The New Left Review has just published an article by the Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Ishchenko entitled “Ukrainian Voices?” Though it has received a lot of praise on left Twitter, I do not think it is a good article.
Ishchenko is critical of those calling for the decolonization of Ukraine, meaning an end to the subordination of Ukrainian aspirations to Russian perspectives. Such calls, he says, have turned into a “self-defeating escalation of identity politics.”
He dismisses the Ukrainian scholars who appear in Western media as “tokenized voices” because they are “English speaking, West-connected intellectuals” who, he claims, do not “represent the diversity of the 40-million-strong nation.”
He instead proposes that Ukrainians to appear on Western media should be chosen on the basis of “the contributions we can make to the universal problems facing humanity.”
Needless to say, he thinks his own insights on what would contribute to humanity are superior to those of other Ukrainians now appearing on Western media.
He says that Ukraine’s three revolutions (1991, 2004, 2014) have “brought hardly any revolutionary changes.” This is incorrect. These revolutions put Ukraine on a democratic path and spared it the fate of Belarus or Russia.
In the article’s last two paragraphs, we learn from Ishchenko that the model of a successful revolution is the Soviet Union itself, “the greatest social revolution and modernization breakthrough in human history.”
The Soviet Union was “the country that jumped from the European agrarian periphery to the cutting edge of space exploration and cybernetics in the space of just two generations.”
Ukrainians should reject the “post-Soviet teleological liberal-modernization story” and instead “recognize that we could be proud of once being part of a universal movement” (i.e., the Soviet Union).
Then this disturbing line: “The mass murders and authoritarianism of the state-socialist regime are universally acknowledged; but to exploit them to depreciate the scale of Soviet achievements is to cast Ukrainian labour, blood and suffering as meaningless.”
As @Ben_Alpers points out, we should be alarmed when the first clause is immediately followed by the word “but.”
I fear that leftists embracing this article are doing so for all the wrong reasons. It gives them permission to ignore a broad swath of Ukrainian voices. It gives them permission to dismiss the achievements of Ukraine’s three revolutions, won by tremendous effort and sacrifice.
And it gives them permission to maintain their romance with the Soviet Union. The last issue is especially troubling. I fear that too many people on the left screen evidence from Ukraine depending on whether it allows them to tell a positive story about the Soviet Union. /THE END
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