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2010s became a pivotal moment in the history of Eastern Europe. Unlike all the apolitical Ukrainian commoners who were endlessly surprised at each turn, I knew in advance where exactly all this is going. I knew about the second Maidan one year before it happened. I knew who exactly will lead it, under which slogans, and under which pretext. But even before that, I knew the long-term plans of Ukrainian nationalists, Ukrainian liberals, and the Kremlin. And I also knew that Ukrainian communists and pro-Russian conservatives had no plans whatsoever, they relied on Kremlin's guidance and were sure that 1991 can only happen once in a lifetime. Unlike them, I was sure that 1991 can happen every five years if there is a need. And I also saw the opening for myself to redefine the meaning of Ukrainian leftism. I have said much about my motivations and geopolitics in a Russophone article "Farewell to Antifa" and I won't repeat myself. Especially since Google Translate works with it fairly well. In this article will elaborate on parts I omitted there.
Ukrainian Communist Party of that time was an anti-Marxist congregation of old hereditary bureaucrats, their kids, and occasional radicals like me. Who were coming in hopes to exploit their still sufficiently decent material base, only to hear something about the great sacrifice of Soviet peoples in World War II and about our common Orthodox Christian heritage. Each sufficiently big city had one or two "moderate Marxists", whose sole task was to marginalize neo-bolsheviks and explain to them the necessity of capitalist course. Smaller cities didn't even have those "moderates" and in those cities, that party was openly Black Hundredist. Thus, the only ones who considered that party communist were Ukrainian nationalists. Antifa never did.
I was not coming to hear about World War II, however. My eyes were set on the private property of the rich, their factories and yachts, their money. My modern positioning as a hedonist partially comes from here. Philosophical hedonism is an archaic form of radical materialism and sensualism, and thus it is a working repellant against those who like to lure into useless talks about higher values. And such people are unfortunately common on all sides of the political spectrum.
Having befriended no one from the ranks of the Communist party, I started looking for marginal leftists in my city. Have to say, it was way easier to do on the most popular social network of that time, Vkontakte, or its later name VK. Unlike modern Facebook, it had the option to search by political beliefs. There I found around 30 people who, just like me, were deemed as radicals by the CPU. In other words, they had the audacity to talk about Lenin instead of Orthodox Christianity in the offices of the supposedly Leninist party.
After we created a circle and Kharkiv got its first properly Leninist underground since the Great Purge, we started attending events in other cities. What we saw in Kyiv disappointed us greatly. Unlike us, those people weren't impoverished proles and lumpen-proles, hungry for money and power. They never had as many problems in life as we did. They were cruising through life, getting prestigious diplomas in sociology and economics, being heirs to parents from the established multi-generational intelligentsia. They were always sure that they will continue doing what they do no matter what, as it's more of a career to them instead of a pressing urgent need. They knew they will have new grants and funding no matter what and thus were never interested in a mass movement. I checked their Facebook accounts in 2022 and it's the very same people liking their posts as ten years ago. No fresh blood.
From an ideological point of view, some of Kyiv's leftists were liberal-adjacent, some nationalist-adjacent. A couple of proto-SJW Maoist-third worldists, who were spending half a year in Spain. Up to 20 neo-Stalinists, some of whom will even take part in the Z-invasion on the Russian side, like the recently deceased Evgeny Golyshkin.
Sadly, in terms of the practical programme and actual willingness to do things Stalinists looked better than non-Stalinists. They weren't cabinet dwellers like the leaders of my own party "Left Opposition" (shouldn't be confused with CPU's rebranding of the same name). They just applied their energy to the wrong endeavor. Both Andriys were against me joining it but I did anyway. Initially, the organization even allowed me to rewrite 1/3 of its programme. It had nothing about worker empowerment, no anti-siloviki themes, and no Eurocentrism. It was a typical centre-left soc-dem programme, made by the hereditary intelligentsia for the hereditary intelligentsia. I changed all that. For a while.
My membership in said organization had little effect on my local activities in Kharkiv. Together with Andriy L., we started forays into liberal organizations. That's how I made contact with the Foundation of Regional Initiatives, the most active liberal youth congregation. And later made the only pro-Bolshevik speech in the history of post-Soviet Ukraine on the grounds of the Jewish centre-right network Hillel in Kharkiv. The reception was far better than expected. Turns out, the main ideological grievance of those people against Bolshevism is the introduction of the difference between the Russian words evrei (meaning Jew) and iudey (meaning religious Jew). Before the revolution, ethnic Jewishness was perfectly attuned to a religious one, while the Soviets succeeded in the promotion of non-Judaic beliefs among ethnic Jews. With the youth wing of these folks, we made an amateur film, which you can see here. That's also where I met fantasy writer Maksym Bezruk, a frequent commenter on this blog. Later we even contemplated inviting Neo-Nazis there, provided they're okay with the pro-Israeli stance of Hillel. But the escalation of the situation put an end to those plans. Thus, in terms of freedom of speech, Hillel proved to be the best liberal-adjacent organization I've come across.
In 2012 we did the first Labour Day rally in independent Ukraine which had no ties to the "Communist" Party of Ukraine. That's when I peaked as a Bolshevik. I did everything which was communist there - flags, slogans, speeches. Speech stands the test of time to this day, as it is crystal clear that I had zero Eurasian influences way before the war.
During the second Maidan, we tried working on the Orangeist side again. Were trying to create a Eurocentrist socialist niche. Zeitgeist was totally against us. But we were managing for some time. It is Leninopad that killed us for good. We were put into a situation where we either defend Lenin monuments together with Orthodox fundamentalists and crime lords who wish to carve an unrecognized anti-European republic out of Ukraine or we're with anti-socialist middle-class supremacists who give us the option to replace them with something better once we're in Europe. We chose the latter.
Despite this, we were continuously stalked by separatists who sought the support of anyone who was not nationalist or liberal. The smartest Stalinist I ever met, 62-year-old "grandpa" by the surname of Timofeev, invited us to the room in Hotel "Kharkiv" in late February of 2014. The dude rode a costly "Jeep" car, quite an achievement for someone who thought that Stalin's approach to governing can and should be repeated. All other Stalinists were either hopeless lumpens or "redskins" in the style of the aforementioned Golyshkin. He also wore decent coats, had Bulgakov's Voland vibes, and was quite a charismatic dandy for a guy of his age. Borotba men and pro-Ukrainian nazbols were also in that room. He was saying that the time comes to support the local authorities, meaning Dobkin and Kernes, against the wave of Western Ukrainian fascism. While he spoke about Jeeps we will all get he had our attention, as that was a refreshing change from the higher values bullshit we were used to hearing from liberals. Then it became apparent that the talk is not about displacing the Party of Regions or CPU, the task for which we were absolutely ready. But a complete break with Ukraine, which, according to him, consisted of just three Galician oblasts anyway. That's when we and nazbols went out and stopped communicating with anti-Maidan groups.
For some time before that Borotba eyed me as a deputy of Denys Isaev, head of the Kharkiv department. They kept me away from their programme, thinking it is already better than one by "Left Opposition". They were also constantly avoiding to answer why their public performances always coincide with the interests of Russia, and never with the interests of European communists.
I was lucky not to get beaten up together with Sergiy Zhadan and other Maidanists during the short-lived occupation of KhODA by anti-Maidanists. I was there for two straight days before that, together with nazbols Mykola Tsikhno and Ruslan Pirozhenko. No one from my anti-Maidan contacts warned me about this attack. Curiously, they chose the day when the leftist Maidan camp over there was represented solely by anarchists, us and them took 2-day turns in our vigil. Thus the pro-Maidan communists and nazbols weren't hurt.
On another hand, our pro-Maidan allegiance proved to be very important. Although Tsikhno thinks I'm exaggerating, I do think that if the anti-Maidan had Antifa on their side they could have held KhODA against the OMON from Vinnytsia. Which was brought up in a hurry because the local OMON from Kharkiv was refusing to do anything about the occupation of the building by the anti-Maidan. We probably wouldn't be able to lure right-leaning anarchists on the anti-Maidan side under any circumstances. But even without them, combined numbers of Kharkiv's Trotskyists, nazbols, and left-leaning anarchists were around 100. Just enough to create immense trouble in such a fragile moment. So yes, I do think I alone decided the fate of KhNR and postponed the full-scale invasion by several years.
Those years were spent rather productively, as I married and divorced a woman. I took a break from politics, spending all the time I wasn't having sex on working, gathering foreign contacts, and watching each episode of my wife's favorite "Sex and the City" drama. I began practicing photography and makeup artistry, a lite version of movie directing. I knew that if I ever return to politics, it has to be on a properly internationalist level, to avoid being dragged into indecisive Ukraino-Russian petty squabbles. I certainly wasn't a fan of many changes which happened during my absence from political life. Many people who now invite me to various projects wrongly assume that just because I was legalizing the nationalist elements within leftist discourse while it was still taboo, I will now support a perversion of my original intentions in the form of Sergiy Sternenko. I'm not in the mood of allowing the liberals to play their favorite "good cop, bad cop" game with fascists, who simultaneously don't exist and are a great danger to democracy. Nor will I support the "leftist movement", which was successfully hijacked by liberals. Let them have it. I am going to support the Shudra, Vaishya, and Dalit castes against Brahmin and Kshatriya castes. But since it is impossible to avoid the latter two completely, some of them will be welcome as long as they agree that the influence of their kind must be limited and put into service for the well-being of the first three.
The internationalist level was reached thanks to Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer. Who chose Kharkiv as a hiding place from SPLC's attempts to extradite him. He employed my services as realtor and walked with me across the very same streets of our working-class districts where I was hunted by gopniks in the 90s. Though I was already a very experienced political activist by the time I met him, he finalized my understanding of how the world works on the highest level. He showed me how some of the world's most powerful men make his life very hard. He agreed with my pre-existing opinion that the only politics which matters is barely legal, above-the-law politics. And just like Boris Moiseev was a straight man playing the role of gay his entire life, Weev is a libertarian playing the role of Nazi. He will publicly deny this of course. Together we engaged in defining the grassroots ideology of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, creating the memes, building networks. It is fair to say that his victory in that campaign is partially our victory as well.
The 2010s is when I formed leadership skills in myself. My personal life improved. And whenever I talked with other smart people they began to recognize the intellectual in me. For a guy with Jewish vibes, I was still very poor. But I learned to exploit the inability of others to believe that a guy like me can be poor. It is still too early to write about the 2020s. But I have one last chapter to present, one which focuses on love affairs - "Women and Me".
Favorite movies at the time: Story of O and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring
Most listened songs at the time: Crucified, Sign Your Name and Self Control
Favorite book at the time: The Will to Power