As Russia once again spreads its tentacles of control across Europe and central Asia—amid the showcase-turned-pathetic-spectacle of the Sochi 2014 Olympics—workers in Ukraine move into their third month of resistance against Russia's past and present domination of their homeland.
The cries of resistance have come mostly from residents of Kiev, the country's capital, and areas tied more closely to Europe's congealing economy than Russia's. Ukraine has become a battle ground of tension between two visions of Empire, both unappealing in their own right.
The calls for reform—some say a revolution is in order, or is a de facto revolution now (they say you can't tell you're in the midst of a revolution until it's over)—are not pleas for a stateless society in any imagining: Today in Independence Square, where the protesters have erected huge, crude barricades made from whatever was handy (in many cases, that being snow), protesters shouted “Glory to Ukraine!” and loudly sang the country's national anthem while waiving the country's sky-blue-and-gold flag.
Workers' Power spoke with a young couple in Kiev—one Ukrainian, the other an American transplant—who provide support to the protesters. Nicholas O'Connell and his wife Svetlana don't participate in the barricades themselves because they have a three-month-old baby, and Independence Square is dangerous to both protesters and police.
In addition to donating clothes and money, Svetlana has taken it upon herself to become a sort of freelance news reporter, broadcasting news of the events on Facebook.
“In Russia, a lot of people, they watch television, and it's complete bullshit,” Svetlana said. The same, the couple admitted, is true in the United States, since so many of the U.S. media sources are fed through Russia.
The protests erupted in November after Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovich backed off a long-planned deal with the European Union. Yanukovich's reward for saying nyet to the EU? $15 billion in bailout funds for the ailing Ukrainian economy.
“Most of us just wanted some way away from Russia,” Svetlana said of the trade agreement with the EU.
The trade agreement provided a path away from Russia's traditional and historical dominance over Ukraine, but Yanukovich changed his mind after a secret, week-long meeting at the Kremlin. Svetlana said Yanukovich's surprise maneuvering was the final straw, especially for young people who “just want to make their own way.”
Eighteen people died in clashes between the police and protesters in the maidan-- Ukrainian for “square”—on Feb. 18, the most intense day in the struggles so far. Night fell with burning tires lighting up the winter sky and police assaulting protesters who have occupied the maidan with stun grenades and water cannons. And the prospect of further Russian intervention secretly frightens the protesters.
Despite youthful inexperience, these unwavering protesters are willing to put their lives on the line for the cause.
“Secular martyrism is going on. People understand dying for a cause like this,” Nicholas said.
If anything, Ukraine's hardy anti-government protesters of today are only now learning how protest is done. For example, Nicholas said that the protesters could have taken control of a government building housing electricity offices but decided against that plan because the protesters did not want to be responsible for electrical outages.
They did choose, however, to occupy Kiev's city hall, and they only left after the government conceded to release 300-odd prisoners arrested during the protests. The protesters never called for the release of all prisoners.
While many of the protesters seek only a departure from centuries of Russian control in favor of Western dominance, some in the maidan appreciate that neither instrumentalities of Empire—Russia or the West—should determine Ukraine's destiny.
What goes on in the maidan? Svetlana admitted that many are quick to compare the protesters to idle hippies who only meet in drum circles, but Nicholas and Svetlana agreed that idleness is not on display at Independence Square.
“No one stands in maidan,” Nicholas said. “No one stands there. They're building barricades, always expanding. There's training where people are trained to fight and defend themselves, people making shields, handing out food, even (performing) surgeries.”
In the large “square” protests of the Middle East's Arab Spring, it was rare that a single person embodied the voice of the opposition. Not so in Ukraine, where the protesters have rallied around Vitali Klitschko, another politician. Klitschko has repeatedly urged the protesters not to abandon the maidan, the itenerant home to some 20,000 protesters.
“We will not go anywhere from here,” Klitschko, the quondam boxer-turned-politican, said. “This (maidan) is an island of freedom, and we will defend it!”
Nonetheless, Nicholas said the contingent of protesters critiquing the opposition for being “too politicky” rings true and is growing in favor of dialogue favoring a stronger parliamentary approach to governance.
One thing that is certain among these sophomore protesters: The police are not welcome here.
The protesters see the police as an instrument of state power. And since the state is utterly corrupt and answers only to Vladimir Putin's Kremlin, the police are another form of oppression uniting both far-right, far-left, and moderate-but-pro-Europe protesters.
“Mainly everyone is fighting for the same cause,” Nicholas said. “The fascists are not fighting for fascism, they're just fighting for what they believe in, which is a better government.”
Nicholas was quick to point out, however, that despite the very small contingent of communists, anarchists, and other left-leaning radicals in Ukraine—overwhelmingly dwarfed by a right wing obsessed with the Orthodox Church—a respectable group of anarchists are “filling a huge role in teaching about aggressive, radical tactics.”
(Even though Nicholas says priests usually align themselves with the police, the Yanukovich's government still felt sufficiently threatened to pass a law prohibiting Kiev's many historical Orthodox churches from giving any refuge to protesters who may seek the church's aid.)
The police's aggressive tactics don't help sway sympathies toward the government's cause. Svetlana says that the police abduct people from hospitals and take them to the woods to torture the ill.
“Sometimes they enjoy offending people,” she said. “Police just like to spit in the face of a regular person for no reason.”
Another misconception? That the occupiers of Independence Square are all lazy and poor with nothing else to do. Svetlana and Nicholas said that most protesters work during the day and protest when they're not working.
Svetlana doubts that Ukraine's protests calling for autonomy and self-direction could spread to other impoverished countries in the region under heavy Russian control.
“In Belarus, the police will just kill people,” Nicholas hypothesized. “They don't care.”
While unconfirmed, there is speculation, according to Nicholas, that given the heavy amount of overtime and crippling economy, the politicians currently in power are paying for the heavy police presence and concomitant assaults out of their own pockets.
At the maidan, the protesters, who are for the most part just learning their way as activists, are becoming more radical.
“My hope is that they really start pushing for the democratic approach of withdrawing the presidency” in the country, Nicholas said. He said that the presidency with one man having almost complete control over the government has not worked well in the post-Soviet era.
On the heels of the police massacring dozens of protesters outside Ukraine's parliament building in Kiev, “people want to fight,” Nicholas said.
“An old man wanted to throw a Molotov at police, and they said, 'No way, old man, absolutely not.'” Nicholas recalled. “The old man said, 'Come on, I just want to give it to them,' so they let him.”
Many of the protesters in the maidan have learned from more radical, left-wing activists. Others learned their skills from compulsory military service.
“A lot of the radicals decided that rather than just break everything, we need to organize these people and make them believe,” Nicholas explained. “They march, stand in formation, know how to defend themselves. And the most popular word in maidan is 'excuse me' or 'I'm sorry.'”
Even still, there are plenty of provocateurs—called “gopkiks”—dressed in tacky track suits like Chavs whom the police pay to start riots and break business windows.
The messages in Independence Square are not universal, and the loudest calls for change—at least for now—come with cries for a new president, not a fundamental change of course away from the Empire that both the European Union and Russia struggle for. But with the dwindling power of the police, despite even their most recent show of brutality and death, demonstrates in Nicholas's mind that some change is near.
And the protests are nothing like the last major round of social unrest in Ukraine, 2005's “Orange Revolution” that led to Yanukovich's ouster as prime minister. Nicholas said that if the Orange Revolution were Occupy Wall Street, what's happening now is the Arab Spring.
What has pushed things in the protesters' favor? The common refrain of governmental repression of disfavored ideas.
“In one month's time, they (the protesters at maidan) became completely radical,” Nicholas said. “What changed their minds was the police's reaction and their understanding of Yanukovich.”
“The government is definitely not as powerful (as before the protests),” Nicholas said. “(The government) will maintain this illusion of power. Most people on the maidan know they've already won.”
With the government crackdowns continuing and the maidan's barricades being crafted from 3-meter-thick snow (10 feet) that will eventually melt come spring, surprisingly, a sense of hope, not doubt, pervades the protesters.
“I feel optimistic and hopeful for the future, but the problem is who comes next,” Nicholas said. “I hope there isn't anyone in particular who comes next. This country is conservative, old-school democracy. They haven't been taught any different and don't know where to go.”
The fight, Svetlana said, cannot be deferred.
“We have Cossack blood,” she said.
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Editor's Note: This entry is one Worker's reaction to our interview from the Ukraine crisis, which you can read on our blog here. Despite the far-right or fascist involvement, an anarchic situation has been created. Any organization, ultra-left or far-right, loses its influence or vanguardesque stability in the transition from situation to event. This does not mean that an event cannot regress, but we find it trivial to postulate the type of insurrectional process that can consume the event--at that point we will have won... The anarchic atmosphere of the situation is elucidated into an insurrectionary process--a becoming-insurrectional.This paradigmatic shift shakes the ground world-wide. The bodies--faceless, organless, dividuals-- of the disciplined society break into an ensemble of singularities (the multitude) with the aptitude to grab abstract desires and notions and forge them as concrete. The impossible becomes possible; the invisible visible; the the disappeared or unappeared, appears; the divided united--yet, united in their freedom. The maelstrom of insurrection will whip through the Ukraine manifesting liberated zones. What will happen in these liberated zones will be determined by whether or not they fall into the archaic dualities of right versus left. Nuancing these zones will be delineated by the interlocutors of the zones: either as a locus of creativity and desire, or as States, thus speaking the language of our modern era, and resuscitating the same problematics caught in the web of modernist duality. We hope the Ukrainians can show us the way in their insurrectional-becoming. As was written in the streets of Paris in '68: "barricades block the streets, but show the way." Liberated territories have to be postulated as terra incognitas, not to necessarily "begin anew," but to formulate an area for our creative impetus. "The burning barricades are visited by people who have come to let out anger and resentment that have accumulated over the years – for the excesses of cops; for the corruption; for the 'golden toilet'; for the stupidity of the sell-out officials. An elderly man, 80 years of age, walks up to young guys in masks and asks them for a bottle of flaming liquid. They ask him:'- Grandad, you wont be able to throw it far enough!- Just give me one, I want to show these beasts that they cannot treat me like this'"The youth might question the elderlies ability to throw a molotov the correct distance to smash against the police phalanx, but as the old man insinuates: with anger comes a logic of insurrection. Consequently, with this logic comes a realization of the total lack of boundaries. The trajectory of the molotov is not nearly as important as the indignant act. This anger screams: "I am willing to create! I recognize my will to power!" Although Empire loses it's topographical boundaries, simultaneously manifesting new ones, the becoming-insurrectional loses its topological boundaries, simultaneously creating new ones. Every time we unveil a bridge connecting pseudo-islands (these pseudo-contingent burst of crises) with capital, we must reconcile the seemingly unfathomable truth that today we deal with a crepuscular capitalism. The capitalism of today is a stage of capital's development that operates in constant crisis, in twilight. What isn't hallowed ground? In a society that is in ruin, destruction becomes creation--desire becomes creation. The Ukrainian situation has illustrated for us the archaic makeup of contemporary leftism. They joyfully march through the quagmires of the 20th century. Since no Lenin or no Durruti has risen from the ashes of Kyiv, those on the left disregard anything creative or new in Ukraine, calumniously condemning their insurrection to the helms of fascism. What boring pessimism! Although we admit, in the preliminary stages of insurrection, with all its ambiguities and ambivalence, fascism is possible—primarily because anything is possible within insurrection. Nevertheless, within this gamble we can intensify this game, change the rules, or fold. Our role, along with the Ukrainians, is to push the struggle to the point of no return. This irrevocability of insurrection refuses to reciprocate banal versions of the 20th century—any pirouette into fascism. This is an apogee where fascism becomes unfathomable—and along with it, any forms of leftism. The leftist of today acknowledge that to destroy fascism they in turn must destroy themselves, and any remnants of a micro-fascism left from the 20th century. Ostensibly, this is what they fear the most. “[W]hat fascism set in motion yesterday continues to proliferate in other forms, within the complex of contemporary social space. A whole totalitarian chemistry manipulates the structures of the state, political and union structures, institutional and family structures, and even individual structures, inasmuch as one can speak of a sort of fascism of the superego in situations of guilt and neurosis.” — Felix Guarttari Empire has expanded the threshold well beyond our old forms, or our decrepit “chemistry,” of political discourse. Leftism is trailing behind. This is why leftism of today is but a sepulcher. |