Who's who in Ukrainian politics

Complete overview of anyone important and relevant as of mid-2023

This is a third version of the text which was supposed to be published on UnHerd first, on request of Aris Roussinos, but was deemed avant-garde by its editorial board. Then it was shelved for half a year until the largely similar request came from San-Francisco-based Palladium magazine and its deputy editor Alexander Gelland, who found my autobiography interesting. With him and his colleagues, this text was largely rewritten from the ground up, tripled in size, and addressed the questions which were bothering their editorial board. In the end, they also found text to be too experimental for their platform, although due to different reasons. Whereas I got the feeling that UnHerd were more concerned about the ideological status quo inside Western Europe and their careful positioning as an accessible and “normie”-friendly centre-right publication, Palladium folks were pushing me to be even more oppositional than I already am and weren’t satisfied with my anti-war zealotry despite that I might be the only influencer in Ukraine who publicly supports the rights of draft evaders during wartime and seeks their backing instead of the backing of armed powerful men.

Ukrainian futurist art from an unknown artist, sometimes incorrectly attributed to Malevich, is probably the best cover for a text about an unknown Ukrainian future.

Now, I take pride in my ability to maintain a clear head and organizational neutrality in the immediate vicinity of dangerous events. This is why such offers continue to come, as many people in the West correctly understand that the likelihood of getting unbiased, marginalized opinion is bigger in my case than in the case of those Ukrainians who subscribe to one of two mainstream, acceptable and state-promoted ideologies in Ukraine: nationalism or liberalism. It is wrong to assume that my position is a product of not being in the employ of anyone, as attempts to hire me were numerous. Before submitting any type of collaboration proposal in the future, please keep in mind that my ideals are more important to me than anyone’s benevolent attitude, money, friendship, inclusion in some schemes, or such. Don’t repeat the mistake of the influential NAFO member, Georgian Legion commander Mamuka Mamulashvili, who promised an interview only to back down from his word after realizing I’m not exactly in a queue to become his lackey.

In a whirlwind of history, with so many smart and well-known influencers taking their stands on relevant issues, it is easy to forget what I am trying to do or assume that I accepted the positions of those you follow or like more than me. To clear some fog, here is my self-identification as of July 2023. 1) Eurocentrist, not Ukraine-cenrist. I still would not call myself the biggest patriot out here nor will I ever try to compete for that niche. I am fine with being the black swan among local right-wingers, offering them tactical advice or even translating their books to English for American audiences. However, their political programmes are too stoic and dogmatic for me, and I would never subscribe to a top-down programme safeguarded against the smallest kind of revisionism. 2) Anti-Liberal. Milking the Western liberal regimes for money and weapons is nice and good, and there is already a caste of servile over-educated eunuchs who serve their purpose on this front. Sometimes they pretend their “values” have a future in Ukraine, but I prefer to believe Ukrainian right-wingers when they say we’re coming to Europe to overthrow the senile Brussels gerontocracy, not to accept their “values”. Since I am the only Ukrainian, apart from Azov’s Olena Semenyaka, to be ever published in Western Trumpist circles, it will be way too easy to destroy their international rightist credibility if they prove to be liberal henchmen many Westerners suspect them to be. 3) Non-Russophobe. It is of course better to be relatives of people without mental problems, but not everyone is so lucky. Sometimes people are relatives of alcoholics, thieves, and murderers. I am anti-meritocratic on this question and believe it is necessary to put local alcoholic above foreign hero. I certainly do so in my daily routine. As a Judaeo-Malorussian I feel responsible for Jews, Ukrainians, and Russians, no matter how many fights they were engaged in. This is why Russia needs to be dragged into the Western sphere of influence, against its will if necessary. Not disbanded into the myriad of Estonias, as a man whose book I just translated to English for a trustworthy Patria Publishing house currently suggests. And not allowed to continue its Eurasianist idiocy, as many American Trumpists seem to be okay with. 4) Socialist in an old, early XX-century sense. As much as I’m against the rule of the intelligentsia in the realm of senses, I am against downshifting and in favor of hyper-consumption. Old communist posters with furs, jewelry, salami, pineapples, and champagne bottles for everyone, instead of just for the rich, never lost their appeal to me. While West German minimalist nothingness never had any appeal to me. Since thanks to Poroshenko’s decommunization laws, I now have an all-Ukrainian monopoly on Lenin, this is where I intend to lead the underground of this banned ideology. 5) Moderate social conservative. I will give no ground to the LGBT Church, nor am I gonna support Abrahamist fundamentalism. Just like Alex Undersky, I believe that the sexual revolution was a force for good, but it did not achieve its goals and was stopped prematurely, creating a favorable culture for the privileged. Sooner or later all this will be condensed into a hedonist manifesto, once I find no less than 30 people across the country ready to support it.

That being clarified, the text itself was conceived as a probe into what was before, what is now, and whether something new can be created in Ukraine or not. I think it is a certainty. Not only we lived through a paradigm shift, which rebooted many old attitudes but had not created enough new ones. We are also on the verge of generational change, where the oldest generation is no longer connected to the aspirations of the youngest one. In this situation ideas get additional weight, but people too. Sometimes the situation can be so complex, that even if you largely disagree with a person on most points, his presence can be more desirable than that of the person you like better. In Ukraine, the elder zoomers (people in their 20s) are not at all prepared for a proper ideological democracy right now, and in the absence of “vatniks” as an ideological entity within the country, they now want to export their struggle to Russia and fight “vatniks” there, pretending that no problems exist inside Ukraine. One public example of this fear is a recent Twitter exchange between “globohomo”-affiliated influencer Sergiy Sternenko and SSU-affiliated combatant Evgen Karas. As we can see there, Sternenko feels insecure in having to defend himself against a patriotic opponent, being used to gain fame by harassing “vatnik” babushkas on Victory Day celebrations instead of fighting in the trench lines. I too have received a proposal to fight “vatniks” in Russia recently, from the former head of Bakhmut’s “Svoboda” party regional office Mykola Tsikhno, the very same nazbol I mention in the fifth part of my biography. He offered to join his new organization, whose ideology I could only describe as “Sternenko with worker aesthetics”. Not willing to write a profound programme like the one we can see in both his former “Svoboda” or National Corps parties, not willing to even name the top ten mottos for this proto-party, he and the few zoomers he has around him are only sure that they are pro-LGBT and anti-Soviet, with anti-Sovietism being the main pillar of their congregation. To my question why would he need the most radical Leninist in the country before the decommunization laws happened, he replied that they largely support Lenin’s ideas but not his… phenotype. He, of course, bluffed about the first part, since not only they have not decided whether they are pro- or anti-EU, nothing is mentioned about the armed imposition of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the point which I have been writing in all the programmes of all parties while it was still legal. I decided not to test his knowledge of what Lenin thought about such concepts as equality and liberty. These two cases should illustrate that the ideological struggle is by no means finished in Ukraine and is mutating fast.

I have axed the numerous re-imaginings of my biography, which were inserted in this text on request of Gelland. These can be read in my older texts. I also refrained from making it more anti-Zelensky than it already is, as his board seemed to want to. I am not exactly a fan of Zelensky, though can’t deny that his ultra-hybrid positioning suits his time and place. An important thing about him is that he cannot be re-elected as Malorussian he was before the war. He irreversibly shifted to the right and the future post-war intrigue is whether he will likewise drag Eastern Ukrainians to the right or not.

Bismarck would be proud to analyze and edit this text. And he did.

I also tried to address the shortcomings of the massive text by Peter Nimitz, which was supposed to be the definitive text about the roots of Ukraino-Russian animosity from a modern Western alt-right perspective. Sadly, like any similar Russophone text, it largely omits the Ukrainian nationalists, anarchists, and independentists of the early XX century. That’s how these years are viewed in Russia, but not in Ukraine.

Ideology and Ukraine

(a name suggested by Palladium magazine)

Between 1991 and 2014, my native Kharkiv was the least attractive destination in Ukraine for Western European and American tourists among large cities, beating only Donetsk and Luhansk. Within Ukraine itself, it also fell out of favor, as its 1920s-style godless urbanism and futurism were too different from both Kyiv’s Orthodox Christian and Galicia’s Uniate aesthetics.

Back then, the Orangeist side consisted of a triumvirate. Yushchenko and his "Nasha Ukraina" party were as close to the mainstream Western liberalism of that era as possible. Yulya Tymoshenko entertained exotic ideologies like South American-style solidarism for a while, then basically became a pro-Western conservative—a position that still got her endless accusations of being pro-Kremlin from her own fellow Orangeists, who were trying to assert liberal supremacy in this camp. The Socialist Party of Oleksandr Moroz, with an average age of members comparable to the geriatric Communist Party, filled the pro-Western leftist spot with social democracy of the softest kind, the one which would make Kautsky look like a radical. (NB - read my interview in Russian with one of their former members, Kharkiv-based, Myrotvorets-listed Andriy Voytsekhovsky). Regarding the then-marginal far-right, back in 2004 they were present only as street troopers and activists, they did not do any decisive ideological work. What made them seem so insignificant then would contribute to making them kingmakers after 2014.

The blue-white Kuchmist loyalist camp consisted of the Eurasianist center-right Party of Regions, which combined Orthodox Christian positioning with some elements of Reagan-era liberalism. Pro-capitalist and anti-communist, it was emulating the ideology of Vladimir Putin’s "United Russia" party for a long time. Their younger brothers from The Communist Party of Ukraine, meanwhile, were made up of de-facto Soviet nationalists: right-wing on both economic and social issues and strongly in support of both Eurasian and Custom Unions. Pure Russian imperialists also existed, like the "Russian Bloc" party of Gennady Basov. They were on the same level as the Orangeist far-right in terms of organizational development, but they ended up influencing little - unlike nationalists, they were never able to project physical force.

Formerly Western Ukrainian, now mainstream Ukrainian view

It is not necessary to like these men, but it is necessary to acknowledge their impact and legacy if you plan to have any diplomacy with Ukrainian political activists. Also, the attitude of Ukrainian activist to each of these men tells you a lot about Ukrainian activist himself.

The first thing to know if you're a Westerner trying to make sense of what was happening in Eastern Europe, then and today, is that definitions of left and right are very different there. Unlike in the West, socialist revolutionaries of the early twentieth century won and kept power for quite some time. They attempted to create a classless society, introduced a planned economy, and had a coherent materialist worldview. While all the anti-Soviet and anti-communist scholars only care about the flaws of that attempt, even they don’t dispute that the system was leftist in nature. Thus, when modern Eastern Europeans look at what is passed off as leftism in the West today, they feel a mix of contempt and bemusement.

Leftism and rightism in Ukraine and Russia today are instead primarily split on two questions highly specific to the region. One is historical, centering on who was right and who was wrong during the first three decades of the twentieth century. The other is contemporary—what is to be done in the post-Soviet and post-war eras? 

In Western and Central Ukraine, the most mainstream position is that nationalist secessionists were right from the very beginning and that the Soviets were always foreign occupiers. Within this demographic, a rightist is someone who thinks Pavlo Skoropadsky was right, wants a homogenous Ukrainophone country, and doesn't mind living in a militarized anti-Russian frontier forever. Likewise, within this demographic, a leftist is someone who traces his historical continuity from the social democrat Mykhailo Hrushevsky and a short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic (majority of Kievan liberal academics) or a social nationalist Symon Petliura and Directorate of Ukraine (fringe minority within modern proletarian socialists, whom I like more than Hrushevsky fans). 

While Moscow-centric historians downplay these persons and events and try to shift the focus in the Civil War period on the White-Red rivalry, they take a central part in modern Ukrainian school curriculums under the name "liberational competitions" (in Ukrainian - визвольні змагання). The three periods of Ukrainian national consciousness—"liberational competitions" —take place between 1917 and 1922, 1938 and 1950, and 2014 to now. Pavlo Skoropadsky, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, and Symon Petliura all come from that first period, and their reception in Ukraine today is often the key to determining what someone’s beliefs are.

Mykhailo Hrushevsky, a professional historian active before and during the Russian Civil War, is heralded as a kind of Ukrainian Benjamin Franklin by his supporters. Known as a non-violent scholarly type, is favored by the intelligentsia for his hyper-intellectual approach and disliked by authoritarians for his inability to secure the longevity of his Ukrainian People's Republic, which was overthrown by Pavlo Skoropadsky. Hrushevsky favored an alliance with Russian liberals and the short-lived Februarist interim government, and opposed both the monarchists and Bolsheviks. After spending the initial "Trotskyist” years of Soviet power in European exile, he eventually returned to Ukraine and recognized the legitimacy of the Soviet Union. He died shortly before the worst years of the Great Purge, deprived of any recognition and condemned as a bourgeois nationalist.

Pavlo Skoropadsky was a German-backed monarchist who combined the support of independence-minded Ukrainians with the Russophilic bureaucratic class for a short while in 1918. His modern supporters compare him with Mannerheim and Kolchak, other Czarist officers who led the anti-Bolshevik national governments in Russia. His cultural Russophilia was exploited by the contemporary Kievan pro-Russian monarchist Oles Buzina—who was allegedly killed by nationalists in 2015—and by the Russian imperialist Egor Prosvirnin, who died in 2021 in Moscow. Prosvirnin wrote numerous pro-Skoropadsky articles on his "Sputnik and Pogrom" website, which was the nexus of Russian nationalism through the 2010s until it was shut down by the government under its hate speech laws. To a large extent, this is why Skoropadsky is not used as a face of Ukrainian nationalism. Stepan Bandera only continued his work, was largely a secondary person in a grand scheme, but he had no Russophilic elements, which makes him purer as a nationalist.

Symon Petliura, who overthrew Skoropadsky’s government, was an authoritarian national socialist before this term meant what it means today. He was one the most active suppressors of pro-Bolshevik uprisings in Kyiv in 1918. On the economy, he was to the left of Hrushevsky and Skoropadsky, and to the right of Lenin and Makhno. He reinstated Hrushevsky's law which supported national autonomies for Russians, Poles, and Jews within the Ukrainian state. The law was opposed by the unitarian statist Skoropadsky and was suspended during his Hetmanate. Nevertheless, Petliura was blamed for numerous Jewish pogroms in 1919 and was eventually murdered by the Jewish-Ukrainian anarcho-communist poet Samuel Schwarzbard in Paris.

The Eastern Landscape

These men produced a lot of mixed identities in Eastern Ukraine before 2014. None of them look promising in 2023.

As Eastern Ukrainians, our priorities were different from those of Russia, the collective West, or even Western Ukraine. We definitely saw the benefits of being together with Europe. We had no Russophobia either. Depictions of the Soviets as occupiers only appeared in school textbooks in the 1990s, and it wasn't treated seriously by children because of common cultural links. 

Within this Eastern Ukrainian demographic, a rightist was someone who thinks that Lenin was a German spy, a thug who crucified the Orthodox Christian Empire and the innocent Romanov dynasty. That's also how it is in Russia. Therefore, for such types, the need for an independent Ukrainian state was always very vague and they were the first to support the pro-Russian insurgencies in Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk. Pre-war leftists of this demographic were very diverse. Leninists-Trotskyists of my pre-war variety were those who thought that the most fatal blow for the Bolsheviks was their inability to spread the revolution into Western Europe and thus the death of the World Revolution motto. Stalinists were arguing that the violence of the 1930s was historically determined and not the fault of the government, which kept the proletarian dictatorship intact like Lenin wanted. Nevertheless, just like their mainstream comrades from Petro Symonenko's party, they were adjacent to the Orthodox Christian crowd and were Eurasianists, unwilling to say or think about what is to be done about modern Western Europe.

However, it is useful to remember that Soviet rule completely annihilated the Church as a political entity. In America, Bernie Sanders doesn't endanger the existence of both Mark Burns and Mitt Romney types, who rely on autonomous religious communities with decent levels of political awareness. In Ukraine and Russia, the right only tries to construct something like that, always with the support of the state. In America, Bernie Sanders never promises a proletarian revolution and thinks it is impossible to overthrow the two-party system. In Ukraine and Russia, even pro-market labor unions get accused of Soviet revanchism. In the end, much falls to the economic development. Which is obviously much better in America.

Pensioner-age Khrushchevists and Brezhnevists were the majority among Eastern Ukrainian and Russian "volkish" Sovietophiles in the 90s and early 2000s. Both disliked the violent parts of Soviet history, but liked its social security and guaranteed right to work. Despite their great numbers, they were never ready to defend their beliefs in face of more violent opponents, and were useless from a party-building perspective. 

Meanwhile, those who thought that the fall of the USSR was good but didn’t care about Ukrainization were pro-Western liberals for the most part. They supported the introduction of a market economy, were dismissive of workers' rights, encouraged hyper-capitalist attitudes, and self-identified as rightists. When Ukrainian nationalists increased the pressure on identity and language issues, the most-educated of them switched to the Ukrainian language and now constitute a new Western Ukrainian diaspora in Eastern Ukraine.

Nestor Makhno deserves a mention too, as many believe that his short-lived community represented the peak of the political agency of anarchists on a worldwide scale. Makhno movement was abolitionist on the national question, agreeing with Rosa Luxembourg and Amadeo Bordiga, that far-left branch of communism which was condemned by Lenin in his work "Left-wing communism: An infantile disorder".  Their popular core were Eastern Ukrainian peasants and thus they were never interested in the heavy industrialization the way the Bolsheviks were. They were allied to almost all civil war sides at one point or another: Petliura, Bolsheviks, and various Russian anarchist atamans. But never to the Whites.

Makhno became popular once again between 1985 and 2014 due to anti-Soviet tendencies in the Russian and Ukrainian rock music scenes. Once there was a thriving subculture of punks who liked him. They worked with me within Antifa and they always outnumbered the neo-Bolsheviks of all types. They were also better-liked by nationalists and were getting less booing when trying to do public speeches in the presence of nationalists. Still, their shaky positioning left them vulnerable to submission to mainstream ideologies and they no longer exist as a distinct current.

Neighbors

As long as Yeltsin was in power in Russia, the global liberal order was fully focused on Russia and barely remembered Ukraine. Although Ukrainian nationalist groups like UNSO existed and even fought in Georgia and Moldova conflicts of that decade, their main political party—Rukh—was very fringe, with supporters mostly restricted to Galicia. With Putin's rise to power and his course on so-called "sovereign democracy," which ensured the quasi-feudal irreplaceability of existing bureaucracy, many Western powers started paying closer attention to Ukraine.

In the 1990s, the inevitability and ethics of the market economy were on shaky grounds in the post-Soviet countries, even after Yeltsin and Gaidar did what they could to ensure the permanence of this change. Pro-Soviet revanchism had wide popular support and Gennadi Zyganov, leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, was closely watched by all manner of Western advisors. While these advisors failed to synchronize that party with the Western Overton window and make it proto-woke, they apparently convinced him to forfeit his Presidential victory in 1996. Many believe Zyuganov won 1996 elections and willingly conceded to Yeltsin at their joint request.

After all, he was only an apparatchik without any serious theoretical ambitions and was not going to re-implement the planned economy. Yet even his symbolic victory was deemed dangerous by the newly formed Russian bourgeoisie and its liberal Western consultants like Anders Aslund. What Zyuganov chose for his party after that favor for the West, proved no less consequential for both Russia and Ukraine. A mix of Stalinism and Orthodox Christian conservatism, with a heavy emphasis on the sacrifice of Soviet peoples in World War II and almost no mention of communist revolutionary internationalism. His Ukrainian counterpart, Petro Symonenko, adopted an almost identical stance except it was even more Eurasianist and anti-Western. Symonenko's best result ever is a firm second place, reflecting  Ukraine’s more rightist attitudes even in the 90s.

To become an activist for any mainstream groups and parties I mentioned above, you didn’t necessarily need to be a believer, much less a fanatic. Oligarchal parties always preferred real-life influence and material skills and abilities, which they called “professionalism.” In practice, that meant they often ended up with hereditary bureaucrats or nouveau-riches who could care less about the party's ideology and treated ideology as opium for the poor. 

For a long time, it seemed possible to have a big Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok, the one Dmitry Medvedev talked about in 2022. Only unlike him, we saw that as a space with equal voices of each country—including both Ukraine and Russia. While party functionaries remained more or less glued to their respective parties and movements throughout the 1990s until the second Maidan, regular activists were not.

The Lower Depths

In 2021, when I made my last attempt to reconcile nationalists and “vatniks,” I spoke with the regional chairman of the now-banned pro-Russian party “Opposition Platform - For Life," Andriy Lesyk. Putting aside his disrespectful attitude—he presented himself as a feudal lord condescending to hearing me out—his actual convictions surprised me greatly. Apparently, he was an unconscious liberal democrat, liked Joe Biden, had nothing against multiculturalism, and would’ve probably fit the liberal “Golos” party much better. He only ended up where he ended up because his former patron, Viktor Medvedchuk - who was freed in a prisoner exchange - saw him as useful and preferred him to the ideological “vatniks”. After a full-scale invasion began he disappeared and his current location remains unknown, despite Azov offering rewards for this information. It is known however that a Russian rocket hit his Kharkiv apartment.

Regular activists were almost always poor and followed their ideas of what is the most just course of action at any given moment. Various identities and circumstances played a role of course. But also the position within the community. This is why some Ukrainian nationalists tried to promote national communism, an eclectic attempt to reconcile the most radical currents. What such types weren’t expecting, however, is that "evil Satanic Judaeo-Bolshevism" requires much greater necromancy to be alive than their vibrant, growing, state-sponsored right-wingery. In their rightist communities they perceived it as a much bigger threat than it actually was.

Migration in various directions was fairly common. Many of my communist comrades in 2010 were originally orangeists in 2004. Likewise, the far-right enabler of Petro Poroshenko's decommunization laws, Yury Lutsenko, began as a promising socialist in the party of Moroz. Now, while the 2015 laws themselves are branded as anti-totalitarian and bother to include condemnation of the Third Reich, they are commonly known as decommunization laws. Their main objective was to decouple the identity of Eastern Ukrainians from the common Soviet and Russian past. Bolshevist apologism became illegal, and dozens of people were jailed for wearing t-shirts with hammer and sickle motifs. With great media attention given to each such case, to discourage the continuation of such practice.

However, historical examples of Bolshevist apologism that occurred before the adoption of these laws are technically legal. That's why I am not afraid to show off my Marx-Engels-Lenin-Trotsky t-shirt from the 2012 May Day rally. Were I or anyone else to try to repeat that today, he or she would definitely get a criminal case.

Another important figure of those laws was Andriy Parubiy, who founded the Western Ukrainian branch of “Patriot of Ukraine”, which would eventually morph into the Azov movement. Before 2005, this organization was half-dead. Things began to change after Andriy Biletsky found the support of fellow police officers and the military in my hometown Kharkiv. His personal qualities and input into the success of Ukrainian nationalism are undeniable and have historical significance. 

The thing is, I suspect charisma was not the only reason for his success. Kharkiv and Odesa were always considered second-tier in their “Malorussian” tendencies, and therefore salvageable from a nationalist perspective. Donetsk and Luhansk were radically Eurasianist, so the only major person that the Orangeist camp got from there is a currently popular media person and a homosexual Denys Kazansky, who began as a Livejournal blogger. 

While almost all of the Ukrainian far-right was and still is connected to either the police or security services, it is important to know that these state apparatuses always compete with each other. This is by design since early Soviet times, and no reformer thinks about changing it. Thus, while Biletsky is a pure police creature, various marginal neo-nazis who tried to compete with him for the far-right niche before the second Maidan were mostly security service employees. One interesting example is the Kharkiv duo Anton Bestaev and Oleksandr Kalyuka, who were members of “Patriot of Ukraine” group, who then tried to work on the left wing in the puppet labor union of Oleg Vernik, a fairly well-known scammer of Western Trotskyists.

In 2014 the duo sided firmly with the anti-Maidan faction and apparently even applied physical violence to some peaceful Maidan protesters. Rumors are circulating that Kalyuka was murdered by Biletsky himself for his testimony against Biletsky during one of the numerous criminal cases opened against Biletsky by his opponents. It is difficult to say whether Ukrainian security services are still to the left of Ukrainian police, as both were extensively rebooted from the ground up since then. 

They do have one joint project today, which is Bohdan Khodakovsky's “Tradition and Order” organization. These folks wanted to rebrand themselves as the Conservative Party in early 2022, but obviously the war halted those plans. According to some of my right-wing friends, their shares are split almost 50-50 between the SSU and the police, and one of their main goals is to assure the peaceful transition of property from the Moscow-dependent Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Metropolitan Onuphrius to the newly autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine headed by Metropolitan Epiphanius I. 

This transition has been the lifetime goal of Tradition and Order’s main ideologue—Dmytro Korchynsky. Although his "Bratstvo" is a more pure form of Orthodox fundamentalism and a half-separate project, T&O hardly ever differentiates from his line on anything. In March 2023, President Zelensky instructed his minister of culture to speed up this process and gave the UOC time until the end of the month to leave the most important Orthodox Christian monastery in Ukraine - Kyiv Pechersk Lavra. UOC monks adopted an unexpectedly brazen stance, filming numerous public videos and warning state officials about their willingness to put their faith above government acts. As of July 2023, monks successfully ignored all the legal and activist pressure, but this business is far from over and its outcome will be very influential on all spheres of life in the country.

Libs

The further we stray away from the right, the less we hear about siloviki and the more we hear about various international funds—which I will call in their native German as that's how they brand themselves. The only exception is obviously the most influential fund—The Open Society Foundation, managed in Ukraine by Yehven Bystrytsky. Controlling most of literary intelligentsia, including the most popular contemporary writer in the country Serhiy Zhadan, they have tentacles in most of mainstream parties. Although their purest form is obviously the Golos party and media influencer Sergiy Sternenko, their followers exist in President Zelensky's party, Poroshenko's party, and many marginal parties. 

They are largely the people who decide whether someone can be recognized as a national democrat, a local hanshakeworthy name for liberals. Anyone who wishes that - must speak Ukrainian, be bilingual, or in the worst case speak Russian while swearing loyalty to the necessity of slow or fast but inevitable Ukrainization of all spheres of life. It is not possible to explain why you can’t or shouldn’t speak Ukrainian while pretending to be any type of intellectual, however—stating that it is unnecessary makes you Ukraine-friendly Malorussian at best. You should also be on the side of the modern Democratic Party’s cultural agenda, promote LGBT, BLM, open borders, and third-wave feminism. And you should also look for the instructions from IMF and U.S. State Department when it comes to the economy, adopting and overturning laws, and stances on local oligarchs and important state officials.

Their most important recent statement is called the “Prolonged Peace Manifesto,” which can be considered as the end goal of Ukrainian liberal intelligentsia in the ongoing war. Written under the supervision of Oleksandr Sushko, executive director of “Vidrodzhennya” fund, which is the Ukrainian branch of Open Society Foundations, and published on the website of Ukrainian Catholic University, it lists far-reaching practical and ideological demands for a defeated Russia. 

Apart from expected material reparations, it lists such things as: the removal of Russia from the UNSC, the decolonization of Russia, demilitarization, denuclearization, and a strategic decision on behalf of the European Union to cease all purchases of Russian energy resources. Notable signatories include a personal friend of Francis Fukuyama -  laissez-faire economist Valery Pekar, brother of a well-known journalist Mustapha Nayyem - lawyer Masi Nayyem, former foreign minister Pavlo Klimkin, various journalists, NGO leaders, and theology majors. 

It’s important to note that such a strong entrenchment of liberal-leaning influencers in Ukraine wouldn't be possible without a lack of energy in non-liberal American and European politicians. While I know a person who successfully invited Ivanka Trump to the Ukrainian ski resort Bukovel during Donald Trump's presidential term, apparently it didn't lead to the creation of a Trumpist party in Ukraine, whereas Biden’s team uses every opportunity to help their people in my country.

Another energetic liberal activist is Kharkiv-based Nataliya Zubar. Supported by Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, she is more Russophobic than anyone on the far-right, she is skilled at controlling media narratives and was highly influential in creating what I like to call modern totalitarian Popperism in Ukraine. Her “Maidan Monitoring” information center specializes in ridiculing and marginalizing all organized and disorganized modes of thinking that aren’t Euroatlanticist liberalism or Ukrainian nationalism.

Having roots in Perestroika-era anti-Soviet liberal dissident movement, her clique was active throughout the entire 90s and 2000s, while remaining Russophone and largely focused on anti-corruption activism. After 2014, they switched to Ukrainian and provided all manner of support to implementation of decommunization laws in Kharkiv and Eastern Ukraine. Whereas I am labeled “avant-garde,” she is seen as acceptable and was published on major European platforms, despite her numerous discriminatory remarks against Ukrainian citizens of Russian ethnicity.

Pure LGBT activism is half-separate from this scene. Chaired by Zoryan Kys, ex-Georgian Maksym Eristavi, Kievan Tamara Zlobina and my former acquaintance Anna Sharyhina, whom I helped to establish feminist studies in Kharkiv before deciding that the third wave became too hostile towards weak straight men, they rely on the support of Swedish and British embassies, US AID and Heinrich Boll Stiftung. Largely suppressed under Arsen Avakov, they managed to hold the first massive gay pride parade under Denys Monastyrsky, his successor as Minister of Interior. Monastyrsky recently died in a helicopter crash. In a helicopter bought under personal supervision of Avakov. Aforementioned "Tradition and Order" currently have an all-Ukrainian monopoly on harassing LGBT people, after their main competitor in this market, "Freikorps" leader George Tarasenko, died in a battle and got a street in Kharkiv named in his honor. To the public displeasure of Sharyhina and her backers. 

Lefties

Between 1991 and 2008 leftists were very marginal, but there was a brief resurgence between 2009 and 2014 that saw a short window for the creation of a genuine socialist party. I described these moments in great detail in English here and in Russian here.

Among those who marched with me on May Day in 2012, apart from my fellow pro-Western Trotskyists, there were two distinct Kharkiv-based groups.  The first one was a group of young ultra-urbanist Stalinists who called themselves the “Weierstrass Function.” Numbering around 20 at their peak, they were mostly from a tech engineer background. Their main authority was not so much Stalin, as mathematician Victor Glushkov, the author of dismissed cyberpunkish alternative to the Khruschevite economic reform by Kharkiv-based Evsei Liberman. Among the leftist Stalinists, which were a minority compared to Orthodox-adjacent rightist Stalinists, he was seen as a missed chance for high-tech socialism. 

The second group was made up of anarchists from the Autonomous Workers Union, whose remains still keep up the barely-working pro-Hillary Clinton website nihilist.li. "Li" is not only a domain but also a Russian form of speech, which is used to put something into question. Therefore they basically state that they aren't nihilists. I'd say they are the purest form of what Curtis Yarvin called pseudo-secular hyper-Christians. While their Kharkiv branch, which peaked at 90 members in 2012, was under the heavy influence of Leo Toltsoy and his anarcho-Christian ideals, their Kyiv people were distancing themselves from anything Russian even before 2013.  Their Kharkiv leader, Sevastopol-born Igor Volokhov was killed by a Russian rocket in 2022, after volunteering for the territorial defense. You can briefly see him as the guy who is giving me the megaphone in my speech video.

Radical neo-bolsheviks have all either dissolved after the adoption of decommunization laws and the so-called “Leninopad” went underground or, in case of the pro-Russian leadership of "Borotba" organization - emigrated to Russia.

Leninopad is a crossover of the words Lenin and lystopad, the Ukrainian word for the fall of leaves and the month of November. Presented as a ritualistic humiliation of communism and socialism, it coincided with demolitions of Lenin monuments across the country performed by masked Azov activists with police turning a blind eye. 

It was also the moment when liberals stopped worrying about the overtly rightist turn, stopped inviting us to make speeches on Maidan or caring about diverse representation, and started whitewashing the radical right. Which, in turn, started moving to the left, abandoning openly racist rhetorics. Many pupils of Alexander Dugin within the Ukrainian right, such as Olena Semenyaka on the nationalist side and Anton Shekhovtsov on the liberal side, denounced him. 

Antifa as a temporary union of Bolsheviks and anarchists ceased to exist, with LGBT hijacking the scene. Despite its softness and impotence, even social democracy was largely outlawed and condemned by the ruling duo of nationalists and national democrats. Volodymyr Ischenko, confidant of Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung, editor and one of creators of Ukraine's sole scientific leftist magazine Spilne, was driven out of the country by Azov. Details of his predicament are unknown to me, but last I heard he was branded as pro-Russian due to his very soft Marxist analysis, which always seemed hardly discernible from liberalism to me.

Combatants

Of course, as a man who is deeply knowledgeable about the Ukrainian grassroots political kitchen I knew a lot of volunteers who appeared on both warring sides since 2014. These four I find the most interesting.

The first one is of course my sister, Yulia "Cuba Libre" Sidorova. Being in the middle of mainstream liberal activism during the second Maidan, she quickly found herself within the battle medics unit "Hospitaliers". Anybody can learn more about her and her motivations in my interview with her.

The second one is Maksym Osadchuk, one of the most active Western Ukrainian leftists of the pre-2014 era. Although living in Alushta at the time, he was known as the guy from Ivano-Frankivsk among visitors of leftist summer camps in Crimea. He was trying to promote far-left ideas in Galicia, a traditionally unhospitable place for them. He was one of the first leftists to volunteer for the Azov-adjacent "Aidar" battalion and received a lot of criticism from Eastern Ukrainian leftists for this, including the aforementioned "Weierstrass Function". I wasn't among them and thought it was understandable action back in 2014. He nevertheless became a pure nationalist with time, and if you open his Facebook page today you won't notice any difference from the average Azov supporter.

On the pro-Russian side, I knew Svyatoslav Gubin. We met during the summer camp of a liberal organization "Foundation of Regional Initiatives" in the forests of the Kharkiv oblast. Back then he was a fairly ordinary liberal, apart from his above-average looks. He was having an affair with the regional head, Ukrainophone Ruslana Korenchuk. In 2014 he became a fairly well-known militant in the so-called Donetsk People's Republic and got an "honorary" page on Myrotvorets website, a site that specializes in publishing personal information about people from that side. Ruslana defended him for no less than a year after that - perks of being handsome.

Another Myrotvorets-listed guy was my former communist comrade, Oleg Stemasov. Although a typical Orthodox Christian Stalinist and a former member of "Borotba", I still liked him because he was a rare case of pure prole within the leftist movement. Going against my advice, he joined the violent gangs of the so-called "titushky", beat up Maidan protesters together with the "Berkut" special forces unit of the Yanukovych regime. Eventually, he was exchanged for Ukrainian captives and sent off to Russia, where I lost track of him.

Section 4. Elections and the future of Ukraine

Since as of now only nationalists and national democrats have ideological agency, only their results matter in all types of post-war elections. It is assured that National Corps, Svoboda, Right Sector, and their allies will get more votes than they got before, but the question is by how much. Their members seem to think triumph is near, but I’m skeptical and estimate their ceiling at 10 percent. 

The party of former President Petro Poroshenko is situated somewhere in between them and national democrats, mixing the stances of these two according to what’s in vogue among non-politicized inhabitants of the orange camp. What exactly they will choose will have big consequences. Their ceiling is 20 to 25 percent.

The only pure national-democratic party, Golos, rode the wave of popularity of their former leader Svyatoslav Vakarchuk. He used to be a soloist for a rock band and was never interested in politics much, but the donors were always interested in him. Abandoning politics for the second time after being prepared for possible presidential candidacies won’t be forgiven even by donors, so it is #ukrtvi, Kira Rudik, literary intelligentsia, Bystrytsky-Zubar scene, Sternenko and henchmen from the marginal “Democratic Axe” party who are destined for trying to salvage the party, which polled below the electability threshold at 4% at the last pre-war polls.

Yulia Tymoshenko uses standard oligarchal electoral techniques (top-down ideology, emphasis on advertising and repetitive populist critique of any government which is not hers), which assure her constant presence in parliament at the cost of complete absence from the country’s intellectual life. Although her party was the only one to staunchly oppose the recently ratified Istanbul Convention, which makes her a conservative according to European standards, the only thing her electoral results are an indicator of - is how well-funded her campaign was.

Just like nationalists are certain to gain, Zelensky’s “Servant of the People” party is sure to lose some percentage of support. Their next campaign will be certainly more right-wing and thus less big tent. They succeeded in creating a new moderate conservative electorate, which could be considered the Ukrainian version of “just want to grill” demographics. It is not obsessed with highbrow cultural dimension and was satisfied with consuming whatever cultural content they were offered before the war.

Now that the general mood in the country and Zelensky’s party shifted to the right, it is inevitable that these voters will start feeling alienated from an existing course after the war. Previously, they would be easy prey for pro-Russian parties, but now that all of them are banned it is interesting to guess where they will go. Tymoshenko is likely to catch some of them, but she doesn’t produce any new senses and only exploits existing ones, so she can only act as a temporary shelter.

In an unlikely situation where national-democrats outperform their plans by a lot, introduce gay marriage and other center-left perks of the modern West, I can see Poroshenko going full-conservative and thus becoming attractive to former Zelenskyites. In a more probable “slow overcoming of stereotypes” scenario, he will stay as eclectic as he is now.

When trying to make a forward-looking prognosis of what each camp will evolve into, we must consider all the possible resolutions of the ongoing war. In case of complete Ukrainian victory, which according to Zelensky means the borders of 1991 and a democratic revolution in Russia, the peaceful 2000s may return, albeit with Ukraine and Ukrainian liberals as the center of pro-Western influence in the region instead of post-Yeltsinist Russian liberals.

In the scenario of partial occupation, where Russia takes what they already declared as Russia (Zaporizhzhya, Kherson, Donetsk, Luhansk regions, and Crimea) we can expect the continuous militarization of Ukraine, a constant increase of rightist sentiments and constant Russian bullying of whatever regime is in Kyiv. I don't think that partial occupation can coincide with the appearance of a neutral government. For that to happen, someone has to arm a non-nationalist militia that would be able to compete with Azov. 

While unlikely, a complete occupation would usher us all into a neo-Stalinist age. I suspect that Europe will keep its borders open for former citizens of Ukraine no matter what, but on the ground, in Ukraine, there won't be enough people to launch a separatist movement. Not after such heavy losses.

In case we realize Adolf Hitler's dream of an eternal Eastern frontier and this war drags on for decades, there will be just two camps. One encouraged by Allies and state apparatus: liberals and nationalists. And another one: everything else, everything Karl Popper would not like. If that is to be the case, we will have to test our character by staying true to ourselves in the face of those who offer safety in exchange for lies and pretense.