On Moral Duty and Left-Wing Theory: An Interview with Bohdan Krawchenko

— What led you to join the Ukrainian left in Canada?

— I didn’t “join the Ukrainian left” in Canada, because at the time no such movement really existed. It emerged in the 1960s as part of the broader politicization of young people who were gathering around critical ideas. I was drawn to leftist views, and I began to formulate them earlier than other young Ukrainians from the postwar émigré community — partly because my own political socialization was somewhat atypical.

After the war, my parents moved from displaced persons camps in Germany to France and then to Canada, settling in Montreal. Although French was my first language, I had to attend a school run by the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal, because Quebec had a confessional education system. French-language schools were only for Catholics, and I was Orthodox. So I went to an elementary school where I was the only Christian in an entirely Jewish class. Living in a Jewish neighborhood, I was a “shabbos goy”: I’d get twenty-five cents for stopping by Orthodox Jewish homes on Saturdays to do things like turn on the television so the men could watch football, or to buy them beer. And nobody ever commented on my name — Bohdan — even though it carried disturbing historical associations for Jews from Eastern Europe. From an early age, I developed an allergy to antisemitism.

After the war, around 250,000 Ukrainians ended up in displaced persons camps (DP camps) in the American and British zones. These camps provided ideal conditions for political mobilization. With few job opportunities available, people’s energy flowed into education, culture, religion, and political debate. The Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) — with roughly 5,000 members in Germany — had the organizational cadres to campaign among the refugees and became the dominant political force. Around 35,000–40,000 DPs eventually settled in Canada, mainly in the urbanized part of southern Ontario, with a smaller number in Montreal. They formed a distinct group, separate from the 390,000 Ukrainians who had arrived in earlier waves of immigration, and settled in the three Prairie provinces, where a more liberal and progressive political culture prevailed. In 1926, the first Ukrainian was elected to Parliament: Michael Luchkovich of Alberta, who spoke out against the Holodomor and helped found the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), a social-democratic party in Canada. In contrast, the Bandera group introduced a far-right integral nationalism [editor’s note: integral nationalism is a type of nationalism that holds the nation as the highest value to which all other interests are to be subordinated] into Canada.

By the way, since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, roughly 300,000 Ukrainians have moved to Canada — by far the largest wave of immigration to date. 

— Who did you connect with in the Ukrainian left during your student years?

— A small Ukrainian left emerged out of the student movement and coalesced around Dii͡aloh (Dialog), which was published from 1977 to 1987. The most important figures for us were former members of the Vpered group, which had emerged as a left current within the Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic Party (URDP). We kept in touch with its participants: Vsevolod Holubnychy (an economist), Ivan Maistrenko (a former Borotbist), Hryhorii Kostiuk (a literary critic), Borys Levytsky (a political scientist), and Roman Paladiichuk — a businessman, a former journalist, and a follower of Ivan-Tadei Mitrynga, who broke with the Bandera faction of the OUN and argued for ethical and humanistic values. The Vpered group later formally dissolved and passed the torch to Dii͡aloh. We also met with Bohdan Fedenko, the son of Panas Fedenko, who had founded the Ukrainian Socialist Party, which belonged to the Socialist International.

I also met Nick Oliynyk, who had once been a member of a Ukrainian communist group in Canada but broke with it in order to support Trotsky’s opposition to Stalin. He persuaded Trotsky to call for an “independent, socialist Ukraine” in his 1939 article “The Ukrainian Question.”

— You were one of the founders of the Marxist academic journal Critique. How would you describe its purpose and contribution, as well as your own role in it?

— After studying in Toronto, I went on to pursue further education at the Institute of Soviet and East European Studies at the University of Glasgow. This experience proved decisive in my life. There were thirteen of us students — all left-leaning and critical of the Soviet Union. 

We were fortunate to have as our professor Hillel Ticktin, a Jewish Marxist from South Africa who, after facing arrest for his involvement in the anti-apartheid movement, received a scholarship to study in Moscow. He was a committed anti-Stalinist and a sharp critic of the Soviet system. His lectures on the political economy of the USSR offered deep analysis of both the economy and the social structure. His method involved posing questions that other approaches to studying the Soviet Union simply never raised. He described the USSR as a “non-mode of production,” historically unstable. The Soviet bureaucracy, in his view, was not a ruling class in the classical sense that controls surplus extraction, but a privileged stratum that managed production and distribution without legal ownership. Its power rested on political control, repression, and the suppression of market mechanisms. The system was inherently inefficient because it had neither capitalist competition nor socialist democracy. Armed with this analytical framework, each of us immersed ourselves in specific aspects. I focused on the condition of the working class and later on the national question.

It was obvious to our group that we had to do something to disseminate this school of thought. I believe I was the first to propose creating a journal. I then moved to Oxford for doctoral studies and took responsibility for preparing the first issue. We produced it almost without a budget, in a left-wing print shop, with support from friends in our Canadian circle who had also moved to London for graduate studies. The first issue of Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory appeared in 1973. The journal is still published today by Taylor & Francis.

It is worth noting that volume 18 of Critique was devoted entirely to Roman Rosdolsky — Engels and the “Nonhistoric” Peoples: The National Question in the Revolution of 1848 — translated and edited by John-Paul Himka, a member of our circle. I published several articles in Critique under the pseudonym Holubenko, including “The Soviet Working Class: Discontent and Opposition” (1973), which generated some resonance, since no one had raised this issue before. The article described in detail the methods of social control and atomization that restrained workers’ discontent. But whenever that discontent took the form of protest, the authorities would immediately make concessions; once the protesters dispersed, the KGB would intervene, and arrests would follow. The article discussed the 1962 workers’ uprising in Novocherkassk, brutally suppressed by the authorities. Among my other publications were “The Famine in Ukraine in 1933” (1986), which was reprinted several times by other left publications, including a Polish underground journal, and “Perestroika and the Soviet Working Class” (1990).

— What were your contacts with the opposition or dissidents in the Soviet Union, particularly Ukrainian ones? Did you interact with them only through literature, or did you know anyone personally at the time?

— You have to understand the context. Soviet society was probably the most atomized society in modern history. The state controlled virtually all economic activity, apart from small private garden plots, and almost all forms of human interaction outside the family took place under state supervision. You couldn’t even organize a simple chess club without permission from a party authority. A powerful repressive apparatus and a network of informers ensured social control. In such a setting, social capital was reduced to a minimum. Fear was internalized, and studies showed that the average Soviet person could trust only a very narrow circle — around six people. The mechanisms of control were especially harsh in Ukraine, as were the punishments. There was a saying: “If in Moscow they clip your nails, in Kyiv they cut off your hand.” According to the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, roughly 60–70 percent of political prisoners in the USSR were Ukrainian, even though Ukrainians made up only about 16 percent of the Soviet population. When it came to personal contact with dissidents, this was difficult not only because foreigners were monitored, but also because such contact put them at risk. I visited Ukraine three times before independence, and in Kyiv and Lviv I met people with oppositional views who knew well-known dissidents — and that was enough.

We were able to read dissident writings largely because two Ukrainian organizations managed to smuggle out and publish samvydav and manuscripts. One was Prolog, a publishing organization founded by the so-called “Dviykari” (the Second Group of the OUN), led by Lev Rebet. The “Dviykari,” founded in 1946, were connected with the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). (Rebet was later assassinated by a KGB agent.) Prolog published works by Ukrainian dissidents. There was also the journal Suchasnist, founded in 1960 by Ivan Koshelivets. Paradoxically, its liberal orientation was made possible by support from an American foundation funded by the CIA, which meant the editorial board did not depend on fundraising among the postwar émigré community, which was largely right-conservative. Another organization was the publishing house Smoloskyp, which issued a large amount of dissident material, samvydav, and the journal Ukrainskyi Visnyk (Ukrainian Herald), an underground human-rights publication founded in 1970 by Viacheslav Chornovil. 

As for the activities of our small left-wing group in distributing literature to Ukraine: we established contacts in Ukrainian communities in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia, and passed on to them stocks of literature — our Ukrainian-language journal Dii͡aloh, which began publication in 1977, as well as various magazines and books intended to inform opposition-minded people about events in Ukraine, in the region, and about global trends. Our contacts would then pass this literature to visitors from Ukraine to read, and in some cases they managed to bring materials into Ukraine. Occasionally, we organized direct transfers of materials to Ukraine, though this was rare. When it did happen, it was usually academic texts that were highly valued by intellectual circles deprived of access to contemporary Western scholarship.

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As luck would have it, the first Ukrainian dissident to reach the West was Leonid Plyushch, and he shared left-wing ideas. A mathematician by training, in 1968 he signed a declaration of solidarity with the democratic movement in Czechoslovakia. In 1972, he was arrested and confined in a psychiatric hospital, where he was subjected to destructive drug “treatment.” Support for Plyushch was broad in left-wing circles in France and across Europe, to the point that leaders of the French and Italian Communist parties appealed to Moscow to free him. He arrived in France in 1976, and the following year he published his memoirs, History’s Carnival (Ukr. «У карнавалі історії»), which became a bestseller. He not only strengthened democratic and progressive discourse; he also complicated — and enriched — the image of the “contemporary Ukrainian,” which was often perceived in the West as monolithic.

Another outstanding dissident — a man of titanic inner strength — was Danylo Shumuk, who spent a total of forty-two years in captivity. Amnesty International recognized this as the longest term of political imprisonment on record. Shumuk was first arrested under the Second Polish Republic for involvement in the underground Communist Party of Western Ukraine. He was released in 1939 when Soviet troops occupied western Ukraine, but was soon forcibly mobilized into a Red Army penal battalion and sent to the front. There, he was taken prisoner by the Germans and held in a POW camp in Khorol (Poltava region), notorious for conditions so inhuman that few survived. In 1943, Shumuk escaped and joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). He later recalled that, although he fully understood how hopeless it was to fight both the Nazis and the Soviet authorities at once, it was a moral duty — to prove that Ukrainians resisted and fought to the end. In 1945, he was captured by the NKVD and sentenced to death; the sentence was later commuted to twenty years of hard labor in the Gulag. He was sent to the camp in Norilsk, a brutal penal complex in Russia’s Arctic zone. There, he played one of the leading roles in the Norilsk Uprising of 1953 — the largest revolt in the history of the Soviet camp system. Released in 1956 during Khrushchev’s “thaw,” Shumuk was arrested again the very next year — this time for “anti-Soviet propaganda” — and sentenced to another ten years. That term ended in 1967. Yet in 1972, during a new wave of mass repression, he was arrested again, now for writing and circulating his own memoirs. In the camps, he organized hunger strikes, joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, and for many years demanded permission to emigrate to Canada, where his relatives lived. Thanks to the efforts of Amnesty International, the Ukrainian diaspora, and official appeals from Canada, he was released in 1987 and resettled in Canada — where I met him. CIUS later published his memoirs in English as Life Sentence: Memoirs of a Ukrainian Political Prisoner.

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Danylo Shumuk was an extraordinary figure: a person who deeply valued social justice, workers’ dignity, and community solidarity. He was an uncompromising opponent of authoritarianism, guided by a strong moral sense of duty and personal responsibility, and remained committed to Ukrainian civic nationalism. In 2002, he returned to Ukraine, died in 2004, and was buried in Pokrovsk, Donetsk region — which, one hopes, will remain under Ukrainian control.

After moving to Ukraine in January 1991, I had the opportunity to meet and work with several former political prisoners who had transitioned into roles as political leaders and civic activists. I won’t go into detail, but I will note that traits such as uncompromising devotion to one’s convictions — admirable and even necessary in prison — were not always helpful in the post-independence period, when success often depended on the ability to build broad coalitions. The failure to unite wide patriotic forces was one reason for Viacheslav Chornovil’s disappointing result in the first round of the 1991 presidential elections. And after 1991, internal conflicts led to the fragmentation of Rukh. In this context, I particularly valued Mykhailo Horyn, who, thanks to his calm, clear reasoning and principled pragmatism, was an effective coalition builder.

— Could you tell us about your engagement with the European left?

— The growing influence of Critique opened new opportunities. When I moved to Oxford, the wave of arrests in 1972 pushed me to start writing articles for left-wing journals in the United Kingdom. And when I relocated to France in 1973, that in turn became a springboard for publishing on the European continent. I wrote dozens of pieces for left-wing journals and newspapers in seven countries. For a period, I had a weekly column in a Danish newspaper. I was also a regular contributor to left-wing publications in Czechoslovakia and Poland. The point is simple: if you want to shape how the European left thinks, you must write for the outlets its supporters actually read.

It’s important to remember that in the 1970s — especially in France and Italy — the Communist Party’s influence on how people imagined the USSR extended far beyond its formal membership. Anti-American sentiment in Europe also mattered a great deal. Fueled by the Vietnam War and by U.S. support for authoritarian regimes around the world, it produced a conviction that the Soviet Union was the lesser evil. At the same time, there was a latent racist subtext. I remember a conversation with a French Communist sympathizer who told me: “Democracy is impossible in the USSR. They’re Slavs — they’re used to the whip; obedience is in their blood, unlike us Europeans.” Many people were prepared to accept that the Soviet system needed reform, but any idea that it was reformable and ultimately had to be overthrown was met with outright hostility. This is where articles that popularized Critique’s position — about the Soviet order’s lack of viability and its inevitable collapse — played a crucial role in shifting the dominant paradigm. 

Of course, the situation today is completely different. Most left-wing forces (apart from orthodox Communists and certain segments of the populist left) support Ukraine. I have seen Ukrainian authors published in left-wing media, but mostly in English-language outlets. And given Europe’s consolidation and its crucial role in supporting Ukraine, it is extremely important that such articles begin to appear in other European languages as well.

— What is your view of the left in the diaspora today, and its relationship with Ukraine?

— Ukrainian leftists as an organized group — like Dii͡aloh — no longer exist. Dii͡aloh itself ceased publication, and its legacy is now preserved in the University of Manitoba archives thanks to Myroslav Shkandrij, a professor there and a former editor of Dii͡aloh. That said, some of its former participants — above all Marko Bojcun — played a key role in creating a left-wing platform for solidarity work with Ukraine by helping to found the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign in Britain. The Campaign, supported by members of the Labour Party and by trade-union activists, is coordinated by a committee that includes representatives of the newer wave of Ukrainian migration — Tanya Vyhovsky (chair) and Yuliya Yurchenko — as well as Mick Antoniw, who represents the postwar generation of the Ukrainian diaspora. Antoniw, who earlier had links to Dii͡aloh, served as a member of the Welsh National Assembly/Senedd and played an important role in organizing trips by Welsh miners delivering humanitarian aid to Ukraine. Chris Ford, one of the Campaign’s key organizers, has also written on the history of the Borotbists and the Ukapists.

It’s also worth adding that before the Campaign there was Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, which ceased publication in 2004. It was founded by Peter Gowan and Halya Kowalsky (a member of Dii͡aloh), and it helped draw the attention of the British left to Ukrainian issues.

I can’t recall anything comparable to the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign in other countries. There are individual left Ukrainian voices — for example, Tanya Vyhovsky, a member of the Vermont State Senate, the home state of Bernie Sanders, who has spoken out strongly in support of Ukraine. And Sanders himself — a politician known for his principled stance — represents Vermont in the U.S. Senate. The Ukrainian question is global; it serves as a litmus test for a group’s moral compass. In 2022, when hundreds of thousands of people took part in marches against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this sent a clear signal of broad support among ordinary people. In Canada, Ukraine is supported across the political spectrum. At the same time, some segments of the far left and parts of the academic world frame the conflict as a proxy war that should be resolved diplomatically—a position that, as it turns out, echoes that of Donald Trump. More broadly, the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada and elsewhere has changed due to generational turnover. It is now generally liberal in outlook, while the integral nationalist current has moved to the margins. The appointment of Chrystia Freeland as foreign minister, and later as deputy prime minister, breathed new life into the Ukrainian community. For us on the left, she was a familiar figure since childhood. Her mother, Halyna Freeland, a well-known feminist, founded the Hromada housing cooperative and later the Ukrainian Legal Foundation in Kyiv.

Overall, I believe that, in the context of today’s agenda of supporting Ukraine in its struggle against Russia, the left in Western countries does not have to perform any special separate task beyond reinforcing mainstream efforts and doing the often exhausting work of countering those on the left who do not support Ukraine. At the same time, there is a potentially important role in supporting efforts within Ukraine itself aimed at far-reaching, much-needed reforms. Yet today the voice of the left in Ukraine in this direction is barely audible — and it needs to be amplified.

— What do you think about today’s Ukrainian left? What problems and challenges do you see?

— I first learned about the contemporary Ukrainian left through Marko Bojcun. In 2024, Zakhar Popovych introduced me more closely to today’s Ukrainian left, and through him I gave several lectures for members of Pryama Diia (Direct Action), who were interested in my experience of student organizing and in the syndicalist ideology of the Quebec student movement. In 2025, I attended a conference of Sotsialnyi Rukh (The Social Movement), which brought together trade union activists and some government representatives. The event focused on hardship bonuses for workers in critical sectors. I was invited, as something of a “historical artifact,” to deliver a greeting. The idea that seemed to resonate most was that concern for workers’ well-being belongs to a long-standing Ukrainian tradition — from Taras Shevchenko onward, the social idea has always been central to the national one.

I hadn’t realized that Sotsialnyi Rukh also aspires to become a political party, and I found myself reflecting on their strategy for broadening their base of support. The organization appeared to function as a hybrid of movement and party: on the one hand, it organizes discussion platforms and builds ties with trade unions. But expanding a party usually requires a broader communications strategy, clear advocacy goals on priority issues, and — crucially — an electoral presence. The organized Ukrainian left is extremely small. Since the closure of Political Critique (Politychna Krytyka), the only left-wing journal is Spilne. Cedos does substantive work in the fields of social and spatial development. But the intellectual and political vacuum that remains is enormous.

Much of the research produced by left thinkers focuses on critiquing neoliberalism — pointing to predatory elites, rising inequality, and the erosion of public goods — often without moving toward practical solutions. Meanwhile, profound social shifts caused by war, economic pressure, centralization of power, pervasive corruption, and the high stakes of postwar reconstruction have created an unmistakable public demand for new ideas about justice, well-being, and collective purpose. The resulting vacuum exists alongside a clear — though not always explicitly articulated — demand for socially oriented alternatives.

— What motivated you to move to Ukraine after the Soviet Union collapsed? Did you want to help build a new Ukraine?

— I arrived in Ukraine in January 1991. I was convinced that Ukraine would become independent and arranged my academic leave so that I could witness that historic moment. I planned to work on a book and to contribute to policy development for Rukh, assisting some Ukrainian economists in drafting an economic program. But within weeks of my arrival, Bohdan Hawrylyshyn — a key figure in bringing George Soros to Ukraine — put me in touch with Soros himself. From that point on, everything changed.

With Soros’s support, an Advisory Council to the Presidium of the Verkhovna Rada was created to bring international experience into legislative and economic reform. The Council included Ukrainian and prominent foreign figures, signaling support for Ukraine’s independence at a time when Western governments were still backing Mikhail Gorbachev. I was tasked with organizing the work of the Council’s secretariat and worked closely with the Deputy Chair of the Presidium Volodymyr Hrynov. This gave me an inside view of key events and of the condition of public administration.

Ukraine faced an extraordinarily complex reform agenda with a government that lacked both capacity and a clear vision of what needed to be done — or how to implement reforms. In Soviet times, all key political and administrative functions were concentrated in Moscow, while residual powers were exercised by the Communist Party of Ukraine, which simply transmitted directives to the government. The institutional structure of the state was astonishingly incomplete. The size of the central executive apparatus was strikingly small: about 12,000 civil servants at the central level in a country of 50 million people — compared to 60,000 in Greece, with a population of only 10 million. The upper echelons of ministries were dominated by people with technical training — 75 percent; only 8 percent had an economics background (of the Soviet type), and just 3 percent had legal training. As an institution, the civil service did not exist, nor did the very concept of “public administration.” It took quite some time before even the term “public policy” entered the lexicon.

I devoted fifteen years to developing the public administration system and building the policy function within government. In mid-1991, after I wrote an analytical memo on priority steps in state-building, Leonid Kravchuk supported my proposal to establish an Institute of Public Administration and Local Government under the Cabinet of Ministers. The institution opened in spring 1992, and I became its first director. It was modeled on France’s École nationale d’administration and became a platform for a range of further initiatives. In 1993, the Law on Civil Service was adopted, and Ukraine became the first of the former Soviet republics to take this step. In 1995, after Leonid Kuchma became president, the Institute was reorganized into the Academy of Public Administration under the President of Ukraine. I served as vice-rector and director of the newly created Center for the Study of Administrative Reform. We began developing public policy as a governing paradigm, which culminated in the adoption of new Cabinet of Ministers procedures requiring that all documents submitted to the government be prepared in the format of policy analysis. At the end of 1999, after Viktor Yushchenko became prime minister, we presented him with a plan for more comprehensive administrative reform.

In 1992, together with Solomiia Pavlychko, we founded Osnovy Publishers, which played a key role in developing an understanding of economics, public policy, and public administration in Ukraine by publishing dozens of important books. At the time, Ukraine was flooded with consultants offering “off-the-shelf solutions” and PowerPoint presentations, often without deeper engagement with context. I was able to persuade donors to support translations of foundational works so that Ukrainians could gain detailed, systematic knowledge across fields and also develop Ukrainian terminology in these areas. In 2003, we published Oleksandr Kiliievych’s English–Ukrainian Glossary of Terms and Concepts in Public Policy Analysis and Economics. He noted that thanks to Osnovy’s work, more than 1,500 new terms entered the Ukrainian language. In total, the publishing house released over 300 titles.

In 2021, the National Academy of Public Administration under the President of Ukraine — together with its regional branches — was shut down. As a result, Ukraine is now the only country in Europe without a national institution specifically devoted to training civil servants. In most European countries, schools of this kind are a well-established part of the continental model: they provide systematic preparation for the civil service. Universities do teach public administration as an academic discipline and carry out research, but they serve a different purpose than national schools of government. After the 2021 reform, the Academy’s key functions were moved to universities, where lecturers often do not have enough hands-on experience of working inside government. The irony is that this happened just as Ukraine is facing unprecedented challenges — especially with European integration — so the state has lost its main tool for preparing professionals to take on tasks of that complexity.

Something similar is happening in public policymaking. In a democracy, you’re supposed to have transparent, mandatory consultations with stakeholders—that’s a cornerstone of good governance and one of the main ways civil society participates. Instead, decision-making is becoming more and more opaque. It feels like we’re watching the same film again: we’re sliding back toward old practices — less openness, less inclusion — rather than moving forward.

— This year Osnovy Publishers is reissuing your book Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Ukraine. How would you describe your approach to Ukrainian history in this work, and what significance do you think it has for today’s Ukrainian readership?

— I raised questions that required an interdisciplinary approach. In a sense, the book is a work of social and economic history, as well as a historical political economy of Ukraine — and it clearly belongs within the field of postcolonial studies. It begins with a portrait of Ukraine on the eve of the 1917 revolution and ends in 1972, the year Petro Shelest was removed from office for a “nationalist deviation.” It offers a material explanation of how national identity and the drive for independence were formed. 

The study uses a socio-structuralist approach, examining how shifts in large-scale social structures shape national identity and collective behavior. It provides a detailed analysis of changes in demography, urbanization, class formation, the economy (including its geographical dimension), and key institutions such as education and the press. Particular attention is paid to the formation of an elite — the Party — and to the impact of Moscow’s policies on the country’s development. It also considers the nature of intellectual agency and, in the revolutionary period, the decisive role of mass movements — especially the peasant movement — in the birth of the nation.

As for the topic’s relevance, I should note that this April I taught a course titled “Nation-Building and State-Building in Twentieth-Century Ukraine: Historical, Political, and Economic Perspectives” at the Department of Political Science of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. The students found it engaging, because they had never previously taken courses in social or economic history — neither at school nor at university — and they had only limited knowledge of the subject. They were better oriented in the history of political thought than in the history of society. Their understanding of the Soviet period was fairly superficial. Unlike their predecessors, the mental map of today’s generation is shaped above all by watershed events: the Maidan and the war. At the same time, they are interested in colonial studies and decolonization — fashionable fields that, at their core, presuppose historical knowledge. This is precisely where the book becomes relevant.

Let’s start with Russian imperialism. From the late fifteenth century, Russia functioned as a patrimonial state — a system in which the ruler enjoyed unlimited personal power, treated the country as private property, and erased the boundary between public and private interest. This patrimonial control constrained the formation of independent economic classes, while the state monopolized the economy to extract resources. Those resources were directed mainly toward financing a vast military and police apparatus designed for social control and imperial expansion.

Meanwhile, agricultural productivity did not improve between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Because of this long stagnation, Russia proved incapable of intensive economic development. As a result, it staked its growth on extensive territorial conquest and large-scale colonization.

Ukraine, by contrast, after the revolution of 1648 and the creation of the Cossack Hetmanate, developed along a different path. The Hetmanate was a corporate social formation — similar to European states of the seventeenth century, but more egalitarian. Serfdom was abolished, and a vibrant class of merchants and artisans organized in guilds flourished alongside growing urban autonomy and cultural development. This progress was sustained through free trade with Europe. To illustrate the scale: in 1710 alone, Ukrainian goods worth over one million rubles passed through Vitebsk. By comparison, the entire state revenue of the Russian Empire in 1708 amounted to only 3.4 million rubles.

Russia’s destruction of the Hetmanate was not merely a political annexation. It was the systematic dismantling of an alternative social order. The empire eliminated autonomous Ukrainian institutions, destroyed economic classes, and introduced serfdom in its harshest form — panshchyna (corvée labor) — to secure a labor force for estates granted to Russian nobles. This was accompanied by a large-scale resettlement policy. The consequences were profound — and unique in the European context. Ukraine’s level of urbanization in the eighteenth century was higher than it would be at the end of the nineteenth; Ukrainians, who had previously constituted a majority in cities, became a minority; and literacy rates declined. In this way, Russian colonialism in Ukraine was more than simple foreign rule. It was a collision between two fundamentally different social systems. The victory of Russian patrimonialism led to economic decline, de-urbanization, and the systematic marginalization of the titular nation.

The forcible incorporation of Ukraine into the Soviet Union was a catastrophe. The cumulative losses — including the Bolshevik seizure of power (1917–1919), the first man-made famine of 1921–1922, forced collectivization, the Holodomor, the political purges of the 1930s, and 6.8 million deaths during the Second World War — were staggering. According to estimates by the Russian dissident demographer Sergey Maksimov, these events took the lives of more than half of Ukraine’s male population and a quarter of its female population. Losses on that demographic scale are without precedent in European history. That is why it is all the more striking that Ukrainian society still retained the strength for national self-assertion in the postwar period.

The concept of internal colonialism is very useful for explaining what happened in postwar Ukraine. The country was part of a single state in which its economy played an instrumental role, with priority given to sectors that benefited Russia. Ukraine’s economy was tightly controlled from Moscow, and this politico-economic dominance was accompanied by a large-scale influx of Russians into Ukraine, who occupied leading, high-status positions. At the same time, Russification intensified to conceal and legitimize this demographic stratification. As a result, Ukrainians were concentrated on the lower rungs of the social hierarchy, producing a kind of “cultural division of labor,” where social stratification was based on visible cultural differences. As one would expect, Ukrainians — as a discriminated group — reactively began to affirm their culture and national identity as a means of gaining greater control over their own society.

Applying this conceptual framework requires a substantial body of empirical evidence to substantiate its constituent claims. Once you assemble the data, the picture becomes quite clear. Between 1959 and 1970, half of all capital generated in Ukraine was exported beyond its borders. Because Moscow controlled 80% of enterprises, it determined how revenues were allocated — and that meant, for example, that the mining industry in the Donbas remained underinvested, leading to worsening workplace safety conditions — one of the main drivers of workers’ protests. Moscow controlled most higher education institutions as well, setting admissions policy, curricula, and the language of instruction. The situation was especially glaring when it came to the social mobility of the Ukrainian working class. Ukrainian workers were among the most educated in the USSR. In particular, Ukrainian youth had exceptionally high educational attainment: in 1970, 63% had completed full secondary education — the highest rate in the USSR after the Baltic republics. Yet the relative position of Ukrainians with higher education fell to 14th place out of 15 union republics — only slightly above Tajiks. Higher education was a pathway to professional mobility.

And centralization was humiliating for Ukraine’s political elite. Just imagine what Petro Shelest, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, must have felt when he had to ask permission from a Moscow bureaucrat to build a pedestrian overpass in Kyiv.

Overall, Ukrainian academic scholarship has advanced significantly over the past few decades. Institutions such as the Institute of Sociology, the Institute of Demography, and others have produced a great deal of valuable research on different aspects of society. The work of younger-generation scholars is especially impressive — people like Yuliia Yurchenko, who apply a political economy approach in their analyses. Given where I live, I can’t follow developments in Ukraine’s research community closely. Still, there seems to be a shortage of integrative studies that systematically bring together analyses of social and economic change in Ukraine. Disciplinary fragmentation continues to dominate, making it harder to form a coherent picture of post-Soviet transformations. And of course, a major obstacle remains the lack of up-to-date census data — the last census took place back in 2001!

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