{"id":17083,"date":"2022-04-16T19:51:01","date_gmt":"2022-04-16T17:51:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/?p=17083"},"modified":"2022-04-18T05:24:22","modified_gmt":"2022-04-18T03:24:22","slug":"the-euromaidan-was-not-a-rupture-in-the-sense-of-a-social-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/?p=17083","title":{"rendered":"The Euromaidan was not a rupture<\/span> in the sense of a social revolution."},"content":{"rendered":"

Volodymyr Ishchenko, New Left Review<\/span><\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Euromaidan was not a rupture in the sense of a social revolution. As my colleague Oleg Zhuravlev and I have written, it shared features with other post-Soviet<\/span> uprisings and also with those of the Arab Spring in 2011.1<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0These were not upheavals that led to fundamental social changes in the class structure\u2014nor even in the political structure of the state. Instead they were mobilizations that helped to replace the elites, but where the new elites were actually factions of the same class. The Maidan revolutions in Ukraine\u2014the 2014 Euromaidan was the last of the three\u2014were similar. These are, in a sense, deficient revolutions: they create a revolutionary legitimacy that can then be hijacked by agents who are not actually representative of the interests of the revolutionary participants. The Euromaidan was captured by several agents, all of whom participated in the uprising and contributed to its success, but who were very far from representing the whole range of forces involved or the motivations that drove ordinary Ukrainians to support Euromaidan. In this sense, while responding to the post-Soviet crisis of political representation, the Euromaidan also reproduced and intensified it.<\/p>\n

\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9<\/p>\n

Those who lost power were, first, the sections of the Ukrainian elite\u2014let\u2019s call them political capitalists, in the Weberian sense: exploiting the political opportunities their offices provided for profit-seeking\u2014organized in the Party of Regions, which backed Viktor Yanukovych. After the Euromaidan, the party collapsed. These oligarchs, as they are usually called, were politically reorganized; but they retained control over some of the crucial sectors of the Ukrainian economy, so the\u00a0Forbes<\/em>\u00a0list of the richest people in Ukraine was amazingly stable. Before and after the Euromaidan revolution, the only person on the Top Ten list who made a career change was Poroshenko\u2014a sign of how little change there was in the way the economy was working.<\/p>\n

The other significant actor that lost out was the Communist Party of Ukraine\u2014and the left in general.<\/p>\n

\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9<\/p>\n

On the formal level, in 2014, the president was weakened and parliament was supposedly stronger. The figure of the prime minister, who was chosen by the parliamentary deputies, became more important. But what did not change was the \u2018neopatrimonial\u2019 regime, as it is often called in the literature of post-Soviet studies: the informal patron-client relations that dominate politics. It is quite normal to speak of clans in this regard\u2014to say someone is in the \u2018clan of Poroshenko\u2019, or \u2018clan of Yanukovych\u2019. These informally structured groups, whose relations are hidden from the public, have more influence on how real politics works in our country than the formal clauses of the constitution. So despite the fact that the position of the presidency was formally weakened, Poroshenko was still the most influential politician in the country, able to push more or less what he wanted through parliament.<\/p>\n

\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9<\/p>\n

The competing oligarchs exploited nationalism in order to cover the absence of \u2018revolutionary\u2019 transformations after the Euromaidan, while those in nationalist-neoliberal civil society were pushing for their unpopular agendas thanks to increased leverage against the weakened state.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Volodymyr Ishchenko, New Left Review: The Euromaidan was not a rupture in the sense of a social revolution. As my colleague Oleg Zhuravlev and I have written, it shared features with other post-Soviet uprisings and also with those of the … Weiterlesen →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17083\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}