← New Books Network
New Books Network
Denys Gorbach, "The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class: Everyday Politics and Moral Economy in a Post-Soviet City" (Berghahn Books, 2024)
01:09:31
Loading summary
Transcript34 lines
- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. So welcome, everybody to New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies. I'm your host, Adam Quinn. I'm delighted to be joined today by Dennis Gorbach to talk about his book, the Making An Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working class, published in 2024 by Bergen Books. Dennis Gorbach is a postdoctoral fellow at Lund University. His work is distinguished by its skillful application of ethnographic methods. He has previously studied serv reliable strategies of Ukrainian refugees in France, with a current project focusing on conflicts around conspiracy theories. The book we're here to talk about today is a political economic ethnography of Kryvy Ri, an industrial town in eastern Ukraine. So, Dennis, welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:51]
B
Thank you.
- [00:51]
A
Like I said in the introduction there, like the book stands out for the extensive fieldwork that you carried in. Perhaps you could just start off by telling us about what field work you conducted and what other sources you used for the book.
- [01:06]
B
Yes, yes. Hayden? Yes, thank you for having me. So the field work. Well, you know, when you say ethnography, usually people, in most cases, they interview, so I do that normally. I spend well, I overall, I spent the total amount of roughly one year worth of visits, of which seven months was uninterrupted stay in the city. So besides the interviews, I also had plenty of occasions to do observations, including participant observations, including. So I had, I had an ambition to do a bit of Michael Buraw, so, you know, this famous sociologist who spent time working at a factory. So I wanted to go to the mine that didn't work out because the big enterprises like mines are too difficult to enter. And then it would be even almost as difficult, if not harder, to get out of that. So it was not very compatible with the fieldwork. So I spent two months working at another type of enterprise. But, yes, obtaining a new trait of assembling windows and so spending time in the city, working at the factory, trying to live the worker's life, so to say. And the other thing that I did was not as much classical ethnographic fuel work, but I spent a while in the local library reading the press archives for the last 25 years. So to try to understand, to combine that with my memories of with my childhood memories, because this happens to be the town I was growing up with. But to get a more educated perspective
- [03:19]
A
on that, how much did that background of living there, did that help you gain entry to this sort of informal factory, or did your background play any role in what you were able to what fieldwork you were able to conduct.
- [03:37]
B
So there is a discussion, I would say, whether it helps or it hinders. So to me, it was not, it was not super helpful the fact that this was my native city. So I did have, thanks to that, I did have the information that this particular small factory exists, of which I would maybe not have been aware otherwise. And it is true that one of my relatives had worked there previously. So she sort of, she asked her friends to tell me what to do, how to get, how to get hired, but otherwise, yeah, all the other usual fieldwork things like, you know, looking for accommodation, all the other everyday details. So that unfortunately had to do by myself because there are not so many people left in the city that I, that I had known. So. And overall, yes, it can be also an obstacle. You know, having too much information may make you biased.
- [04:48]
A
And so the book is to a large extent about populism, populist politics. And you talk about needing to achieve an expanded view of populism, like, what is this expanded view and how do you achieve that in the book?
- [05:05]
B
So my starting point was, my interest in the beginning was populism as I understood it in the Marxist sense of the world, I.e. political attitudes contrary to the ideological, for example, Marxist or otherwise other types of politics. But then I quickly understood that this is maybe not the best angle to start with analytically, because in academia especially, it is considered to be a swear word, especially maybe not so much in English speaking world as in French speaking, because so, yeah, in France, when I was doing my PhD, this was, you're talking about populism. What are you, Are you some kind of mainstream careerist liberal who wants to become a prime minister or what? So that also didn't help. And eventually I understood that also analytically this concept does not help, does me advance very much. So I shifted rather towards the other concepts that really became the central points for me, the everyday politics, class, moral economy, which afterwards helped me in the end, I think, to arrive at the initial point of populism. So thanks to all this concept, I believe I finally helped understand better populism as precisely this apolitical politics, the politics without the ways of being political, without participating in a movement, without sharing a coherent ideology, like rationally verbalized ideology, that kind of thing. But this middle way here I had to go it without this concept.
- [07:14]
A
As the title suggests, the book is about class. How do you understand class in the book? And perhaps just as well about just a word on moral economy as well, and how that those two concepts that underpin the book so Class,
- [07:39]
B
the title of book kind of hints, so makes a big wink at the book, at the concept of E.P. thompson, the making of the Working Class, which so. Which implies this Thomsonian optics of class being relational, class being not a thing, not an object. If we want to quote other 70s, other obscure authorities from the 70s, we might as well drop in Nikos Polansas, who said that workers do not carry their number plates like cars on their backs. So saying that they are workers. So it is not about the number of a number of people assembled and labeled to be of a certain class, but it is a relation and as Thompson would say, a field of force that is created by daily interactions. So this is why everyday politics or interactional dynamic side of this whole thing is important to me. And this is also the reason for invoking moral economy because. Because a lot of these interactions are informed by this set of implicit or explicitly formulated expectations and obligations that link people horizontally and vertically. So people or members of the class, as it were, between themselves and this class with the dominant.
- [09:31]
A
And hopefully you give some really good examples of how this moral economy sort of shapes those everyday relations and hopefully we can get into some of those later. And the book proceeds, you have three levels of analysis, like the city sort of going further under the microscope to the factory and then the individual. To start with the city. You have a number of really encycloped case studies just illustrate how political economy has developed since the 1990s and beyond. And you've clearly had quite a bit of fun with the titles as well. You have another reference, the Archaeology of Power. But perhaps just to speak about the focus on housing for now, how did the sort of the political economy of housing change post 1990s? And how did this. I guess one question is like, how did this lead to like. Or did it lead to political atomization of people?
- [10:43]
B
So political economy of housing is. So the most important thing that happened was the privatization of the housing of the housing stock, which was not. Did not take place uniformly across the whole post socialist region. So in many places, especially to the west of Ukraine, the state sold housing to people who lived in it in the post Soviet countries. Well, I will speak about Ukraine. So yeah, in Ukraine it was transferred for free, which. Which was later deplored by neoliberals as an unearned gift and so on and so forth. But in the pragmatic sense, it was a very reasonable trade off, whether it was specifically designed as such or not. But the effect was that it helped people to come to terms with all the other austerity measures, all the other deprivations that they lived through during this period. So everything becomes thin air, all the stability of employment and everything else. But at least there is something new that I have obtained. So a piece of the world that is my own and that is my flat, which previously was basically so in the Soviet time, the rent was almost equivalent to owning, but still it was not equivalent legally ownership. So this was a little bit of a little piece of security newly obtained. And I argue that this is one of the instances where an intermediary property regime was reinforced. So it had existed before, but it was reinforced in the post Soviet period. The individual property, meaning that in the interstices between the public domain, which is governed by the state or the public Morris, and the private domain, which is the domain of the market, there is this interstitial space that is not exactly commercialized, but also intrusions of the public authorities are equally illegitimate there. So in the case of housing, it is this. And then I also show the same for public transport, for example. So atomization. I would not link this exactly to this famous thesis of atomization of post Soviet societies. It is a complicated discussion and I'm not always sure which side I want to take in this discussion. But yeah, the question also is about the moral economy. And this is precisely the good illustration of how it works. Because atomization or not, what happened is that this housing stock, which now became private, so had still to be served by the public authorities in terms of water supply, electricity supply, heat and so on. These utility tariffs used to be completely, well, practically free before 1991. So it was the minuscule amount of money that you had to pay, far less than the so called market value. And then during the extremely hard period, everybody understands that this is extraordinary, this decade of 90s, everybody understands that people don't have resources to pay, so nobody even asks this minuscule payment. And then the economic growth returns in the new decade of the 2000s. And there it is interesting to trace how the discourse of the authorities becomes harsher and harsher. So they say, okay, we understand that you had difficult times, but now times are not so difficult anymore, so please start paying. And they. So one after time and again there are these implorations, like, would you steal a bread from the shop? No, you wouldn't. Why are you stealing heating or electricity without pain? And this is, I think, a very nice case like illustration of how moral economy works and how it stops working when this precisely set of expectations does not match between the expectations from the
- [15:47]
A
other Side Yeah, this is something that we've always got for below market value. So why would we pay market value for that? And does that relate with. So housing becomes like privatized and you get your house for free in the 1990s. How does that affect people's relationships with factories? In the Soviet system where everything is state owned, is there any like sort of latent notion that well, this factory is ours too, or at least or whenever that becomes private property, is that then that boundary sort of respected?
- [16:29]
B
So this particular city was one of, was actually the stage of one of the most violent and one of the best known cases of so called large scale privatization in Ukraine. So the big steel mill, actually the largest steel mill in Ukraine at some point largest in Europe. But never mind. Krivorich Stal gets resuscitated by the public effort by the state by the end of the 90s as becomes quite profitable. So gets back on the track without any private effort, without any private actor. And then, then the president, the outgoing President Kuchma, this wants to secure property in the hands of his friends and family before he leaves the office. So he forces the privatization of these big assets that were previously public against the will of the city authorities and the workers, obviously. And well, then the Orange Revolution comes about. The factory is renationalized, only to be re privatized again. So all of this is to say that 10 years later, 10 years after these events, everybody, there is no way of not knowing that the factory is private. Like everybody refers to it as being run by the Hindu, that is Lakshmi Mittal, the owner of Arcelor Mittal. And at the same time it is quite common to call it public or state owned. So this is not an ignorance of, of the facts. This is rather the implicit slip of the tongue that betrays the underlying understanding that yes, despite all the legal regime of ownership, it is still understood viewed as belonging to the public domain, to the sort of common will. And this is what distinguishes in my experience, from what I've seen in my field work, this attitude is applied to all the big enterprises that were built in the Soviet period in the sense that not in the sense that people demand, it's actively demand nationalization or something. This demand, it will not surprise anyone, but it is not like an edifice, but in the sense that the public regulations, laws and regulations apply here and average work ordinary workers, but also trade union activists are extremely vigilant, for example, as regards any potential violation of for example labor code or anything. Whereas other enterprises, so the one notably Where I worked, which was created after the fall of the Soviet Union, somehow falls into the, into the private domain. So there the sovereign will of the owner is not really contested. So people hate it, but they somehow see it as legitimate and as really genuinely private.
- [20:12]
A
And that leads people to I guess you sort of touching on this like about. You talk about like a post Soviet, a post post Soviet work impact and, and you perhaps you could like elaborate a bit more on what, on what you mean by that. And you sort of touched on there but like how that, how that differs between those big legacy industries and then newer ones like the, the screen wind that you, you spoke about.
- [20:42]
B
Yes, so. So there is, so what was already. So there is something that I didn't discovered that was there well before me. It is called the Soviet factory regime. So quite specific political economic configuration at the factory, at the enterprise, the industrial enterprise that links the administration and the workers in a particular, in a specific pact like planned fulfillment impact and so on. That is one thing. And then the post Soviet factory regime is also relatively well known. This is what happens in the 90s, immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. So elements of the industrial relations culture that are today usually considered as relics of the Soviet regime by ordinary people. In fact they have nothing to do with state socialism. They were created as a way to deal with the fall of state socialism, sometimes for example, the non money butter schemes and so on. So all of these things that are heresy to liberal economists back in the day, they were praised as the manifestations of the ingenuity of capitalism. So look how we are actually inventive and so on. So this is about the post Soviet regime where factories keep hoarding labor. They prefer non market exchange, they prioritize maintaining production and employment to actual profits and so on. And this more or less comes to the end with the extraordinary circumstances of this survival decade of the 90s. So the question is what happens next? And to try and well, to observe and then to theorize what I saw, Yes, I came up with this term post post Soviet to underline the continuity. But obviously still some kind of break. But the break is not radical enough, is not quality. So there is no qualitative sort of jump to clearly that would merit a separate, completely separate adjective, separate name. So this is what concerns the so called default regime when nothing happened. Well, nothing, no radical measures, no transformations take place. But it is not 1995 anymore. It is like 2015 for example. But the basic attitudes are the same, except that what is not the same is the material basis underlying these relations. So for example, in 1995 you had enough of stock in reserves, enough of equipment that was new enough and so on to keep the factory running without investment. This becomes difficult 20 years later. So this is what is new. And next to the enterprises that have this default mode of management, I also identified two diverging regimes that tend to be more sort of stable. So these deserve their own labels. So these are what are called neofordism, that is enterprises that are run by oligarchy that are integrated into an oligarchic vertical corporation and the owners deliberately resuscitate the paternalist spirit. So this is explicitly what they build their legitimacy on. And the opposite case is screenwind, the enterprise that I worked at, which goes completely neoliberal. And despite having this tyrannical regime of work, it remains legitimate because of this understanding that this is private owner. What do you want?
- [25:22]
A
I couldn't like you spoke about this like when you were talking about the field work, about your difficulty with getting into those factory regimes. Like how much agency do people have like living in the city, can they. If they can't get into the big. The big mines, the big legacy industry is it. Do they have to break their backs at Screenwind for 13 hours a day is.
- [25:51]
B
Actually the workforce reservoir is shared. So at Screenwind at the factory working next to me were people with. Were people who had been miners before, for example. And it is not inconceivable to circulate between. So the question the agency is expressed in the choice which is more or less free, give or take the choice of what do you prefer the security of so called state enterprise, meaning just simply big industry enterprise with health hazard. Because still, even if there are all the regulations about safety and so on, you are still spending your life underground in the mind. So it's not very nice as opposed to yes, back breaking tempo and so on, but adulterated with the feeling of autonomy and kind of perspective of self improvement, as they say. So yeah, so there are no. These spaces are not enclosed, they are shared. And more often than not former miners or former metal workers end up in screenwrit, which despite their expectations, turns out to be a dead end for them. But that is the sort of more or less objective statistics. But if we speak about people's perceptions, it is one perspective for one way of seeing the world as opposed to the other. Free agency versus secure employment, let's say
- [27:58]
A
to move on to like the level of the individual. And so much sort of outside media and discussion about Ukraine focuses on identity and I was surprised reading the book, that just how fluid, like at the level, at the everyday level, like you find identity to be? How is identity, like, manipulated, if that's not too strong a word from above and below? And how is it shaped by this moral economy?
- [28:34]
B
Well, exactly, it's been manipulated both from above and from below. So it's not as if identity is a complete ruse that is invented and so on, that is like an opium of the people and stuff like that. But it is true that it is extremely fluid. And I think it might be, it surely is the case elsewhere as well, that by reading old newspapers I realized how different was the understanding of what is even Russian or Russian speaking or Ukrainian actually. How different was the meaning of these words back in the early 90s compared to the early 2000s. So what I was able to sort of trace is the story that happens in the 2000s when on the national level huge transformations take place. This famous Orange Revolution happens when the presidential power, presidential authorities are being weakened. Parliament gets to the fore of the political arena. So it becomes this stage of conflict between various oligarchic forces, which means that these forces now have to compete as parties, so now have to perform parliamentarism, so to say. And if you need parliamentarism, you need more or less convince an ideologist. And here identities become the simplest way of mobilizing people. So without. Because there were other attempts, for example, in the 1998, there was extremely popular political project called the Party of Greens, owned, as it happens, by your very pollutant enterprise owners. But this didn't quite. This was a one off hit, but it didn't live very long. Whereas founding your political force on ethno linguistic belonging turned out to be a winning bet. So it is, I argue that this famous, this picture of two Ukraines, you know, divided between the Russian speakers and Ukrainian speakers, or pro Russian Russians and pro whatever Westerners that want to kill each other. So this popular image, well, obviously it is wrong, but also it starts. So it, it is rooted in the, in the realities, quite recent realities of the 2000s, when indeed this polarization starts off. And it starts from above, from, from Kyiv. And I kind of show how these impulses coming from the capital are perceived and how they are transformed, recuperated sometimes from below by the local authorities, so the local power block on the city level and actually by individuals. So the local elite, which used to be completely technocratic, they took pride in saying that, yeah, we are neither left nor right, we support the party that is called, you know, so we just, we just get things done and we are not interested in politics. They resist this politicization, but especially after the privatization of the biggest enterprises, gradually the old guard loses the power and the new elite is formed by the militants of this so called pro Russian with big quotation marks, pro Russian political bloc which justifies themselves by avoiding to peddle their ideology, which is based on basically production of the Russian language of the Russian Orthodox Church and the historical memory of the Second World War in its Soviet version. And the fourth element is current geopolitical choices, rather biased in favor of Russia. So basically these are four pillars of their ideology. And the secret to success for them is to deny the ideological character of these pillars. So they weave it together with the lay apolitical attitude, selling it as being neutral, as being non political. Yeah, we just speak this language. Well, this is true that the majority speaks this language, but for the majority this is not political. And now there is the local party that dominates the city council and that says yes, it is political, it is. Well, I mean it is normal, it is natural. And we are here to protect this natural state of things. So we are not doing politics, not at all, but we are here to protect you. This is one thing. And then on this background you have individual, especially intellectuals, so people from the local pedagogical university, but also workers, miners whom I describe in the book, who adhere to the opposing ideology that is dominant on the national level, the ideology of pro Ukrainian, so to say choice or pro Western, pro European and so on. They, they willingly isolate themselves from the majority of their comrades, of their co workers. Why do they do this? Because this helps the. The fact of switching to Ukrainian in their everyday life, the fact of defending memory politics that is not popular locally and so on. So this helps them advance in the sense of Burgosian distinction strategies. So they. So in one breath you can hear a person saying, yes, sure, of course I speak Ukrainian and also I read books, you know. So yeah, I'm just intelligent. I'm sorry, this is not the case for everyone. So this ideology that is far away or identity set of identity, identitarian attitudes that is far away and up serves as the beacon, as the vehicle of individual distinction strategies as compared to the mass of so called ordinary people surrounding you, adjacent to you.
- [36:10]
A
I guess one question, sort of the elephant in the room about a lot of this book is how the war has shaped that and how like workplace relations, identity, like how what has changed since sort of 2022? I know you were just maybe finishing up the book then what has changed since the invasion? The full scale invasion,
- [36:41]
B
A lot of things, but also not much. So the gist of my book, the central argument is probably the crying absence of politics in the conventional sense of the word. So people tend to do very political things, vehemently denying the political nature of these things, like wildcat strikes and stuff like that. Yes, disgust to attitude of disgust to what all things political is. And from this disgust you can build links to the atomization thesis and so on. And then comes this full scale invasion of 22 which brings with it pictures of impressive popular mobilization. Mobilization in both senses, so military, but also actual social mobilization in favor of defense. So this was genuine, at least in the beginning. The first weeks and months of the invasion, there were really masses of formerly non aligned, not interested in politics, people certainly many of those whom I interviewed and portrayed in the book, who now went to the like, volunteered for the army or started volunteering in the pro defense activities of various kinds. And this poses question, yes, so what about was I wrong? What does it say? What can we say about my thesis in this new light? And I argue that in fact there is a way of understanding these two realities together in a non conflicted way, non contradictory way. Because to me this mobilization is not nationalist and not even ideological in the wider sense, from what I see from some occasional discussions online with the people who are engaged in these activities in 2022. So what I observe is rather people are still protecting their private space, individual space, non political domestic space from the intrusion of politics. That is to say, if before, like in 2020, for example, there was a big strike where people were insisting that the strikers insisted that they were not doing that they were not being political. So at that point politics tried to intrude and destroy local loyalties, friendships, solidarities, as they saw it now it is basically the same story, only that this time politics comes in the shape of bombs and missiles. Because yes, something extremely, the extremely political thing, this invasion is motivated by extremely politicized discourse about the brotherhood and so on and so forth. So an ideology which is not exactly shared and not exactly loved by the majority. And people protect their everyday life as it used to be, so come without any political things going on, protected from the ideologies that took even more deathly shape now. So I don't know if I'm being clear on that one, but this was my.
- [40:58]
A
Well, you talk about this dogged determination people have to stay out of politics and really low levels of trust in political leaders. And some of Your correspondent seemed to almost be like fantasizing about, like an authoritarian, like a benevolent, benevolent authoritarian figure who would come in and sweep out corruption. And you did sort of Zelensky in the presidentials, when he was elected president seemed to. Well, he was someone completely without, like a history of politics. How did people respond to his election? Like, as sort of getting their wish in that sense of someone not touched by the corruption of all the political class and also with martial law, then he is this figure who can sort of is bestowed with the powers to sweep out corruption and remain apolitical. Like, how did the people you were corresponding with respond to Zelenskyy's initial election?
- [42:24]
B
So Zelensky in 2019 is not identical to Zelensky in 2025, like in the popular Perception. So in 19, yes, it was absolute enthusiasm. It was as normal as walking on two legs to vote and to support Zelensky. So it is not exactly so. I often get this question. It's probably because he comes from the same city. Well, maybe like a total, very small amount. But basically it was one of the other presidential candidates also was from the city, Alexander Vyukul. So it's not precisely about rooting for locals. It is about rooting for someone who, in the words of one of my interlocutors, who has no black mark, black mark of previous participation of being in this contagious relation with the world of politics. So Zelensky and his team did this very ingeniously. So they tapped on the precisely correct chords, correct buttons with some of their messaging. They made a point of not promising anything, for example, because politicians, what do they do? They promise and they lie. We are not politicians. We do not give out any promises. And one of their advertisement slogans was a line from a cheesy melodramatic pop song in Ukrainian in the 90s which says, basically, no promises, no forgiving. So the song is about couple breakup and they literally put no promises, no forgiving. And it is like, it hits right in the spot because, yes, we are not promising anything and we will not forgive, we will not pardon those who did all of this to you. So when we come to the positional authority, yeah, we will be like harsh. And it is true that. This idea should not be romanticized, because it is, yeah, we can talk about resistance, weapons of the weak and whatnot, but it also carries the seeds of authoritarian, of lay here, support authoritarian politics with it. So what happens afterwards? To a significant degree, this infatuation with Zelenskyy fades already in the first months. So I mean, this is only to be expected. This is natural. And again, already during the presidential campaign, there was one moment when two of my co workers were discussing the, the campaign and once said, yeah, and what happens if he actually wins? Can you imagine that? Yeah, if he wins. I don't know. I guess now we are laughing at his jokes and then we will laugh and then we will also maybe cry. So, you know, there is this preemptive disillusionment. So like kind of psychological self defense in advance. We, like you prepare yourself for to be disillusioned. This happens, but this happens not as dramatically as is usually the story in Ukraine. So traditionally, after every presidential election, the newly elected president finds that his approval ranking falls to like 4% in the course of one year. So this was not the case of Zelenskyy. Still, he maintained a sort of, well, a significant popularity despite all the expected disillusionments. So here I can cite my colleague and friend Daria Saborova, who wrote a book, she wrote sort of a sequel to my own book, because she went to the same place, she spoke sometimes to the same people, only that she did it in 2023, so after the beginning of the invasion. Unfortunately, her book is in French and I don't know if it's been translated now in English or not. Maybe it will come. So she says, and she describes it in the book how, yes, in the war context, people tend to forgive all the corruption. Well, not to forgive, but to ascribe all the corruption scandals of the last year or two years, ascribe all the responsibility to the corrupt surrounding of Zelenskyy, who made bad choices in terms of picking his team. So rather than the dominant attitude is still that he is still there, rather ours, one of ours, one of the like non tainted guys, non political guys who is simply being tricked, cheated by the people in the position of power around him. So this is, this is. And speaking of authoritarian potential authoritarian tendencies. So so far, luckily, even surprisingly, maybe this is not very, very prominent in society. There is this popular refrain that lays hope not in Zelenskyy, but in our guys who will come from the front line. Again, this is very universal. I think it was the same even during the first World War in the Western Europe. Our guys will return and they will set things right. They will punish the deputies and the politicians who are now exploiting us. This is very, very popular refrain today in Ukraine. To what extent it carries actual danger of, of actual former military forming some kind of junta and so on, which would Enjoy popular support for now. If we are to trust quantitative sociology figures, this is not yet the case. Although the various far right groups do try to speculate on this, saying that, yeah, like you know, the military should get the hand, get the upper hand in the, in the society, like we should run this. But so far this, the high trust in the army is not exactly converted into literal pro authoritarian attitudes. So there is still some space of hope. Not some, there is still space for hope, yes.
- [49:56]
A
Yeah, but it's made me wonder. There's such low levels of trust in public authorities then, but yet you can still elect somebody, a complete outsider, a comedian to the president, the president's office, but then after a month or two, nobody trusts him. And this sort of retreat into everyday politics, think of it like a reservoir of resistance, if we want to call it that, but a resident reservoir of like political behavior. It doesn't manifest itself in grassroots political organizations. What can get people out of sort of living in everyday politics whenever most people don't actually recognize at the everyday level is the political nature of that.
- [51:02]
B
Well, I, I don't like psychology as a discipline and I don't like psychologizing explanations of social phenomena. But, but at the limit here I can accept the term trauma to briefly refer to the factors that are in my view behind all this. Because the beginning of the story of independent Ukraine, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, was actually genuine politicization. So the masses were very politicized, including workers of Kriveri. So there were all these, all these stories of genuine enthusiasm from below. And then what happens is this very profound crisis which pushes people away from the public sphere into the private sphere. And what can push them back or pull them back from the private into the public? Well, that's an excellent question that I and many of my comrades from the leftist movement that was active in Ukraine in 2010s that we struggled to answer this and well, surely after the war, however, it will end, surely this will bring changes. I have no idea how that will look like the picture of popular attitudes, but so far I believe that yes, we still remain in this pre political, if you wish domain where army is the most trusted institution, but not because people adore generals and they want military to run the country, but simply because the army, even before 2022 and before 2014, even in the so called normal times, it was simply the institution that it was the reservoir of shared formative experience for the male population of the country. So yeah, you spent two years of your young life with people who became Your comrades for life. So one of the best and the worst memories are from this period. So, yes, this is why you trust army in this sense, rather than military structure and so on. And then there is plenty of this politics that we can call that, but that people deny this name, which is manifested in networks of friends and family, informal networks that ensure that society runs its course, that help settle things in order, that are informal. And yes, so far, what I have seen, what I have observed, is this stop, how we call it, break. When you want to stop the train, you pull the brake, the handbrake. Yes, whenever your, for example, collective that is already quite institutionalized, informally, whenever there is a suggestion to make it actual political party or something like that, immediately it is an outrage. So, yes, we will not allow for that. We are not sellouts, we're not corrupt, we don't want that. And objectively, obviously, this ruins any attempt to perennialize any social advance, any mobilization that you have. So the momentum that you have gained for now, you will lose it in a month unless you institutionalize it. And institutionalization is precisely what people, what people resist to. Will it become any better thanks to the mobilization that happens in the course of this invasion? Afterward, to my book, I speculated that it may be the case, and also that in terms of identities, that this story of constant polarization and governing, thanks to the balancing between the two identities, this will come to an end, because the invasion gives you sort of the common ground for identifying yourself as people who live on the given territory, under the given administrative political regime, and attacked by an enemy from the outside. So this should be enough for you to consider yourself a nation without any further purges on ethnic or linguistic level. But currently these purges have been revived, so there is the renewed effort of the actual government. So the Zelensky government, they jumped into this cesspool of. Of nationalist memory, politics, language, laws, and so on. So currently I remain unsure both about the prospects of politicization of the masses and prospects of forming an idealized political nation.
- [57:04]
A
And perhaps like a better thing to, rather than sort of psychologizing, trying to psychologize people. Like what, at a basic level, like, what shapes moral economy? Like, does, like that sort of big exogenous shock, like the war, shape what people, how people navigate their life? I can sort of see that in the purges against corruption at like the sort of high level, like, how has it changed that sort of everyday moral
- [57:35]
B
economy, on the more sort of structural level of social structures, how they react. In a way, there is a return of Again, this extraordinary survival conjuncture of the 90s. So the local economy is practically dying because of the. So nothing has been bombed so far in Krivy per se, but the adverse effects of blockaging, of merit in blockage and so on, and plenty of other factors make the bulk of the local industry. Despite that, the mines. The mines keep hoarding the employees, they do not declare bankruptcy and the people are super angry, of course at the managers, but they still don't go anywhere, mostly because they don't have anywhere else to go. So there is this desperate attempt at all levels to maintain, to cling to what remains of the so called normal life in terms of employment, in terms of city authorities, so to maintain stability as much as it is possible. So this may be one consequence of the exogenous shock. The city is being bombed back into the 90s, so to say, in this sense. And the other interesting sequence is that linked to the political struggle on the city level. Because the guy who competed on behalf of, who competed in the presidential elections of the year 19 as the head of the so called pro Russian camp, Alexander Vukul, holds no official position today in the city and yet he presents himself as this strongman, as the guy who runs things. His father is the formal head of the city, but even he's not actually an elected mayor, he's the acting mayor after the former mayor was killed. So the formal legitimacy of his son is extremely thin. But thanks to all these extraordinary events of the invasion, he reinvents himself politically, becoming hyper patriotic Ukrainian politician, initiating the renaming of the streets that he had vigorously resisted before 2022. So now he says yes, we should do that and that, and that we should decommunize, deracify toponomics. So it will be interesting to see how this invasion will reconfigure power configurations in Kryverij and also in other similar circumstances. Yeah. In similar cities.
- [61:12]
A
And we're sort of coming up for time here, so I just wanted to ask about what you're working on at the minute and perhaps how that, what, what should we expect next from. From your work?
- [61:28]
B
Yeah, so after this, after this project, I started another one that was focused on individual strategies of Ukrainian refugees in the Western Europe, notably in France. So some of that work has been already published, but me and my colleagues, we want to normally keep it longitudinal. So this year, this summer actually we met some of our interlocutors back from 23 re interviewed them. So I think this will be an interesting thing to trace the way people accommodate or not the way people choose to, sometimes to go back to Ukraine or if they want to integrate, how they proceed. So these more material things, but also on the level of attitudes, political attitudes, but also identities. So how they renegotiate their. Yeah, their identity, whether who they are, are they Ukrainians, are they refugees or not, and so on. So this is one thing. And the other project that I'm now literally employed at is to make it short, devoted to the conflicts around conspiracy theories in a number of countries. So me, my own project is about Belgium, which has nothing to do with Ukraine, so Belgian society and European level, because Brussels happens to be in Belgium. So it also falls upon me to study all these struggles around freedom of expression, regulation of speech, regulation of platforms. So all of these things, and what I'm interested here in is the way speech is being policed or not from below, what is sayable, what is outside of the polite society, what remains taboo and. And what is the role of suspicion in the formation of edit of political knowledge, in the production of political knowledge, so to say. So Belgium is very mild in this sense, mild country compared to Ukraine. So it is actually rather difficult to find proper conspiracy theories to focus on and so on. But afterwards, after this project, what I would like to do is to continue this interest in suspicion and conspiracy theories and take it to the field of. Again, to the post socialist field. So to work with the role of suspicion and mistrust and everyday politicization of post Soviet population. Nice.
- [64:47]
A
And one of the highlights of the book is those everyday insights into people's lives and I guess very different contexts in Belgium. But I was just thinking of one of your interlocutors who was a real blend of this East Slavic paganism and complete distrust and suspicion around any sort of political activity, which is, I guess, an extreme example of attitudes in the book as a whole.
- [65:20]
B
Yeah, I hope there will be plenty of such stories, entertaining stories, plenty of
- [65:28]
A
material for another book. Well, Dennis, thank you very much for joining us on the New Books Network.
- [65:34]
B
Thank you.