Please note that this post is fascinating but very long.
If you would find it easier to save as a PDF file for later viewing, like on a Kindle, you can find a PDF copy of the original here. That contains the original formatting, this version has been slightly tidied, but not edited, for the web.
I have also converted it into an MP3 file using a text to speech service, so you can listen on your bike or train ride - and the outcome is pretty good! If the link to the file breaks please let me know.
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| Friedman |
Here, he speaks with a number of Ukrainians who became involved in the Maidan and then discusses what has happened afterwards. Reblogged from Ukraine Solidarity Campaign.
What Happened in Ukraine?
Ukraine went through mass mobilizations and a political revolution during November, 2014 – February, 2015. In this it resembles struggles in Tunisia and Egypt since 2010, and as in the Egyptian case, the outcomes of these struggles (to date) have sorely disappointed most of the left in the United States and, indeed, internationally. Unlike the Egyptian and Tunisian struggles, however, from its outset the struggles in Ukraine were seen in remarkably contrasting ways by different parts of the left.[ii] Some have viewed the Maidan struggles as an illegitimate movement that supported US (or US/EU) imperialism and should thus be opposed. Others have viewed it more favorably.
Far too much of the discussion on the left and in progressive pulications, in my opinion, has focused on the geopolitical aspects of the struggles in Ukraine. Far too little has focused on the failures of those movements that did succeed in ousting their governments in Ukraine but also in Egypt and Tunisia to bring about governments that moved away from supporting austerity, belt-tightening, and support for neo-liberalism.
Most importantly, far too little discussion has focused on the failure of left currents in any of these movements to create serious efforts to bring about a socialist, anarchist, environmentalist or horizontalist reorganization of the economic and social order of society.
In this article, I first try to clarify what happened in Ukraine, focusing primarily on events in the Kyiv Maidan movement but also addressing what has happened since. I base what I say on the words of friends of mine who took part in it.
At the end of the paper, I will also address several important analytical questions: 1. Why the government that developed from a politically-amorphous popular revolution has been so right wing; 2. why no mass movement has developed to oppose from the left the austerity that has drastically reduced living standards in the months since this revolution; and 3. what are the implications of these events for the actually-existing lefts in the “post-Communist” countries and in the rest of the world.
Unlike most Americans who write and speak about these events, I had several good friends in Ukraine before these events began.[iii] I had met them because I have conducted research (and assisted in activism) around HIV/AIDS since 1983, with a considerable amount of this research focused on people who use drugs and their communities.
In the 1990s, after the USSR broke up, HIV began to spread among Ukrainian drug users and sex workers. The people who later became my friends got involved in efforts to stop its spread and to help those who became sick, mainly through the activities of the International AIDS Alliance Ukraine, various medical institutions and the All-Ukrainian Network of People Living with HIV.
I became involved with their efforts in 2010 when they decided to use some of my ideas to try to stop HIV’s spread. In the next few years, particularly in visits I would take to Ukraine two or three times a year but also when we would meet at international conferences around drug use and/or HIV, we shared in these efforts and some of their other projects. In some cases, we became very close friends. For example, in some cases, they sought my advice about problems with lovers or other intimate issues.
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| Because of this corruption, there are enough drugs to treat only half the HIV patients in Ukraine. |
As I have thought over what they were saying about this and other political and economic topics, I have realized how deeply the consciousness of my friends in Ukraine — and I might add, also of my friends in Russia and Poland who are engaged in work with drug users, sex workers and others facing the HIV epidemics in their countries — is deeply shaped by their understanding that what some call “state socialism” was a bad thing. Since they were taught, and are taught, that this is the essence of Marxism and of anti-capitalist thought, this poses barriers to my friends’ thinking through the possible outcomes and strategies for their Maidan revolution — barriers even more challenging than those we face in the USA.
During the Maidan struggles, I had conversations with some of them via Skype and e-mail, and had the opportunity in late January, 2014, as the Maidan struggles were nearing their climax, to have a several hours long face to face conversation with one of them in another country in a context where we could speak freely with much less fear that others would know what we were saying. At that point in time, my overwhelming impression was the similarities between what he was describing and what I remember of the US movement in the mid-1960s in terms of its being an effort to organize democracy from below while engaging in potentially-mortal struggle with the “power structure.”
In May, at the time of the confrontation in Odessa, two of my friends, including the one I spoke with in January, were in New York and were in my office when they heard about the way the confrontation between pro- and anti-Maidan forces had involved considerable violence on both sides, and how this led to the tragedy of scores of anti-Maidan activists being killed in a fire in a building they had taken refuge in (while continuing to exchange gunfire with the pro-Maidan forces.) By then, it was clear that the radical-democracy direction of their consciousness was being moved by events into a more nationalist direction.
Since then, I have spoken with Ukrainian friends face to face in Australia during the International AIDS Conference and during two-week trips to Odessa and Kyiv in February and in May, 2015. During the February trip, I had long conversations about what had gone on, and got written comments or descriptions from several of them.
What this means is that I am reasonably confident that the descriptions they have given me over these months have been honest descriptions. Unlike much of what we read, they have not been presented orally or in written form “with political intent” but rather as statements to a friend.
There is one exception to this, perhaps, in that when they spoke to me in February, 2015, they knew I planned to write it up for US publication. (And they know I am a Marxist antiwar activist in the US, and that my primary audiences will also be left. Which, I might add, my friends are not.) But even in these cases, they were speaking to me primarily as a friend. This by no means implies that I think that their words are “neutral” or “objective,” since this is not possible in social conflicts of this sort. But I do believe that they were honest reports about what they did and saw.
At this point, I will present several descriptions that friends gave me about what happened in the Kyiv Maidan over the months of the struggle during November, 2013, through February, 2014. I present them edited only for clarification.[iv]
