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 |
Sam Friedman is the author of
Teamster Rank and File and
other publications about workers’ struggles; a lifelong socialist activist; a
poet; and an internationally known researcher on HIV/AIDS epidemiology
and prevention.
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.
 |
| Because of this corruption, there are enough drugs to treat only half the HIV patients in Ukraine. |
On one of my first trips to Ukraine, about two years before the
Maidan struggles began, I became impressed with how much more deeply a
sense of Russian imperialism was in my friends’ consciousness than I had
expected. It was based on their understanding, based on what they
learned in school and from family recollections, of Ukrainians’
experiences before 1917, during the Revolution, from the famine and
state repression of the 1930s, and in the decades since. It was most
strongly impressed upon me by a young woman I have worked with who grew
up in Odessa in a non-elite family.
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]
Recollections of the Kyiv Maidan
