new patriotism being taught to the younger generation of Ukrainians,” the author tells us. “Through these types of discourses, this generation will learn not to expect the state to provide such services for them. State discourses take the ‘activism’ out of civic initiatives started on Maidan and depoliticize them through state and national expectations of volunteer participation” (p. 224). Russia’s full-scale war intervened in that vector of change: Ukrainians feel immanently the importance of the local authorities who ensure their access to electricity and water amid Russian attacks on critical civilian infrastructure, and current examples of voluntarism are political in the most basic sense, an affirmation of people’s will to exist as a society and to keep their own country. Only time will tell whether the voluntarism now widespread throughout Ukrainian society will persist. But even if Ukrainians’ current high level of trust in state institutions diminishes after Ukrainian armed forces restore the country’s territorial integrity, Ukrainians may be uniquely intolerant of any future attempts, even by their own government, to depoliticize their efforts. After all, since February 2022, Ukrainians have learned first-hand at immeasurable cost what a depoliticized society can be persuaded to do to other human beings.

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