I like the tone and the global historical perspective of David Harvey’s FocaalBlog article. Harvey’s socialist internationalism versus competitive nation-statism should be the only national flag allowed in the 21st century. It was always already essential to make that point against the  environmental and public health catastrophes we are facing. It has become even more essential now that humanity is obviously sliding into a deadly phase of imperial competition of which Russia’s criminal assault on Ukraine is a first episode; as is the West’s emerging reaction to it, and the duplicitous self-serving pro-Russia position of China as well (I am writing 27 February). We should be aware that these are just early moments in a developing story that has been incubating in the dying post-1989 world order for some time.

But in this Harvey piece there is much more on the deeds of NATO and the US than on Russia, let alone Ukraine (see Derek Hall). This, sadly, is a recurrent, understandable, but not quite excusable problem of the Anglophone Left. I am not trying to launch a call for ‘local history’ or ‘ethnography’ of the ‘provincializing America and the West’ type here. On the contrary, the call is for an in-depth vision of the dialectical relationships between and within these three ‘worlds’ in motion, their dialectically entwined histories in the making. That is what is needed if we want to understand the direction things have been taking in time and space.

Harvey makes a welcome, though by now broadly accepted point about the West’s humiliation of Russia and the ongoing eastward expansion drive of NATO against earlier ‘promises’ of ‘no inch’.  However, what gets easily forgotten is that even Russia, from Gorbachev to around 2007, had itself dreamt of becoming a member of a reconstructed NATO.  NATO not only pushed quite deliberately towards the East after 1994, it was just as deliberately sucked into it, also, by the passionate requests of Eastern politicians and nations. When all modernist projects had collapsed in the East, as it seemed in the mid 1990s, the supposedly universalist Western project of democratic capitalism was simply the only available project left. The post-socialist East was happily sharing for a while in Western hubris.

I am writing from Budapest. Like the German parliament in an impressive ‘historical’ session today (27 February), people here are keenly aware that an epoch, their epoch, the post 1989 liberal Western hegemonic world, has now ended. The young new Left, to which many of us are connected as teachers, colleagues, and friends, wrote a terrific statement on their LeftEast blog. Many of us know people who are right now escaping from Ukraine or being called up as reservists; some are possibly already standing with a machine gun in hand and facing an enemy that is capable of launching outright genocidal mayhem if it can’t get its way via routine bloody assault. Imagine Kyiv as Grozny after it was levelled by the Russian army at Putin’s behest. The Chechen war is not something that has stuck in the West’s memory, but people in CEE remember it at once. And then there are the longer run local historical memories of lethal violence, state crack downs on populations, holocausts, cycles of human sacrifices for imperial self-satisfaction of all kinds – none of which the Anglo-sphere (to use a word) has ever experienced in the last millennium, at least not with its white populations as victims. Harvey’s point about being approached by a guy with a knife is well taken but also supremely understated.

Anti-Soviet Nationalisms

Harvey writes that people were not consulted when the Soviet Union was dissolved into so many somewhat arbitrary successor states. In truth, people mobilized by the millions to demand or support these nationalist secessions. The peoples’ chain across the Baltics, connecting the Polish and Russian borders over a stretch of more than a thousand kilometers stands as a symbol of such sentiments. Ukraine was not different. There was a referendum on independence in 1992: over 90 percent support, including in the Donbas (where the percentage of supporters was lower but still overwhelming). Nationalism was scripted into the new independent states in the East from the very beginning, including of course the ones that later accessed the EU. That nationalism was anti-communist, anti-Russian, largely liberal-democratic, and, in the spirit of the times, thoroughly neoliberal. It worked by way of reimagining their bourgeois ‘civil democratic’ and ‘morally virtuous’ openings in the interbellum that were cut short by the Second World war, the Soviet occupation, and the establishment of “really existing socialism”.

That is the starting point: democratic bourgeois-peasant nationalism – also in Russia itself, going back not to the 1930s but to Czarism – thrown into the neoliberal collapses of the 1990s and then into the deeply contradictory, socially polarized, and uneven reversals of the 2000s. Over time, practically everywhere, with Leftist politics switched off, those liberal nationalist impulses transformed into sometimes virulent majoritarian ethno-neonationalisms in search of an enemy, both at home and abroad.

This is not the only story. There are liberal ones to be narrated too, as well as social democratic and democratic socialist ones, even feminist and LGBT ones, and various religious ones. But there is, by now, hardly a post-socialist nation in Central and Eastern Europe or the Commonwealth of Independent States that does not have a potentially biting ethno-nationalist undertone or overtone in its dominant politics.

Russia: The come-back of the Kremlin

Harvey’s piece rightly emphasizes the Russian (and Ukrainian, but that’s overlooked) 1990s. Humiliation, collapse, IMF, the first reversal of male demographic gains (later to be repeated in the US rust belt), massive outmigration; and a West in self-celebratory mood, NATO in search of an enemy (finding it in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, etc.). In the post-socialist countries, this was not just a lost decade, like in Latin America. It was an outright kleptocratic and often lethal decade, with the West showing little interest except, as Harvey rightly notes, blaming the victims for their own cultural ills (‘corruption’, ‘mafia’).

Putin became Putin by first levelling Grozny against the Chechens (the stigmatized ‘gypsies’ of Russia), then beating the oligarchs into submission (Khodorkovsky), reestablishing central state capacities (making the regional governors subject to Moscow again), and finally by reaping the fiscal windfalls from the rising oil and gas prices since 2003 and redistributing a bit of that into a rather desperate population that now finally saw some income growth and stability returning.

These moves are still the bases for Putin’s reign. However, since the financial crisis Putin has kept up an austere regime over the Russian population, refusing to democratically share the oil, gas, and grain revenues, and instead building up a big sovereign wealth fund (600 billion USD now) that remained at the discretion of the Kremlin itself, along with substantial central bank reserves. Starting as a seemingly liberal reformer, Putin had become the pinnacle of a steep stately hierarchy, surrounded by cliques of billionaires, with an austere attitude towards the wider Russian population.

Ukraine: stagnation and revolution

Ukraine, never an imperial center, failed to grow a Putin, and got stuck in the 1990s. State collapse or failing state is too big a word, but oligarchic kleptocracy remains roughly correct amid a rather democratic freewheeling public sphere. While everywhere in the post-Soviet world, economies turned around in the 2000s, also the most Stalinist ones such as Belarus or Turkmenistan, Ukraine never reached its 1992 GDP again. This was so despite Ukraine being among the highest educated parts of the Soviet Union, with better life expectancy and quality of life than in many other places, though in Kyiv and the East more so than in the West.

Western Ukraine has for long remained a basket case (things have been going a bit better since 2014, as everywhere in CEE). The Donbas economy, but also Charkiv, has remained closely interwoven with the Russian military industrial complex, one reason why the East was leaning more towards Russia then towards NATO, apart from the Russian origin of much of its population. The area around Lviv, former Habsburg territory and under Poland until 1939, had been the scene of a bloody anti soviet guerilla from 1944 to 1949. In the 2000s it took the template of its 1940s ‘social-fascism’ (Stepan Bandera) and developed it into a new equally anti-communist engram such as embodied in the Swoboda party, which began winning local elections in the areas around Lviv in the aftermath of the financial crisis. It blamed enduring communism for Ukraine’s failings and projected that imagined communism onto Russia and its continued influence over Ukraine.

During the Maidan uprising, the new engram energized the street-fighting ‘Right Sector’, who were the front troops for the revolutionary coup of February 2014. The Maidan outcome turned these regional and increasingly ethnically imagined divisions into lethal ethno-contradictions. The post Maidan state enshrined ‘de-communization’ with overt anti-Russian connotations into its constitution, as well as future NATO membership (the earlier constitution had declared ‘neutrality’).

The new nationalist state was not nice to the Russian language and heritage, nor to other minority languages, sacrificing Ukraine’s deep diversity as a historic ‘border land’ for an openly ethno-nationalizing project in which the fascist heritages of Galicia were now celebrated and officialized nation-wide. While losing Crimea and parts of the Donbas to Russian aggression, it found it hard to bring itself to offering a positive vision for the ‘Russian’ dissenters in the East and elsewhere. As after the orange revolution (2004), a new IMF diktat would reign over its social and economic policies, making each ruling party swiftly unpopular.

Ukraine is the only state in the Global North that resembles the typical Western vassal in the Global South: dependent on Western aid and capital flows, an internationalized rentier economy in the capital focusing on finance and real estate, surrounded by stagnating provinces (with some recent urban exceptions) from whose laboring populations wealth is continuously extracted by a local rentier oligarchy and then transferred to bank accounts in London or Switzerland (see also Adam Tooze).

In the same years, Putin, fearing a ‘color revolution’, mobilized the Russian provinces against the metropoles that were rising up in protest against his continued dominance and electoral fraught. Here was the Russian version of the global urban risings of 2011. In Moscow, Petersburg, Ekaterinburg and other large centers there were massive demonstrations in late 2011/early 2012. Putin crushed them by embracing Russian Orthodoxy, Czarist state symbolism, police state tactics, and playing out the ‘common Russian worker’ of the declining mono-industrial towns against the ‘decadent creative classes’ of the metropoles. This was the start of an accelerating dismemberment of liberal democracy and ‘civil society’ in Russia. After Grozny, after the showdowns with the Chechens, the oligarchs, and the regional governors, it was now the turn of the urban dissenters.

The Maidan revolution in Ukraine afforded Putin a further jolt to his Czarist emergence by acting on behalf of the protection ‘of all Russians’ abroad, in Crimea and the Donbas. And Syria gave him a chance to showcase his power on the world stage. Just before the Ukraine war, even ‘Memorial’ was closed down. This was one of the last standing critical NGO’s in the country, now accused of being a foreign agent. Memorial was the curator of the memory of the victims of Stalinism and went back to no one less than the Russian nuclear physicist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrej Sakharov. Earlier there was the cruel and treacherous Navalny story; the shooting of Nemtsov; the closing down of the ‘European University’ in Saint Petersburg, to name a few of the violent interventions. Russia was becoming a very sad state, with continued low life expectancy, subjected to unrelenting ‘political technology’, lies, and repression. It was also the paramount leader-state of the global illiberal movement, if something like that indeed exists.

Sabotaging Minsk 2

Resurgent ethno-nationalist Russia, a petro-state with Putin as a new Orthodox Czar seeking to restore Slavic empire, was now facing a weak, virulently anti-Russian, NATO affiliated,  ethno-nationalist but at the same time divided and diverse Ukraine. Both states were temperamentally inclined to sabotage the Minsk 2 accord. And then there was NATO in ongoing imperial mode as if the 1990s were never going end, pushing its frontiers further East and promising membership to a Kyiv that was now more openly anti-Russian than ever before. NATO seems to have been hardly taking note of what was simultaneously happening in Russia.

More precisely, it was the US and the UK not taking note and doing the pushing (applauded by the Baltic states and the other East Europeans). France and Germany, with an eye on Russia, had sought to block the Anglo efforts to bring in Ukraine (and Georgia). Ukraine, in short, was subjected to the inevitable contradictions within NATO. And of course, no one was openly telling the Ukrainians that if the new Czar would become really angry, no one in the West would ever want to die for Ukraine. Nor was the West until the very last moment willing to find a diplomatic formula for saying that Ukraine would not become a member of NATO – that is, until German chancellor Olaf Scholz at his press conference with Putin in Moscow uttered wryly that it was a non-issue and just not on the agenda and would not ever be so before even Putin, whom he imagined would want to stay long, had stepped back from power.

But that was too late and too understated to matter, and who were the Germans anyway? It had to come from the Americans. And so, the US imperial mantra that every sovereign country that wanted so would always be welcome in the Western club had to be repeated over and over again. In the accelerating global imperial rivalry, imperial rhetoric, once broadcasted, cannot be lightly abandoned lest weakness is betrayed. In a crisis, ritual repetition is therefore vital, even when the issue is demonstrably irrelevant; and so it is for one’s opponent who must seek to bring precisely that rhetorical banner down.

It was as earlier in Georgia: Western imperial rhetoric feeding deliberately into local desires for the NATO, lies about membership and support, and then war. In 2005 I landed in Tbilisi just after Air Force One. I asked my interlocutors, “do you really think the US will send their aircraft carriers into the black sea in order to rescue you from a war with Russia?”. They were willing to bet on it. Until it happened. Ukraine was just like that. If only not to be in ‘Burkina Faso’, as Harvey quotes a useful quip from Boris Kagarlitsky.

How the West helped set up a monster in the Kremlin

In early February I and Volodymyr Ischenko argued in a Dutch newspaper that Ukraine should forget about NATO and finally embrace Minsk 2. It would be war or Minsk 2, we wrote. And with war we meant the military occupation of the Donbas. The Donbas had to be solved, and probably Crimea acknowledged; and not NATO but the EU should become much more involved, and not in armaments and IMF type macro-economic management but in post-conflict reconstruction. And the US and UK should finally support the French and German efforts for Minsk 2 rather than encouraging Kyiv to work against it. We were asking for another form of ‘Western unity’ then the belligerent one steadily admonished in the English language press and reproduced through NATO channels. Two weeks later we were surprised to find even someone like Jeffrey Sachs in our camp. But it was again far too late.

What we, like so many others, did not reckon with was that Putin had meanwhile gone insane. So, the knives and all the rest are now out. Unless Putin gets repelled in Ukraine and there is a coup in Moscow, Europe (and the West) will be facing a fierce and nasty new cold war. Note that none of the current sanctions is effectively aimed at the flow of oil, gas, and grain out of Russia that pays for the Kremlin’s militarism (writing 27 February). Western capitalism has set up a monster in Moscow. Threatening he Kremlin with NATO and ‘orange revolutions’ while at the same time feeding it lavishly with petrodollars, and allowing it to get away with all sorts of ongoing minor thuggish behavior is asking for trouble. Petro- and commodities’ dependencies in semi-peripheral states are nothing special. But there is only one case where the rents accumulate in an openly revanchist, militarist, and aggressive imperial center.

I am not defending an exploitative global system that is anyhow running towards its own demise. Of course, we need international peace and collaboration rather than competitive states or rivalling blocs that seek to eat each other, as David Harvey emphasizes. Socialist internationalism, there is no rational alternative. But I am torn between the fundamental pacifist and eco-socialist goals that inspire my discipline of social anthropology as much as  my own politics, and the knives that are now out in the East. Ukraine’s temerity to loudly say “fuck off” in the face of unjust overwhelming power and oppression, like its border guards on Snake Island, and then accept the inevitable sacrifices, is a more sophisticated political lesson for us all than it superficially seems.    

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Don Kalb is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen where he leads the Frontlines of Value project. His last book, edited with Chris Hann, is Financialization: Relational Approaches (Berghahn Books, 2020). He is the Founding Editor of Focaal and Focaalblog.

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Cite as: Kalb, Don. 2022. “‘Fuck Off’ versus ‘Humiliation’: The Perverse Logic towards War in Europe’s East.” FocaalBlog, 1 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/01/don-kalb-fuck-off-versus-humiliation-the-perverse-logic-towards-war-in-europes-east/