An analysis on the War in Ukraine translated from the project “Our baba doesn’t say fairytales | anti-state communist news from ex-communist states” for the purposes of our event on 18.03.2022.
I. The fourth political theory
It is extremely difficult for these lines to be written, because it is extremely difficult to evaluate a situation which even the participants themselves cannot exactly understand. The weight of each line is also greater when there is a war of such magnitude. Almost 8 years ago, when the Maidan and anti-Maidan movements began, we were different people, with different theoretical tools and clearly, different hopes. But time has passed since then, and time has passed since the sun of optimism disappeared behind endless horizons. Now we live under the afternoon light of a hope that we still remember, but cannot directly see. Such are the times in general.
The war in Ukraine broke out unexpectedly, especially to such an extent. The only ones – from political spaces – who predicted it are those who always predict war, and who secretly wish for it. It was these groups, of various anti-imperialist and nationalist colourings, fanatical pro-Russian Christians and open or secret supporters of the “Fourth Political Theory”. It is this theory of a war of civilisations, of a corrupt West against a pure East, that has been prepared for a long time. It was worked on non-stop with, as primary material, the despair of the European left, which after the end of the Cold War is looking for a new myth to believe in so that it can continue existing. They also worked on the despair of the traditional Christian, conservative faction of the West, which sees the “postmodern” condition sweeping away its traditional values, its gender identities shimmering, its national identities disappearing, and generally, the organised, ordered world staggering. These people became the new preachers of a message that was ready to be heard. Either from the right or the left, the desire was one, to be given the hope that their theories, their views, what was known to them, would not be lost in the world of western capital without resistance.
In this way, the Fourth Political Theory, a theory emanating from the bowels of the Russian state, was not instilled into the masses in some magical, conspiratorial way, by Russian media and social media. It had long been ready in the frustration of parts of western society that felt that their time was coming to an end. And thus, under the umbrella of the “anti-globalisation” of capital, both the old anti-imperialists and the conservative Westerners have been baptised as anti-capitalists, and of course this meant anti-Americanism, anti-Europeanism and an elusive morality, which posits that whoever, in some way, doesn’t support this chauvinistic fallback, is sworn to the western ideal of human rights, which, of course, is nothing more than hypocrisy. And of course, in the latter case, they are largely correct, which is why the rest of their arguments became credible.
II. Orientalism for Eastern Europe
The cost of today’s military clash is inconceivable, and of course I’m not referring to material damage, not even human and animal losses. I am mostly referring to the fact that from now on no progressive policy will be conceivable in Ukraine. It is commonly known that nationalism and the national idea is formed first and foremost over the experience of conflict, murder, loss, over the heroes lost, who must be honoured forever. While in previous years the issue of national identity in Ukraine had central coverage in the media, it remained marginal and secondary in Ukrainian society, and to some extent incomprehensible. For centuries, the boundaries between Ukrainian and Russian identity, language, culture and symbols were blurred.
The debate in Greece, the way in which Russia and Ukraine are perceived, is filled with such a vulgarised Orientalism, that it is difficult to break it down. Across the political spectrum, from the left to the far right, the region of the former USSR and/or the Russian Empire is the land of the brave, the land of great narratives. This is the reason why the political spectrum accepted such diverse narratives so effortlessly. The left believed in the “anti-fascist myth” and the right in the “big Christian brother, that would bash the gays and the drugs”. Every person, from this narrative, received their own antidote to what they considered problematic in Western society.
This tendency of Orientalism was already known in eastern countries and their ideological mechanisms. As informational war is now an integral part of diplomacy and armed warfare, it was promoted accordingly, with countless organisations, Twitter accounts, “initiatives and campaigns” born and lost overnight, spaces and “delegations”, often exploiting the pure sentiments of people on the left in the Western world, who were worried about where reality is heading.
Of course, all these western orientalists, left and right, who hate the “West” so much, are its most loyal offspring. It is the fact that they come from a place of privilege, secured by the distance they have from these societies, that gives them the luxury of romanticising the issues there, and not bothering to look their contradictions in the eyes. And it is this that also proves that they really do not care about what is happening there, that what they are interested in is a political conflict within the West. Western orientalists have never ceased to care essentially about Western society, their own localism. The tears for Donbass, the fascism in Ukraine, are only indirect means, projections of a struggle that they consider to be taking place here, against the “moral decay” of the West. But the truth is that both Russia and Ukraine are neither the USSR, nor the Makhnovtschina, nor Christian empires, nor fascist states. They are societies that are so institutionally complex, societies that break the teeth of the rigid political analyses of European orientalism when they meet them. And it is this that forces us to look at them once more, carefully. Modern western orientalism is a romanticism without ideals, without even an aesthetic. It is simply the despair of people that the evolution of capitalist society, with all its pros and cons, left behind.
III. The liberals of the West: this curse
If our problems were limited to those discussed above, then we might have hoped to untangle them. However, the opposite of western orientalism exists for Eastern Europe. Western liberalism, equally blind to what is happening in the east, proposes that these countries, or at least those that can bind themselves financially to it, should become societies of rights, of democracy and national sovereignty. This is just as wrong. People in Eastern Europe have social and cultural relations beyond the ideal of human rights, beyond confused identities and mixed political views, which only make sense in the historical context from which they emerged. Worse still, the Western liberal is possessed by a view of state and nation quite foreign to the lived experience of most people in Eastern Europe. He believes that societies are basically structured by the state, that a society and the way it operates is defined by legally guaranteed negative and positive rights. Deep down into his own history, he forgets, of course, that in Western Europe too, what is today a right, guaranteed and standardised by the state, was firstly a social conquest, the product of long-term agitations and struggles. Thus, Western European liberals, incurably statist – and often indirectly state-funded – sought to approach these countries completely ignoring their history, their historical foundations, their social and institutional dependencies. They pursued a cultural policy of “aggressive rights”, promoting for example an undefined “freedom of speech” which basically meant freedom to promote the Western cultural and state paradigm, a “secularism”, a “national classification”, as well as a “right to national sovereignty”, a “depoliticisation”, and a logic of the “end of history”, concepts which were still foreign to large parts of these societies. For many of these societies, there was a need for history to begin again, not to end. The attack of a “top-down”, regulatory, rights-based policy, regardless of whether individual parts of it, such as LGBTQI+ rights, may find us in agreement, was experienced in these societies as an external intervention, as a moral and qualitative complaint against a “backward” population. This deeply divided Eastern European societies in terms of the cultural example they felt they wanted to be included in, and thus made large sections especially prone to any kind of populist rhetoric. And this populist rhetoric was not only that of the Russian version, of the United Russia party, but also of the Western and pro-Western political organisations in Eastern Europe: the rhetoric that this people is better or worse, more or less progressive. This, as a self-fulfilling prophecy, created such psychological defences within the masses, such projections, such symbolic narratives, that now political activity was always mediated by these mutual images of the other.
Western liberalism is governed by an essentialism of rights, believing that for “every reasonable person”, the supremacy of the Western way of perceiving social policy, and especially of the example of the Western state model, is obvious and self-evident. But this is not the case. Eastern European societies had their own logic, their own particular rhythm and concerns about democracy, their own balance of power, and their own particular characteristics in their struggle for a freer way of life, for a dynamic change of identities, etc. For example, the Westerners’ complaint about the “absence of minority rights in Eastern Europe and Russia” systematically ignored the fact that Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan had an intercultural education, and locally recognised languages. Of course, the West didn’t ignore this information, but the recognition and operation of these structures was quite different to how they functioned correspondingly in Western Europe. And so, in the eyes of the West, they simply did not exist. Thus was created in the core of Western liberalism an equally orientalist, this time negative, narrative about Eastern Europe and later on especially Russia, as a country of barbarians to civilise. It did not care, for example, that despite its many shortcomings, Eastern Europe was far ahead of Western countries in issues of interculturalism, access to health, accessibility for disabled people in cities. And yes, these are equally human rights.
This belief in the superiority of the Western state paradigm – as far as it can be considered uniform – has led to the mass moral denunciation of those who did not follow it for whatever reason. And of course, this led to the narrative of a “war” of civilisations becoming more and more credible. From one point onwards, this discourse focused specifically on Russia and Belarus, as, due to geopolitical and economic factors, it was these states which, par excellence, had an interest in refusing to join the Western financial and state model. In the aftermath of this war, all of this runs the risk of turning into a blindly cultivated Western anti-Russian culture, pervasive in certain business circles in Western countries. All in all, this is proof that discourse has the power to create subjects, structures and social groups. Because, very simply, discourse creates and limits fantasies, fantasies create and limit desires, and desires create and limit powers.
IV. The reasons for the recruitment of large segments of society in the conflict
Of course, none of this would have been so serious if it were not for the imperilment, and the overlap, of purely material, economic factors. The extension of the Western model does not concern an extension of “capitalism” against something else, but rather the extension of the “Western mode of capitalist accumulation and institutionalisation” to the capitalist countries of Eastern Europe, which, as mentioned above, had their own particular social, and obviously economic, structures. The mode of economic accumulation which has prevailed in Western Europe, which was born, created and reproduced in the legal transformations of Western states, promotes flexibility in labour, in workers’ – and not general social – rights, it promotes subjectivity, the way of life which, for a large part of eastern societies and their political systems, seems weaker. The Western state model is based on, and derives legitimacy from, the social rights and the “social” freedom of a fluid and mobile everyday life. This presupposes an extensive deregulation of labour. On the other hand, capitalism in Eastern Europe, associated with forms and objects of labour that often have to do with gigantic infrastructure, with the appropriation and allocation of wealth-producing resources or heavy industry, is a static, mass capitalism, more reminiscent of interwar Europe and the golden age of industry in the 50s and 60s.
These different methods of labour and financial exploitation, are associated with different subjectivities and state institutions, different forms of everyday life and ultimately with different desires and interests. It is for this reason that parts of the population in eastern countries, especially young people in large urban centres, were more receptive to the Western narrative, the Western fantasy and desire for “modernisation and liquidity”. That is why they so effortlessly incorporated themselves into the abstract term “civil society”. And it is for this reason also that the working populations in areas with more stable forms of labour – especially in eastern Ukraine and the Russian South – feel threatened by such a new economic and social model. The desire and social imagination of these people was more closely linked to a sense of stable, and essentially paternalistic, institutions. And this is why this population irritates Western leftist orientalism more, as it reminds it of an old political trauma of its own: the fact that the stability of labour was lost in the West, and with it, the traditional working-class subject and therefore the social base of the Western left. And it is also this dynamic that irritates Western liberals, seeing in the faces of the young, mostly pro-Western populations of the cities of Ukraine and Russia, in the supporters of Navalny and other political adventurers, their “wronged siblings” on the other side.
It is this combination of desires, institutional disagreements and material, financial differences, which made the conflict so deep, so chaotic and impossible to contain within a state, in this case the Ukrainian state.This war is not the result of any struggle against fascism, nor the result of the struggle of the “free world” against russian “totalitarianism”. It is the complex conclusion of a combination of factors. And it is these factors that have given the conflict such an extensive social character, within Russia and Ukraine. It is ultimately wrong to consider the conflict as merely geopolitical, or even economic. It is, on the contrary, a conflict of different forms of sociability inside and outside Russia and Ukraine. The young people of Moscow, the fluid and precarious generation of people raised in the labour regime of the urban fabric, of the service sector, etc., are already closer to the West, to the Western state model, and the pro-Western Ukrainians. That is why “anti-Putinism” is manifested mainly in the big cities of Russia. It is the new subjectivity of the big city, of the creative class, and not the working class. In contrast, the older generation in Russia, as well as parts of the left, and the Russian countryside, are basically still in favour of the existing model. This distribution of subjectivities gives the conflict its mass nature, the fact that people do not perceive it as a simple “clash of titans” for their own interests, but rather as something that concerns them personally.
V. Of the reasons for the war from a statist perspective
That being said, I think it goes without saying that in addition to talking about the discrepancy between two specific forms of capitalist accumulation, it is a joke to believe that one side or the other provides better living conditions for the lower strata of society. International capital no longer has any particular rational status. Instead, it adapts to what it finds ready within society, and pushes for social changes only to the extent that they are needed in order to create a new type of individual and a new form of socialisation, that will be synchronised with its other, geographically and temporally dispersed functions. The dreams of both Western orientalists and the residents of Eastern Europe, that an induction into the West or the Russian sphere of influence will bring them a better future, are not simply illusions, but ideological hallucinations which will be dispelled very quickly. Small changes, of course, may happen, but not key ones. The big cities will continue to live as they do, and the remaining regions will continue more or less in the same direction.
This also means that the war is not waged, on the side of states, for any noble purpose. Russia has clarified the terms of its political engagement, which are more or less reasons of security (NATO encirclement) and the loss of key industries and coal deposits in Eastern Ukraine. Such a loss would happen through Ukraine’s addition to the Western pricing policy, as had been warned in reports as early as 2014. The reason for this is that Ukraine had already joined the free economic zone of the Eurasian Union of the former countries of the USSR, and its participation in a corresponding European agreement would effectively unite the markets of Russia and the EU, with negative consequences for the Russian economy and, in the long run, for the Russian political and statist class.
The so-called theory of dependence promoted by the Ukrainian side, the idea that Russia is trying to make these countries dependent on it, is wrong. Russia is not trying to create dependence, on the contrary, it inherited this dependence from the USSR. More specifically, the social policy of the USSR dictated the mitigation of the differences between city and countryside, according to the well-known Leninist saying. This practically meant the transfer and dispersion of industrial and retail units throughout the former USSR, so that there was an equal division of labour. What was part of social policy in the USSR, accompanied by the construction of hundreds of new industrial towns, became a problem after its fall: organic industries, wealth-producing resources, and Russian military bases found themselves in scattered countries, outside central control, without the possibility of an alternative in logistics or the protocols of industrial production. This forced countries that wanted to pursue an independent policy to sit again at the same old (Soviet) conference table. Such a solution could only be problematic. What China is now actively trying to do, so-called “infrastructure imperialism”, where through infrastructure, it attaches countries, or parts of countries, to its own policy, has been adopted by Russia, and for Russia it was as much of an advantage as a problem, as it attached countries and populations to itself, with internally contradictory political ambitions and tendencies. In fact, many times, these contradictory tendencies did not wholly concern a country, but rather specific regions of it. In the light of this analysis, we must acknowledge, and most Ukrainians today would probably acknowledge, that the proposal by Russian businessmen in 2006, to reopen the special economic zone in Donbass, and to make it a buffer zone for the Russian market and businesses there, could have been a solution which would decompress – to a certain extent – the crisis. At that time, they did not accept it, as they considered it a “forerunner” of a separatist movement; now, it is too late.
Finally, in combining the above arguments with those of the previous section IV, we must acknowledge that an attachment of Ukraine to the West, beyond the direct economic and geopolitical consequences – which are to some extent justified concerns from a Russian, capitalist point of view – would turn Ukraine into a cultural and working pole of attraction for a new subjectivity in both Russia and Ukraine, which has mainly ascetic, flexible and youthful characteristics, and would have an oppositional nature. This is now acknowledged openly, so much in anti-Putin and anti-war demonstrations in Russia, as in international Ukrainian communities, with the chant «Сейчас в Украине, воюют за нашу и за вашу свободу» [In Ukraine right now, they fight for their own and our own freedom].
VI. Of fascism, antifascism and nationalisation
a. Of nationalisation
I do not know in what perverted universe anti-fascism is carried out with fighter jets, thermobaric bombs and Chechen Islamist commandos. The rhetoric of antifascist struggle in Ukraine, as paranoid as it is, is directly linked to the belief that Ukraine is a fascist country. The inverted image of this statement, is the statement that Putin is the new Hitler. These two statements are essentially the result of the different orientalisms with which Eastern Europe is approached. Either of these two claims is at least funny, even in the face of the latest facts. The regime and the political scene of Russia and Ukraine are not, as the whole Western world believes, children of the Soviet regime, but products of the 1990s, which were literally chaotic, with colossal institutional and financial changes and ideological agitations far removed from anything Westerners know. Many times, the separation of left and right, deeply Western, and specifically a French product, is of little importance in Eastern Europe. We do not yet have the terms to understand the form of these states and their political systems.
To the extent that analogies can be made to our own political categories, both states, as well as their societies, show special similarities both between each other and also with the West. Russian and Ukrainian chauvinism, dogmas with a moderate level of social penetration in both countries until the recent confrontations, incorporate both left-wing and right-wing narratives. In Russia, Stalinism and the Soviet Big Idea usually go hand in hand with more traditionalist imperial narratives. This is done both on the basis of military power, as well as a critique of postmodern capitalism, that is considered socially divisive, a phenomenon that is particularly negative for the type of socialisation that prevails in many parts of Russia. Social representations are also formed on this basis, for example, in Russian cities. In the same town square, there are monuments to Zhukov, the Red Army, the “unjustly” murdered family of the Tsar, and opposite the subway station named after Kropotkin. The Russian Duma still bears the double-headed Russian eagle, an old symbol of Tsarist nationalism, as well as the hammer and sickle.The reasons for this amalgam are more than obvious, and it is also self-evident that all these elements are not integrated into the national ideology as they existed in their historical dimension. The Russians who admire Stalin or Lenin today are not communists in any sense, the Western leftists who see them should stop being moved, but understand them in the context of contemporary Russia. So, for example, protectionist labour policy – which is very controversial in itself as the devaluation of labour in Russia and Belarus is very pronounced – comes with a package of anti-LGBTQI policies, and a breaking-down of the Russian Constitution wherever various regions, such as Chechnya, are not de facto subject to Russian Federal law, and essentially to a democratic process of any kind. The national narrative and the elements it incorporates do not define the political reality of a country, but are retrospectively defined by it.
The same goes for Ukraine. The national myth of Ukraine is the national myth of “little Russia”, as it was called in Russian textbooks at the time of the empire. This short history tries to grow, to reach a narrative which justifies in its eyes its course towards the West, which a few years ago would have seemed absurd to them. Bandera, a bona fide fascist and anticommunist, is a very recent piece of the mainstream Ukrainian narrative. The first, independent from Russian or Soviet identity, clear indications of a Ukrainian identity appeared in the 1980s. Until then, for many people in the former USSR, and of course for the people of Ukraine, not necessarily because of internationalism, but mainly because of anthropological conditions, “national belonging” was a confusing, complex affair, the answer to which depended largely on who set the question, the framework of discussion, etc. It was in the 1980s, when the central administration of the USSR began to falter, and the local administrations of the respective federal republics were called upon to pursue a local, financial and cultural policy independent, or deviant, from Moscow, where the idea of a clearly demarcated identity was born. And it took a while to spread to the population. The components of this identity were, of course, to some extent anti-Russian, anti-Tsarist and anti-Soviet, for obvious reasons. This is how the three pillars of contemporary Ukrainian national ideology were created: pro-Westernism, the emphasis on bourgeois, Western democracy, and anti-Sovietism. Of course, these were just declarations, as the majority of the population never digested this mixture well, and this is one of the reasons we have reached the present crisis. Except for Bandera (whom most learned about following the 2014 Maidan, through fascist photographs, and were content to know that the “national hero of the Ukrainians” was Bandera, without even bothering to see the whole of the Ukrainian national narrative), who, like every fascist, is included within the national narrative “cleansed” of his fascism. Within the Ukrainian national narrative, Makhno, Petliura, and Vynnychenko were also included, cleansed from any relationship with socialism or anarchism. The national narrative incorporated them as romanticised figures, whose internal contradictions allow for ideological manoeuvres. This does not mean that the national ideology of Ukraine is per se fascist, or, even funnier, socialist or anarchist. Their national ideology, consisting more or less of scumbags, and occasionally positive figures such as Makhno, differs in nothing as an ideological process from the purification and integration into the national Greek ideological narrative of contradictory formations such as Pavlos Melas, EAM and Metaxas – who said “No” (to be precise, the analogy of Bandera and Metaxas as individual cases is quite symmetrical). Of course, in all this, the fascists in each country have no problem calling things by their name when it comes to national heroes with clearly far-right views. But in the context of the broader national ideology, it is impossible to accept these figures as such. National ideology sterilises historical factuality based on the needs of the current state. And this is why national ideology falls into so many contradictions.
As for the process of ethnogenesis, we can say that Ukraine and Russia, taking advantage of their pasts, do not differ much in terms of the contradictions within their narratives from many European countries. Needless to say, the image of the nation after this conflict will be much worse. The nation and nationalism, structurally based on national conflicts, will emerge unimaginably strengthened from all this.
b. Of fascism, antifascism and “genocide”
In this context, one of the basic arguments of the Russian propaganda line and reasoning behind the invasion, that of a fascist regime in Ukraine, cannot be justified only on the basis of the national Ukrainian idea. A fascist regime would also need to have something more than far-right volunteer groups which are recruited by and fight alongside the state at a time of war. What would be needed would be a deep, institutional and social transformation which would abolish any form of representation, any form of judicial power and any form of elections, and also would have to be accompanied by a stable and organised ethnic cleansing.
As for these conditions, the only one that has seen the light of the public sphere has been the last, which, apart from Russian claims, is still awaiting public confirmation. The argument that a genocide is taking place in Donbass comes from speeches by the president of the Russian Federation himself. Even there, the language he uses is very diplomatic, stating that “the situation is reminiscent of genocide”. This is a formulation that is extremely careful, both at the diplomatic level, and also in the creation of impressions. From this statement onwards, on the 15th of February 2022, hundreds of posts appeared that spoke of 14,000, 16,000 or even 200,000 dead(!). There is no doubt that Ukraine has repeatedly violated the Minsk agreement, and that it has exerted armed pressure on the breakaway regions. But it remains to be proven internationally that, besides the military clashes on a local level, and beyond the confirmed repulsions of the Russian-speaking rural population towards Russia, which essentially never stopped, that an organised genocide was conducted, with thousands of victims. These operations are carried out by battalions of the Ukrainian army, but it is unknown who and where exactly. It is a certain fact, however, that Azov and Aidar, now battalions of the Ukrainian army, also took part in these purges in their founding acts within the Ukrainian neo-nazi far-right. It is almost certain that these battalions are operating “uncontrollably”, and Amnesty International has gathered significant evidence on their actions until 2016, at least in the active phase of the war. The Azov and Aidar battalions tried to gain electoral prominence, and therefore state coverage, by having a joint parliamentary presence in the “Patriots of Ukraine” party. Their neonazi ideology and consequently its aims, were so far from the Ukrainian national narrative that in 2019 they received 2.15% of the vote and remained outside of parliament. This is another piece of evidence that the national ideology of Ukraine is a completely formal ideology, with itscontradictions and its authoritarian character, but one which is far from being simply “nazi”.
The integration of Azov into the Ukrainian army, the portrayal even in Western newspapers of the battalion as far-right and the consequent outcry, as well as the recurrent electoral failures of the far-right in Ukraine, led to something much more interesting, and politically dangerous, which the rhetoric about a “fascist state” or a “fascist battalion” completely underestimates. Azov was transformed into a mercenary company with soldiers on contract, which is currently being leased by the Ukrainian state. This is the first confirmed case of a mercenary army funded by a Ministry of Defence on European grounds, and, as there was no precedent for something like this, it provoked reactions even within the Ukrainian defence ministry. The structure of Azov, and its relationship with the Ukrainian state, is as important as its ideological colouring. And while the integration of the far right into the military is not a new phenomenon, their integration as mercenaries is a new, qualitative upgrade that allows both themselves, and the state itself, to move within questionable legal waters and command mechanisms. The effects of this phenomenon are yet to be seen, but they will most certainly exist. It is most likely that Azov will develop into a far-right mercenary company, which will be essentially de-nationalised from the Ukrainian state, and therefore available for hire by equivalent large clients, by states or businessmen. It is worth noting that it is in response to all of this that the Russian leadership mobilised beyond the regular army, which is not lacking in numbers, also using paramilitary, openly extreme Islamist groups led by Kadyrov and other Chechen far-rightists, to attack Ukraine. Also, perhaps, not coincidentally, Kadyrov appears to have clashed directly with the Azov Battalion in Eastern Ukraine. It was the only mass, and also legally ambiguous, military entity on the Russian side that could compete with Azov, both ideologically and militarily, in a form of “hybrid warfare”.
As for the genocide, however, the fact remains that regional data does not support such a thing, nor does the data of Amnesty International: shortly before the current war, Russian leadership recognised the products of Donbass as duty-free for the Russian Federation, products that could be exported as “made in Russia” and provided them with import-export codes, as well as investment programs from its central bank. In response, Zelensky pursued policies of re-establishing the “Donbass special economic zone”, that has failed since 2005, in an attempt to attract capital and investments. It goes without saying that, if there was a genocide, and such a large-scale military operation were taking place, any discussion of investment and productive activity would be unthinkable. On the contrary, the proposals both show that, within the breakaway regions, but also in the wider region of Eastern Ukraine, which remained under Ukrainian control, a “relatively stable” situation prevailed in the various regions, allowing for economic activity and planning.
Nevertheless, around the internet (mainly the social media sites of Facebook and Twitter), the acceptance that genocide is being carried out in the East by fascist battalions with exotic names spread like lightning. Perhaps it is better to assess the situation from the official evaluations of the Russian Federation about the situation in the East, which, before the war, were submitted to the UN. According to these estimates, from 2014 to 2022, Russia officially approximates that, in Eastern Ukraine, 2.6 thousand civilians of Russian origin have been killed by Ukrainian fire. There has been a total of 10 thousand deaths of fighters on both sides, deaths which are split about 50-50 between Ukrainian soldiers and Russian separatists. As expected, slightly higher (5,650) came from the Russian side. The vast majority of the dead come from the period 2014-2016, during the most active phase of the war, the so-called “Ukrainian Counter-Terrorist Operation”, with the casualties falling significantly in the next period. Together, they make up about 14,000, the number that was spread on the internet, but that includes civilian and military casualties from both sides (for reasons that escape me, the Russian side gives fewer deaths than the UN, with the difference being large, about 600 people). This is why the UN, while accepting Russia’s claim of casualties, refused to call it genocide. In order to understand the magnitude of the deaths in relation to the severity of a conflict (and how a number was spread without any critical analysis of confirmation, but was spread in the context of the informational war and became immediately credible for specific reasons), at the time of writing (28/02/2022), with full-scale war in Ukraine, the official civilian casualties throughout the country come to about 400 people. Reliable sources for military casualties on both sides are not yet available.
Given the above, and seeing how far the official information that states are forced to release differs from what is circulating the internet, it is necessary to identify a few points, which concern Western as much as Eastern propaganda. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine is multifactorial, and does not allow for clear assessments. The accusations surrounding a fascist state in Ukraine, when they are not based on exotic narratives of numerous fascist battalions operating in the deep Ukrainian East, are based on the fact that the Communist Party of Ukraine was barred from running in the 2019 elections. These accusations are analogous – ironically – with those accusing Russia of fascism. Nevertheless, banning the Communist Party from electoral participation, an undoubtedly anti-democratic and anti-communist act, is an act which has a long tradition and legal precedent in nearly all countries of Eastern Europe. In Russia, in the last decade, a number of parties have been excluded from elections, not necessarily of a right-wing or liberal tendency, but also from the milieus of the far-right and far-left, usually with bureaucratic excuses. This tactic, which usually comes from a logic of the use of the state apparatus as a tool by each respective government, has both populist-democratic and authoritarian characteristics. In this regard, Western rhetoric and propaganda is utterly hypocritical in accusing Russia of fascism or lack of democracy, while applauding the Ukrainian government for democracy when, broadly, the two countries treat their electoral legislation in a similar way. The only difference between them is that in Russia, the governing bloc is much more concentrated around the United Russia Party, and its military-industrial complex, while in Ukraine, as a smaller and more politically and economically heterogeneous country, there is an alternation of central and right-wing parties, with similar policies.
These policies, as far as the cultural-ethnic part is concerned, have nothing to do with what is usually referred to as “Russian hunting” or “language banning”. What has indeed been done, and is undoubtedly a step in the process of a stronger ethnogenesis, is to urge the media to use more Ukrainian than Russian, while at the same time the first intellectuals to speak of a “nation with two languages” have appeared. The integration of far-right groups into the regular Ukrainian army and security forces, those groups that wanted to remain loyal to the state, was expected, and not unprecedented. Now of course, it has special, technical characteristics when it comes to each individual state. However, similar examples exist in the USA, Germany, Russia, Greece and many Balkan countries. Obviously, none of these countries was described as “fascist”. As for those far-rightists who refused to accept their role in the security forces and had greater ambitions, in both Russia and Ukraine, the usual fate awaited them: imprisonment, judicial exhaustion and marginalisation.
VII. To our friends on the other side
But where, after all, can these many problematic misunderstandings and misconceptions be attributed? If we accept that the core of politics is, among other things, desire, we cannot stigmatise those who believed in the narrative of a great anti-fascist struggle by saying they only did it out of orientalist stupidity. In any case, the more people are defined by the society they live in, the more they overcome it through critical thinking and, many times, their passion.
It is perhaps better to say, perhaps more accurate, that the belief of the majority of people in various versions of the informational war, even some liberal activists, or fanatical anarchists and anti-Stalinists, comes from their anxiety to see a new dawn, a world which brings a certain hope. It has become commonplace in political analysis that we now live in a “multipolar world”, and not the “bipolar” one of the cold war, with neatly ordered narratives and expectations. However, I think this assessment is partly wrong. Our world is not multipolar, but a-polar. The major state powers, China, the US, Russia and the EU, do not have their own, strictly defined, spheres which they can use to act upon others. On the contrary, they are so interconnected on a financial, infrastructural and commercial level, that these countries, while they do form distinct states, do not form exactly distinct societies. There are no longer distinctly good or bad guys, clear policies, truths and lies, clear political goals. Now, many Russias, many Ukraines, and many Greeces are networked internationally, externally and internally of the traditional limits of their states, and may have little to do with other social groups otherwise established in the same state administrative district. Society has changed so much, that History has become unrecognisable.
In this context, where even the great state narratives are collapsing – who can now effortlessly convince their soul that China has the prospect of Communism, that the USA has a vision of democracy, that Russia is a pole of pro-worker politics, or that the EU is a community of rights and prosperity? – the agony of believing in something becomes a real pain. In this conflict, but also in those that are coming, there is no position or choice that belongs to us beyond resistance to state barbarism. However, the people that believed in this whole story, with all its truths and exaggerations, are ultimately motivated by the passion to define the world through a goal, the passion that great narratives, clear, and noble aims are still somewhere out there. It is the passion that drives people to feel that a greater affair is taking place, beyond them, and that they have not been left, in their own corner of the world, completely alone. Not coincidentally, they are people who, in their own local communities, are active, progressive. People who, in general, are still taking part in the struggle. Some may think this is psychologising, but in the last few years, even the most headstrong have learnt the truth that mental phenomena have a place in politics.
In a paradoxical way, all this disagreement, all this ignorance, the reluctance to learn, is good news. For it is proof that the hope and expectation for a better world, for a restoration of history as the production of a better, more just society, despite the spectres it hunts and obsesses over, is a desire that has not disappeared. And, as such, it can always find its way again, that of the critique of the old, the salvation of the beautiful, and the production of the new. As for us, it is not the choice of a side we are due, but exactly these things, that is, the Exit.