The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class 9781805392996, 9781805392989, 9781805393009

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The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class

DISLOCATIONS

General Editor: Don Kalb, University of Bergen & Utrecht University The Dislocations Series inquires about the relational, spatial, and temporal dimensions of power under globalized capitalism. Through stimulating critical perspectives and cross-disciplinary frameworks, the series provides a forum for politically engaged, ethnographically informed, and theoretically incisive responses. Recent titles: Volume 36 The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class: Everyday Politics and Moral Economy in a Post-Soviet City Denys Gorbach

Volume 31 Bulldozer Capitalism: Accumulation, Ruination, and Dispossession in Northeastern Turkey Erdem Evren

Volume 35 Insidious Capital: Frontlines of Value at the End of a Global Cycle Edited by Don Kalb

Volume 30 Facing the Crisis: Ethnographies of Work in Italian Industrial Capitalism Edited by Fulvia D’Aloisio and Simone Ghezzi

Volume 34 From Village Commons to Public Goods: Graduated Provision in Urbanizing China Anne-­Christine Trémon Volume 33 Corporate Social Responsibility and the Paradoxes of State Capitalism: Ethnographies of Norwegian Energy and Extraction Businesses Abroad Edited by Ståle Knudsen Volume 32 Glimpses of Hope: The Rise of Industrial Labor at the Urban Margins of Nepal Michael Hoffmann

Volume 29 Big Capital in an Unequal World: The Micropolitics of Wealth in Pakistan Rosita Armytage Volume 28 Fifty Years of Peasant Wars in Latin America Edited by Leigh Binford, Lesley Gill and Steve Striffler Volume 27 Brazilian Steel-Town: Machines, Land, Money and Commoning in the Making of the Working-Class Massimiliano Mollona

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/dislocations

The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class Everyday Politics and Moral Economy in a Post-Soviet City

_ Denys Gorbach

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2024 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2024 Denys Gorbach All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gorbach, Denys, author. Title: The making and unmaking of the Ukrainian working class : everyday politics and moral economy in a post-Soviet city / Denys Gorbach. Description: First edition. | New York ; Oxford : Berghahn Books, 2024. | Series: Dislocations ; volume 36 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023051026 (print) | LCCN 2023051027 (ebook) | ISBN 9781805392989 (hardback) | ISBN 9781805392996 (epub) | ISBN 9781805393009 (web pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Political participation--Ukraine--21st century. | Political culture--Ukraine--21st century. | Populism--Ukraine--21st century. | Working class--Political activity--Ukraine--Kryvyi Rih--History. | Economics--Moral and ethical aspects--Ukraine--Kryvyi Rih--History. | Municipal government--Ukraine--Kryvyi Rih--History. Classification: LCC JN6639.A15 G67 2024 (print) | LCC JN6639.A15 (ebook) | DDC 323/.04209477--dc23/eng/20240116 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023051026 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023051027 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-­1-80539-­298-­9 hardback ISBN 978-­1-80539-­299-­6 epub ISBN 978-­1-80539-­300-­9 web pdf https://doi.org/ 10.3167/9781805392989

Contents List of Illustrations

vii 1

Introduction

Part I. Theoretical and Empirical Context

17

Chapter 1.

Populism, Moral Economy, Informality: Imbricating the Political

19

Chapter 2.

Ukrainian Political Economy: Property Regimes and Identity Cleavages

36

Part II. The City

67

Chapter 3.

From a Military Outpost to an Oligarchic Stronghold

69

Chapter 4.

Archaeology of Power: Regimes of Domination Reflected in the Urban Infrastructure

88



Part III. The Factory

117

Chapter 5.

Informality and Hierarchies at the Post-­ Soviet Workplace

119

Chapter 6.

Paternalism in Decay: Post-­Post-­Soviet Inertia

127

Chapter 7.

Politicized Embeddedness, Depoliticized Disembeddedness: New Factory Regimes

151

Chapter 8.

Part IV. Everyday Politics Distinction and Class: Strategies of Self-­ Valorization

181 183

vi   |   Contents

Chapter 9.

Mapping Lay Virtues on the National Political Landscape

214

Chapter 10.

Political Attitudes and Attitude to Politics: Apathy and Authoritarian Anti-­corruption

243 281

Conclusion Epilogue. References Index

Ukraine after 2022

299 306 329

Illustrations  2.1. Wage and Profit Share of GDP. Source: Derzhstat  2.2. Investments in fixed capital, 1994=100%. Source: Derzhstat.  2.3. Structure of Ukrainian exports, %. Source: Derzhstat.  3.1. A French map of the Russian-­Ottoman borderlands in 1769. The future location of Kryvyi Rih, marked with a spot, is situated in the steppes, controlled by nomads and Cossacks, far from all ‘civilized’ settlements. Source: Vkraina.com.ua.  3.2. Striking miners holding the banner: ‘The Lenin mine will stand till the end’. Source: Shakhtar Kryvbasu, 29 February 1992.  4.1. The geographical contours of Kryvyi Rih. Source: Google Maps.  4.2. A trolleybus purchased in 1992 and repaired in 2014. The inscription on board says it was refurbished thanks to the money donated by AMKR. Photo taken by the author in March 2019.  4.3. A makeshift cover over a manhole. Such covers, made from various materials at hand, are the initiative of local residents worried about public safety. Stories about people and even horses falling into unprotected manholes were abundant. Photo taken by the author in February 2019.  4.4. Stairs leading to the most centrally located metrotram station in Yesenina Street, next to the city council and chic restaurants. Photo taken by the author in March 2019.  4.5. The beach, renovated in 2007 and neglected ever since. The plaque says: ‘The beach complex was built with the help of the member of parliament Oleksandr Vilkul in May 2007’. Photo taken by the author in May 2019.  4.6. A freshly painted children’s playground situated in an otherwise decrepit park. The inscription at

52 54 61

70 74 89

94

100

101

102

viii   |   Illustrations

 6.1.  6.2.  7.1.  7.2.  8.1.

 8.2.

 8.3.  9.1.

10.1.

the entrance says: ‘May the children’s laughter ring loud! – Konstantin Pavlov’. Pavlov was one of the key members of Vilkul’s team; he succeeded him as mayor in 2020. Photo taken by the author in June 2019. Sport trophies of KZRK workers on display in the corridor at the local PMGU head office. Photo taken by the author in March 2019. AMKR’s social expenses in 2017, UAH millions from a total value of 340.6. Source: the website of AMKR. The improvised canteen at Screenwind. Photo taken by the author in March 2019. View of the factory. Window sashes are stacked ready to be taken by my team and equipped with metal fittings. Photo taken by the author in April 2019. Monument to Danko, the main character of a short story by Maxim Gorky, at one of the squares of Kryvyi Rih. In order to lead his tribe out of the wilderness, Danko ripped out his own heart, which glowed and showed the way to the people. Photo taken by the author in April 2019. An example of resourcefulness as an individual strategy of social reproduction: a public lawn that has been appropriated by the owners of a nearby house, who use it to grow food. Photo taken by the author in July 2018. Makeshift food cellars in a residential area in Kryvyi Rih. Photo taken by the author in June 2019. Preparations for the military parade. A platoon of Cossack reconstructors, standing beside the cadets of local military colleges, are a new element of this traditional Soviet ceremony. Their presence attests to a partial integration of the ethnonationalist agenda into the older ritual. Photo taken by the author in February 2019. Space designated for political advertisement and information concerning the presidential elections is fully occupied by private ads offering jobs, loans, home refurbishment services, money for hair and transportation services. Photo taken by the author in April 2019.

103 132 143 165 168

186

200 202

230

250

Introduction

_ In May 2017, the main industries of Kryvyi Rih, a city in South-­ Eastern Ukraine, came to a halt. The four mines of local iron ore extraction company KZRK (Kryvyi Rih Iron Ore Integrated Plant), the largest in Ukraine, were blocked by a wildcat strike. The workers demanded a revaluation of an average miner’s wage to its 2012 level of $1,000. It had not been cut since then, but devaluations of the national currency had eaten into the miners’ real income. A week after the strike had begun at KZRK, it spread to Sukha Balka, the other local mining company, and to the ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih (AMKR) – the giant metallurgical factory owned by the multinational corporation of the same name. The unprecedented wave of spontaneous militancy empowered workers. Discussing it with me in 2019, they perceived the 2017 strikes as a missed window of political opportunity. According to them, it could have been used not only to get higher wages but to remake the social world on the city scale in a wider sense, shifting the balance of power in favour of the working people. This utopian vision was not completely unrealistic from a historical point of view: twenty-­five years before, in 1992, a miners’ strike reshuffled the political landscape in Kryvyi Rih and reminded the local elite that it was dependent on political support from the working class. But in 2017, the social explosion did not become a generalized social movement with city-­w ide purchase. Disaggregated into isolated workplace struggles, it was dealt with by the respective industrial managers. In the mines, week-­long negotiations with the recalcitrant management won the strikers a twenty per cent r­ aise – ­much less than they expected but enough to bring them back to

2   |   The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class

work. The negotiation process was especially painful at Sukha Balka, which was owned by a Russian corporation. The nationality of managers and security officers became a factor of embitterment for the miners. A few weeks after the end of the strike, the Russians sold Sukha Balka to a Ukrainian oligarch and withdrew from the scene. At AMKR, workers carried out a radical confrontation by storming the administration building of the factory. In order to calm spirits, management was quick to make generous concessions and offered up to a 70 per cent raise for some professions. Workers accepted. In another large industrial enterprise, M ­ etinvest – w ­ hich employs around 20,000 people at its iron ore quarries in Kryvyi R ­ ih – ­there was quiet, and no work stoppages at all. These different patterns of conflict among the workforce of enterprises with a roughly similar profile and located in the same city are puzzling in themselves. Factors standing behind such a divergence can be plausibly found in the divergent factory regimes, which is one of the foci of this book. However, the puzzle I wish to address is wider than the differences in industrial workplace power configurations. It concerns the contradictory political attitudes and behaviours demonstrated by the workers of all the mentioned enterprises. Regardless of the level of militancy, they all shared a deep suspicion of organized political structures that could have otherwise sustained their struggle. Avid consumers of political news, Ukrainian workers often have strong opinions in this domain while at the same time declaring a totally apolitical stance, where ‘politics’ as such is condemnable. They long for political action that would challenge the domination of a self-­serving elite and establish the working people in their rightful place in the symbolic hierarchy, but they remain quite timid and docile in their everyday practices. Criticizing trade unions, parties and all other institutions as corrupt and serving the interests of the elite, they put all their hopes on rare spontaneous outbursts and often criticize modest attempts at self-­organizing on the smallest scale as amateurish and useless. They support the ‘lesser evil’ of an incumbent political leader or a vague anti-­system message of a nationwide movement. Behind the impressive militancy and growing class consciousness hide uneasy relations between the workers and politics. The widespread aversion to institutional politics was manifest in two mass mobilizations that shook Ukraine early in the twenty-­ first century: the 2004 Orange Revolution, dubbed a ‘revolt of the millionaires against the billionaires’ (Matuszak 2012), and the 2013–2014 Euromaidan (or simply Maidan), known in the official

Introduction   |   3

discourse as ‘the Revolution of Dignity’. Both events had a ‘post-­ materialist’ (Inglehart 1977) agenda of anti-­corruption and were a fight for personal dignity; they are now officially celebrated as manifestations of the middle class and/or of a classless Ukrainian nation (Oliinyk and Kuzio 2021; Wynnyckyj 2019). Against this idealized vision, the dominant narrative presents the 2014 counter-­ mobilization (Antimaidan) as consisting of marginalized sub-­ proletarian masses with little professional or class identification whatsoever. However, waged workers dominated numerically in all these mobilizations, as they do in Ukrainian society as a whole (Simonchuk 2018; Varga 2015; Zelinska 2017). The ‘millionaires’ revolts’ and the ‘billionaires’ reaction’ were all informed, in a different manner, by lay ideas of political authenticity, fair redistribution, social hierarchies and obligations, hiding subtexts of class behind the headlines of the nation (Kalb and Halmai 2011), or of a European good life (Bulakh 2020). Another massive political overhaul, which arguably reflected the contradictory political attitudes of the Ukrainian working class, happened in 2019, when the presidential elections were won by the comic Volodymyr Zelenskyi (incidentally Zelenskyi was born in Kryvyi Rih), who offered anti-­system slogans and promised to drain the swamp. In a matter of months, the showman and his close associates won an unprecedented single-­party majority in parliament. An overwhelming majority of Kryvyi Rih workers voted for ­Zelenskyi – ­yet one year later most of them supported the incumbent elite at the mayoral elections, preferring it to the change promised by the candidate allied to the anti-­system president. The universe of Ukrainian nation-­level politics, which consists of cabinet reshuffles and negotiations with the large domestic capitalists (oligarchs), the IMF and foreign leaders, may seem very distant from the universe of provincial workers. And yet I argue that there is a two-­way connection. By attempting to understand the worldview of Kryvyi Rih workers, one can better understand the way political domination works through shaping subjectivities, linking different temporalities and producing moral economies on the local scale. These moral economies regulate the everyday politics of Ukrainian ­workers – t­heir claims, expectations and obligations, which, in turn, contribute to forming the party-­political agenda on the more noticeable institutional level. I am specifically interested in the way these processes play out on the city ­level – ­in my case, Kryvyi Rih, a working-­class post-­Soviet provincial c­ ity – ­constituting it as a political space.

4   |   The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class

The question that guides this book, then, can be formulated as: How does the Ukrainian working class relate to politics? In what way does class consciousness interact with everyday politics, and how does this interaction proceed on a city level? The term ‘relation’ is understood here in two senses. The first is the objective relationship between the workers and the domain of the ­political – ­that is, the way workers are inscribed into this domain or otherwise structurally interact with it. Here, I am interested in social structures and mechanisms that mediate such ­relations – ­for instance, industrial workplaces but also key infrastructure such as transport or housing. The second meaning alludes to the subjective relation, or attitude, of workers to the political field as such, as well as their subjective positioning within it. Here, I pay particular attention to the everyday politics of workers and the way that political consciousness is exercised through mundane gestures, expressions and ­dispositions – ­which are often not perceived by the workers themselves as political but which can be taken to express an explicit positioning of self in a system of given political ­coordinates – ­as well as key efforts to grasp and explain the social world from specific points of view. I also distinguish between different analytical scales, of which the city is the most prominent one. The city scale has been traditionally important for studying Soviet and post-­Soviet power configurations (Collier 2011; Kotkin 1997; Morris 2018; Rogers 2006; Stoner-­Weiss 2002). Another important level at which post-­Soviet power relations are set in motion is the workplace (Ashwin 1999; Clarke et al. 1993; Crowley 2021; Varga 2014), and I will examine five different factory sites located in the same city. Finally, the most intimate level is that of individual dispositions, opinions and value hierarchies, as well as the trajectories and survival strategies of workers (Baysha 2014; Clément 2003; Dufy 2008; Humphrey 2002; Ries 2009; Shevchenko 2009). These have been charted by interviewing informants living in Kryvyi Rih. These three scales interact with each other, making it an analytical necessity to move between them. These scales also interact with the national scale, traditionally privileged by social scientists; with the regional scale of the postsocialist space, marked by shared discursive and material legacies; and with the global scale, marked by flows of capital and ideas transcending national borders. On the highest level of generalization, my book speaks to the problematics of global variegated capitalism (Peck and Theodore 2007), conceived as a unit of analysis. Grounded in a specific location serving as a site of production of economic value and political subjectivities, my research ultimately aims to contribute to

Introduction   |   5

the understanding of the nature of the global capitalist system, which constitutes itself through articulations between different scales, domains (the economic, the political, the cultural) and temporalities (Wolf 1982) in the process of uneven and combined development (Anievas and Nişancıoğlu 2015; Antunes de Oliveira 2020; Kasmir and Gill 2018; Rosenberg 2020). Accordingly, the sub-­questions that help structure this book are the following: 1) What mechanisms and legacies mediate the workers’ relationships with the political domain at the city level? How does the city scale interact with other scales, and how does the political at this scale interact with other domains (moral economy, culture, national politics)? How do these interactions help reproduce the domination of a city elite, many times, at the cost of genuine worker representation? 2) What role does the factory level play in the making and unmaking of the Ukrainian working class? What mechanisms of politicization and depoliticization are at work at the level of enterprise? How do these legitimize power relationships between workers, trade unionists, owners and managers? 3) What does the study of personal trajectories and strategies of distinction and survival among a wide set of workers tell us about their relation to politics? How do workers activate, exploit and transform the available toolkit of identities? These identities include ethnolinguistic ones, class identities with historicities from both post-­Soviet and Ukrainian times, and also moral hierarchies. What political programme arises from this interaction, and how does it resonate with the institutional political scene?

Working-Class Politics as a Research Subject The set of political and anti-­political views and attitudes that are the subject of this book can be called populist. The concept of populism can indeed be useful in analysing contradictions of ‘anti-­system’ political views and movements (Hopkin 2020); however, the connotations of abnormality and exceptionality that this term often carries make it awkward to employ it without reservations. In Ukraine, politics has always been ‘populist’ – in the sense of an overwhelming discursive focus on the ambiguously defined ­virtuous

6   |   The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class

people, constructed in opposition to a morally compromised elite. This basic populist duality, which might seem scandalous or exotic to Western scholars, has been a structuring feature of the local public sphere since the Perestroika era of the late 1980s (Ries 1997). Similarly, calls for establishing a direct connection between the leaders and the masses, bypassing institutions, and reinstating a natural popular will, would hardly raise the eyebrows of post-­Soviet observers (Kasyanov 2007; Wilson 2005; Yekelchyk 2007). The political ‘normality’ of a classical left–right divide and a functioning institutional infrastructure of representative democracy remains a teleological aim in native modernist discourses in Ukraine rather than a lived reality. With this caveat, we can use the term populism as a normal mode of political functioning rather than an aberration. Academic studies of labour politics are geographically unequal. The most prominent body of research is devoted to the working-­class population of WENA1 countries. There, emphasis is often placed on a populist or even authoritarian political culture of the workers, whose sympathies for the producerist and welfare-­chauvinist agenda of right-­wing nativist political movements present a challenge to the liberal democratic order (Betz 1994; Derks 2006; Norris and Inglehart 2018; Rathgeb 2021). When the general tonality is less normative and accusatory, the focus is on the post-­democratic (Crouch 2004) dealignment of the Western workers from electoral politics: many works explore the depoliticization of the former working class in the context of deindustrialization and the end of social democracy (Braconnier and Mayer 2015; Retière 1994; Sayer 2005; Skeggs 2003). The main theme is the historical decline of the working class and its efforts to make sense of and find a new place in a new moral economy of neoliberalism. Research centred on the working-­class condition in the Global South is more pragmatic. The advent of neoliberalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America has put an end to protected flagship industries of developmental states, but overall it rather led to forced urbanization and uneven industrialization, producing new, flexibilized and precarious working classes in those parts of the world. Social scientists studying labour in these countries analyse a rich variety of factory regimes and modes of formal and informal embeddedness that structure political divisions and recompositions within the working class (Breman 2004; Greco 2019; Hann and Parry 2018; Kasmir and Carbonella 2014; Parry 2020; Raj 2013; Smith and Pun 2006; Vadot 2021). The politicization of workers in the capitalist periphery is more often seen through the lens of global connections and of contentious

Introduction   |   7

class politics, but also through the prism of social control mechanisms going beyond the rational-­legal classics. In Eastern Europe, traditional themes of labour studies have been roughly following those of WENA but pay greater attention to global connections and lament the steeper downfall of the working class compared to countries of the capitalist core. The postsocialist deindustrialization and marginalization of the working class went deeper and was more compressed in time than in the West. The liberal democratic institutions were freshly installed and poorly embedded into the local moral fabric. The legitimacy of the postsocialist liberal order was more brittle than in post-­Keynesian WENA countries; it crashed quicker, producing the populist wave of ‘democratic backsliding’ (Cianetti and Hanley 2020; Knott 2018; Scheiring 2021) in Eastern Europe well before populism became the main preoccupation in the West. Connecting the surface of the ‘illiberal’ (Enyedi 2016; Hann 2020; Szelényi and Csillag 2015) politics in these countries to the fundamentals of the changing social status and worldviews of the working class, and viewing these connections in the light of the international political economy, has long been the strength of labour studies in Eastern Europe (Ashwin 1999; Burawoy, Krotov and Lytkina 2000; Clarke et al. 1993; Crowley 1997; Hann 2002; Kalb 2009; Kideckel 2004; Ost 2005; Verdery 1996). These authors have focused on the quick and deep destitution of the working class in societies where this class used to occupy the pinnacle of symbolic hierarchy, being celebrated in native moral economies. Where should we situate Ukraine on this map? It certainly belongs to the postsocialist region with its dramatic social crisis of capitalist transformations. However, on the lower analytical level my case allows me to weave together different strands from geographically distinct schools of labour studies. Similar to WENA workers, and contrary to the cases of Poland and Hungary, which are overrepresented in the literature on Central and Eastern Europe, the dominating mood for Ukrainian workers is disenchantment in all institutional politics rather than trust in the national elite or in any other really existing political force. Contrary to WENA, and similar to examples from the Global South, the Ukrainian working class is not entirely undone as a socio-­economic category: for all the losses taken by some industries, other industries have survived and are currently profitable parts of global value chains, employing tens of thousands of the local population in cities like Kryvyi Rih. In Kryvyi Rih, just like in other peripheral cases known from the literature (Greco 2019; Hann and Parry 2018; Parry 2020; Sanchez 2016), symbolic

8   |   The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class

­ ierarchies and moral economies enact temporalities and historical h layers from different periods of global capitalism, mixed together in a peculiar combination that, while locally expressed, sustains global commodity flows. Contrary to many cases from the Global South, my Ukrainian interlocutors cannot fall back on the social safety net of rural extended families, being more dependent on the state and/or the employer for their livelihoods in the postsocialist setting. The very question of the existence of the working class as such in contemporary Ukraine is polemical. Certainly present as a class in the economic sense of a social category defined by its place in the relations of accumulation and exploitation, the working class is not so evident in the sociological ­sense – ­be it as a Thompsonian class, as a set of dynamic social relationships (Thompson [1963] 1980), a Bourdieusian class, as a system of social reproduction of habitus (Bourdieu 1979), or a Marxian class-­for-­itself (Marx and Engels [1847] 1963). Contrary to Thompson’s narration of the making of the English working class, a large part of the literature on the postsocialist working class postulates its unmaking (Kideckel 2002). Many scholars would say that the notion of class and class consciousness is inseparable from class ­struggle – ­in this sense one can hardly talk about the working class in today’s Ukraine. This work traces the processes of class formation and decomposition without giving a definite ­answer – ­the ambiguity remains in the book title. In any case, the anti-­teleological spirit of the present work refuses deductivist assumptions about a working class with a pre-­ordained kind of class consciousness that automatically implies a pre-­formulated political agenda once such consciousness develops. Discarding the uniform and linear vision, I aim to mark the relations between the workers and the domain of the political that unmake or reconfigure them as a social class. Taking an ethnographic approach from below, I focus on the perspective of workers as my departure point. However, throughout the book I situate their emic perspective in wider structural contexts. In the terms suggested by Michael Burawoy, I aim to encompass both the ‘participant truth’– that is, the common sense of the subalterns populating my field ­site – ­and the ‘sociological truth’ – that is, examination of wider forces that determine and explain the participant truth (Burawoy 2017: 282).

Introduction   |   9

Methods and Data Methodologically, this research follows the extended case strategy (Burawoy 2009). Contrary to adepts of the grounded theory approach of the Chicago school, researchers belonging to the tradition of the extended case method do not nurture ambitions of building a new theory from the field data (Tavory and Timmermans 2009). Instead, they typically start with a ‘favourite theory’ that already exists but fails to explain a certain observed phenomenon (Eliasoph and Lichterman 1999). The theoretical ambition of such research is then to improve the existing theory, enriching it with new insights that help take account of previously ignored facts and interpret them within a given conceptual approach. The role of a deficient ‘favourite theory’ here is played by the linear model of social change in the postsocialist countries, which Marxism shares with the modernization theory. According to this vision, capitalist transformations would destroy barriers that prevented class formation and open class conflict in the Soviet Union. With mechanisms reproducing social atomization and political passivity no longer in place, the reorganization of the economy on the basis of the law of value would push industrial workers to form a proper class-­for-­itself and produce a strong social democratic movement on the national scale (Clarke 2007; Ticktin 2002). This Marxist prediction chimed with the liberal normativity of transition from the aberration of state socialism to the ‘normal’ capitalist society with a left–right cleavage organizing national politics (Cianetti and Hanley 2020; Minakov 2021). This latter vision, initially hegemonic among Western scholars of postsocialism, lost its clout by the late 2000s but remains dominant locally, where the native discourse marries it to the rhetoric of a European civilizational choice (Gressgård and Husakouskaya 2020). Regardless of the political connotations of this prediction, it clearly failed: instead of capitalist and liberal democratic normalization of the local politico-­economic field, the transition produced unorthodox polarizations and populist political templates that were later exported westwards, reversing the expected direction of the flow of ideas and models (Kalb 2015). In order to make sense of these developments, I focus on the case of Kryvyi Rih, the provincial Ukrainian city that was the scene of the opening vignette above. Situated far from the typical sites attracting social scientists in Ukraine (most research is focused on big cities like Kyiv, Dnipro, Odesa, Kharkiv or Lviv), it represents the country’s industrial backwater. Kryvyi Rih stands out from other industrial

10   |   The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class

settlements in South-­Eastern Ukraine in several respects. First of all, its size (600,000 people) makes it a city rather than a town; local residents complain that they do not receive as much attention from the central media as they should, given the size of the city and its significance in the national economy. This significance is the second trait that distinguishes Kryvyi Rih: in fact, the very period when it disappeared from the radar of the national press was the time when it gained in economic importance, becoming the site of profitable export-­oriented extractive and steelmaking activities while the more advanced industries lost their significance. My fieldwork included eight months of on-­site observations (July– August 2018 and January–July 2019). During this time, I contacted and observed employees of the city’s largest industrial enterprises: the two mining companies belonging to Ukrainian oligarchs, the steelmaking factory privatized by a multinational corporation, and a vertically integrated metallurgical corporation owned by a Ukrainian oligarch. Besides this, I spent two months employed as a manual worker at a small-­scale factory that makes reinforced windows. Having initially planned to get a temporary job at one of the large enterprises mentioned above, I soon had to give up on this idea, since circumstances on the ground made it impractical. Instead, I discovered the second tier of industrial enterprises flourishing alongside the large ‘city-­forming’ ones. Due to the extremely flexible procedure of hiring and firing at these factories, working in the grey zone of legal regulations, I found a job as a fitter at a window manufacturer, which features in this book under the fictional name Screenwind. This was hidden ethnography: I chose to maintain discretion about my research agenda, instead putting into the limelight biographical details that allowed me to construct a plausible working-­class trajectory. I disclosed my double status at the end of my employment period in order to arrange for follow-­up interviews with my co-­workers. This strategy ensured my quick immersion into the labour process, the hierarchical relations of power and the informal horizontal social networks. Political talk in the changing room and dining hall were not infrequent in this period of the presidential campaign; participant observation revealed a lay perspective on politics that would have not been so clear had I limited myself to interviews. Moreover, I had the opportunity to participate in and observe the industrial labour process at this post-­Soviet greenfield enterprise, with its specific configurations of informality and ­autonomy – ­factors that are important in explaining the workers’ relation to politics.

Introduction   |   11

After my departure from the field, I continued the fieldwork through the methods of digital ethnography (Góralska 2020). Namely, I kept following the discussions among my informants on Facebook, which is the main online social network platform in Ukraine. A number of groups created by Kryvyi Rih workers supplied indispensable data during the major miners’ strike and the protest movement at the steel mill, which took place in 2020 and 2021. Apart from the Facebook groups and various streaming services that enabled me to follow the protests in real time, I made use of workers’ chat groups on ­Viber – ­the smartphone messenger application popular in Ukraine. The Viber group of the steel mill workers, which had 1,500 members, provided valuable insights into the way workers interact with the world of the political. These online observations were mostly made in the period from September 2020 to September 2021. Another part of my fieldwork was dedicated to the archives of Chervonyi Hirnyk (Red Miner), the newspaper published by the city council. This is the only local media that existed throughout the whole period of Ukrainian independence. Being the voice of the local elite, its materials certainly cannot be taken at face value. My work with this newspaper, hence, was also informed by the ethnographic approach (Cohen 2008; Descamps, Weber and Müller 2006). It allowed me to reconstruct the changing discourses that dominated the city’s public sphere and to analyse events that did not leave any other explicit trace elsewhere. The data I gathered consist of the following: forty-­two semi-­ structured interviews, ethnographic observations (participant and non-­participant, traditional and digital), and newspaper archives. Most of my interlocutors were manual workers and/or trade union leaders; however, I also talked to several white-­collar employees. Among my observations, collected during the half-­year of my uninterrupted presence in the field, several episodes and themes are worthy of a special mention. In February and May 2019, I participated in a number of public events: the commemorations of the liberation of Kryvyi Rih from the German army in 1944 and of a battle that a Kryvyi Rih regiment lost against the Russian army in 2015; celebration of the May Day, organized by independent labour unions; and celebrations of the 1945 Victory Day. Apart from this, I witnessed a wildcat strike of Kryvyi Rih miners that took place in early May 2019. Another, more powerful miners’ strike happened after I left the field, in September 2020; I was able to observe it from a distance by watching numerous livestreams and following online discussions in

12   |   The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class

miners’ groups on Facebook and Viber. My fieldwork coincided with the presidential campaign, which became a separate theme of my observations, spanning the period from the beginning of the electoral period in January to the popular vote in April and the first steps of the new president in the summer. Finally, the last important element of my field observations consists of my employment at the window factory from the beginning of March till the end of April. My access to the field was conditioned by my personal ­background – ­a native of Kryvyi Rih and a former anarchist activist during my life in Kyiv. By reactivating my old activist connections there, I was able to get in touch with my first informants in Kryvyi Rih, independent trade union activists allied with leftist circles in Kyiv. One of them, a well-­c onnected patriarch of the city’s independent union scene, was crucial for the success of my research at its early stages. One enterprise, nevertheless, remained impermeable to independent unions, and hence inaccessible to me via this channel. I was able to get a foothold there thanks to another gatekeeper, a manager in that enterprise who helped me because of his old friendship with one of my family members. Gradually, I moved further away from committed union activists to work with less conspicuous workers in the first case, and from the management to more subaltern employees in the second. Despite these efforts to provide a more complete picture, all the usual ethnographic caveats apply. Besides unequal access opportunities, my own positionality as a researcher played its part, inevitably closing off some avenues and opening up others. My male gender conditioned my access to certain informants, and my class background as a grandson of labour aristocracy and a son of engineers structured my field possibilities. As an ‘outsider in one’s own land’ (Ergun and Erdemir 2010), I had to constantly negotiate my identity, switching between the position of a native ethnographer and that of a stranger coming from a distant metropolis. The resulting fluid status did not lead to either full inclusion or exclusion, allowing me to maintain a certain level of useful distance from my interlocutors (Beaud and Weber 1998).

Structure of the Book This book consists of ten chapters grouped into four parts. The first part presents the general context: theoretical and empirical. My conceptual toolkit, developed in Chapter 1, is centred on the notion of

Introduction   |   13

moral economy (Götz 2015; Palomera and Vetta 2016; Thompson 1971). Bringing agency and reflexivity into structural politico-­ economic analysis, this concept allows dichotomies between economy and morality, between embedded and disembedded systems and between macro and micro levels of analysis to be overcome. Besides moralizing the ­economy – ­that is, seeing it as a set of lay expectations, obligations and claims regulating the work of institutions and defining their ­legitimacy – ­I am interested in politicizing ­it – ­that is, using the moral economic prism to analyse the everyday politics of Ukrainian workers. Everyday politics (Tria Kerkvliet 2009) is the other key concept that orients this research. It expands the conventional understanding of politics, looking at mundane gestures and routines, which are political as long as they concern production, use or allocation of resources and the ideas underlying these activities. These concepts will help me make sense of the place of populism, understood as the general logic of the political (Laclau 2005; Mouffe 2005), in the processes of class formation and the reproduction of political domination in Ukraine, studied from the perspective of post-­Soviet workers. In Chapter 2, I systematize and historicize Ukrainian political and moral economy. Basing my narrative on the existing research, I put together studies on different periods and different aspects (electoral politics, ethnolinguistic relations, changing property relations and the recomposition of the class structure, and the changing structure of the national economy and its external dependencies and connections) of post-­Soviet Ukraine to produce a periodization and a consistent interpretation that provides contextual references for the subsequent chapters. The second part analyses the city as a single case: Chapter 3 presents an evolution of power configurations and legitimation regimes employed by the Kryvyi Rih elite over the three post-­Soviet decades. These changes are connected to macro-­level political developments, the change of ownership regimes and the dynamics of global markets. I show how the miners’ strike of 1992 has reconfigured the local political field, activating the moral economy of survival that defined the modality of the governance by the recomposed local elite in the 1990s. This moral economy of mobilization, corresponding to the macroeconomic emergency situation in the 1990s, clashed with the context of economic boom and privatization in the subsequent decade. Frictions between the logics of disembedded neoliberalism and embedded mobilized economy were articulated in a language of identity cleavage, imposed by political actors competing on the

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national scale. The local elite bloc had to reinvent itself once again, based on the changed political discourse and politico-­economic power relations. These multiple reinventions produced a multiplicity of legitimation regimes that structure the local society. In Chapter 4, I trace the ways in which these dynamic moral economic regimes have been shaping three urban infrastructure systems: public transport, heating and housing. The two former infrastructures became highly politicized in the course of the post-­Soviet transformations. Both public transportation and heating used to be purely technical systems, not problematized politically in the initial period, but the ad hoc survival-­oriented solutions that reshaped them in the 1990s turned them into hotly debated political issues in the subsequent decades, when the city residents began contesting increased heating tariffs and the sociopolitical function of the municipal transport. Housing, on the other hand, used to be an important political issue in the early post-­Soviet period, when the efficiency of the local elite was judged based on the intensity of the construction of new housing blocks. Arrested by the crisis of the 1990s, housing construction never resumed, but this does not present a noticeable political problem. After the privatization of housing and the change of demographic trends, the issue underwent a marked depoliticization: housing moved from the public into the private symbolic domain. The third part, consisting of three chapters, works at a lower analytical level, interrogating political dynamics at the workplace. Chapter 5 presents the history of the specific Soviet factory regime, with its paternalism, informality and workers’ autonomy. It also analyses the post-­Soviet factory regime that emerged as an adaptation of the pre-­existing regime to the extreme conjuncture of the 1990s. Many of these adaptations, taken for Soviet residues today, were new inventions, at that time associated with the ingenuity of liberal capitalism (e.g. in-­kind exchange, reinforced non-­monetary elements of the social wage, or the expansion of the economic profile of the enterprise). Chapter 6 traces the transformations of the latter regime in the twenty-­first century, conceptualizing a post-­post-­Soviet factory regime of decomposing industrial paternalism, exemplified by the mining enterprises of Kryvyi Rih. In it, I show how the mechanisms developed in the urgency of the 1990s conjuncture remained in place afterwards due to the management’s unwillingness to normalize their investment and other policies in the times of economic growth. Yielding social stability and good profitability in the short term, in the long run the main pillars of this regime were subjected to erosion. In Chapter 7, I analyse the two alternative factory regimes, more

Introduction   |   15

stable politically and economically and more efficient in legitimating the domination of the employer. These two new regimes are the neo-­ Fordist paternalism of an oligarchic corporation and the disembedded hyperflexibility at a small window factory. The two mutually opposing subjectivities produced by these ­regimes – ­the loyal client of the paternalist capitalist boss and the neoliberal subject cherishing their economic and social ­autonomy – ­are equally legitimate in the same working-­class milieu of Kryvyi Rih. In the fourth part, I deal with the level of individual trajectories and political behaviours. Chapter 8 presents individualist strategies of distinction adopted by my interlocutors and puts them into dialogue with the post-­Soviet imperative of proactivity and personal development. I show how class dissolves in the personal strategies of workers that strive to become members of the respectable middle class. At the same time, the criticism of the working class as passive and atomized, internalized by such individuals, contradicts the everyday ‘accidental’ activism, performed by my interlocutors in their survival strategies. Chapter 9 complicates this picture by discussing the identity landscape of Kryvyi Rih: the default working-­class identity of my informants coexists with the two competing ethnopolitical identities developed on the macro level. These two identities, the ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ and the ‘East Slavic’, stand in uneven relation to each other: the identity dominant nationally becomes subaltern locally. However, both of them are peripheral on the global level; this peripherality occupies an important place in both narratives. In Chapter 10, I interrogate the anti-­political attitudes of my working-­ class interlocutors. In light of all the complexities dealt with in the previous chapters, I analyse the rejection of politics demonstrated by my informants, their moralizing approach to public matters, and their populist political ideals that can be summed up as authoritarian anti-­corruption. In the conclusion, I will indicate the ways in which this research contributes to the theoretical framework employed here and sketch the prospects for further research on the moral economy and everyday politics as local articulations of the global variegated capitalism. I will discuss other concepts that can be productively mobilized to these ends, as well as other promising fields and perspectives.

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Notes A note on transliteration: this book uses a modified ALA-LC standard without diacritics to romanize Ukrainian and Russian. I have further simplified it by omitting apostrophes, ligatures, and soft and hard signs (e.g. Zelenskyi instead of Zelens’kyï). Given the multilingual character of my fieldsite, I transliterate local terms both from Russian and Ukrainian. The choice of the source language depends on the frequency with which a given word is locally mentioned in Russian or Ukrainian. However, I use Ukrainian versions of official toponyms and names of government bodies, even when most of my interlocutors refer to them in Russian (hence Kryvyi Rih, Donbas, and vykonkom instead of Krivoy Rog, Donbass, and ispolkom). 1. Western Europe and Northern America.

PART I

_ Theoretical and Empirical Context

— Chapter 1 —

Populism, Moral Economy, Informality Imbricating the Political

_ This chapter addresses a number of key concepts that I will use to analyse the way in which Ukrainian workers relate to the domain of the political in their everyday practices and interactions. The first concept that needs a clarification is populism. In the first section, I offer an overview of existing academic approaches to populism and situate my own research in this field. My proposition is that the ideational approach to populism is important but not sufficient for explaining everyday politics of the subaltern. Analysis of populist politics must have wider purchase than discourse analysis; it needs to be embedded in material practices and structures regulating the mundane social reality. The second section deals with the concepts that allow this embedding: moral economy and everyday politics. This will also be the occasion to discuss briefly the problematic of politicization understood as class formation: it is this process that interested E.P. Thompson when he popularized the term ‘moral economy’. In the third section, I discuss informality and the various concepts that arise from its analysis in the upper echelons of the society (neopatrimonialism, patronage) and among the lower classes (clientelism, blat, solidarity networks, corruption).

Populism Studies: Going Beyond the Ideational Approach Since the 2000s, the concept of populism has been occupying an important place in academic accounts of East European politics and

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its differences from the public sphere of WENA countries. In the postsocialist liberal transition discourse, populism has been equated with the concept of ‘civilizational incompetence’ – the deficient political and general culture of the population that obstructs a given country’s progress to a Western-­style liberal democracy despite the efforts of the intellectually equipped elite (Buchowski 2006; Warczok and Zarycki 2014). The argument that populism establishes a political link between the non-­enlightened native masses and the corrupt East European governments with an antiliberal agenda appeared at a very early stage (Matsuzato 2004; Van Zon 2005) and still has not lost its currency. During the last decade, it was even reinforced by the new wave of academic interest in populist studies. I argue that this concept can play a useful role as long as it remains a second-­rank auxiliary term in a conceptual system centred around other notions. Cas Mudde defines populism as a ‘thin-­centred ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite”, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people’ (Mudde 2004: 543). This minimalist definition has become the most widely accepted in the newly burgeoning field of populist studies (for an overview, see Tuğal 2021). The ‘thin ideology’ approach allows for the interpretation of a vast amount of contemporary political phenomena as populist, provided they feature the morally informed dichotomy of the people and the elite and the primacy of the people over procedures and institutions. Another less popular but also less ambitious approach to studying populism defines it as a specific political style, rather than an ideology (Moffitt and Tormey 2014). Citing Latin American cases, this school rejects Mudde’s distinction between the pure people and the corrupt elite, instead focusing on the role of sociocultural differences between those ‘above’ and those ‘below’. Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital becomes key for this understanding of populist politics (Ostiguy, Borriello and Jäger 2020). Combining the high–low cleavage with the left–right one, this perspective sees populism as ‘the antagonistic, mobilizational flaunting the “low”’ (Ostiguy 2020: 52), which appropriates the image of ‘unpresentable Other’ constructed in the course of modernist civilizational projects and flaunts it as the disregarded ‘national pleb’. Both of these schools appeal to Margaret Canovan, whose seminal work rejects the binary opposition between populism and democracy. Against the image of populism as a pathology or a threat to democracy (Urbinati 2019; Weyland 2001), Canovan situates it in

Populism, Moral Economy, Informality   |   21

the gap between democracy’s two faces, redemptive and pragmatic. Populism here is the product of the constant tension between the politics of faith and enthusiasm, aiming at perfection or salvation, and the politics of scepticism, cultivating low expectations from a government, moderation, and the stability of institutions. Given that both of these aspects are integral to democracy, populism is the shadow of democracy that corrects its institutional excesses only to produce excesses of its own that need to be corrected by political institutions. As such, populism cannot be eradicated as long as democracy exists (Canovan 1999). This approach, applied to Belarus in a recent work (Artiukh 2020), allows for the avoidance of the normative stance that is often present in discussions about populism in Eastern Europe. Taking the cue directly from Canovan, a recent book by Federico Tarragoni defines populism as a mode of political action that makes an appeal to subaltern groups to constitute themselves into the people. Four key elements of populism for him are: radical and revolutionary dimension, class heterogeneity, charismatic leadership and the opposition between the people and an elite. According to Tarragoni, populism is not a thin ideology or a completely trans-­ ideological phenomenon; it has a concrete ideology: ‘radical democratic criticism of representative governments when these enter into a crisis’ (Tarragoni 2019). This approach, then, historicizes the concept of populism, identifying it with the crisis of representative liberal democracy. An alternative, more sophisticated but also more disembedded perspective on populism is offered by the post-­Marxist discourse theory (Laclau 2005; Laclau and Mouffe 1985). This school approaches populism structurally, analysing it as the underlying logic of the political, which is equated with agonistic conflicts (Mouffe 2005). Laclau and Mouffe’s understanding of populism stems from their effort to rethink Gramsci’s (1992) ideas on hegemony. In their theory, hegemony is not a tactical alliance of social groups but a discursive articulation of their interests. Focusing on discursive practices, they argue ‘that any distinction between what are usually called the linguistic and behavioural aspects of a social practice, is either an incorrect distinction or ought to find its place as a differentiation within the social production of meaning, which is structured under the form of discursive totalities’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 107). That is, all social reality is conceivable through the lens of discourse analysis, and class only represents one of its many dimensions (‘moments of rupture’). The production of frontiers that structure society by articulating various interests thus becomes detached from any evident

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and given referential framework (e.g. the class structure), making these frontiers ‘essentially ambiguous and unstable, subject to constant displacements’. At the same time, this constitution of identities is declared ‘the first of political problems’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 134). Hegemonic politics essentially consists of capturing ‘wild’ antagonisms (floating signifiers) and situating them in the ordered system of class (i.e. identity) relations, thereby producing the people.1 This highly abstract analytical framework begs the question: if everything is populism, what is the use of this concept? Indeed, many authors prefer to disown the concept of populism as such, arguing that it does not live up to the criteria of conceptual quality, being loose, normative and performative (Cannon 2018; Ogien 2020).2 Sketching a way out of the current impasse for populist studies, Cihan Tuğal suggests that this academic field needs to be enriched with theoretical frameworks that would bring in ‘world-­structural determinants’ of populism. Concepts that can help avoid both the extrapolating universalism and the isolating particularism can notably be found in the Gramsci-­inspired political economy (Tuğal 2021). Introducing such a middle-­range framework can help ground studies of populist discourses in the capitalist mode of production with its institutions that are susceptible to change or disintegrate over time (Rey-­Araújo 2020: 199). To analyse populism productively, we need to expand our perspective and move beyond the boundaries of purely discursive politics, looking up (global political economy), down (everyday politics of the subaltern), sideways (economy, culture, industrial relations, social reproduction) and back (history). Contrary to Laclau and Mouffe, this perspective is rooted in the material processes, allowing an understanding of why in a given conjuncture many ‘demands’ can be suddenly unsatisfied and hence a new ‘equivalential chain’ may be established. This breakdown of institutions is the moment when the concept of populism may be brought back to the stage (Rey-­Araújo 2019), defined as politics ‘that aspires to distribute income and, nourishing illusions about the function of the state, is politically disorganized’ (Boito 2019: 135). Seen through this lens, populism can be analysed using the Gramscian language of interregnum, the situation of non-­hegemony, when ‘the old is dying but the new cannot be born’. Interregnums, ‘situations of a capitalist economy without a functioning ideological hegemony’, may last indefinitely. It is a political form of organic ­crisis – ­the situation in which the ruling class has lost its legitimacy and is unable to lead society (Stahl 2019: 6). Interregnum excludes the possibility of low-­tension depoliticized policy changes and brings

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to life various ‘morbid symptoms’ that are today often collectively labelled as ‘populism’. Despite the existing criticism of the concept of populism, I consider that it can still be a useful concept, provided it is relegated to the conceptual periphery and serves as an auxiliary term to clarify other, more central concepts. Following Kingsbury (2016), I am less interested in recognition and consent, explicitly effectuated on the discursive level, than in the production of ­subjects – ­everyday reproduction of class power, which involves more complex movements beyond the limits of the purely political and ideological domain. These parapolitical processes can be better grasped by the concepts of moral economy and everyday politics, treated in the following section.

Class Formation, Everyday Politics and Moral Economy On the most general level of abstraction, this book assumes the classic Marxist understanding of class as the relation to means of production. However, this framework does not help in answering the questions raised here. All of my informants are proletarians in the sense of not possessing means of production and having to sell their labour force to make a living, but this shared belonging to a theoretically constructed ‘class on paper’ (Bourdieu 1987) can hardly explain their political and other attitudes and ­behaviours – ­unless one imputes to them analytically deduced class interests that ought to produce a certain type of class consciousness. It is precisely against this reification, treating ideologies ‘as if they were political number-­plates worn by social classes on their backs’ (Poulantzas [1973] 1982: 202), that E.P. Thompson developed his dynamic approach to class, understanding it as ‘a social and cultural formation, arising from processes which can only be studied as they work themselves out over a considerable historical period’ (Thompson [1963] 1980: 11). For Thompson, class is a historical and relational phenomenon rather than a structure or a category. It is not present by default but rather formed in the process of class struggle, which takes place in multiple domains (e.g. not only the production sphere but also culture) and shapes the consciousness of class. Following this approach, many theoreticians prefer to speak of ‘social groups’ and ‘subalterns’ instead of ‘the working class’ (Ciavolella 2018; Clarke 2014). Like the proverbial potatoes in a sack (Marx [1852] 1984), these groups exist in the conditions of

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s­ ubalternity, but it is only through class struggle that they become classes (Jessop 1980). Thus class formation becomes a more important concept than the illusion of a static, fully formed class. This is why ‘the making of’ a class often seems to be a better formulated study subject, concomitant with the process of politicization. But what if there is no class struggle going on? The process of class formation among subordinate groups is not predetermined; it can indeed be obstructed by ‘occupational fragmentation, exploitation of ethnic and religious identities and symbols, helplessness before the coercive repression of states and dominant groups (both official police and military repression and unofficial death squads), consumerism, and the petty-­bourgeois aspiration to individual upward mobility’ (Cox 1987: 390). Analysing the processes of informalization of employment and the casualization and marginalization of the former labour aristocracy in a major Indian textile city, Jan Breman describes this as the ‘unmaking of an industrial working class’ (Breman 2004). A similar term is widely used to refer to the working class in CEE, where the deindustrialization and the dismantling of the welfare state went together with the declining social prestige of industrial workers and the unravelling of their social networks (Kideckel 2002, 2004; Stenning 2005). In this sense, one can speak of the long process of the unmaking of a previously existing class in the course of its depoliticization. This does not imply a linear process with a fixed ­finality – ­that is, the creation of a proper class or its full annihilation. Instead, the process of class formation can be better understood as a constantly functioning ‘societal field of force’ that permanently reshapes social groups and relations, adjusting them to changing conjunctures. This metaphor was offered by Thompson to analyse the ‘class struggle without class’ in eighteenth-­century England, where the workers did not have their own class-­specific institutions and ­movements – ­much like in postsocialist Ukraine. His definition that inspires the present work goes as follows: ‘Class eventuates as men and women live their productive relations, and as they experience their determinate situations, within “the ensemble of the social relations”, with their inherited culture and expectations, and as they handle these experiences in cultural ways’ (Thompson 1978). These experiences add up to the process of a simultaneous making and unmaking of class on the everyday level. Thompson’s ideas of dynamically and relationally conceived class were taken further in Don Kalb’s concept of ‘expanded class’ – in the sense of an expanded analytical scope and more contingent and

Populism, Moral Economy, Informality   |   25

inductive analysis: ‘an understanding of class as it is lived and produced in specific temporal and spatial relationships’ (Kalb 1997: 23). Detailed empirical studies of complex historically embedded conjunctions, informed by class understood in this way, have the potential to clarify the absence of the class vocabulary in workers’ political consciousness and explicit discourse. The mundane and often implicit character of political phenomena that interest me in this book is summed up in the concept of everyday politics. Alf Lüdtke, whose studies of the political in the working-­class milieu focused on their struggle for autonomy in the labour process, defines politics as ‘a constantly realizable “compression” or “intensification” of feeling’ (Lüdtke 1993: 67). A more formal definition, important for the present research, understands politics as being ‘about the control, allocation, production, and use of resources and the values and ideas underlying those activities’ (Tria Kerkvliet 2009: 227). The arena of everyday politics, performed at the level of individuals, their emotions and daily practices in narrow socio-­ spatial confines, is different from what Lüdtke calls the ‘arena of formalised and state-­oriented politics’– that is, politics in its conventional sense of state and para-­state institutions. Nevertheless, the two spheres are not isolated from one another: everyday politics codetermines the scope and contours of the formalized politics, both of them being aspects of a single field of force and action. The coexistence of these two types of politics raises the question of boundaries between the private and the public. Contrary to the normative distinction between the two domains, Lüdtke suggests that the boundary between them is porous and ambivalent. Thus, for workers in interwar Germany ‘the individual and familial sphere formed the basis for participation in the public arena, while simultaneously providing a space for retreat, a private corner for putting some distance between yourself and the broader society, a bit of breathing space’ (Lüdtke 1993: 77). Later, the workers’ withdrawal into the private sphere could be read as small-­scale resistance to the policies of the state, but at the same time it rendered impotent resistance on the larger scale. Elsewhere, Lüdtke concludes that ‘[e]ven communicative silences and the often richly nuanced forms of complaisance, distancing, and willful Eigen-Sinn never reflected needs that were merely individual. It is always a question of the organization of social ­relations – ­a matter of politics’ (Lüdtke 1995: 19). In other words, the ‘privatism of the poor’ (Schwartz 2002), the workers’ depoliticization and retreat into the private space, should also be interpreted as a political phenomenon within a broader framework.3

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To analyse workers’ everyday politics in the situation of non-­ evident class structures and language, I will rely on the concept of moral economy. For E.P. Thompson, this is a lay normative framework grounded in the moral and political fabric of consumption norms and power relations between social ­groups – ­as opposed to disembedded and abstract laws of market distribution that separate economy from politics and morals (Thompson 1971).4 James Scott gave further impetus to the concept of moral economy by transplanting it into the field of peasant studies. In his analysis of South-­East Asian peasant societies, moral economy stands for emic conceptions of social justice, rights and obligations, and reciprocity. Attention here shifts from the distribution of consumption goods to securing access to means of production (Scott 1976). In his subsequent work, Scott ([1985] 2000) expands the meaning of moral economy, understanding it as the field of force regulating relations between the weak and the strong. My own use of this concept follows this broader meaning: moral economy is a set of lay expectations, claims and obligations that regulate the functioning of both formal and informal institutions, mediating power relations and defining their legitimacy. It does not operate exclusively on the margins of industrial capitalism (in Thompson’s pre-­industrial England or Scott’s peasant communities). A certain kind of moral economy regulates every society, including the one structured by mass employment in industrial manufacturing. My focus is on the way moral economy functions on the level of the industrialized city, producing meanings and regulating relations between the working-­class population, the local political elite and the economic elite controlling major local enterprises. On the analytical level, this concept accounts for the coexistence and tension between economic and moral types of reasoning (Götz 2015). Bringing agency and reflexivity into the structural politico-­ economic analysis, it allows dichotomies to be ­overcome – ­between economy and morality; embedded and disembedded systems; and micro and macro levels of analysis. Moral economy helps in analysing ‘the political culture, norms and expectations of the various groups of people involved in social reproduction, broadly speaking; the power relations between the governed and the elites; and the articulation of such dispositions and relations with capitalist processes of continuity and change’ (Palomera and Vetta 2016: 415).5 The moral economic approach defended here deals with classic objects of study of political economy, but it implies a deeper interrogation of the particular ways in which they are embedded into

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analytically distinct domains. The invocation of embeddedness requires a short discussion of the relation between moral economy and the substantivist economic anthropology of Karl Polanyi ([1944] 1985). His notion of embeddedness has been influential enough to inspire not only several generations of anthropologists from Marshall Sahlins to David Graeber and Chris Hann (Gudeman and Hann 2015; Hann and Parry 2018) but also adjacent disciplines like economic sociology and institutionalist political science. Polanyian framework, which involves the liberal ‘movement’ of disembedding markets and the subsequent re-­embedding ‘counter-­movement’, is often used today to make sense of political turbulence in WENA as well as in the postsocialist world. The framework employed in this book is, however, not Polanyian. First of all, Polanyi’s approach is formalist in offering three possible logics (reciprocity, redistribution and market) that are mutually exclusive; besides, it leans normatively towards a social democratic market economy regulated by a welfare state (Szelényi and Mihályi 2020). The moral economic framework, on the contrary, assumes permanent intertwining of the different economic logics: all three are usually present in each society, contributing jointly, even if unevenly, to a given politico-­economic configuration. Moreover, it avoids normativity. Another difference lies in the approach to class: in the orthodox perspective proposed by Polanyi, the working class forms as a response to external threats posed to the existence of pristine subaltern populations. The Thompsonian approach, on the contrary, puts emphasis on the agency of subaltern groups that precedes all the macro-­scale changes: class formation stems from pre-­existing legacies rather than from the anomie induced by external disturbances. Finally, Polanyian scope is usually confined to the big events in the economic and political markets, whereas this book is focused on dynamic processes and contestations that maintain and reshape domination on a daily basis, remaining under the radars of theoreticians of large processes. To sum up, I centre my theoretical framework around the relational and dynamic understanding of class, the non-­n ormative understanding of everyday politics, and the concept of moral economy understood as the set of lay moral norms embedding economic rationality. In the following section, I will address informality and patronage, concepts that are often employed within this framework.

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Informality: Studying Up and Down The focus on non-­institutional, everyday politics and on moral economy informed by lay norms and customs invites a short theoretical discussion on informality. This concept has been amply discussed in the academic literature, which so far remains as two separate bodies: macro-­scale political economy (study of the elites) and small-­scale study of informal practices among the subaltern populations. Existing works on informality in the upper classes mostly build on the Weberian tradition. Looking back at Weber’s typology of different types of legitimacy, such authors pay special attention to the patrimonial type. They challenge the orthodox vision of linear progress and normalization of the ‘iron cage’, according to which the legal-­rational domination is bound to prevail across the globe, and postulate the existence of neopatrimonial regimes. Taking the logic of Weber’s traditional domination into the new historic conjuncture, such regimes possess their own dynamics and ought to be studied on their own terms. Having started with studies of postcolonial African states (Bayart 1993; Médard 1992), in the new century this approach has gained traction in the literature on the postsocialist area. The first explanations of the emergence of oligarchy’s informal power in the postsocialist states mobilized the concept of ‘political capitalism’: the old elite uses its control over economic resources to influence politics and then uses the acquired political power to accumulate resources via economic reforms (Ganev 2009; Staniszkis, Kisiel and Szelényi 1991). Péter Mihályi and Iván Szelényi use the same reasoning but add an institutionalist framework when they write about oligarchs in the post-­Soviet Russia: markets do not appear out of thin air but need capitalists; domestic investors (capitalists-­to-­be) require low prices and state credit to get access to property; the distribution of state credit, as well as other forms of state support, has to rely on some criteria, and it is not easy to establish any formalized rules to distinguish optimal pretenders; this is where political and social capital comes to play its role, structuring the politico-­economic field. After the original sin of capital concentration is done, the field does not even out and switch to transparent legal-­rational rules but keeps obeying the structure that lies in its foundation: a president-­centred, informally regulated patronage network of oligarchs (Mihályi and Szelényi 2019).6 Oleksandr Fisun (2010, 2012) conceptualizes ‘post-­Soviet neo-­ patrimonialism’, spawned by the belated institutionalization of rational bureaucracy, which happened after the democratization

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and not before it. Henry Hale suggested the term ‘patronalism’ to describe non-­WENA political regimes, effacing fine analytical distinctions between patrimonialism, paternalism, patronage, clientelism and other terms (Hale 2015).7 Others interpret patronalism as a Bonapartist regime relying on bureaucratic neopatrimonialism to organize the elite and on an atomized loyal majority among the dominated classes (Matveev 2018: 34–35).8 A Weberian framework was often abused by authors employing it within the context of the linear modernization theory or essentialized civilizational divides. Thus, the text that contains the first conceptualization of Ukrainian neopatrimonialism implies a hierarchy of societies, in which Ukrainians, unable to grow up to the Western standards of legal-­rational capitalism, occupy a lower rung (Van Zon 2001). This view is taken further by Khanin (2004), who uses African cases to prove the essential difference between ‘developed’ Western countries and the backward neopatrimonialists spanning from Africa to Eastern Europe. In the case of Ukraine, this essentialist and value-­laden approach sometimes leads authors to draw civilizational borders across the country, distinguishing between the civilized and truly European Western Ukraine and the undemocratic and patrimonial East and South (Van Zon 2005; Wejnert 2020). In order to deconstruct this colloquial thinking, one ought to combine the analysis of elite configurations with a look at lay moral economies and the place of informal practices within them. The most well-­known theoretical articulation of subaltern post-­ Soviet informality was developed by Alena Ledeneva (1998) in her conceptualization of blat. This system of informal exchanges was previously studied as the quasi-­market mechanism that allowed Soviet industrial managers to facilitate flows of goods and materials constrained by administrative hurdles (Berliner 1957; Favarel-­ Garrigues 2007; Katsenelinboigen 1977). Ledeneva instead looked at the interpersonal dimension of the blat economy of favours. It regulated not only economic but administrative processes, personalizing the bureaucratic ‘iron cage’. In the post-­Soviet era, blat became depersonalized in essence if not in form: personal interests (accessing certain goods) transformed into business interests (seeking profit or rent). As a result, ‘[p]ervasive bribery, corruption, the so-­called “nomenklatura businesses”, a criminal “second” society and active interpenetration of big business with politics are all part of the criminalised legacy of the economy of favours’ (Ledeneva 1998: 212–13). In other words, the Soviet ‘second economy’ of solidarity spawned the post-­Soviet corruption,

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oligarchy and ‘violent entrepreneurship’ (Volkov 2002). According to Ledeneva, the post-­Soviet social instability and lack of confidence in the future made it impossible to build long-­term open-­ended relationships of blat. However, another interpretation is possible, according to which these embedded exchanges built on trust and long-­term connections persisted and flourished, gaining in relevance precisely because of their stabilizing function in a chaotic environment where formal institutions could not be trusted any more. Informality at the workplace is another theme that will be prominent in this book. Classic works of Simon Clarke (1993b, 1995), Don Filtzer (1986, 1992, 1996) and Lewis Siegelbaum (1990) shed light on the ‘plan-­fulfilment pact’ that informally regulated the production process at the Soviet factory. The same authors later used this framework for analysis of subsequent post-­Soviet workplace transformations, also governed by informal relations between successor unions, factory managers and industrial workers (Alasheev 1995a; Ashwin and Clarke 2003; Clarke 1993a; Siegelbaum and Walkowitz 1995). This literature plugged into the wider research on factory regimes; in fact, it was Michael Burawoy, the author of the concept of factory regime (Burawoy 1979), who made it travel to the socialist (Burawoy 1996) and later postsocialist fields (Burawoy, Krotov and Lytkina 2000). One strand of this scholarship focuses on the informality reining in the labour process: the non-­Taylorized character of the post-­ Soviet industrial workplace grants vast autonomy to the workers, giving them informal political leverage against the management (Burawoy and Krotov 1993; Filtzer 1996; Stark 2009; Ticktin 1992). Besides arming workers with ‘weapons of the weak’, this autonomy also generates their emotional attachment to the job and to the enterprise, thus perpetuating the idiosyncratic post-­Soviet factory regime (Alasheev 1995b). Other authors focus on the enterprise level, tracing the roots of industrial paternalism centred on an imagined labour collective, protected by the legacy union and represented by the director (Ashwin 1999; Bizyukov 1995; Crowley 1997; Mandel 2004; Piskunov 2018; Schwartz 2003). Despite the competition from the Taylorized model imported by Western investors (Morris 2018), post-­Soviet industrial paternalism continues to be a viable social form in the twenty-­first century (Gorbach 2019; Lebskiy 2021; Morrison 2008).9 In all cases, informal regimes of interaction contribute to the creation of vertical social ties of paternalism, in which economic dependency and political quid pro quo are intertwined with moral

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obligations and feelings of solidarity, mutual respect and empathy. Such an extended understanding of paternalism makes it difficult to differentiate it from clientelism, or a patron–client relationship. The latter term was defined by James Scott in his earliest work as a special case of dyadic (two-­person) ties involving a largely instrumental friendship in which an individual of higher socioeconomic status (patron) uses his own influence and resources to provide protection or benefits, or both, for a person of lower status (client) who, for his part, reciprocates by offering general support and assistance, including personal services, to the patron. (Scott 1972: 92)

Scott lists a number of factors that define the intensity of patron– client links: a patron’s monopoly over local resources; his monopoly over links to other structures; lack of firm impersonal guarantees of personal security and income for clients; persistent legitimate inequalities; disintegration of horizontal kinship-­based structures of support; importance of electoral politics. Most of these factors are in play in contemporary Ukraine. Post-­ Soviet provincial factory towns feature clear patrons (management of the industrial enterprise dominating the local economy and/ or the mayor) possessing monopolistic access to locally available resources (jobs, social services, welfare etc.) and to exterior resources (controlled by the central state or by foreign investors or creditors). The postsocialist transition has greatly increased social inequalities, which is hardly legitimate but which remains unchallenged; at the same time, it diminished the capacity of horizontal social safety networks based on kinship and friendship. The weakness of the postsocialist state makes it difficult for potential clients to rely on its impersonal guarantees while accentuating patrons’ demand for a base of loyal voters. The resulting relations of dependency, unequal exchange of favours, and obligations that regulate the local moral economy do not have the dyadic nature required by Scott, but they are nevertheless informed by personal affections. In this book, the concepts of paternalism and clientelism, or patron–client relations, will be used interchangeably, relating to the informal dimension of the moral economy of post-­Soviet workers, present at various ­scales – ­urban, factory and interpersonal.10 Many aspects of this embedded, paternalist political economy run counter to the mainstream economic wisdom. In hindsight, they are often theorized as hallmarks of state socialism that stifled prescribed capitalist transformations and development (Åslund 2000). In practice, these ‘baroque economies’ (Gago 2017) became a

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way of ­integrating the postsocialist space into the global neoliberal economy. This approach rejects the binary opposition between the embedded informal economy and the disembedded formal markets (Breman 1976). To overcome such unnecessary Polanyian allusions, Jeremy Morris suggests using the term ‘imbrication’: ‘informality, along with corruption, patrimonialism, and clientelisitic practices, would not exist unless they were imbricated with the workings of both state and market institutions’ (Morris 2019). It is the ‘baroque’ multiplicity of formal and informal regimes itself that creates a suitable landscape for ‘straddling’ between different types of capital (Médard 1992) in the process of building paternalist/clientelist political and moral economies. Another common misconception of informality that needs to be dispelled here is its presentation as a liberatory force. Informal social mechanisms are often equated to Scott’s ‘weapons of the weak’ that empower the subaltern in their resistance against the rationalization that is the tool of the dominant. However, the conflict between ‘lifeworld’ and ‘system’ (Habermas 2005) can switch polarities: informality can be a tool for maintaining hierarchy and domination as much as it can be a weapon of the weak (Morris and Polese 2015). This book maintains an axiologically neutral position, analysing political conjunctions that result from the intertwining of formal and informal instruments of domination, rather than celebrating either of them. To sum up, this book avoids the formal/informal binary, at the same time appreciating the importance of informal practices that are imbricated with official institutions and cannot be analytically isolated from them. The key terms from the semantic field of informality studies that will be used here are: neopatrimonialism and patronage; paternalism, clientelism and patron–client relations; and horizontal mechanisms of exchange, such as blat.

Conclusion My ambition with this book is to contribute to our understanding of populism by presenting it as an element of lay moral economy that regulates the everyday politics of the postsocialist working class. The everyday politics should be understood not only as a set of discursive convictions but also as formal and informal power mechanisms producing hierarchies, loyalties and solidarities (patron–client politics and horizontal informal networks).

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Starting with populism as the most ‘obvious’ concept routinely applied to Ukraine, I show that none of the usual theoretical contexts existing around this term is helpful for understanding the specificity of political processes and attitudes in Ukraine, their embeddedness in the politico-­economic landscape, and the interaction between different scales of this landscape. However, I stop short of discarding the term populism completely, instead relegating it to the status of a second-­rank concept that serves to illustrate some central ideas of the theoretical framework privileged here, featuring the concepts of moral economy and everyday politics. The notion of class plays an important role in my conceptual setting: instead of the static sociological class defined by relation to the means of production or reproduced dispositions, I use the processual and relational concept of class that takes root in the work of E.P. Thompson. Class formation is understood here as a societal field of force shaping social groups and relations; in this sense, class politics is present even when class is absent from the discourse of the subaltern. This mundane and discrete politics of class is known as everyday ­politics – ­low-­profile gestures and attitudes that refer to the issues of production or distribution of resources. Not necessarily thematized as political by their authors, these small-­scale acts and ideas co-­determine the world of institutional politics. It is this complex interplay between the two modalities of the political in their relation to the postsocialist workers that interests me here. If class is coterminous with the process of politicization, a large part of this process takes place in the innocuous forms of everyday politics. These forms are not necessarily directed at ­resistance – ­they might as well be oriented towards compliance, quiet evasion or enthusiastic support of the status quo. The framework of moral economy will help me understand the everyday politics of Ukrainian workers. Moral economy is a set of lay expectations, claims and obligations that regulate the work of formal and informal institutions, mediate power relations and define their legitimacy. Different segments of the same society may have conflicting moral economies. My analysis of the moral economy of Kryvyi Rih workers will focus on the imbrication of moral and economic types of reasoning, determined by, and determining in their turn, material circumstances in which they are produced. Imbrication is also the term that best describes the perspective on informality taken in this book. The two ­spheres – ­formal and ­informal – ­are not isolated from each other but rather embedded, or

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imbricated together, contributing jointly to produce the social reality I aim to analyse. The concepts of paternalism and clientelism offer a way in which the analysis of the worldview of provincial workers can contribute to the understanding of wider politico-­economic landscape. Using these concepts pragmatically, I employ them to explain non-­evident political mechanisms, ensuring the reproduction of a given configuration rather than seeking hopefully for traces of resistance in the informal politics or to condemn these mechanisms for their non-­compliance with a certain normative agenda.

Notes  1. This hegemonic articulation of the people is treated in greater, almost technical, details in Laclau’s later work. He identifies three populist movements: ‘the unification of a plurality of demands in an equivalential chain; the constitution of an internal frontier dividing society into two camps; the consolidation of the equivalential chain through the constitution of a popular identity which is something qualitatively more than the simple summation of the equivalential links’ (Laclau 2005: 77). Heterogeneous demands, each of which could be individually satisfied within the existing regime, are aggregated through ‘equivalential links’ into a popular subject position, which crystallizes around an empty signifier, presenting an insurmountable challenge to the regime.  2. Existing theories of populism are even less helpful for analysis of cases like Ukraine. Throughout the thirty years of Ukraine’s independence, its political scene has been featuring amorphous political forces without mass party membership or consistent ideologies. Instead of coherent leftist or rightist programmes targeting specific classes or social groups, their discourse consists of appeals to the will of the ambiguously constructed virtuous people, as well as criticism of the self-­serving elite (Kasyanov 2007; Wilson 2005; Yekelchyk 2007). This language has been used in lay political discourses, as well. In other words, the whole political field is populist according to the most popular definition of the ideational school. The analytical value of the term vanishes when it can be safely applied to every political development taking place.  3. Under the influence of James Scott (1990, [1985] 2000), everyday politics is often assimilated to the ‘weapons of the weak’– that is, to small-­scale but permanent resistance performed by subaltern populations on the micro level. This is not necessarily so. The agency of the subaltern may be expressed in silent acts of deviance and protest as well as in strategies of accommodation and making-­do – ­the latter being more present in the everyday politics of post-­Soviet workers than the former.  4. Initially, Thompson insisted on the narrow use of the concept of moral economy, reserving it for the particular conjuncture of eighteenth-­century English towns. However, later he accepted that this concept can have a wider purchase, relating to all situations when lay normativity dictates non-­market distribution based on considerations lying outside of purely economic rationality. Here is the definition offered by Charles Tilly and approved by Thompson: ‘The term “moral economy” makes sense when claimants to a commodity can invoke non-­monetary rights to that commodity, and third parties will act to support these ­claims – ­when, for example, community membership supersedes price as a basis of entitlement’ (Thompson [1991] 1993: 338).  5. This understanding of moral economy as a dynamic combination of norms, meanings

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 6.

 7.

 8.

 9.

10.

and practices that embed the economic in the moral and social is different from the conception proposed by Didier Fassin. Evacuating the economic from the concept of moral economy, he reinterprets it as economy (i.e. exchange) of morals (Fassin 2009). This overstretch leads Chris Hann (2018) to discard the concept completely, arguing instead in favour of simply underlining a ‘moral dimension of economy’. By that, he means the same focus on the multidimensional embeddedness of human economies that I call moral economy. I consider that the term deserves being retained, provided that its conceptual context is sufficiently clearly articulated. Szelényi’s own account (Szelényi 2016) is more theoretically informed and empirically focused, presenting a Russian case as the template for the region. The picture he paints of Yeltsin’s regime, where property is distributed by the ruler’s grace with the aim of creating a loyal grand bourgeoisie, bears striking resemblance to the Ukrainian developments discussed in the following chapter. The two countries part ways after Russia turns, in Szelényi’s terms, from patrimonialism to prebendalism, transforming ‘fiefs’ into ‘benefices’ under Putin. The term ‘patrimonialism’ can also be used without direct references to Weberian ideal types of domination. Thus, Catherine Wanner (2005) speaks about patrimonialist moral orders in Ukraine in the anthropological rather than Weberian intellectual context. In a similar vein, Christian Geffray (2000) draws explicit distinction between Weberian patrimonial state and regimes relying on the distribution of resources by a strongman in order to create moral obligations. In the latter case, the principle of people’s sovereignty underlying the modern state is real enough, constituting one of the two parallel systems of belief: one involves the rule of law with (formal) redistribution done in the name of the people, whereas the other one regulates activities of clientelist networks distributing personalized ‘manna’ independently of the public ­budget – t­ hat is, informally. Bonapartism, understood as the precarious regime of class compromise, relying to a great extent on the state bureaucracy, is a welcome terminological diversification away from the dominant Weberian framework. Not only does it widen theoretical appeal but also mobilizes comparisons from beyond the postsocialist region (Bayart 2019; Boito 2019; Denning 2020; Riley 2017). Similar to the original Bonapartism (Marx [1852] 1984), this theorization analyses a specific form of political domination in light of class alliances and compromises. This adaptability to the global post-­Fordist politico-­economic conjuncture, as well as the predominance of informal elements in the setup, is what distinguishes post-­ Soviet industrial paternalism from the Fordist-­era paternalism in the West (Fontaine 2013; Gueslin 1992; Noiriel 1988; Sigaud 1996). On the other hand, non-­WENA contexts supply other cases of industrial paternalism functioning in the global neoliberal economy (Buu-­Sao 2013; Hann and Parry 2018; Mollona 2019; Parry 2020; Sanchez 2016). Informality also penetrates labour regimes in the West, even if its presence is less easily detectable (Mollona 2005). An example of productive analysis of these paternalist/clientelist configurations can be found in the work of Douglas Rogers (2006) on the post-­Soviet city-­level governance. Rogers sketches the process of parcellization of sovereignty that took place in the 1990s, when local bosses claimed monopoly of violence and sometimes of currency transactions. Rogers underlines the emic distinction between a paternalist boss (khoziain) and a disembedded ‘entrepreneur’, who occupy different poles of the post-­ Soviet moral economy, even if their legally defined functions might be identical. A similar accent on the khoziaistvo, the concept that is best understood in the sense of the Greek ‘oeconomy’, defines Stephen Collier’s analysis of the post-­Soviet ‘embedded neoliberalism’ (Collier 2011).

— Chapter 2 —

Ukrainian Political Economy Property Regimes and Identity Cleavages

_ Ukrainian capitalism cannot be viewed apart from Ukrainian politics, from the processes happening beyond national borders, or from its historic dynamics. Hence, the initial question of the populist political culture of the working class requires a complex analysis of the forces structuring this culture on various scales and from different angles. The puzzle of postsocialist workers painfully aware of inequalities and class domination but obstinately refusing to correct this situation through collective political action can only be answered by sketching the general picture of Ukrainian capitalism, its historic dynamics, spatial connections and interdependencies. In this chapter, I will systematize such a picture in wide strokes before proceeding with a more specific analysis on narrower scales.

The Survival Conjuncture in the 1990s On 24  August 1991, the Supreme Council of Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) proclaimed the country’s independence. This step was taken in a parliament dominated by the Communist majority (‘the group of 239’), with the support of the 126-­strong nationalist opposition. It was prompted by the failed coup attempt against the Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev: the leader of the Russian SSR Boris Yeltsin had won over the coup plotters, and the Communist party of the Soviet Union was outlawed. Nevertheless, the formal abolition of the party did not mean that Leonid Kravchuk, the communist head of the Ukrainian parliament, lost his influence: on the

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contrary, passing the independence initiative he managed to remain in power, informal influence making up for the lack of institutional machinery. These ­characteristics – ­an unequal alliance of two opposing political groups that joined forces under the pressure of external events, driven by informal ­arrangements – ­can be extrapolated onto the whole history of the formation of the new nation-­state. The Ukrainian Communist party played a leading role in it, seemingly against its own best interests as the dominant political force. Competing nationalist projects, which implied restoring a pre-­Soviet statehood and excluding (ex-)communists from the political life of the new state, were marginal, mostly advanced by politicians and mass mobilizations coming from the Western regions. For all practical purposes, they strengthened rather than undermined the dominating group’s positions.

Political Networks: The West and the Rest At the presidential elections on 1 December 1991, Leonid Kravchuk gained 61.59 per cent of votes, winning on the first ballot. His closest competitor, the leader of the nationalist Rukh party Vyacheslav Chornovil, received 23.37 per cent. His voters were concentrated in the three Western regions of Galicia, which were the only ones to give him an absolute majority. The voting outcome and the geographical distribution of votes reflected the divide between the ‘national-­ democratic’1 Western Ukraine and the rest of the country. The division between ‘the two Ukraines’ was bemoaned by intellectuals sympathizing with the nationalist and Westernizing element and condemning the Russophone ‘creoles’ (Riabchuk 1992). The sensational image of a fatal civilizational divide cutting across the country was legitimized in the accounts of prominent globalization theorists (Huntington [1996] 2011) and further reinforced by the national media. For them, this was a suitable language in which they could frame the dilemmas of national development without using the discredited language of class. This essentialist and normative approach associated two parts of the country with, respectively, a ‘democratic European future’ and a ‘hated totalitarian past’ ­(Zhurzhenko 2002). The divide uncovered by the elections was more complex than ‘the Ukrainian-­speaking West vs. the Russophone rest’. Being the language of social and spatial mobility, Russian has been the marker of urbanization: Russophone cities, populated to certain extent with

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migrants from other Soviet republics, have often been surrounded by Ukrainian-­speaking countryside. This duality existed in the context of the Soviet ‘affirmative action empire’ (Martin 2001), which ossified ethnicity, identifying it with nationality (Suny 2005: 98). The national borders of Ukraine were meticulously defined based on ethnolinguistic criteria (Rindlisbacher 2018). Territory was understood to be the privileged domain of the ‘titular’ (titulnaya) ethnicity. The emic term for the latter, natsionalnost (nationality), resonates with the German primordial understanding of nation, rather than with the Anglo-­Saxon civic model (Miller 2012, 2017). Being an essential part of a citizen’s official identity,2 ethnicity was assumed to be an inherited trait of a person. This official identification implied a host of cultural connotations, chief of them being the formally assigned ‘native language’ (Wanner 1998). Every citizen formally classified as a Ukrainian was supposed to learn Ukrainian at school and have at least passive knowledge of it in adult life. The ethnolinguistic mixing in large cities, exacerbated by the conscious Russification policies in the 1970s and by the unequal patterns of cultural consumption in the different languages, led to the widespread phenomenon of Russophone Ukrainians: people who define themselves as Ukrainians and their native language as Ukrainian but hardly ever use or even know it on a decent level. This identity did not necessarily mean pro-­Russian political ­orientation – ­on the contrary, it could combine the contempt for ‘backward’ and ‘rural’ Ukrainian cultural-­political identity with distancing from the ‘privileged’ Russians from Moscow and Leningrad (Zhuk 2010). On the other hand, Ukrainian ethnic nationalism failed to muster a broad social base outside the Western regions.3 This led to its radicalization, pitting the movement against the unconvinced (‘creole’) Ukrainians as much as against Moscow (Wilson 1997: 59). Anxious to avoid an internal conflict at the time when nationalist wars were ravaging other post-­Soviet countries, the leadership of the new nation took an extremely cautious stance in terms of all kinds of social transformations. The spectre of ‘social explosion’ stymied attempts to quickly liberalize the economy or to impose the hardcore nationalist agenda on the population. Citizenship and language laws were quite inclusive towards the Russophone population, compared to contemporary policies of the Baltic states, and ethnic identity was played down in state policies. The social peace thus achieved was one of the factors contributing to the proverbial state weakness in Ukraine (D’Anieri 2007).

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Heterogeneity was also a suitable epithet for Ukrainian elites. The dominating faction, the former nomenklatura, was a field of fierce competition between different patronage networks, organized by territorial principle. These geographically anchored patronage pyramids, known as ‘clans’, take root in the Soviet postwar reconstruction investments: three main industrial clusters, Kharkiv, Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk, competed for the distribution of resources from the centre. This competition institutionalized a system of informal equitable distribution of administrative positions between these groups in 1950–1990 (Minakov 2019). By the end of this period, the Dnipropetrovsk group was dominant: in 1990, 53 per cent of Ukrainian executive officials came from that city (Zhuk 2010: 25). In the new era, the landscape became more complex with the addition of a new elite faction from a different provenance: the ‘national democrats’, mostly coming from the intelligentsia of Kyiv and Western Ukraine. Boasting extensive symbolic capital, they commanded little administrative or economic resources, which made them structurally weaker. The president, Leonid Kravchuk, did not belong to any one of the groups mentioned above. Inside the ‘communist’ dominant faction, he had played the role of mediator between different regional groups, and he took on the similar position of arbiter between camps and clans on the wider scale. Simultaneously, the ‘national democrats’ gained access to the nationalizing sites of the new ­state – ­the schooling system, cultural institutions and other platforms where they could promote their agenda without destabilizing society too much (Wanner 1998). They ‘accepted that the nomenklatura keep the reins of power and the levers of policy in exchange for a commitment to the new republic’s independence’ (De Menil 2000: 51).

Economic Rupture In the last years of the Soviet Union, supporters of Ukrainian independence relied on the economic statistics that seemed to support their claim: the rich republic is being systematically exploited by Moscow due to unequal exchange. Ukraine alone produced about as much basic commodities as Germany, France and Italy, but the purchasing power of Ukrainians’ average wage was several times smaller. ‘Ukraine: a European state in potentiality, a Moscow’s colony in reality. We are poor because we are not free. To be rich, one has to be independent’, concluded a nationalist leaflet. However, the beginning of an actual economic separation soon showed that these calculations had ignored Ukraine’s dependency on

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the (post-)Soviet supplies and markets.4 The disintegration of these chains led to an extreme decline in industrial production: in 1996, it constituted only 42 per cent of the 1989 figure. The slump was a common experience for the region, but hardly anywhere else was it so deep: the average indicator for CEE was 88 per cent, for CIS 54 per cent (Van Zon 1998: 610). The drastic hike of oil prices by Russia translated Ukraine’s structural dependence on energy imports into a structural current account deficit. In order to finance their trade imbalances, post-­Soviet central banks unleashed inflation competition.5 In order to keep enterprises running, the Ukrainian parliament introduced a national fiat currency and forced the central bank to flood the economy with ‘cheap credits to agriculture and industry equal to almost a third of GDP in 1993’ (Åslund and De Menil 2000: 6). The fiscal deficit in that year constituted 13.8 per cent, whereas monetary emission covered 36.3 per cent of all fiscal expenditures (Halchynskyi 2018). Maintaining the volumes of natural production was supposed to not only prevent massive layoffs but also stimulate the growth of nominal GDP, while social protection would shield the population from growing prices. With this aim, net credit expansion to enterprises in 1993 reached 47 per cent of Ukraine’s GDP. Their annual interest rate constituted only 20 per cent (Åslund 2000). In fact, this unleashed hyperinflation, which erased people’s incomes and rendered meaningless the very notion of monetary income as such: the consumption price index was 2,100 per cent in 1992 and reached 10,256% in 1993. Soft budget constraints on a scale unseen in the Soviet Union (Popov 2020), extreme embeddedness of manufacturing into the fabric of social life (which made mass bankruptcies unthinkable) and extreme price differentials across national borders promoted rent-­ seeking behaviour among the elite of the new state. The situation grew highly unstable in every domain: fiscal and industrial policy; relations with Russia; identity cleavages inside the country; division of powers between the main institutions and political groups; life standards and the social reproduction of the labour force. It was the last issue that triggered the event that structured Ukrainian political and socio-­economic configuration on the macro level in a sustainable manner.

The Crisis of 1993–1994: The Dust Settles Down On 7 June 1993, the miners of a large coal mine in Donetsk went on strike over the rapid hike of state-­controlled food prices. Besides

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the economic demands, the miners, supported and advised by their employees, put forward political demands that came down to wanting greater regional autonomy and snap parliamentary and presidential elections. On 18 June, the government agreed to hold a referendum on popular confidence in the president and the parliament and to double the miners’ ­wages – ­without guaranteeing against new price hikes. These were the gains of the workers; the enterprise directors, on the other hand, made the government cancel their fines, solve their debt problems and grant tax concessions and greater freedom to trade. At the snap elections that followed, Leonid Kravchuk built his campaign on the nationalist agenda, effectively hijacking the Western Ukrainian electoral base of his nationalist adversary from 1991. And just like the latter, he lost to an adversary posing as a moderate pragmatist concerned for the social cost of reforms and not too keen on identity issues. The new president, Leonid Kuchma, was supported by the ‘red directors’, who publicly demanded that the government tackle ‘real’ (as opposed to ‘ideological’) problems, stop ruining economic connections with Russia and impose law and order (Lytvyn 1994: 317). A technocrat with the mission to save the country’s industry, Kuchma made a U-­turn and unveiled a liberal economic programme immediately after the election. He abolished most price controls, leading to a 72 per cent price hike (Shpek 2000: 31), and cancelled wage indexation, allowing inflation to eat into workers’ incomes (Pynzenyk 2000: 81). This created the political space for leftist opposition led by Socialist and Communist parties. On the other hand, Kuchma’s economic agenda differed from the standard IMF recipes. He advocated quick privatization but argued that the integration of Ukraine into the global economy had to be done gradually and be preceded by active industrial policy. Kuchma ‘pledged to eliminate some of the most egregious rent-­generating distortions, but also promised his industrial allies new spoils from large-­scale privatization of major state enterprises’ (Kudelia 2012: 420). He was also not prepared to support a fully-­fledged austerity and deregulation plan drafted by his prime minister. This divergence from the neoliberal orthodoxy alienated the ‘national-­democratic’ opposition. Thus, the Ukrainian political landscape gained a stable structure: in its centre was the president, acting as a representative of and an arbiter between ‘red directors’ who controlled the country’s industrial assets. He followed the careful path of liberal ­transformations,

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embedding them in local social realities, and maintained a pragmatic attitude towards the dominating political ideologies, flaunting technocratic instincts. On his flanks, there was left and right opposition. The former was constituted by (post-)Stalinist mass parties, which commanded significant grassroots mobilizing capacities and impressive parliamentary presence. Their political agenda combined a leftist socio-­economic agenda with Soviet nostalgia, articulated as a pro-­Russian geopolitical stance and reticence towards the ‘Ukrainianization’ of the country’s cultural landscape. The voters of these parties mainly lived in the industrialized cities of Ukraine’s East and South. The rightist opposition, conversely, relied on the agricultural Western regions and on intelligentsia in Kyiv and Western Ukrainian cities. It harboured a Westernizing, pro-­European neoliberal agenda combined with ethnic nationalism.

Centralized and Fragmented Hegemony: Biudzhetniki, Clans, Unions The newfound stability of this configuration was due to the inter-­ class alliance that co-­o pted two dominated classes in differing manners. One pillar of this variegated alliance was concluded in a centralized fashion between the state and public sector employees. Public bureaucrats of lower ranks, doctors, teachers and other public employees collectively known as biudzhetniki (‘those who are paid from the state budget’) have found themselves to be relatively less precarious in terms of employment and access to a number of benefits provided by the state. The trade-­off was the abysmally low official salaries, which gave birth to a ‘second economy’ in public institutions: biudzhetniki have learnt to augment their meagre incomes with informal side payments, monetary or otherwise (Polese and Williams 2016). What is more, this tacit agreement implied the right of the state to mobilize its employees for purposes going far beyond their formal job descriptions: from mandatory attendance at political demonstrations and other gatherings to participation in various schemes during elections. The other pillar linked the dominant social group of ‘red directors’ with the industrial workforce. One of the vivid manifestations of the commonality of their interests in the 1990s was the abundance of workers’ protests led by directors of enterprises. The so-­called ‘directors’ strikes’ addressed their demands to the state as the ultimate arbiter of the country’s economy, asking for tax exemptions, protectionist measures or simple fiscal transfers to liquidate wage arrears. This inter-­class bloc was fragmented: in fact, it was a sum of thousands of

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separate enterprise-­wide blocs, united mechanically, not unlike the famous Marx metaphor of ‘potatoes in a sack’ (Marx [1852] 1984). It was realized at large ‘city-­making’ enterprises that were too big to fail and/or able to insert themselves into important capital flows in the new economic conjuncture: metalworking, mining and machine-­ building. These enterprises, concentrated in the heavily industrialized regions of the South-­East, offered their employees and the local and regional authorities relatively generous pacts ensuring collective survival. Fragmented hegemony embedded itself into existing patronage pyramids and into global markets, remoulding the relations between clans. The Kharkiv clan, which controlled the relatively high-­tech machine-­building industry, gradually decreased in prominence compared to the Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk groupings, whose economy was based on mining and metalworking. The latter two were not on an equal footing, either. The ascent of Leonid Kuchma opened the era of domination by business interests from Dnipropetrovsk. Besides more distant relations with the head of state, the Donetsk economy to a great extent consisted of coal mining, which, unlike metallurgy, was entering a systemic profitability crisis. Donbas coal mines, technically exhausted and dependent on the state subsidies, suffered from the greatest wage arrears and were a hotbed of working-­class ­militancy – ­in a striking opposition to neighbouring Dnipropetrovsk. Lacking a stable hegemonic configuration, the ruling class formation in Donetsk was more contested, featuring more explicit violence and conflicts involving the criminal world. Who has been left out of the 1990s social pact? Among a number of excluded groups, one deserves a short mention here: the employees and employers in the informal economy. The share of the informal sector quickly reached 50 per cent of GDP or more, according to various estimates. It benefited from an initial lack of inclination or capacity to regulate it: various small-­scale trading and manufacturing activities usually avoided taxation, staying under the radar of the state. Their modus operandi did not allow for legitimate claim-­ making towards the state; at the same time, all claims made by the state (e.g. taxes) were also illegitimate.

‘Merchant Capitalism’: Old and New Owners Both the academic and the lay narratives about the 1990s economy of Ukraine underline its short-­termist and parasitic character, focused on the circulation of the previously created value. However, this

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description does not sit well with the image of a typical ‘red director’, whose main aim lies precisely in ensuring the continuity of production at all costs rather than sucking the enterprise dry before acquiring a next one. The late 1990s were the time when this type of capitalist faced challenges from the new class, known as komersanty or biznesmeny – profit-­oriented owners whose scope of operations spanned far beyond a single enterprise. The clash of the two models was a part of Kuchma’s explicit project of the capitalist class ­formation – ­turning the fragmented hegemony of ‘red directors’ into a more stable and encompassing configuration. True to his declaration that privatization should ‘form and empower national capital, raise its international competitiveness’ (Halchynskyi 2018: 120), Leonid Kuchma was explicit in restricting access to foreign investors and setting prices very low for domestic pretenders. Capital concentration was being done under the careful auspices of the state. This process was rooted in the post-­Soviet ‘merchant capitalism’ – an economic system based on domination by monopolies controlling access to supplies and markets, ‘driven by the pursuit of profit that comes primarily from trade rather than from transforming production’ (Burawoy and Krotov 1993: 88). The keys to real control over the enterprise lay in controlling its procurement and marketing in an economy suffering from a liquidity deficit.6 The ‘new’ capitalists gradually took over control of industrial assets from the ‘red directors’ by means of corporate raiding (reiderstvo). Academic literature defines it as the ‘illegal or improper transfer of valuable assets, or value generated from those assets, generally by means of improper coercive action, or failure to act, on the part of corrupt state authorities’ (Rojansky 2014: 420; Viktorov 2019). To ensure the success of ‘improper coercive action’ in the form of a raiding operation, an interested business group needs to muster violent resources, legal arguments and at least passive cooperation on the part of the state officials. The involvement of police and legal authorities can range from active participation (O’Shea 2015) to simple failure to act. These conflicts left their imprint on popular political imaginaries. Seen as external intruders with parasitic and criminal inclinations (as opposed to stability-­oriented traditional industrial elite),7 biznesmeny did not evoke much compassion when they themselves fell victim to predatory practices. Hence the notorious indifference of the Ukrainian population to the liberal values of property rights. The perceived unfairness and unjustness of the privatization gave

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way to cynical attitudes. As soon as fragmented hegemony started taking root, it was distorted by the very efforts taken to make it more stable and centralized.

Conclusion The first decade of Ukrainian independence was marked by an extremely steep economic decline, caused by the rupture of production and distribution chains that had spanned the Soviet Union. Pressed by industrial lobbies, the government chose a very conservative economic strategy, which likely spared the country an even worse humanitarian disaster by keeping afloat large industrial entities that managed the social and physical infrastructure of cities. This came at the cost of hyperinflation and the proliferation of rent-­ seeking activities. Two social categories were co-­opted, to a differing degree, by the elite: the state established patronage relations with the new and vast social category of public sector workers, and thousands of ‘red directors’ maintained fragmented paternalist relations with their massive personnel. Politically, the centrist hegemonic bloc was flanked by and manoeuvred between the Stalinist left and the neoliberal right. The specific cultural landscape of the country resulted in the significant correlation between political and linguistic-­geographical divisions: the left were strongest in the Russophone and industrialized South-­East, feeding off the feelings of nostalgia for the Soviet Union, whereas the neoliberal agenda was married to the wider nationalizing and Westernizing programme, rooted in the less economically developed regions of Western Ukraine. The efforts directed at creating a national bourgeoisie, and thus forming a more sustainable and centralized basis for hegemony, encouraged the proliferation of a new type of elites. Less socially embedded than traditional ‘red directors’, they were better suited to concentrating assets, creating efficient regionally organized patronage networks able to influence national politics. Beside industrial assets, these ‘clans’ concentrated political leverage and social capital, penetrating criminal and political worlds. Unlike many countries of CEE, Ukraine did not have access to external resources in the guise of massive debt write-­downs, loans or investments from the West in the first years of independence. The only accessible external financing came from Russia, partially on the back of inertia and partially as a geopolitical tool. Alternative financing came from the IMF; besides providing cheap loans, it also

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helped renegotiate existing debts with Russia (De Menil 2000). The Ukrainian economy thus relied on internal resources to a greater extent than many other CEE countries, but it has also been heavily dependent on access to external resources, which was only possible on condition of political concessions to Russia and/or to the IMF. Students of CEE economies widely employ the concept of ‘dependent development’ (Fabry 2019). Given the lack of quantitative economic growth in the Ukraine of the 1990s, and even less qualitative restructuring of its economy during the period, it seems fitting to call this conjuncture ‘dependent survival’. The devastating effects of the postsocialist transformations in Eastern Europe were observable in hard science: the economic slump in the former Soviet Union from 1992–2011 resulted in a massive reduction of greenhouse gases, which compensated for a quarter of CO2 emissions due to deforestation in Latin America in the same period (Schierhorn et al. 2019). Fast privatization was strongly associated with higher working-­age male mortality rates (Azarova et al. 2017), and being born in a ‘transition’ year in Eastern Europe costs a person 1cm in body height (EBRD 2016: 35). When the macroeconomic data for the region are disaggregated by countries, Ukraine has some of the worst dynamics, and the 1990s were the darkest period. However, the situation started changing after the 1998 crisis, which triggered an economic boom and a substantial politico-­economic reconfiguration.

Oligarchic Democracy in the 2000s The first signs of Ukraine’s economic recovery were linked to the rebound of global demand for metals after the crisis of 1997–1998. Seizing the opportunity, the state agreed to support an ‘economic experiment in the mining and metalworking industry’, which lasted from 1999 to 2001. It amounted to restructuring or writing down fiscal debts accumulated in the previous years, provided that the enterprise in question paid its current taxes and wages. The experiment, which was replicated in other industries on smaller scales, prevented bankruptcies, which would have been a threat to the existence of entire cities dependent on enterprises (Paskhaver, Verkhovodova and Agieieva 2007). The economic growth that followed became the background for the major power shift of 1999–2000. It allowed Leonid Kuchma to win the presidential elections in 1999 by mobilizing the anti-­communist

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nationalist vote in the West and by enacting coercion and patronage power structures in the East. These structures relied on the state’s centralized control over ‘hard power resources’, courts and informal business ‘clans’.

From Clans to Oligarchs (1999–2004) Following the changes in popular usage, the academic vocabulary of the early 2000s has gradually switched from the term ‘clans’ to ‘oligarchs’ – a word coined by Russian journalists initially to describe the powerful businessmen of the Yeltsin era (Fortescue 2006). More than just a terminological shift, it coincided with meaningful changes in the organization of political and economic power on the national scale, affected during Leonid Kuchma’s second presidential term. From then on, he relied less on vague regional loyalties, typical for the previous period, and more on informal business groups, which might be in fierce competition despite common regional provenance. This differentiation is traceable in the case of the Dnipropetrovsk clan that united ‘neo-­nomenklatura and capitalists-­in-­the-­making who emerged from the criminal-­political nexus and Komsomol’ (Ishchenko and Yurchenko 2019). Yuliya Tymoshenko, a local Komsomol activist who ran a video club (Zhuk 2010: 299–301), used her connections to start a joint fuel trading business with Viktor Pinchuk: they imported natural gas, paying for it with pipes produced by Ukrainian factories (Balmaceda 2009). Later, Pinchuk parted ways with Tymoshenko; he consolidated pipe-­m aking industry in his corporation Interpipe and married the daughter of President Kuchma. Family connections made Pinchuk an oligarch par excellence: a billionaire whose wealth and social status were conditioned by his intimate access to the high ranks of the state apparatus. Tymoshenko’s gas trading company YeESU, on the other hand, did not survive the fall from grace of her patron, the former prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko. Her economic assets were taken over by Pinchuk and others (Matuszak 2012: 15–16). The other important oligarchic group from Dnipropetrovsk is known as the Privat group. Its founders, Ihor Kolomoiskyi and Hennadiy Boholiubov, organized barter schemes, supplying industrial enterprises with raw materials and marketing their produce. Privatbank, founded with the help of a former Komsomol leader, Serhiy Tihipko, flourished during the hyperinflation period. Having gained prominence among the population, the bank was able to accumulate 2.3 per cent of all privatization vouchers emitted by the

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state and started buying industrial assets (Yanitskiy and Stack 2018). Serhiy Tihipko left the group to start his own business group, as well as a political career; however, just like Yuliya Tymoshenko, his economic assets are not so immense to qualify him as an oligarch without reservation. Kolomoiskyi and Boholiubov, on the other hand, have become classic ­oligarchs – ­billionaires deploying their political resources through informal channels to expand their ­clout – ­by putting loyal people in important government positions and on the boards of state-­owned companies as well as by indulging in corporate raiding on a massive scale (Rojansky 2014: 424–25). Rinat Akhmetov built his patronage pyramid on the basis of the Donetsk regional clan, more tightly knit than the politically amorphous Dnipropetrovsk businessmen. It centred around Viktor Yanukovych, the regional governor appointed in 1997, who became prime minister in 2002. Besides having a clear political leader, the Donetsk ‘clan’ centralized its political activities in the single Party of Regions, which united various oligarchic groups (Matuszak 2012: 14). As the clan started to expand beyond its home region under Yanukovych’s premiership, initial unity gave way to conflicts. Akhmetov’s SCM corporation turned out to be the most successful, competing with Serhiy Taruta’s ISD group. There were other oligarchic groups, all of them politically embedded in a president-­centred political system (Melnykovska 2015). Instead of the ‘red directors’ autonomous from the state, the new power bloc was more centralized, governed by strong presidency at the pinnacle of the formal state apparatus and informal norms. On the party political terrain, Kuchma asserted his primacy over the parliament in 2000 by pushing the leftist parties out of key parliamentary positions and co-­opting the right (Kudelia 2010). However, soon a new ‘democratic opposition’8 emerged, whose ideology was a combination of a traditional Westernizing agenda of ‘national democrats’, anti-­corruption and pro-­democracy narratives. At the parliamentary elections of 2002, this opposition gained the majority of votes. This success was due to the resources of the second-­rank bourgeoisie (Ilyin 2020), which grew strong enough to dare challenge the ‘closed access order’ controlled by oligarchs (Smahliy 2006). These power shifts, taking place on the eve of presidential elections scheduled for 2004, pushed Leonid Kuchma to take steps towards restructuring his power base. On the party political level, he initiated a discussion of constitutional reform, which would, if accepted, disperse the decision-­making centre, shifting it from the presidency to the parliament. On the level of assets distribution, he quickened

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the pace of privatization, transferring the mining and metalworking industry to the oligarchs on the eve of presidential elections. Finally, in picking a successor to compete at the elections, Kuchma made a choice in favour of the political representative of the Donetsk group, Viktor Yanukovych.

Orange Revolution: Oligarchs and Identities The presidential neopatrimonial model built by Kuchma did not survive the elections of 2004, which escalated into a set of contentious events, accompanied by mass mobilization inside the country and mediation by foreign powers. After the Supreme Court sanctioned a re-­run of the second tour, the oppositional candidate Viktor Yushchenko narrowly won. The trade-­off for the victory of the opposition, defined during the negotiations, was that the new president’s powers would be limited by constitutional reform: the centre of decision-­making shifted to parliament. Such were the results of the political crisis of 2004, known as the Orange Revolution (Hale 2015: 182–90). In the course of this standoff, the liberal reformist camp presented its electoral struggle against the dominant ‘technocratic’ bloc in identitarian or even civilizational terms. The ‘party of power’, in its turn, played along, demonizing Yushchenko and his supporters as extreme nationalists, culturally and politically alien to the East. The idea of ‘the two Ukraines’, first formulated in 1992, became a material force in the hands of political strategists. Since then, the Ukrainian political field has been constituted around the division between the ‘orange’ (national democratic, pro-­European, neoliberal, Western Ukrainian) and the ‘white-­blue’ (Russophone, pro-­Russian, paternalist, Eastern Ukrainian) camps, according to the colours used in the 2004 campaign. The pre-­existing divide was revitalized by constructing the myth of the Other. Western Ukrainians were stigmatized as biological and political heirs of wartime nationalist collaborators, whose backward economy did not entitle them to an equal share of the national income; for the other side, Russophones were associated simultaneously with the imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, symbolizing everything hostile and backward. The major power shift of the Orange Revolution, thus, had at least two repercussions on different levels. The restructuring of the power configuration among oligarchs and top politicians was connected to a change of agenda in mainstream political ­narratives – ­from a discussion of socio-­economic inequalities and corruption to a growing prominence of identity-­based issues. Finally, this event signalled the

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interpenetration of geopolitical power struggles in the region with those inside the country: Viktor Yushchenko’s pro-­Western rhetoric alarmed the Russian government, which lent its political and diplomatic weight to his opponent, constructed as ‘pro-­Russian’.

Oligarchic Democracy: Elections and Conflicts Initially, the new government tried to erase ancien régime oligarchs completely from the political and economic map. The prime minister Tymoshenko promised a massive revision of all privatization deals. However, by early 2006 the elite fractions found a relatively stable modus vivendi. The place of arbitrage moved to a large extent from the presidential office to parliament, becoming more public and dependent on electoral politics. The party political field was structured by three large blocs: the oppositional Party of Regions, headed by Viktor Yanukovych; the bloc of Yuliya Tymoshenko; and the party created by the weak president Viktor Yushchenko. Each bloc was connected to certain business groups. This system, featuring a weak state captured by rent-­seeking elites, served as the paradigmatic case for the theory of ‘pluralism by default’ (Way 2015). Namely, the balance of forces did not allow any group to consolidate political and economic assets on a sufficient scale to establish an authoritarian regime. Ideologically, these major blocs did not differ much from the ruling parties in contemporary Hungary and ­Poland – ­a ‘centrist populism, where the emphasis is on newness, competence and an anti-­corruption agenda, rather than challenging the transition policies and offering an alternative economic programmatic agenda’ (Toplišek 2019: 4). In Ukraine, however, this technocratic centrism was modulated by identity ­issues – ­the crucial point of differentiation on the national political market, divided between the ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ and the ‘Eastern Slavic’ electorate. These allegiances were not simple ‘superstructural’ decorations: the ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ identity was statistically correlated with ‘pro-­democratic and pro-­market’ orientations, whereas the ‘Eastern Slavic’ one was a good predictor of everything ‘antidemocratic and antimarket’ (Shulman 2005). The scheme featuring a technocratic ‘party of power’ dominating a resource-­poor ideological opposition came to an end. All serious contenders for power found themselves obliged to find an ideological face and use an ideology as additional leverage. Starting from 2005, the central government was directly invested in ethnonationalist identity-­building on the basis of historical figures extremely

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controversial outside Western Ukraine, such as the wartime leadership of the Ukrainian nationalist underground. The ‘white-­blue’ oppositionists headed by Yanukovych, on the contrary, reinvented themselves as defenders of ‘antifascism’, attracting a voter base by reviving Soviet commemoration practices (Kozachenko 2019). This actualized and perpetuated old and potentially irrelevant geographical divisions, filling them with new senses. The identitarian divide, manufactured by elites during the 2000s, became a leverage that helped prevent a consolidation of power in the hands of a specific group. If one fraction of the ruling class went too far, the other could mobilize its voters against the perceived attack on their liberties from the other linguo-­cultural group (Way 2015). However, it prevented not only a democratic curtailing but also neoliberal reforms explicitly targeting living standards of the population, working along the same logic, predicted already in the 1990s: ‘Ukraine’s complex ethno-­regional politics are also likely to make substantive economic reforms difficult. Any Ukrainian government is likely to find it difficult to implement rigorous reforms and austere budgets over the heads of regional protests’ (Wilson 1997: 201).

Growth, Redistribution and the State The precarious coalition between oligarchs and the working class could not rest exclusively on ideological cleavages; as with every hegemonic bloc, it needed economic growth in order to co-­opt the dominated classes (Jessop 1983; Porto 2020; Scott 1976). Export-­led growth, made possible by the 1997–2012 global commodity boom (Kolodii et al. 2018), provided the resources necessary for such co-­ optation: after the vertiginous fall of GDP in the 1990s (−8.9 per cent was the yearly average in 1990–1999), the average yearly growth in 2000–2008 was as high as 6.2 per cent. This did not fully compensate the previous ­fall – ­in fact the 1990 level has never been ­achieved – ­but the growth did create space for some sort of class compromise. One of the first socio-­economic measures taken by the new government was a radical increase of one-­time parental payment for each new-­born child. Its size, previously devalued by the hyperinflation of early 1990s, was increased to 22.6 times the living wage,9 making this payment the first major and direct evidence of the state’s redistribution role. Other welfare payments soon followed; the whole period in question was marked by consistently growing ‘social standards’ – minimum wage and other benchmarks that define the size of

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Figure 2.1.  Wage and Profit Share of GDP. Source: Derzhstat.

­ ensions and welfare payments, as well as wages in the public sector. p During this whole period, wage share of GDP was systematically higher than that of profit (Figure 2.1). Every new government in the unstable political conjuncture was pushed to further raise standards of living, on pain of being declared ‘anti-­popular’. Redistributionary rhetoric went together with communitarian rhetoric. This conjuncture had demobilizing effects on the masses. Mihai Varga (2011) shows how political liberalization in the 2000s did not lead to a politicization of workers in the form of explicit social contestation. Instead, the main drive even for industrial conflicts came from gifted political leaders like Yuliya Tymoshenko, or from the opposing ‘white-­blue’ elite networks (Kostiuchenko and Melnykovska 2019). Oligarchs, who had to underwrite the expansion of redistributionist policies in order to maintain political control, found the trade-­ off reasonable in the context of the continuing economic boom. Profitability of their assets, expressed as s/(c+v), remained high thanks to two factors: the exceptionally cheap price that they had paid for these assets and the lack of significant expenses on modernizing the capital equipment mostly built in the Soviet times. From

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2000 to 2014, the degree of deterioration of fixed capital steadily grew from 43.7 per cent to 83.5 per cent. In the peak year of 2007, investments in fixed capital were only twice as much as in 1994, the worst year in terms of economic prospects (Figure 2.2). A more urgent problem was connected to the import-­driven character of consumption in Ukraine. The growth of household incomes brought back permanent foreign trade deficit, after a short period of surplus in 1999–2005. The import of consumption goods was financed by the massive influx of capital from Western banks, attracted by high interest rates (Segura et al. 2009: 7). This external vulnerability was further aggravated by Russia’s hostile economic policies, which tried to stifle the ‘orange’ regime with high gas prices.

Economic Crises and Regime Changes The global crisis of 2008 hit Ukraine severely. The slump in commodity markets hit exporting industries, and GDP contracted by 15 per cent in 2009, making Ukraine one of the hardest hit countries. Simultaneously, the global liquidity crisis provoked a massive outflow of foreign capital from the country’s banking sector. The government had to negotiate a $16.5 billion loan from the IMF and devalue the national currency by 60 per cent. On the IMF’s demand, the government froze wages in the public sector and increased excise taxes, further contributing to the rising cost of living. This perfect storm for the government was aggravated by the split in the ‘orange’ elite bloc, which allowed Viktor Yanukovych to win the presidential elections of 2010. For the first time in Ukrainian history, a single political party came to dominate the country’s power structures: the new chairman of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions (PR), Mykola Azarov, became prime minister and distributed 2/3 of the cabinet positions to his party comrades. PR members also filled 90 per cent of all regional administrations. Later that year, the Constitutional Court reversed the political reform of 2004, re-­empowering the president. The new leader aimed at achieving stabilization by returning to the single pyramid informal patronage system of 1994–2004. In 2010, the Ukrainian economy started regaining its tempo. This was possible thanks to the rebound of global demand for steel and chemicals, as well as to domestic investments made in the course of organizing the European football championship in 2012. However, Russian natural gas prices kept growing, which undermined the budgets of energy-­intensive oligarchic industries as well as the state budget that subsidized gas for households. The Russian government

Figure 2.2.  Investments in fixed capital, 1994=100%. Source: Derzhstat.

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remained deaf to the pleas of the Ukrainian leadership, making all concessions conditional on Ukraine joining the Russia-­led Eurasian economic union and abandoning plans of signing a free trade agreement with the EU (Cadier 2014). This option was no more acceptable to Ukrainian oligarchs, competing with Russian counterparts, than agreeing to the IMF-­induced austerity. Yanukovych thus continued a middle way: refusing Russian geopolitical offers, initiating instead the most extensive ever association agreement with the EU in 2012, and looking for alternative sources of fuels, on the one hand, and refusing to liberalize the domestic gas market, on the other (Pirani 2021). Thanks to the quantitative easing programme of the US Federal Reserve, Ukraine could find cheap money with no strings attached by Russia or the IMF (Tooze 2018). However, Russia did not cease to promote its agenda. Starting from 2012, it launched a series of trade wars, blocking various Ukrainian imports: cheese, meat, dairy, confectionery, rolling stock, pipes. These measures were interspersed with official warnings against Ukraine signing a free trade agreement with the EU (Svoboda 2019). On the other hand, the EU made it clear that membership in the Russian customs union would be incompatible with a free trade agreement with the EU. Both partners occupied roughly equal shares in Ukraine’s trade balance, and it seemed to be impossible to sacrifice one for the sake of the other. This dilemma coincided with the end of the global commodity supercycle (Chim 2021): prices for all commodities in which Ukraine specialized started stagnating or falling no later than in 2012. The Ukrainian economy demonstrated zero growth in the second half of 2012, and the growth did not resume in 2013. The reduction of the state’s redistributional capacities happened in parallel to the growing consolidation of power in the hands of the president. This consolidation followed the template supplied by neighbouring Russia, whose president Vladimir Putin had begun his rule with building a strong ‘vertical of power’ (vertikal vlasti), formed on the basis of his ruling party. Similarly to Putin, Yanukovych also started distancing himself from the oligarchs, eager to become the independent and dominating centre of gravity rather than an arbiter between and political representative of existing ones. Upon gaining extensive constitutional powers, Yanukovych started accumulating assets of his own, building a group that came to be known as ‘The Family’ (Semya) (Matuszak 2012: 40–50). The net assets of his eldest son doubled from $63 million in 2011 to $121 million in 2012 (Kudelia 2014: 22). This shift from collective ­authoritarianism

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to personalized autocracy introduced a new pattern of sharing rents and state resources, antagonizing traditional oligarchs. Finally, the other element of the political configuration of the early 2010s was a growing identitarian polarization. Experiencing a crisis of legitimacy brought about by the worsening economic conjuncture, the ruling group chose to reinforce it with the help of identity politics (Korostelina 2013). Instead of moving away from the ethnonationalist policies of his predecessor, Yanukovych reversed the ideological state apparatus to promote the opposite, ‘East Slavic’ version of identity. The role of the politics of memory as the regulator of ongoing political conflicts was growing (Shevel 2014). A new language law passed by the ruling coalition in 2012 expanded the spheres of official use of Russian. It hardly had any influence on the real use of languages, but it mobilized society around an identity issue just months before the parliamentary elections. The far right ethnonationalist party Svoboda gained over 10 per cent of ­votes – ­a sensation facilitated by the party leadership’s constant presence on major pro-­governmental TV channels. Despite the economic problems, it was thought that Yanukovych could easily win a presidential runoff in 2015 against the Svoboda leader Oleh Tiahnybok. The ‘orange’ opposition, on its part, grew closer to the ultra-­ nationalists from Svoboda and ditched its traditional bland rhetoric of anti-­corruption in favour of Svoboda’s ethnolinguistic agenda. This corresponded to a genuine mood among a large portion of voters. Even if these people did not share the views of the nationalists, they still appreciated their ‘genuineness’ as opposed to the cynical world of big politics.

Conclusion The externally generated economic growth of Ukraine in the early twenty-­first century secured the legitimacy of the rule of oligarchy. When the resources feeding this growth started drying up in 2009 and especially in 2012, the ruling elite found a short-­term fix to reinforce its hegemony in the ideological polarization of society. This conjuncture can be called interstitial in several senses. It merged neoliberal global markets of commodities and finance with legacy post-­Soviet social mechanisms, regulating production and consumption. It was also shifting between different models of clientelistic organization of ­power – ­a single president-­centred pyramid and multiple pyramids competing in the field of parliamentary poli-

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tics. The interstitial state is a fitting description for the identitarian landscape of the country, whose elites had to balance between the two parts in order to stay on top. The event that brought about the final undoing of this conjuncture had to do with Ukraine’s interstitial position between two economic and political blocs. The shrinkage of the neutral space unravelled the brittle hegemony both at the ‘basis’ (exporting commodities in both directions) and at the ‘superstructure’ (conflict between the political projects associated with the two blocs).

Organic Crisis: 2014 and Afterwards In November 2013, Yanukovych’s refusal to sign the Association agreement with the EU at the last moment triggered protests in Kyiv. They grew in scale after the police tried to disperse them by force; during the winter of 2013–2014, the protest movement expanded and radicalized. Numerically minuscule but equipped with violent resources, far-­right groups managed to gain political prominence as the most militant part of the movement that otherwise had no clear ideological agenda (Ishchenko 2016). When the escalation of violence led to mass shootings, Yanukovych fled to Russia, and the ‘orange’ opposition leaders created an interim government. This is the short story of the movement, known as the Euromaidan in academia, as the Revolution of Dignity in the official discourse, and as the Maidan in common parlance (Hale 2015: 234–38). These events were not limited to Kyiv. Beyond the capital city, protests and occupations of administrative buildings were disproportionately concentrated in Western Ukraine. People from the Eastern regions were mobilized to participate in the ‘Anti-­Maidan’ by their employers in the public (biudzhetniki) and private (industrial workers) sectors. After the regime change, the Anti-­Maidan protests took root and were radicalized. Politicians on both sides kept forcing the polarization, presenting to the public a choice between ‘Nazis and bandits’ (Ryabchuk 2014). The international dimension of the conflict featured the US and Russia. The former was mostly engaged on the symbolic level, with the US secretary of state coming personally to distribute food among Euromaidan protesters. Russia’s engagement went beyond symbolic gestures: at an early stage of the protests, it offered Yanukovych a $15 billion loan and a gas discount without any conditions in terms of fiscal discipline (Svoboda 2019). When this aid failed to prevent the

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fall of Yanukovych, Russia covertly sent troops to annex Crimea and armed pro-­Russian separatists and deployed military instructors to the Donbas area. The snap presidential elections in May resulted in victory for Petro Poroshenko, a Russophone ‘orange’ oligarch with a very moderate political image. The new government had to deal with civil unrest, military conflict and the crumbling economy.

The New Structuring Divide The military political conflict has radically restructured the identitarian see-­saw that defined the pre-­Maidan conjuncture. Poroshenko’s victory in the first round of elections was made possible by the massive abstention in the heavily populated ‘white-­blue’ regions in the East and South. About 25 per cent of Yanukovych’s 2010 voters had been excluded from voting due to the ­conflict – ­their number is tantamount to all voters living in three Western regions. The new balance mathematically prevented a political force appealing primarily to South-­Eastern voters from winning elections. As a result, reintegration of the separatist-­held territories objectively ran against the interest of a ‘national democratic’ government aiming to consolidate power through selective enfranchisement (D’Anieri 2018). At the heart of the new hegemonic bloc that the elite strove to build lay the loyalty to the event of Euromaidan itself rather than a specific ideology. Personal presence at the protests converted into a sense of belonging to the political nation, becoming the chief Schmittian political criterion structuring the post-­Maidan Ukraine (Zhuravlev 2015). The new structuring divide, hence, lay between the ‘active’ citizenry loyal to Euromaidan (war veterans, civilian volunteers) and the rest of the population, whose main characteristic is ‘passivity’. Within the ‘active’ core, another divide separated partisans of liberal economic and social reforms supported by Western governments, on the one hand, and conservative nationalist forces, allied to the national bourgeoisie, on the other (Rakhmanov 2017: 66). Nationalist movements, previously marginal in mainstream politics, became an important element of both camps. Having built themselves into patronage pyramids on the national as well local levels, they were able to increase their influence dramatically, even if it did not translate into electoral success (Gomza and Zajaczkowski 2019; Gorbach and Petik 2016). Wielding substantial violent resources autonomously from the state, they assumed the role of entrepreneurs of political violence (Gorbach 2018). In the competition of mul-

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tiple patronage pyramids, the exploitation of the nationalist agenda becomes a political innovation that one can only ignore at one’s own peril: if one player refuses to use this tool, his competitors will use it against him (Ishchenko 2018: 7). Oligarchic networks have persisted despite the anti-­oligarchic narratives of Euromaidan (Kostiuchenko and Melnykovska 2019). Unlike the Orange Revolution, Euromaidan did not take even symbolic steps towards opening the economy to competition from foreign capital. In 2017, 62 per cent of the largest companies in Ukraine were owned by the domestic capital markets, compared to 29 per cent in Poland, 3 per cent in Hungary, and 0 per cent in Slovakia ­(Rakhmanov 2017: 62). The constitutional reform of 2014 and reshuffling of oligarchic groups (Melnykovska 2015) did not challenge the core regulatory principles of the ‘neopatrimonial democracy’ (Fisun 2016). The inefficient institutions of a weak state are a powerful obstacle on the way to building a legal-­rational democracy, but these inefficiencies in fact stabilize the configuration, allowing for a continuing political and economic domination without resort to outright violence (Matsiyevsky 2019).

Legitimation Crisis The military political crisis, to a great extent brought about by economic stagnation since 2012, in its turn provoked a fully-­fledged economic downfall. In addition to the collapsed access to the Russian market, Ukraine was facing a direct loss of industries situated in the war-­affected areas, indirect adverse consequences for supply chains, as well as the general strain that a military conflict puts on the economy. Eight billion USD, which Ukraine received from the IMF in 2014 and 2015, was not enough to prevent a drastic depreciation of the national currency by 70 per cent. In addition, the government had to agree to harsh austerity measures demanded by the IMF. The lifting of gas price caps led to a nearly tenfold hike in 2014–2016. This was an important blow to the regime’s legitimacy. Utility tariffs became one of the main political concerns of the population, along with the military conflict and far above language issues. Facing a legitimation crisis, the government raised the ‘social standards’ as soon as the economic context allowed, doubling the minimum wage in 2016. This led to an enormous growth of average real wages in 2016–2017 (Astrov et al. 2020). The other step consisted of ramping up the jingoist rhetoric. Following the logic of the

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post-­Maidan public sphere, Poroshenko took a harsh stance on the language issue, launched the ‘decommunization’ campaign and initiated the creation of an independent Ukrainian orthodox church. The main tagline of his presidential campaign in 2019 was ‘Language! Army! Faith!’. Despite the consolidated support of the ‘active’ segment of Ukrainian society over-­represented in the media, Poroshenko suffered a humiliating electoral defeat, losing to Volodymyr Zelenskyi, a comedian with no political experience. In the runoff with Poroshenko, he received an unprecedented 73 per cent of votes, erasing the geographical divide that had played such an important role for two decades. 25 per cent of Poroshenko’s votes were mostly concentrated in three Western regions. A few months later, the parliamentary elections brought a supermajority to Zelenskyi’s newly built non-­ideological party, crushing local notables who had relied on local patronage for votes in majoritarian districts (Kudelia 2019). The electoral purge of the ruling elite highlighted the organic crisis but did not show any ways out of it.

Rearticulation with Value Chains The hegemonic crisis went along with the deepening accumulation crisis. The deterioration of capital remained well above 50 per cent. The modernization that did take place was aimed at maintaining technologies from the late 1980s and minimizing input demand, rather than introducing new technologies or switching to output with greater value added. The share of metalworking facilities operating beyond their designated service life reached 65–70 per cent (Shatokha et al. 2020). Steel production in Ukraine reached its peak in 2007, after which the global economic crisis combined with the increase in global supply by newly built Chinese factories to minimize the share of Ukrainian steel. Ukrainian steelmakers responded by sliding downwards in the global value chains, increasing the share of unfinished products and raw materials in their exports. This amounted to a disarticulation of Ukraine from the global value chain of metallurgy, taking place via ‘the politics of disinvestment, devaluation, place-­making, and subjectmaking’ (Bair and Werner 2011: 990). Simultaneously, the Ukrainian economy articulated with other commodity chains, namely agricultural ones. The 2009 recession reversed ‘the industrialised vigorous eastern area and the agrarian western area, which lagged behind the east, into respectively an industrialised stagnant area and an agrarian growing area’ (Kallioras

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Figure 2.3.  Structure of Ukrainian exports, %. Source: Derzhstat.

and Tsiapa 2015: 89). The national economy has been reorienting towards grain production and export (see Figure 2.3).

Moving Out: Demographic Response to the Crisis The post-­Euromaidan crisis conjuncture has a demographic dimension. Having reached its historical peak of 52.2 million in 1993, by 2019 Ukrainian population had shrunk to 42.2 million. During this period, the share of people aged 60 and older had grown from 18.7 per cent to 23.4 per cent, while life expectancy was only 72 years. These trends were exacerbated by the lack of significant migratory population inflows, which offset natural decrease and help even out the top-­heavy demographic structure in superficially similar Western European countries. Instead of this, Ukraine experiences massive emigration of the working-­age population.10 CEE countries that joined the EU in 2004 have gone through a similar massive outflow of workforce, mending labour market deficits in Western Europe. Today, the Ukrainian workforce effectively liquidates these deficits for these countries’ labour markets. The majority of first-­time EU residence permits in 2018 were given to Ukrainians, most of them in Poland (Edwards 2020). After 1.2 million Poles left the country in 2002–2013, their places were taken by 1–2 million

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Ukrainians, who arrived in Poland in 2014–2019 (Growiec, Wyszynski and Strzelecki 2019). These unequal relations generate ‘migration rent’, which allows a receiving country to move upwards in global production chains and keep FDIs thanks to a large pool of foreign workers (Bastide 2019). Conversely, Ukraine has no source to compensate for the loss of its workforce, which was the fastest-­shrinking even before full-­scale war began in 2022 (PricewaterhouseCoopers 2019).

Conclusion The Euromaidan uprising was driven by an ideology valorizing civil society, small business ownership, the rule of law, committed activism, patriotism and the notion of ‘Europe’. These values lay at the core of the ideology on which the ruling elite attempted to build a new hegemonic bloc. Instead of public employees (biudzhetniki) and pensioners, directly dependent on the state, and employees of large Soviet-­built industrial enterprises, the new bloc was supposed to rely on the small and medium businessmen and farmers interested in building a legal–rational bureaucracy and in close cooperation with the EU. Instead of the permanent balancing between two politico-­ geographical identities, the new bloc would find stability by fully discarding one of them and definitively embracing the other. The ‘active citizens’ recruited from the ranks of strong civil society were supposed to become a new reservoir of the national elite, instead of oligarchs and corrupted bureaucrats. The failure of this project became evident soon enough. The liberal civil society turned out to be as weak as it had been previously: in 2018, 70.8 per cent of Ukrainians did not consider themselves ‘active citizens’ and saw no point in volunteering or had no time for it (Mostovaya and Rakhmanin 2018). On the other hand, Euromaidan has created political space for an ‘illiberal’ civil society on the ethnonationalist political flank. While this did provide an element of stability, it was achieved at the cost of alienating the population of the South-­East, sceptical of the Euromaidan values (Rish 2019), despite the self-­congratulatory declarations of a national unity finally achieved (Riabchuk 2015). The liberal wing of the Euromaidan hegemonic bloc turned out to be too weak to challenge the informal schemes of patronage regulating the Ukrainian economy. The shadow economy amounts to 46 per cent of Ukrainian GDP (ACCA 2017). The key industries are still monopolized by oligarchs, who export commodities and hide the

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lion’s share of their profits in offshore havens (Antonyuk et al. 2018; Faccio 2019). Crony capitalism is still the preferred term of the World Bank to characterize Ukraine (World Bank 2018). Ukraine is one of the few countries where no significant social group experienced growth in income during the postsocialist transformations. This lack of transition winners made the task of building a stable hegemony bloc dauntingly hard.

Conclusion Ukraine’s semiperipheral economy emerged out of a set of structural inequalities and dependencies, which defined the trajectory it took to fit into global markets. It is marked by tight interconnection of the domains of the economic and the political, and is exemplified by the term ‘oligarch’. An oligarch differs from a Weberian capitalist not only quantitatively (by the level of capital concentration) but also ­qualitatively – ­by his ability to command the nominally separate domains of politics and civil service, accumulating capital by converting it from one type to another. Extreme concentration of capital, poorly protected ownership rights and the proliferation of informal channels connecting the economic and the political were as much the outcome of structural factors as the result of conscious attempts to create a national bourgeoisie. It arose as a fusion of the paternalist industrial nomenklatura, interested in the survival of their enterprises, and of profit-­oriented entrepreneurs controlling supply chains and financial flows. As they concentrated a significant amount of industrial assets, their political clout grew, reaching the national scale, at which they entered a coherent political configuration centred on President Kuchma. This configuration was able to build a relatively durable hegemonic bloc by co-­opting employees of oligarchic industrial enterprises and public employees dependent on the government. Material resources for securing these ties were provided by the global commodity boom that started in the late 1990s. The resultant accumulation strategy relied on the use of material assets accumulated during the Soviet era. The use of offshore havens has allowed oligarchs not only to better protect their property rights but also minimize the volume of their fiscal contributions. These settings helped ensure a comfortable level of profitability. However, this satisficing strategy has set oligarchic industrial assets as well as public services on the track of constant underfinancing.

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Politically, the ruling neopatrimonial pyramid was promoting centrist technocratic attitudes. Over time, it faced a new ‘national democratic’ opposition representing the interests of ‘lesser’ oligarchs. This opposition got the upper hand in 2004, dismantled the single president-­centred pyramid and instituted parliamentary competition between various pyramids. In the public sphere, this competition articulated with the ethnolinguistic divide of the country, increasing the polarization with each electoral cycle. The end of the commodity boom in the early 2010s coincided with a number of other crises. Ethnolinguistic polarization reached unsustainable levels, threatening the very political system that relied on it; simultaneously, the system was undermined by the president’s attempts to centralize the neopatrimonial patronage dependencies into one pyramid, consolidating power and assets to the chagrin of oligarchs left behind. Finally, the interstitial geopolitical space between two competing projects of regional integration closed, putting an end to the era when the Ukrainian economy could combine multiple vectors in its foreign policy. The unstable politico-­economic conjuncture completely unravelled with the Euromaidan crisis and the military conflict that followed in 2014. The new balance of forces was still built on the principle of parliamentary competition of oligarchic patronage pyramids. However, it excluded the ‘East Slavic’ electorate from participation, assuming that a new hegemonic bloc could rely solely on the ‘ethnonationalist’ identity. The failure of attempts to construct a new hegemonic conjuncture on these premises became manifest during the presidential and parliamentary elections of 2019. The population excluded from the new hegemonic project rejected it by massively voting for a populist comedian, whose sole promise was to remove the old political elite. This crisis of legitimacy has reconfigured the political field yet again, pitting the atomized majority of ‘populists’ against the nationalist bloc, which did not renounce its claims to national leadership. Neither camp has offered a convincing hegemonic project capable of co-­opting important sections of society and identifying an accumulation strategy for the new global economic conjuncture. The full-­scale Russian invasion that began on 24 February 2022 took place in this context of interregnum, carrying with it a possibility of finally consolidating society behind a widely shared national project but also the menace of its complete undoing. How does the society function in the absence of a national project shared by the population? How do power blocs organize their domination on lower levels? What connections can be drawn between

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capital accumulation, power consolidation and legitimation, individual and group survival strategies, and cultural landscape? And how does the interaction between these processes produce populist politics in Ukraine? To answer these questions, I will first examine politico-­economic dynamics at the city level. In the following two chapters, I will trace the evolution of the post-­Soviet power bloc in Kryvyi Rih, a large industrial town in Eastern Ukraine.

Notes  1. ‘National democratic’ is an emic term of Ukrainian politics, where its meaning has little to do with the semantic load in other countries. It stems from the political struggle in the last years of the Soviet Union, when ‘democrats’ were discursively counterpoised by ‘communists’ and national liberation was constructed as synonymous with the democratic agenda. The term survived the conjuncture that brought it to life, remaining in use throughout most of the time period covered in this chapter.  2. Colloquial euphemism for ethnicity/natsionalnost, ‘the fifth line’ refers to the place it occupied in the passports of Soviet c­ itizens – ­the main identity document.  3. The regions that constitute today’s Western Ukraine belonged to different state formations than the rest of Ukraine for the larger part of their history. Being part of Austria-­ Hungary and Romania in the nineteenth century, they spent the interwar years in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania before being annexed by the Soviet Union in 1945.  4. Indeed, Ukraine was not only the top food producer for the whole Soviet Union, but it also accounted for 40.8 per cent of all Soviet pig iron production, 34.2 per cent of steel, 45.5 per cent of iron ore, 33.5 per cent of steel pipes. However, most of Ukraine’s industrial output, being semi-­finished produce, was shipped to other republics for final assembly; finished goods constituted less than 20 per cent, and only 17.9 per cent of Ukrainian-­produced goods were consumed in Ukraine (Halchynskyi 2018: 111). Ukraine was the biggest recipient of hugely underpriced energy from Russia and Turkmenistan (Dabrowski and Antczak 1996). By 1991, Ukraine’s highly energy intensive industry paid 3 per cent of the world market price for Russian oil (Van Zon 1998: 609). The country’s economy relied on these implicit subsidies, as well as on the highly integrated production and distribution chains inside the USSR.  5. The initial push came from the neoliberal government of Russia that liberalized prices in January 1992. Partial liberalization of prices in Ukraine was offset by a large number of administered and regulated prices: energy, utilities, rent, basic foodstuffs (Dabrowski and Antczak 1996). However, the price shock was real enough to lead to massive non-­payments: 24 per cent of products manufactured in Ukraine in 1992 were shipped without payment (Yushchenko 2000: 101–2).  6. Shady traders helped industrial factories to keep producing, by selling them inputs dearly and buying cheaply their output (subsequently reselling it dearly abroad). This was all the easier in a liquidity-­poor environment: ‘Barter trade constituted some 42 percent of industrial trade in 1997–98. In-­kind wages increased from 6 percent to 13 percent during the period, while netting out (the mutual cancellation of payments and taxes due) constituted one-­quarter of consolidated budget revenues’ (De Menil 2000: 63).  7. Political legitimacy of the figure of ‘red director’ can be seen from the persisting relevance of the epithet ‘strong (or sound) owner’ (krepkiy khoziaistvennik, mitsnyi

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h­ ospodarnyk), coined in local electoral campaigns of the 1990s. It underlines experience and wisdom in procuring and managing resources for the sake of the ­commonweal – ­even if in an undemocratic or corrupt way.  8. This term, dating from early 2000s, denotes the non-­leftist opposition to Kuchma, distinguishing it from the Progressive Socialist, Communist and Socialist parties, considered non-­democratic by virtue of their ideology.  9. ‘Living wage’ is an imperfect translation of the emic term prozhytkovyi minimum, literally ‘living minimum’. This concept coexists with minimum wage and minimum pension in the Ukrainian legal field. It can be higher than the latter two; instead of direct regulation of citizens’ incomes, it rather serves as a yardstick for determining the size of various social payments. It is also a moral yardstick, even if compromised: the practical function of prozhytkovyi minimum in budgeting prevents the state from updating it in a comprehensive manner, and it remains systematically undervalued. 10. 25% of the economically active population left to work abroad during the economic downturn of 2014–2016 (Vlasiuk 2017). In the short-­term perspective, this helped Ukraine cope with its structural account deficit: in 2017, remittances inflow reached 8.4 per cent of the GDP, being far greater than the FDI volume (Libanova 2019: 322). However, in the long run the massive outflow of labour force makes a return on the track of economic growth ever less probable.

PART II

_ The City

In the first part of this book, I presented the key concepts I am going to rely on and systematized the politico-­economic and historical context in which subsequent chapters will unfold. In this second part, I will focus on politico-­economic transformations in a large industrial city in South-­Eastern Ukraine, Kryvyi Rih. In Chapter 3, I historicize Kryvyi Rih’s politico-­economic landscape. Analysing local political developments, I show that a form of hyper-­politicization coexists with ­technocracy – ­the belief in a politically neutral governance of embedded public officials guided by their expertise and distant from all ideologies. This, I argue, gave birth to a city-­level hegemonic bloc. In Chapter 4, I analyse how the relationship between the city elite and its working-­class population is expressed through the physical infrastructure of the city: urban transit, housing and utilities. Over the three decades that I analyse, these three areas experienced significant changes: certain transportation modes disappeared while others emerged; the city stopped expanding and housing projects were halted; water pipelines decayed. These material changes have played a crucial role in the changing political landscape of the city.

— Chapter 3 —

From a Military Outpost to an Oligarchic Stronghold

_ Kryvyi Rih in Imperial Geographies The steppes of Southern Ukraine, controlled by the Crimean Khanate in the early modern period, were traditionally framed as the Turkic ‘Wild Field’ (Dyke Pole), external to Ukraine proper. The borderland between the two zones was inhabited by ­Cossacks – ­a militarized social corporation whose legitimacy and claims to political autonomy were built on their ethos of frontier guardians. Their autonomous polity (Zaporizka Sich), which included the area of what is now Kryvyi Rih, was made obsolete by the Russian expansion into the previously Ottoman-­controlled lands (Kappeler 2003). The history of Kryvyi Rih (Krivoy Rog in Russian; literally ‘crooked horn’) begins in 1775, when Russian authorities established a post relay to communicate with the newly conquered areas (Tiamin 2009). A military settlement was established next to it (Figure 3.1). By the mid-­nineteenth century, Kryvyi Rih counted 3,600 residents, most of whom were state-­owned bonded peasants (Shatalov 2021). Besides ‘civilizing’ the new territories, the Russian empire launched the development of export-­oriented agriculture based on coerced cash-­crop labour (Boatcă 2014; Lago 2009). State interventionism and active inclusion into the global economic periphery marked the development of Kryvyi Rih even more after the discovery of iron ore in its vicinity. In 1880, in the midst of the Long Depression of 1873–1896, local entrepreneur Alexander Pol managed to attract French capital in a joint venture to develop these deposits. Other foreign investors followed, driven

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Figure 3.1.  A French map of the Russian-Ottoman borderlands in 1769. The future location of Kryvyi Rih, marked with a spot, is situated in the steppes, controlled by nomads and Cossacks, far from all ‘civilized’ settlements. Source: Vkraina.com.ua.

by the quest for profitability. By 1913, the volume of iron ore extraction in Kryvyi Rih accounted for 74 per cent of aggregate extraction in the Russian empire. The share of foreign capital in the region’s steel industry was 78 per cent (McKay 1967: 243). Its economic domination combined with the political domination of the Russian empire equated to highly profitable dependent capitalism, reliant on a coercive state, protectionist policies and low production costs. The economic boom in Kryvyi Rih took the form of an encounter between ethnicized expertise and management (all white-­collar positions in the mining and steel enterprises were occupied by Poles) and migrant unskilled labour on a colonized terra nullius.1 Wages offered by mines and factories were high enough to attract a peasant workforce from distant regions into this area plagued by chronic labour shortage. Relations between the management and the workforce were characterized by paternalism, equally typical for Russia and Western Europe in that period: the employer provided consumption options, organized the leisure activities of the workers and managed the social reproduction of the workforce.

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The revolution of 1917 excluded Kryvyi Rih from global capital circuits, but the importance of administrative decisions taken by the political centre in Russia remained. In 1934, the party-­state opened a new metalworking integrated mill (Kryvorizhstal); in the process of this construction, the town population grew from 22.7 thousand in 1920 to 212.9 thousand in 1941 (Tiamin 2009: 264). In the postwar decades, the local growth accelerated even further.2 New extraction technologies led to the construction of five mining and concentrating mills (GOKs) to develop lean ore. The restored and expanded Kryvorizhstal inaugurated new production assets every year; in 1974, the factory launched the world’s largest blast furnace. Soviet factory-­centred urbanization gave birth to the concept of a ‘city-­forming enterprise’ (gradoobrazuyushchee predpriyatie). As well as providing jobs, many attributes of city life were partly or fully provided and maintained by this major industrial enterprise, including roads, housing, household utilities, kindergartens, community centres, parks, sports facilities, hospitals and shops (on the evolution of the term industrial enterprise, see Collier 2011: 90–102). The party-­ state directed Soviet modernity through industrial branches rather than through city-­planning institutions and local councils. Collective life was conceived as a space of total planning, and it is with such a conception that Kryvyi Rih, like so many other Soviet settlements, became the city it is today. For example, gender disparities were evened out by building shoemaking and wool-­weaving factories to provide jobs for the wives of miners and metalworkers. Kryvyi Rih’s importance for the economy of the whole USSR, combined with the prestige of industrial labour, gave birth to the popular narrative of it being a ‘toiler city’ (gorod-truzhenik) and ‘the nation’s iron heart’ (zheleznoe serdtse strany). This narrative was confirmed by distribution policies, which reserved special treatment for Kryvyi Rih. Within the city, this moral economy privileged male miners and metallurgists, extolled as the builders of the national wealth, whereas other professions were relegated to various lower ranks. Two less evident hierarchies were made up of people from rural backgrounds and criminals. Firstly, the coexistence of Russophone populations arriving from afar with Ukrainian speakers from adjacent rural areas produced a linguistic hierarchy. Everyone knew both Ukrainian and Russian, but the former was implicitly associated with rural backwardness, whereas the latter was perceived as the language of modernity, industry and development. The official press was printed in Ukrainian, but high social status correlated with the usage of Russian in everyday communication (see Derluguian 2005

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for similar hierarchies in the Soviet Caucasus). Secondly, the use of forced convict labour in postwar construction gave birth to the widespread myth of Kryvyi Rih as the city of (hereditary) criminals. The convict colonies that did exist have been blown out of proportion in the popular imagination, much to the disdain of local historians (Honchar 2019b, 2019a). This produced the additional expectation of local masculine roughness (on top of similar expectations associated with the industrial working class) and with it the subjective importance of using cultural capital as a tool for distinction among the dangerous criminal masses. Kryvyi Rih reached the end of the Soviet era as a model city. Centred on gigantic industrial undertakings, it took pride in its working-­class identity, which was validated by the material redistribution policies of the state. Though a multiethnic and bilingual space of encounter for uprooted populations from across the Soviet Union, it was nevertheless structured by class, status and linguistic hierarchies.

Subsistence and Survival in the 1990s The collapse of the Soviet Union was catalysed by a massive wave of industrial action that persisted in the first years of independent Ukraine. The strike wave that emerged in 1989 shook the repertoire of interactions between local elites and workers. It notably redefined the political architecture of Kryvyi Rih.

Striking Difference: Miners Reshaping Local Politics The late Soviet strike movement that began in 1989 was the most pronounced in the coal industry (Clarke 1993c; Clarke and Fairbrother 1993b). The ore mines of Kryvyi Rih joined the movement at a comparatively late stage and rather reluctantly. The greater share of the social wage in the steel industry meant steel workers were more pacified than the coal miners (Crowley 1997). A push towards greater militancy came when the Soviet government partially deregulated prices, putting in danger social investments of the enterprises: ‘Throughout the Ukraine, iron and steel works were faced with the prospect of sharp cutbacks in house building, coupled with reduced earnings’ (Filtzer 1991: 995–96). Therefore, when the Kryvyi Rih mines began a strike of solidarity with the Donbas in 1990, their demands were very locally and

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sectorally specific. The strike committee wanted full economic independence for industrial enterprises (which should keep their foreign currency revenues) and to Kryvyi Rih (which should keep all the taxes collected in the city). Their agenda revolved around the autonomy and privileges of specific enterprises and territories. Kryvyi Rih authorities sympathized with these demands. The paternalist turn that the strike movement took made it quite different from the conflict-­laden atmosphere in the Donbas. A year later, in 1991, the Kryvyi Rih trade unions scolded the ‘anti-­worker movement’ of the Donbas miners, whose industrial action was threatening the steelmaking industry in Kryvyi Rih. Local authorities were firmly in control, presenting themselves as guarantors of local workers’ particularist interests and distancing themselves from troublemakers representing a different region and a different economic sector. The situation changed with the first significant price hike in early 1992. It provoked a wildcat strike that quickly paralysed most of the city’s mines (Figure 3.2). The strikers requested, and successfully obtained, the resignation of the city mayor, but did not stop at this: they demanded consumer prices be brought down, to allow the mines to keep their export revenues and to elevate their wage fund. The interim city leadership and the mine directors supported the strikers, blaming the new taxes recently introduced by the Ukrainian government: governmental regulations skewed the market in favour of enterprises with little in the way of a ‘social sphere’. The need to maintain the paternalist social wage system was an undisputed conviction, shared by the workers and the industrial managers. As the chief provider of livelihood, the enterprise needed to be liberated from the fiscal yoke. At the same time, the state had to aid the same enterprises and to rein in consumer prices. This stance is consistent with merit-­based distribution: the ‘toiler city’ should not be measured by the same standards as less productive areas and economic sectors. The strike lasted almost a month and only ended after the presidential decree introduced important tax exemptions. A new power bloc emerged: born out of workers’ militancy, it affirmed the domination of local industrial elites, who established themselves as the workers’ legitimate representatives and redirected their demands against the new state. It presented itself as politically ­neutral – ­that is, as relying on the embedded expertise of local industrialists rather than on an abstract political programme. This new formation proclaimed city-­wide solidarity against external forces and self-­sufficiency as the main survival mechanism.

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Figure 3.2.  Striking miners holding the banner: ‘The Lenin mine will stand till the end’. Source: Shakhtar Kryvbasu, 29 February 1992.

The recombined city elite had to prove its legitimacy in the face of new conflicts. Encouraged by the miners’ example and embittered by new price hikes, healthcare workers and teachers started their own strikes. The municipal newspaper responded along the lines of the

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new power bloc’s ideology. Laying all blame on the national government, it added: ‘you can only count on thy neighbours. That is, on the city authorities. If they succeed in convincing enterprise directors to give some money for teachers, share some produce to barter for their sake, this will be a real bird in the hand, at least temporarily’ (ChH, 17 March 1992).3 The City Council publicly sent an angry telegram to the central government and asked the national parliament to raise wages; they also mobilized local resources for a one-­off handout to the striking teachers and medics. The new mayor, Yuriy Liubonenko, managed to co-­opt not only the traditionally privileged industrial workforce but also the underprivileged workers of the social reproduction industries. The period of 1989–1992 in Kryvyi Rih was extremely politicized in the sense of mass involvement in power struggle and decision-­ making. The paradox of this politicization is that it refused to recognize itself as such, hiding struggles for recognition and redistribution behind the apolitical language of technocratic necessities. Monetary concessions gained in these struggles did not last long in the hyperinflationary environment. More important was the set of principles (self-­subsistence and mutual aid within the moral community of the city) and ad-­hoc solutions (labour hoarding and non-­monetary transactions intermingling production with social reproduction) that emerged together with the new power configuration.

Debt and Barter: Normalized Emergency One of the principal means to rein in the socio-­economic chaos and hyperinflation of the 1990s was barter. It started in the energy sector, with manufacturing enterprises bartering for coal and oil for electricity, but it also spread to other markets. Kryvyi Rih’s main enterprises were kept afloat by in-­kind exchange with partners in Ukraine and abroad: the share of barter deals in their trade oscillated between 62 per cent and 95 per cent in 1996. The demonetized exchange triggered a massive fiscal debt crisis. Receiving no tax income from its main taxpayers, the City Council was unable to finance the running expenses of schools, hospitals, kindergartens and other public entities. In order to avoid insolvency, it came up with convoluted schemes, sometimes involving more than five parties, in which the enterprises’ fiscal debts were offset in exchange for resources they provided to local public organizations. The circuit of fiscal and debt obligations did not leave the city and remained in the cashless form.

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The ad-­hoc fixes, introduced to survive the extreme economic conditions of the 1990s and seen as an anti-­market pathology by liberal economists, were celebrated locally as manifestations of the true capitalist spirit. The values of autonomy and self-­esteem were articulated by the imperative of ‘hustling’ (krutitsia) – making do in the hostile economic environment. In Kryvyi Rih, the barter economy provided a vitally important economic survival fix for the local community and thereby legitimated the local elite as smart patrons able to take care of their clientèle even in the hardest times. After the relative stabilization of the national currency and the beginning of economic growth, the government gradually eliminated barter schemes, but their legacy lived on. Important Kryvyi Rih enterprises that had previously accumulated debts now used them as leverage, forcing creditors to accept the continuation of unequal partnership. Barter relations stayed even longer in the enterprises’ relations with their employees: wage arrears were still paid back with consumption goods and food or offset with workers’ own debts for utility payments. The system of in-­kind distribution regulated by informal claims reinforced patron–client links on various levels. These relations were centred on the figure of an omnipotent boss who provided for his clients’ livelihood in exchange for political loyalty. The unmaking of state-­centred welfare infrastructures and connections reinforced the ‘city-­forming enterprise’ as the sole actor responsible for the well-­being of ‘its’ city or district. Besides traditional goods and services, trade unions started massively distributing land plots. Growing vegetables individually was a feat of private initiative celebrated by the local press, who contrasted this manifestation of the new capitalist spirit with the old ways of asking for things from the powers that be. Enterprises also intensified food production themselves, for distribution among labour collectives. Factories provided other elements of livelihood too: coal for heating, coupons for free rides on public transport, housing. Industrial enterprises in Kryvyi Rih diversified into the production of food, beverages, furniture, shoes and other consumption goods for their dependent populations. After the end of the economic emergency of the 1990s, enterprises shed the most burdensome ‘social’ assets: housing and urban infrastructure, schools, hospitals, shops. They also curtailed non-­core production activities. The ‘social sphere’ was redefined to keep the enterprises’ social commitments financially viable but morally adequate. These relations were typical for the post-­Soviet Ukraine,

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establishing the political domination of ‘city-­forming enterprises’ over ‘monotowns’. However, Kryvyi Rih was too large and had too many important enterprises to let one of them establish such a monopoly. Its power bloc comprised all major enterprises but was headed by an unaligned bureaucrat, the mayor Liubonenko. His task was to determine projects of city-­wide importance that required the participation of ‘sovereign’ directors beyond their conventional area of competence. Thus, in 2000 the mayor mobilized all industrial enterprises for a massive renovation of the city for its 225th anniversary. In exchange for repairing city roads and façades, they were promised debt restructuring. Those who refused to comply were threatened with exclusion from informal arrangements. Singling out laggard enterprises, a deputy mayor noted: ‘Such an attitude to the common cause can be interpreted as a refusal to take part in it, even though the city did them favours (yshlo nazustrich) and still does, so far. Nevertheless, I am sure that conclusions will be drawn’ (ChH, 22 April 2000). In the 1990s, this informal cooperation among the city’s elites ensured a certain level of protection against extreme macroeconomic conditions. The city came to be viewed as a moral community, where the City Council and enterprise managers shared the responsibility for meeting the social needs of the population. This community also included a new social group, namely small private businesses. However, having little resources to offer and presenting little political value, they were incorporated on rather unfavourable terms, remaining on the periphery of the bloc. Another peripheral actor was the central state, in opposition to which the ruling elite articulated the unity of the city.

Conclusion The wave of strikes in the early 1990s, upholding the moral economy of distribution based on deservedness and autonomy, dealt a blow to the typical Soviet configuration of the political elite in Kryvyi Rih. The local elite regrouped to face the challenges of the new economic and political climate. The new mayor established himself as a khoziain, ‘the master’ of the city (Collier 2011), by coordinating activities of the core enterprise leaders. The latter commanded resources otherwise unavailable in a situation of limited central state capacity and hyperinflation. Non-­monetary forms of exchange that proliferated in the new conjuncture turned out to be even more embedded in the local

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s­ ociopolitical fabric than in the centralized and rationalized Soviet economy. Factories expanded their economic activities and started to resemble self-­sufficient Roman villas or ‘suzerainties’ (Humphrey 2002) in an attempt to secure a diversified inflow of income and ensure the continued employment of ‘their’ population (see Crowley 1997). The latter, in turn, depended on the factories not only for their employment but for many other dimensions of their livelihood pertaining to social reproduction. These embedded relations were reinforced on the city level, where the City Council coordinated tasks that went beyond the sphere of responsibility of a single enterprise. These relations were celebrated as manifestations of the new spirit of market economy, understood as self-­reliance and inventiveness. This bloc also managed to integrate the interests of those who were not included in direct relationship with the enterprises that sprang up in the centre of the new coalition, namely public sector workers (biudzhetniki). Having little direct influence on their incomes, the city coalition mounted pressure on the central government, integrating the agenda of biudzhetniki with that of the ‘city-­forming’ enterprises. What resulted was the construction of city as moral community, founded on the values of mutual aid, represented by the legitimate elite and opposed to external actors.

Privatization and Political Recombination The moral community of the city was able to sustain the Kryvyi Rih economy in the most difficult period and to bring about a new economic upsurge thanks to the unceasing struggle with the central government for special treatment and to the changing global commodity markets. However, this new economic climate prompted further transformations, eventually unmaking the post-­Soviet city hegemonic bloc and building a new one. Large industrial entities were privatized in Ukraine much later than in most neighbouring countries. This process was pushed ahead by the central government, against the resistance of the local elite. In the late 1990s, mining enterprises of Kryvyi Rih were turned into joint stock companies. Their shares, initially distributed among labour collectives, were concentrated and traded by anonymous commercial entities in opaque ways, while a certain share remained in the hands of the state. It was not easy to understand who exactly owned one GOK or another at any given moment. After numerous violent conflicts, by the mid-­2000s most of the city’s mining industry ended up

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under the control of Rinat Akhmetov, a Ukrainian oligarch and the owner of the Metinvest corporation. Kryvorizhstal, the giant steel mill, was bought by Lakshmi Mittal, the British-­Indian steel magnate. The previous centralized politico-­economic system characterized by public ownership was unmade, and the new economic landscape was structured by private owners. The local elite’s monolithic unity gradually unwound, pulled apart by the centrifugal forces of capitalist competition. It was not only the organizational structure of the local power bloc but also its ideology that underwent a transformation.

The Arrival of Politics ‘The overwhelming majority of Kryvyi Rih residents are ideologically situated in a so-­called grey area. That is, they would like their elects to support capitalism with elements of socialism or, vice versa, socialism with speckles of capitalism.’ This is how a journalist of the municipal newspaper described the dominant ideology in 1997. The city-­wide poll published in the newspaper showed a shared reluctance to support any explicitly formulated ‘political’ narrative, preferring instead a syncretic set of ‘universal’, common-­sense values rising above ideologies. This lay ideology was reinforced by political elites, who shaped it into a technocratic centrist vision. The locally elected members of parliament were such self-­described centrists, constantly complaining about both communists and nationalists, whose idle talk was nothing but an obstacle to ‘real work’. The hegemonic confluence of an apolitical business-­like attitude and loyalty to the city was parsimoniously formulated by the member of parliament Vadim Gurov; when asked about his political sympathies, he replied that he ‘belongs to the party called Kryvbas’.4 The technocratic ideology of ‘real deeds’ persisted after the beginning of the economic growth and kept prevailing in local politics after the Orange Revolution. However, the political reconfigurations on the national level and the privatization of local industry challenged this monopoly, starting from the parliamentary elections of 2006. Two general directors representing three privatized GOKs (Oleksandr Vilkul and Volodymyr Piven) and the leader of the PMGU city chapter Anatoliy Makarenko decided to run on the lists of the oppositional Party of Regions (PR), financed by the new owners of these enterprises. Makarenko explained that ‘today, unions find it easier to reach understanding with the owners and management of the enterprises than with the

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government that refuses to sign the 2006 general rate agreement as suggested by us’. Vilkul expanded the criticism of the government for raising electricity and railway tariffs and otherwise increasing the fiscal pressure on industrial enterprises, leaving them no funds to modernize equipment. The old local elite bloc, formed around the slogan of financial autonomy and redistribution channelled through enterprises, was being recreated in the new conditions, this time better aligned with the political and economic bloc on the national level. This alignment required a common ideological language, something that had been missing from the more sporadic relations between the autonomist city bloc and the central government in the previous conjuncture. Such a language was gradually borrowed from the identity-­laden politics at the national level, where the Party of Regions reinvented itself as the socially protective defender of Russian language and Orthodox faith. PR’s national projects taken to Kryvyi Rih by Oleksandr Vilkul were called ‘[Second World War] Veteran’, ‘Childhood protection’, ‘Regions youth’ and ‘Protection of Orthodoxy’. The penetration of the new identity politics did not go unchallenged by the traditional elite. In June 2006, PR started a nation-­wide campaign against the Ukrainian military’s joint manoeuvres with NATO forces in Crimea. Its factions in local councils were rubberstamping the town in question as a ‘NATO-­free area’ with a protected Russian language status. Liubonenko resisted this decision in Kryvyi Rih, arguing that these issues were for parliament, and the prosecutor’s office would contest such a decision in court. Saying that he would vote against the declaration, the mayor added that the local council was the place to solve economic, not political, issues; as an example of the proper burning issue, he pledged to resist the increase in utility tariffs in Kryvyi Rih. Vilkul retorted that the language issue was part of the party’s programme, approved by voters, and hence an important issue to push at every level. That summer, he also organized the installation of four memorial crosses at the entry points to Kryvyi Rih, helped the local orphanage, repaired a bridge that would allow a local woman (related to a heroic tank commander who had participated in the liberation of Kryvyi Rih in 1944) to regularly attend her local church and was decorated with an honorary badge of the Orthodox church. By the end of that year, Oleksandr Vilkul and his father Yuriy had firmly entered the informal pool of the city elite. The list of notables whose New Year greetings were published by the municipal newspa-

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per consisted of the mayor Liubonenko, prime minister Yanukovych, the head of the regional administration Deeva, head of the regional council Vilkul, and the member of parliament Vilkul. From then on, only two ­people – ­Liubonenko and ­Vilkul – ­officially greeted residents of Kryvyi Rih on lesser but more frequent occasions: Unity Day, Kryvyi Rih Liberation Day, Motherland Defender’s Day, Women’s Day, the Day of Municipal Services, the Day of Folk Art, the Day of Security Service of Ukraine, and the Day of Interior Troops. The number of Second World War-­related memorial dates in the official calendar reached a level previously unknown: in 2007, the official newspaper celebrated or mourned the anniversaries of the liberation of Kryvyi Rih; the liberation of the Dnipropetrovsk region; the liberation of Ukraine; the beginning of the war; the end of the war; the ‘Day of the Partisans’ Glory’; the conference of Kryvyi Rih veterans; the blockade of Leningrad; and a local mass execution by the Nazis. The elections that followed reinforced the domination of PR in Kryvyi Rih: the party had gained around half of all votes in 2007, and in 2010 63 per cent of local voters supported Viktor Yanukovych at the presidential elections. Oleksandr Vilkul, who became a new regional governor, also reinforced the Christian Orthodox topic by making Kryvyi Rih the first city in Ukraine to celebrate the ‘Day of Love, Family, and Fidelity’ – the Orthodox attempt to substitute Saint Valentine’s Day. The remaking of the local elite was completed in the autumn of 2010, when Liubonenko refused to run for a fifth mayoral mandate. Yuriy Vilkul became the new mayor, endorsed by all Ukrainian-­ owned local core enterprises. His position as the head of the regional council was taken over by Yevheniy Udod, a Metinvest manager from Kryvyi Rih. The PR majority centred around the Vilkuls and connected to Akhmetov dominated not only the city council but the regional power structures as ­well – ­reversing traditional power relations between Kryvyi Rih and Dnipropetrovsk (Shkarpova 2013). The new power bloc was included in a new national pyramid of patronage on beneficial terms. Despite the clear ideologization, the new local elite formation presented itself as a pragmatic political force, contrary to the ‘orange’ opposition, allegedly obsessed with language and history issues. Even when identitarian themes of the Orthodox faith, the Russian language and Second World War commemoration came to dominate the local political discourse, they were still presented as a default common-­sense and non-­political position.

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The resilience of the ‘Vilkuls clan’ has been significantly weakened in the post-­Euromaidan period. In the mayoral elections of late 2015, Vilkul almost lost to a local grassroots activist, a biology professor allied with a national liberal party Samopomich. After these elections, Akhmetov’s Opposition Bloc, headed by Vilkul (Ogushi 2020), lost the absolute political monopoly it had enjoyed since 2006: it gained less than 40 per cent of votes, and the new city council was composed of seven parties, an unprecedented diversity. However, the incumbent elite bloc managed to remain in power by co-­opting two other factions in an informal coalition. Threatened with failing legitimacy in 2014–2016, the ruling faction was able to marginalize the opposition and retain its dominant position.

Material Co-optation The material basis of the local elite’s hegemony could not stay the same after the change of ownership and alignment with actors external to the city. Mechanisms of economic coordination involving local industrial giants had to change in order to accommodate the new realities while still upholding the power of the political elite. From the informally regulated mobilization economy of the 1990s, the new elite switched to a more formalized partnership with the city and privatized industrial enterprises. In 2011, the total value of such ‘cooperation agreements’ reached 45.5 million UAH, of which 15 million were pledged by AMKR. The annual cost of the cooperation for AMKR remained the same until 2015. Metinvest, on its part, donated 20 million UAH in 2011, 40 million in 2012, 30 million in 2013 and in 2014. Other enterprises were giving less: in 2012, YuGOK chipped in 10.3 million UAH, Sukha Balka two million, HeidelbergCement only 0.5 million UAH. The same amounts were set as targets in the following years as well. The money thus obtained was spent on projects such as tram rails refurbishment, street renovations, embellishment of parks, improving sports facilities in schools, repairing roads and bridges, patching roofs, purchasing medical equipment and installing computers in schools. The list of ‘partners’ grew, including even smaller enterprises that were willing to spend some money in order to establish good informal relations with the city authorities: in 2015, the local Volkswagen Centre joined the programme, pledging 845,000 UAH. Despite the significantly narrowed range of coercion mechanisms at the disposal of local authorities, enterprises decide to cooperate because participation is rewarded with tax leniency. The land fee

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(plata za zemliu) is an important source of income for local budgets in Ukraine, reaching up to 35–40 per cent of total incomes in some cities. It should be especially large in the case of Kryvyi Rih, given the vast spaces occupied by industrial enterprises: 16,000 hectares, or 37 per cent of the total city area (43,000 hectares). However, the local elite has been systematically keeping land tax rates for the mining and metalworking industry at very low levels, arguing that otherwise the vast land mass owned by these enterprises would ruin them. In 2010, the changes in national laws obliged the City Council to raise the basic rate from 1.09 to 2.40 UAH per square metre; after long negotiations, the rate was raised to 1.50 UAH ($0.19), with subsequent raises promised but not specified. Even after this raise, at the peak of global metal prices, combined land fee payments of all mining and metallurgic enterprises in Kryvyi Rih in 2011 amounted to a meagre $29 million, or 9.7 per cent of the city budget. Another external push to raise the fees came in 2013: according to the new tax code, the rate had to rise from 1.50 to 7.05 UAH/m². However, the city council was allowed to introduce a diminisher (ponyzhuyuchyi koefitsient). Instead of the potential fivefold increase, the most profitable exporting industry’s land fees only increased by 24 per cent in absolute terms in 2014, and in fact fell by 37 per cent when one takes into account the 197.3 per cent devaluation of the national currency that happened during that year. In 2017, parliament passed a law drafted by a member of Akhmetov’s Opposition Bloc, which introduced a 0.25 coefficient for mining enterprises. Thus, informal and flexible contributions to local ‘development projects’, negotiable each year with the vykonkom (executive committee of the City Council, which holds the real power), are exchanged for tax discounts of a different order of magnitude. This scheme dramatically reduces the amount of funds available to finance the needs of the city: in 2019, the funds that were thus lost amounted to 270 million UAH, or approximately the annual cost of the city’s social aid programme (Khomenko 2019). At the same time, this gives the mayor efficient power leverage over privately owned local companies, thus maintaining the informal mechanisms of elite cohesion. Both principal parties to this ­pact – ­the mayor and the corporations owning the ­enterprises – ­are able to gain political capital, presenting their charitable contributions as proof of their continued embeddedness. This policy allows the local elite to efficiently co-­opt the dominated groups in its hegemonic bloc, antagonistic towards the central state and discursively founded on the premises of paternalist solidarity. In order to prevent the passing of a draft law that would

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increase rent payments for mining industries, Metinvest and AMKR mobilized their workers to protest: allegedly, the ‘killer law’ threatened all the cherished citywide and corporate social programmes (Gdanskaia 2019). The presidential elections of 2019 introduced new threats to the stability of the local power bloc. The new president Zelenskyi, who obtained an extremely large vote in his native Kryvyi Rih, sent hostile messages to the mayor Vilkul on his first visit to the city. When the election campaign time came, Zelenskyi’s party The Servant of the People (SN) allied with Akhmetov (Bratushchak 2020) against the Vilkuls. Their joint candidate was Dmytro Shevchyk, the CEO of TsGOK known as a pious Orthodox notable, who had joined SN. The promises of Shevchyk were clear: a new, more transparent and formalized professional managerial elite; renovation of infrastructure following examples of other towns fully dominated by Metinvest; continuing commitment to the Orthodox values; and a general renewal as promised by Zelenskyi’s political project. The incumbent elite, on its part, had made a bet on an extension of the tried and tested paternalist policies. Kostiantyn Pavlov, the long-­ time associate of Yuriy Vilkul who represented the incumbent team when Vilkul withdrew for health reasons, promised political continuity against the threat of an overhaul initiated by outsiders. He also promised to triple the size of the annual monetary aid to every city resident (from 500 to 1,500 UAH, or 50 euros) and to make the municipal public transport free for everyone. The flashy redistributionary promises went together with the more traditional set of political tools at the disposal of a post-­Soviet city mayor. Almost all these tools are visible in a photo taken on the dawn of the Victory Day celebration in 2021 and published on the website of the vykonkom: Pavlov and Vilkul are leading a procession to lay flowers at a Second World War monument; the procession features local notables, including an Orthodox priest and the managers of industrial enterprises; they are walking on freshly laid paving, past a new children’s playground with Pavlov’s logo at the entrance; behind the procession one can see a renovated Palace of Culture. Pavlov won, against all odds, relying on little more than local administrative and moral resources to beat the candidate supported by the head of the state and the corporation dominating the city. The moral economy of informal autonomist paternalism has proven itself capable of organizing the power landscape on the local level, commanding the trust of the subaltern classes.

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Conclusion The local power bloc, formed in the 1990s, limited political opportunities for its competitors. However, it was powerless against challenges coming from the outside and extending over a wider scale. A city-­wide elite bloc relying on the ideology of apolitical technocracy and administrative merit-­based redistribution was not tenable in the context of the formalization of property rights and formation of a national bourgeoisie. Privatization has restructured the principles of politico-­economic coordination: the new configuration is more clearly linked to the national landscape and wider scales; it is more formalized but still deeply steeped in informal principles of mutual dependence and patronage. The changes on the national scale also led to the rearticulation of the ruling group’s ideology: the old motifs of pragmatism and care were inflected through cultural identity and national political cleavages. Combining elements of old and new ideological elements, introducing arcane rules of informal governance in the city and mobilizing complex political tensions on the national level, the city hegemonic bloc transformed itself and eventually managed to remain in power despite the adverse configurations of national politics. Both the old and the new ruling blocs feature the principle of wealth in people – ‘in the shape of rights conferred and obligations owed through larger and larger networks’ (Rogers 2006: 920). However, it would be wrong to claim that this principle prevails over conventional wealth in capital. The two principles support each other: wealth in capital becomes a structuring criterion of social power, but it cannot be maintained without recourse to policies cultivating wealth in people.

Conclusion Throughout the two last centuries of Kryvyi Rih’s history, several structural traits have persisted. Strong political and economic connections with the central state apparatus have always conditioned the economic development and the arrival of modernity, be it the imperial civilizing modernity of the eighteenth century, the capitalist modernity of the late nineteenth century, the Stalinist industrializing modernity of the twentieth century, or post-­Soviet transformations imagined as a return to capitalist normality. In each case, strategic decisions taken by the faraway political ­centre – ­colonizing

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the frontier, protecting domestic industries, subsidizing expensive investments in local industry for its deeper insertion into domestic production chains, renewing subsidies for the opposite purpose of realigning with global ­chains – ­were the necessary preconditions for local development. Alignment with global capital flows is another structural element defining the key turning points of Kryvyi Rih’s history. Its very emergence as a city was made possible by the commercial interest of investors from the most industrially developed countries at the time: France, Belgium and Britain. These connections grew much weaker in the Soviet period, only to make a powerful comeback in the 1990s, when the city’s fortunes became firmly tied to global commodity cycles. These external factors accompanied internal socio-­e conomic organizational principles that have persisted throughout the city’s ­history  – ­namely, the embeddedness of economic entities in the sociopolitical fabric. Local enterprises have always been more or less firmly inserted in the local moral economy, prescribing non-­ market modes of distribution and coordination. These relations of embeddedness gained in strength after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when they were celebrated as the manifestation of the new capitalist spirit; they also survived the privatization of assets, which has led to their restructuring but not liquidation. One of the structural factors pushing for a constant reproduction of non-­market mechanisms has been the permanent situation of emergency, which calls for extraordinary measures. This normalized emergency can be traced from the situation of the frontier in the pre-­ industrial period to the mobilization economy of Stalinism, to the existential threat posed by the unmaking of Soviet economic links in the 1990s. Survival took precedence over other motives in the public sphere, calling for an extended collaboration and the delegitimization of disembedded, profit-­oriented practices. The ideology resulting from these constraints perceives itself as egalitarian and pragmatic. Condemning the social inequality associated with unchecked liberal reforms, proponents of post-­Soviet embeddedness profess their aversion to vertical polarization. Struggling against nationalists, they also condemn horizontal polarization, discarded as ‘politics’. However, this picture is incomplete on both counts. The rejection of new inequalities stems from a meritocratic viewpoint that remains committed to a different set of hierarchies. The pragmatism of the technocratic political style mobilized to restore these hierarchies is also not entirely identity-­blind: with time,

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it has acquired distinct identitarian leanings. And yet, the official narrative combines an explicit commitment to one of the identity-­laden styles with a continued discursive rejection of ‘politics’, understood as superficial ethnocultural struggles. This ideology of mobilization and survival focused on the moral community of the ­city – ­the basic social unit that should not be allowed to disintegrate like the wider ones did. In order to achieve the hegemonic position at this level, the new elite embraced the interests of certain dominated groups, extending solidarities beyond the traditionally prescribed minimum. The importance of these changes, their volume and radicalism have been masked by the gradualist ideology that justified them with appeals to continuity. As a result, the great transformations of the last three decades on the local scale have gone unnoticed to a large extent. Despite the great distance separating the survival of an extended company town in the early 1990s from its embattled configuration in the late 2010s, the dominating subjective perception is that of stability (for the supporters of the resultant regime) or stagnation (for its opponents).

Notes 1. The contemporary conscience of the colonial character of industrial development is obvious from the early monument of Alexander Pol erected at the pig iron factory: the inscription presents him as ‘the Columbus of Little Russia’. In contemporary journalistic accounts, Kryvyi Rih was often referred to as ‘the Southern Russian California’. 2. The nature of the population influx was variegated. A large share of people arrived during the grand mobilization campaigns of komsomol in the 1960s. Others were convicts, contributing their forced labour to the development of Kryvyi Rih and settling there for good after prison. Nearby agricultural areas supplied its peasant population. Various degrees of economic and non-­economic coercion were present in the formation and development of this region. 3. From here on, ChH will stand for Chervonyi Hirnyk, the newspaper published by the Kryvyi Rih city council. 4. Kryvbas (Kryvyi Rih iron ore basin) is the name of the geological area that came to signify the city of Kryvyi Rih in everyday parlance. Etymologically similar to Donbas (Donets coal basin), it stands, however, for the city alone and not for the surrounding region.

— Chapter 4 —

Archaeology of Power Regimes of Domination Reflected in the Urban Infrastructure

_ The previous chapter analysed the changing politico-­economic conjunctures on the city level, and the transformations of the local power bloc that accompanied these changes. But how did these processes imprint themselves in the everyday life of my informants? I argue that traces of shifts in power structures can be found in material systems that are shaped by the way political power is ­organized – ­notably, in the physical infrastructure. Beyond the simple regrouping of political alliances, these shifts on the city level have influence on lay property regimes and approaches to property management, on paternalist political patterns, and on relations between political gravity centres on different scales (national, regional, urban, corporate). In this chapter, I will continue analysing city politics through this ‘archaeological’ prism, by writing a political history of the urban infrastructure of Kryvyi Rih. My task here will be to trace the evolution of three infrastructural ­systems – ­public transport, housing and ­heating – ­in their connection with the politico-­economic dynamics discussed above. These three case studies will show the palpable material dimensions of changes in city-­level power configurations. Far from being limited to the discursive sphere, these changes notably affect such mundane aspects of everyday life as the availability and composition of the public transportation fleet, the quality and amount of new housing, and the physical state of water pipes. It is this type of connection that allows us to speak about ‘everyday politics’ as a coherent concept, linking institutional politics taking place on TV screens and in governmental quarters with the way politics is lived by the ‘regular’ working people. The connection is not unidi-

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rectional: infrastructure systems are not just receptacles reflecting the outcomes of political decisions, they also partake in shaping politics, in their turn.

The Strange Death of Public Transportation The specificity of Kryvyi Rih’s public transportation is imposed by the geography of the city (see Figure 4.1). The shape of a sixty

Figure 4.1.  The geographical contours of Kryvyi Rih. Source: Google Maps.

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kilometre-­long but narrow string of workers’ settlements makes it especially difficult to connect them all via a single functioning system of public transit. Besides the usual arsenal of trams, trolleybuses and buses, in the 1980s the city launched the construction of ­metrotram – ­a rare hybrid mode of transportation that consists of trams running in metro-­like underground tunnels. Subsidized in the Soviet period,1 this industry faced an abrupt shortage of funds in the 1990s. The central government did not consider it a priority to finance municipal transport at previous levels, and transit operators faced the need to raise their fares. Parliament, for its part, tried to alleviate the economic shock for the population by introducing a massive number of new categories of lgotniki2 – passengers entitled to free transit. These exemptions, however, were not accompanied by subsidies from the central budget to compensate transit companies for losses. The unsustainability of this situation soon became clear to everyone. Starting from 1 January 1992, municipal bus companies of Kryvyi Rih had no external sources of financing, while the fare they collected only covered 7.8 per cent of their expenses: 51 per cent of their passengers belonged to some of the 34 categories of free riders. By the end of 1994, 90 per cent of municipal rolling stock in use were beyond their service life.

The Downfall of Municipal Transport To remedy the situation, the World Bank offered a $40 million loan to Kryvyi Rih, conditional on reducing the number of lgotniki, introducing commercial competition and free tariff-­setting. However, the local elite was not prepared to commercialize public transportation. Neither was it willing to introduce collectivist recipes of making public transport free for all and finance it from local taxes. Instead, the vykonkom decided to move in both directions at once: in 1995, it allowed private buses to compete with the public fleet and ordered industrial enterprises to set aside 1 per cent of their incomes to subsidize public transport. This solution was centred around the city elite, giving it discretion in an issue that would have otherwise remained disembedded from politics. Each large enterprise was designated responsible for ‘its’ population. By the end of 1996, city transport heavily depended on the aid of local industrial enterprises: they were buying rolling stock and spare parts, producing some spare parts themselves and repairing vehicles. This aid offset fiscal payment that the enterprises owed the

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city. Offset payments were also employed to cover the bus companies’ energy bills. Despite these interventions, the fate of municipal buses was sealed. Their number fell from 1,100 in 1994 to 650 in 1997, and their upkeep cost ten times as much as the incomes generated by the transit. The city’s five vehicle fleet operators (ATPs) were privatized through a scheme that consisted of distributing shares among the labour collectives. The City Council refused to take them into municipal ownership. Refusing to finance bus operators, the vykonkom also declined their requests to raise fares after a fivefold hike of fuel prices; neither did it reimburse their losses from lgotniki. When the fleet was completely exhausted and there were no more operating buses, the ATPs closed. ‘Buses have vanished because time has passed and they have become obsolete’, commented the mayor Liubonenko in 2003. Trolleybuses, trams and the metrotram are much more technologically embedded than buses: besides rolling stock, they all require constant investment for their upkeep. Despite this, the city chose to keep these more expensive systems afloat; moreover, the metrotram network expanded during the most difficult post-­Soviet decade.3 The difference in treatment was marked, but the overall condition of electric transport was degrading as well. In 1999, the city financed less than 9 per cent of the needs of bus transport and 24.3 per cent of those of electric transport. Compared to 1991, when the city bought twenty new trolleybuses and ten new trams in just one year, in the period between 1996 and 2000 the purchases amounted to eight trolleybuses and twelve trams, half of which were second-­hand. The overall amount of active-­duty rolling stock fell by one third during the 1990s. In order to save money on maintenance, the municipal operator downgraded novel double frame trolleybuses, cutting them in half, back to the more primitive model. Austerity continued after the economic growth resumed. The city elite focused on renovating existing old rolling stock rather than buying new. As with the buses, the chronic lack of funds was attributed to fare exemptions granted by the central government: the subsidies coming from the state only covered 30–40 per cent of the losses incurred (Rudakevych, Sitek and Soczówka 2019: 67–69). In 1999, only 34.1 per cent of passengers in Kryvyi Rih’s electric transport were not lgotniki. The situation did not ‘normalize’ after the 1990s: by 2011, the share of paying passengers even fell below 30 per cent. For those who did pay, the fare remained moderate. After the end of the 1990s hyperinflation, municipal transit fare hikes became a rarity. Between 1997 and 2020, the fare grew 8.3 times the nominal

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value, while consumer prices increased 14.1 times. Both mayors, Liubonenko and then Vilkul, persistently took pride in reminding people that transport tariffs in Kryvyi Rih were among the lowest in Ukraine. Deficits generated by these low fares were covered by the city budget. What is more, even these modest fare payments were hardly collected. The system of ticket control and enforcement had collapsed in the 1990s.4 Finally, when the passenger did pay, they would usually pay less than the established fare, saying they did not need a ticket (‘bez bileta’). The money would then go directly to the conductor, never reaching the coffers of the transport company. Contributing to the chronic lack of funds, and hence to the underinvestment in public transit enterprises, was the new moral regime, which relied on direct interpersonal solidarity among members of the subaltern classes and articulated distrust and suspicion of formal schemes. This moral economy was new compared to lay norms of the Soviet period. The sharp fall in living standards in the 1990s reprioritized spending priorities and obligations. The residents of Kryvyi Rih have successfully claimed and maintain the right to use public transport for free or for a small fee. They accept the downside of this ­deal – ­the worsening quality of the services, decaying rolling stock and fewer and slower vehicles on the lines. This bargain relegated municipal transport to the means of transportation for marginalized social groups with little financial resources: pensioners, children and the poor. Lgotniki constituted two thirds of municipal transport ­passengers – ­but only one third of the city’s population. The social groups with higher incomes and greater ­demands – ­including the bulk of the city’s working ­class – ­switched to different modes of transportation. Partially, this ‘core’ population used the expanding network of metrotram.5 However, the single 18 kilometre-­long line of metrotram was not enough in a 60 kilometre-­long city. The city kept functioning thanks to the introduction of a new mode of ­transportation – ­the fully commercial private minibus, known as marshrutka. They became the dominant mode of transportation at a time when public rolling stock was dwindling. As early as mid-­1996, private transport operators already accounted for more passengers than municipal transport. How did they operate?

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Marshrutka: A Commercial Solution for the Masses The new mode of transportation consists of freight cars converted into passenger minivans, usually Mercedes or Volkswagen. The comparative reliability of marshrutkas (in 2019, the average waiting time for a minibus was only four minutes, while it could extend to over an hour for a trolleybus) has been reinforced by their ubiquity and seemingly extra-­legal status: a hybrid between a proper bus and a taxi from the legal point of view, they stopped anywhere to pick up passengers and let them out, so people did not even have to go to a bus stop anymore. On the symbolic level, marshrutkas were framed as a ‘civilized’ transport, a symbol of the new capitalist modernity. Being an ostensibly private commercial means of transportation, they are free from the moral economy that regulates municipal transport: the fares charged by marshrutkas have been at least three times higher, and there has been no way to avoid paying them. The new private transport became profitable by socializing losses. Catering to faraway neighbourhoods, running during off-­peak hours, transporting the poor and observing the protective labour law in regard to informally hired drivers have been absorbed by the safety net of subsidized public operators. The libertarian utopia of marshrutkas is in fact regulated by the vykonkom, which allocates lines and schedules, sets fares and defines the payment regime for lgotniki. In 1998, the city leadership introduced a compromise: a minibus driver was obliged to let lgotniki ride for free, but no more than one person at a time in one vehicle. Dozens of small entrepreneurs running marshrutkas are informal contractors working for the official operator, a company that is usually connected to the mayor. The latter is the main arbiter, exerting informal power over a market that is excluded from the paternalist social contract. The city does not have to invest in rolling stock, outsourcing all running expenses to disembedded private owners, who are symbolically separated from the public domain.

Rebirth of Municipal Transport as a Political Tool The ultimate disembedding of marshrutkas contrasted with the progressing social and political embedding of municipal transport, starting from the 2000s. Each time the city got additional resources that could be used to improve public transport, they were redirected through informal channels, building personalized political

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Figure 4.2.  A trolleybus purchased in 1992 and repaired in 2014. The inscription on board says it was refurbished thanks to the money donated by AMKR. Photo taken by the author in March 2019.

­ ierarchies and dependencies. This was a new trend, conditioned by h the beginning of the economic growth that generated the resources in the first place. The new trolleybus purchases in the mid-­2000s, after a decade-­long pause, were personalized as gifts to the city from local notables: the members of parliament elected from Kryvyi Rih’s constituencies but also key enterprises (see Figure 4.2). In late 2014, the post-­Euromaidan national liberal government passed a law that cancelled free rides in public transport for a number of social categories. The financial state of local operators could be improved with fares coming from these passengers. However, now that the city elite was finally receiving what it had been demanding since the early 1990s, it refused to accept the gift. The city leadership announced that it would preserve all the fare exemptions existing at that moment at its own expense. Maintaining the privileges for roughly 14,000 local residents (labour veterans, disabled people, army widows) cost the city budget 884,000 UAH in 2015. Moreover, the vykonkom has launched a programme for the extension of the municipal fleet. On 1 March 2016, a month before the

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third tour of contested mayoral elections, the first municipal buses took their routes after a fifteen-­year long pause. At that point, there were only seven old buses, which quickly broke down. Having got re-­elected, during his second term Vilkul extended the municipal bus fleet to twenty-­four new large vehicles. The size of the fleet and the density of the network were purely symbolic compared to the proper public bus transportation system that existed in the early 1990s. However, it technically allowed a local resident to travel across the city for the small fare of 4 ­UAH – ­that is, two times cheaper than a commercial marshrutka. Needless to say, all lgotniki were fully exempt from the fare. Without changing significantly the material system of public transportation, the token reintroduction of buses conveyed a number of important narratives: the revival of elements of the Soviet ‘good life’; geographic unification of the city;6 commitment to the well-­being of the most vulnerable social groups; and the central role of the mayor in this process. The cost of this loyalty-­building mechanism was relatively moderate: subsidizing free bus rides for the vulnerable population cost the city approximately 12 million UAH per year. Later, this scheme was extended to the trolleybus network.7 These policies received a new impetus during the mayoral elections of 2020. The opponent of the incumbent elite bloc, a CEO from one of the Metinvest GOKs, represented the promise of top-­down modernization of the city transit, which implied raising fares in exchange for a better service.8 The incumbent elite offered an alternative to this project: ‘stability’ (i.e. no major overhaul) and free municipal transport for everyone. This was a central point in Kostiantyn Pavlov’s victorious campaign. On the 1 May 2021, Kryvyi Rih became the largest city in the world with free public ­transit – ­if one does not take into account marshrutkas, which keep collecting a commercial fare, operating outside of the commonweal. This does not cost the city budget much, given that already before this measure 75 per cent of trolleybus passengers were lgotniki. The fare collected from the remaining 25 per cent of passengers only covered 4 per cent of the transit costs. Once the zero fare has been introduced, it will be politically much more difficult to undo it and switch to the alternative strategy of high fares and significant investments. Municipal transport has been completely transformed into a political tool, losing its primary function of ensuring mass mobility.

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Conclusion The differentiation between two property regimes has been consistently structuring the public transport system of Kryvyi Rih over the last three decades. Publicly-­owned transport has suffered from disinvestment, caused not only by a lack of financial support from the state but also by new financial obligations of a ‘social’ nature imposed by the same state. Its ageing and slow rolling stock became transport devoted to serving the free-­riding lgotniki. The bulk of the economically active population switched to a new kind of public transport –private commercial marshrutkas; being profit-­oriented they are not contested by the lay moral economy. Free from the burden of lgotniki, they were embedded in the social fabric on different terms, with informal bargaining and elite patronage writ large. With the beginning of the economic growth in the 2000s, municipal transport started receiving some limited investment, which obeyed, however, the political logic of paternalism. New projects have aimed at reinforcing its function as a socially marked charitable means of transportation. Obligations to lgotniki became a potential political asset rather than a pure economic burden. The access to public goods is particularized, typically for post-­ Soviet moral economies, articulating the nostalgia for strong welfare provisions with learned capitalist realism: ‘The elderly and disabled are offered free rides, but public transport is treated by public authorities as if it was an option only for those who have no other choice. Consequently, it can be curtailed and neglected in scope and quality’ (Sgibnev and Rekhviashvili 2021). This ‘lean production’ of hegemony does not yield optimal results, but it is able to secure a minimal level of legitimacy for the local elite.

Housing and Public Spaces: Three Property Regimes Housing was one of the most prominent elements of paternalist politico-­economic arrangements in the Soviet Union. Industrial enterprises made use of their access to the necessary resources to make housing a leverage in their competition for skilled labour (Filt zer 1996). In Kryvyi Rih, the steel mill, the mines and the GOKs constructed entire neighbourhoods and districts, which are colloquially known by the names of the enterprises to this day.9 In the 1980s, Kryvyi Rih saw a boom in housing construction: that decade accounts for the plurality of today’s housing stock in the

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city, mostly five- and nine-­storey prefabricated panel blocks (Malaia 2020).10 With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the state and the enterprises were unable to continue building on the same scale as before. After several years of a construction slump, public officials suggested that there was no need for new housing anyway: it was now cheaper to buy an existing apartment than to build a new residential block. By the end of the decade, most large enterprises stopped their housing construction projects.11 However, this was not perceived as an obvious problem by any of my informants. When asked, most would repeat the official line: no need to build new houses in the city with a decreasing population.12

Housing Ownership and Maintenance The decommodified Soviet housing model was put to an end by the free mass privatization of housing stock that was launched in 1992. People were accorded full property rights to their apartments. The political and moral economy of housing that resulted from this differed both from the conventional liberal market model and from the Soviet model of state-­managed subsidized rent. A privately owned flat became the sole secure and stable asset, immune from the turbulences that put at risk everything else, from one’s job and bank savings to one’s consumption and leisure routine. By giving away all apartments to families who occupied them, the state created an anchor of stability in the lives of citizens that legitimated, at least partly, all the subsequent privatization of enterprises and other market reforms. Even in 2021, the typical argument against nostalgia for the lost advantages of life in the USSR (cheap consumer goods and services, guaranteed employment, lack of precarity) in lay political debates is a reminder that housing did not really belong to those who lived there: it was the new Ukrainian state that allowed people to privatize their dwellings. The lay sensitivity to the stability and inalienability of this property is very high: a rented apartment is by definition inferior to an owned flat. Moreover, the post-­Soviet moral economy of housing rejects mortgage loans, for they offer an incomplete degree of ownership: the bank still owns the property until the loan is fully paid. This opposition of ‘owning vs owing’, described in the literature (Zavisca 2012), is still in place in Ukraine. According to a 2019 survey, 85 per cent of Ukrainians can only consider a privately owned flat as their real dwelling; owning an apartment is an overwhelmingly shared attribute of the good life (Fedoriv and Lomonosova 2019: 96–98).

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Thus, neoliberal reforms, including the privatization of productive assets, have found their legitimation in an anti-­neoliberal normativity of pre-­existent social rights. In the socio-­economic chaos of the 1990s, housing became the one kind of property that could not be taken away or destroyed.13 These attitudes were encouraged by state policies designed to support and extend private homeownership rather than the public rental sector (Fedoriv and Lomonosova 2019: 26–43). The fixation of my informants on their private sphere, spatially embodied by their privatized apartments, does not translate into a joint effort to take care of the apartment block as such. They often invest considerable resources into improving what they perceive as their personal space (including its enlargement by means of grotesque balcony extensions and arbitrary ‘land grabs’ of stairwell landings) but are not interested in managing shared spaces and structures such as attics, cellars, roofs or outdoor spaces. The very ownership of these assets has been an open question for a long time, with flat owners sabotaging the creation of condominiums.14 Having no clear owner, these common spaces fall into disrepair. 60 per cent of urban residents in Ukraine live in houses that have never seen a major renovation, while 89 per cent live in houses built in the 1980s or earlier (Fedoriv and Lomonosova 2019: 59–60). Both numbers are certainly higher for Kryvyi Rih, which had no massive commercial housing construction unlike some other cities. The overwhelming majority lives in buildings constructed at least three decades ago, which have never been seriously refurbished or repaired. The city authorities are expected but not legally obliged to intervene. Expectations, moreover, have been tempered by decades of chronic austerity. A case in point is a khrushchevka apartment block built in the northern outskirts of Kryvyi Rih in the late 1960s. Over time, it has developed visible cracks, leaving the residents in constant fear for their homes’ safety. In 2020, the situation was brought to the attention of the city council: the residents asked it to repair the building. The vykonkom’s first response was to reiterate that it had no formal responsibility for the technical state of the building. However, having established that, the mayor promised to make an exception and take the cost of repairs out of the city budget, a low-­cost and sporadic act of paternalism but nevertheless convincing enough to the popular classes, who see the mayor as a figure who provides essential aid and protects them from the ravages of disembedded markets.

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Once unified around the large enterprises and the city council, the housing scene in Kryvyi Rih fragmented into thousands of atomized islands of personal property that had no resources to invest in the maintenance of physical assets. This allowed the local elite to pursue its weak legitimation strategy, relying on the contradictory reaffirmation of the sanctity of the apartment owners’ private property (allowing them greater freedom than ever to physically reshape it) and posing as a saviour in extraordinary situations through episodic investments, framed as aid rather than as an obligation. In other words, the wider politico-­economic conjuncture has allowed the power bloc to disembed itself from the material obligations implied by the paternalist moral economy of housing but at the same time stay embedded in the corresponding moral landscape as its central element.

Investment in Public Spaces as a Political Tool The appearance of even the most central locations of the city stands in sharp contrast to the city’s prominent role in the value creation process. This dissonance has not escaped the attention of local residents. ‘Given how much wealth we produce here in the mines, stray dogs should run around with gold teeth here!’ – exclaimed one of my informants, referring to what used to be a public park and now a scene of decay and wilderness. In practice, most of the city’s public space has been left to the discretion of private ­initiative – ­both legal and illegal. The latter is most prominently manifest in the open manholes all over the city: the lids, made of cast iron, are routinely stolen and sold to informal scrap dealers (see Figure 4.3). Non-­ ferrous metals are an even more prized: 2019 saw an epidemic of broken elevators because of local residents stealing copper wiring. Municipal services do take care of manholes in the central streets, but even the most privileged locations are not immune to signs of ruin (see Figure 4.4). Public structures are often left to gradually decay.15 Most public investment that does take place is heavily conditioned by the political context. One early example of such politicized development of public spaces is a river and beach in the Miners’ Park. A popular leisure destination, it gradually fell into disrepair in the 1990s, when neither the enterprises nor the municipal authorities had resources for its upkeep. However, the advent of the new power configuration in the 2000s made targeted investment politically expedient. The beach was reconstructed in 2007, receiving a new stair

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Figure 4.3.  A makeshift cover over a manhole. Such covers, made from various materials at hand, are the initiative of local residents worried about public safety. Stories about people and even horses falling into unprotected manholes were abundant. Photo taken by the author in February 2019.

approach with a plaque indicating that the renovation had been done thanks to Oleksandr Vilkul (see Figure 4.5). Vilkul’s other interventions in public space have been even more politicized, including the construction of a memorial for the 66th anniversary of the liberation of Ukraine from the Nazis, completed during the mayoral elections of 2010 (this timing explains the strange choice of the non-­round anniversary date). The memorial was made of cheap materials and has been neglected ever since: nine years after its installation, it was falling apart (krivbass.city 2019). The electoralist character of such projects dictates their typical traits: low cost, quick to execute and visible. The most ambitious projects do not reach much higher than the reconstruction of a park or a bridge. The more typical projects involve building children’s playgrounds, outdoor sports facilities and making small improvements to residential spaces (e.g. installing benches or streetlights in courtyards). Usually, the object displays the name of the benefactor

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Figure 4.4.  Stairs leading to the most centrally located metrotram station in Yesenina Street, next to the city council and chic restaurants. Photo taken by the author in March 2019.

(see Figure 4.6). Sometimes politicians even hijack existing embellishment projects. Alina, a small entrepreneur, recounted what had happened when her middle-­class friends crowdsourced the construction of a playground in their neighbourhood:

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Figure 4.5.  The beach, renovated in 2007 and neglected ever since. The plaque says: ‘The beach complex was built with the help of the member of parliament Oleksandr Vilkul in May 2007’. Photo taken by the author in May 2019. Everyone was happy. Then they come in the morning and see a sign plate: the playground was created with the money of the Party of Regions, thanks to it, applause. Vova was shocked. He said, how shall I look people in the eyes? We collected money from the people, from local residents! How shall I prove that I have nothing to do with the Party of Regions or with this sign plate?

This model of public investment can be theorized as the politicization of public ­space – ­in the sense of making it dependent on the party political struggle. However, this very dependence may sometimes lead to place-­making policies of local elites in the direction of ­depoliticization – ­in the sense of making it a tool for reducing the political participation of the masses. An example can be found in the redevelopment of the space in front of the City Council building. In the Soviet period, it featured a large square, which was the traditional place of assembly on May Day and of mass demonstrations of political loyalty to the regime. In the early nineties, the square was politicized, becoming the stage for mass protests of striking workers. Shortly after the beginning of the post-­Soviet political turbulence, the vykonkom ordered a reconstruction. Today, in the place of the former

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Figure 4.6.  A freshly painted children’s playground situated in an otherwise decrepit park. The inscription at the entrance says: ‘May the children’s laughter ring loud! – Konstantin Pavlov’. Pavlov was one of the key members of Vilkul’s team; he succeeded him as mayor in 2020. Photo taken by the author in June 2019.

square, there is a shady park with a large fountain in the centre and benches under the trees. It makes for a nice leisure space, unfit for mass political gatherings.

Unequal Property Regimes The social functioning of the built environment in Kryvyi Rih is governed by three property regimes. Rules concerning personal property extend to all places belonging to individual households: apartments, balconies, garages, cellars, sheds and dachas. This regime renders all state intrusions illegitimate, coming close to an anarcho-­capitalist utopia.16 Similarly, tinkering in a garage can develop into a profitable activity, but any attempt to regulate or tax it meets fierce resistance. Whatever personal resources may be available to individual owners, they are not enough for the long-­term upkeep of a property that was conceived in the context of centralized management, eventual renovation and substitution. The lack of public or private investment,

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justified by the demographic and economic conjuncture, condemns the infrastructure of this personal property to decay in the long run. In the short term, this property regime helps the local elite claim paternalist legitimacy on the basis of occasional intervention, without any systematic support for the ageing housing stock. The lay morality of a self-­sustainable household simplifies the task for the incumbent power bloc. The second type of property is private, distinct from personal property in that it is used for capital accumulation. Former palaces of culture and cinema theatres converted into supermarkets and entertainment centres are part of this category, as well as ground floor apartments having been turned into grocery stores, dental clinics. The autonomous status of this property is rarely contested in the lay moral economy. However, the autonomy granted to such owners also excludes them from the public contract that gives them, for example, the right to protection: police and other public resources ought not to be used for the benefit of a kommersant, who can and should employ his private resources to ensure the security of his assets. Caroline Humphrey (2002: 125) sees this situation as proof of the illegitimacy of private property or commerce; I interpret this attitude, on the contrary, as the demonstration of its legitimacy: private owners are given full rein in the private domain, which is conceptually fully separated from the public. Public property serves as the background, the default that gives birth both to personal and private property. Besides administrative institutions, schools, hospitals etc., public property comprises streets and roads, lighting and lawns, parks and monuments. Lacking systematic public investment necessary for its upkeep, public property is generally in a poor state. However, this landscape serves as the background in yet another sense: it is the space for relatively small-­ scale investments that produce quick and visible sporadic improvements. All three forms of property have been severely affected by normalized ­austerity – ­that is, the lack or severe dearth of public investment. It has been normalized in different ways: by the autonomist ideology of self-­reliance, dictated by the desire for a territory of personal control and stability, in the case of personal property; by the ideology of private owners’ sovereignty pushed to the limits, in the case of small and mid-­size private property; and by the paternalist ideology of care, centred around the charitable ‘big man’, in the case of public property.

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The Moral Economy of Heating Utility payments, comprising bills for electricity, running water, hot water, natural gas, heating and house maintenance, have been collectively known in Ukraine as komunalni platezhi, or komunalka. This concept encompasses traditional services related to ensuring housing is inhabitable on the basic level. In managerial parlance, it corresponds to the term that translates as ‘housing and utility system’ – zhytlovokomunalne hospodarstvo (ZhKH, zhilishchno-kommunalnoe khoziaistvo in Russian). Heating is the core element of the ZhKH complex. Keeping the energy infrastructure intact and accessible is one of the most important lay criteria of the political elite. The political embeddedness of this system is doubled by its physical embeddedness in Soviet urbanism. Mass housing construction since the 1960s has been accompanied by the construction of centralized heating systems of two types: co-­generation heat and electricity plants built and controlled by the state, and kotelnyie (district heating nodes) built and maintained by city-­forming enterprises. This infrastructure, unique in its scale and penetration, is rigidly fixed by a technical framework that has no mechanism for user control or differentiation.

Indebted Transition in the 1990s The heavily subsidized Soviet utility tariffs amounted to around 5 per cent of the real cost of services. The situation changed relatively little in the 1990s. Tariff hikes were quickly eaten up by hyperinflation: people would delay paying bills until their real value became more bearable, remaining within customary norms. Even after the hikes, tariffs for the population remained far behind those for public organizations and industry thanks to the system of cross-­subsidizing. Industry paid twice as much as households (Romaniuk, Kucherenko and Tsvetkova 2003), this being the hallmark of Ukrainian energy policies. Debt accumulation was the chief mechanism of keeping utility tariffs low. Thus, half of the city’s aggregate debt in the mid-­1990s was the money that the City Council had to reimburse the heat distributing company for the ‘social’ tariffs but ultimately failed to do so. Debts were also accumulating at the level of households, which were not able to pay even the reduced tariffs. The state tacitly allowed citizens to ignore utility bills they could not pay because of wages and other payments they were not receiving from the state, solving

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the situation by means of complicated debt offsets and reducing or cancelling all capital investments in the sector. Initially construed as part of the technocratic survival conjuncture in the 1990s, the low cost of komunalka became a political issue when the central government broke its part of the contract by raising the tariffs in 2000. Suffering financially from the artificially low tariffs, the city elite nevertheless perceived the hike as a threat to its political legitimacy. The immediate response was to neutralize the threat by lowering tariffs, continuing the economic logic of the 1990s.

Competition of Moral Reasonings in the 2000s In the longer run, however, the rhetoric of the city elite changed. Instead of the unconditional protection of households from all financial claims, the local power bloc unfolded a massive propaganda campaign aimed at persuading city residents to pay for the utility services and energy they consume at home. Starting from 2000, the local elite started trying to impose this new norm. Its reasoning combined market and moral justifications. The former consisted of recurrent admonitions extending the market logic to the domain popularly construed as governed by non-­market norms. In other words, the city elite tried to reframe heat and gas as marketable commodities rather than universally accessible use values. ‘Electricity, heat and natural gas are goods no different from bread, but people still cannot fathom this. Nobody would think of coming into a bakery, taking bread and leaving without paying, but people keep doing this when they consume utility services’ – passages like this have been repeatedly published by the local media. The Kryvyi Rih elite made this market rhetoric more palatable by comparing tariffs across different cities to show that they were offering the most moderate hikes, and they blamed the central government for these hikes. The second narrative justifying the new market discipline was moral. In October 2000, Chervonyi Hirnyk demonstrated its calculations: household ZhKH debt on the national scale amounted to 6.03 billion UAH, whereas the aggregate debt of the state and employers to households (wage arrears, pensions and social payments) had been reduced by 6.49 billion UAH. The state fulfilled its part of the social contract, and citizens violated it by reneging on payments now that they were able to pay. A few months later, the mayor Liubonenko expanded this logic in his appeal to city residents: most enterprises are paying wages on time, in many places wages are even growing,

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so you should now pay your bills and ask your neighbours to do the same. This narrative had little traction with the population, which apparently had interpreted the social contract in different terms. For the lay normativity, low ZhKH tariffs were not a temporary trade-­off but the normal state of things. In the lived experience of Kryvyi Rih residents, the komunalka tariffs had always been low, and there was no reason why this should change. The campaign for payment discipline lasted a whole decade without much success. Each summer, the city elite attacked city residents with a familiar set of moralistic invocations and threats of lawsuits and heating cutoffs, as they kept ignoring illegitimate bills. This recalcitrant position was made possible by the technical difficulty of cutting off supplies for debtors in apartment blocks: it could only be done for an entire apartment block, which was legally problematic. In an attempt to make people pay, the city elite mobilized industrial enterprises. Starting from 2001, employers were withholding money from workers’ paychecks to pay for ZhKH services on their behalf. At the peak of the scheme’s performance, it involved 50.4 per cent of workers living in the city. However, profitable industrial enterprises participated in it reluctantly, as the City Council’s leverage against them was diminishing. Other methods included blocking access to all bureaucratic procedures for debtors, or naming and shaming the debtors in the press. None of this was efficient. Between 1999 and 2002, the aggregate ZhKH debt of Kryvyi Rih households further increased by an order of magnitude. The simmering conflict, rooted in the notions of embeddedness and rights, has been going on for two decades without any decisive solution. In a tacit pact, both sides agree to the suboptimal level of satisfaction of their claims. Households do not pay what they consider unjust, while municipal enterprises do not invest in maintaining or improving the level of service. In the words of Misha, a KZRK miner: ‘I don’t understand these tariffs. Do we have Hennessy flowing from our taps? Because they make us pay as if we’re getting cognac instead of water.’ The following section shows how this stalemate simultaneously led to the decay of the infrastructure and to its politicization.

Technical Disintegration and the Political Weaponization of Heating The two heat producing companies of Kryvyi Rih are Teplotsentral, a former cogeneration plant that stopped producing electricity in 1989,

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and Teploset, which owns seventy-­five boiler houses. Their facilities provide central heating, but also supply hot water from tap. Both of them use natural gas, an expensive input, and both had trouble collecting money from consumers. While heating has been constructed as an inalienable right, hot tap water cuts were a threat that could be implemented. Already in the autumn of 2000, Kryvyi Rih switched to hot water rationing: heating it was only available three days a week, with monthly bills accordingly cut down by half. A year later, heating remained intact but hot water disappeared from many apartments in the winter. After the end of that heating season,17 most of the city’s large boiler houses were shut down, meaning around half of all apartment blocks in Kryvyi Rih had no hot water in the summer of 2002. Its supply only returned in the autumn, together with centralized heating, after difficult negotiations with the City Council. From this period, the conflict has been ritualized. Every spring, the end of the heating season would always coincide with the beginning of hot water cuts. Starting from August until November, the city would threaten the residents into paying debts but at the same time negotiate with the national government and gas suppliers for debt restructuring. Hot water supplies resumed for the period of full activity of boiler houses. December and January would often see conflict provoked by intergovernmental negotiations over gas supplies with Russia, which would result in additional stoppages. Hot water cuts, which used to be an emergency, became a customary and expected routine, contributing to the disintegration of the centralized system. ‘As soon as the weather gets warmer, cities stop supplying warm water’ – thus went the newspaper advertisement of individual electric water heaters in 2011. By that time, the switch to individual heaters became so widespread that the mayor Vilkul himself advised city residents to do it. This marginalized centralized water heating: the smaller the number of households relying on boiler houses, the more loss-­making was their work and the less politically important it was to continue. In the summer of 2013, hot water was being supplied episodically in 33–50 per cent of Kryvyi Rih’s apartment blocks; in the following year, it disappeared completely. A former director of one of Teploset’s departments explained to me in 2019: ‘For the last five to six years there has been no hot water in the city, and in all probability it will never appear again, because the pipes are all rotten now’. As a result of the disinvestment and disintegration cycles that reinforced each other, the equipment for heating and transporting water is not functional anymore.

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The ruling bloc still does not dare to publicly acknowledge the death of this symbolically important element of infrastructure, preferring to maintain uncertainty that could be interpreted as hope. Since the City Council refuses to take an official decision about abolishing centralized hot water supply for good, Teploset does not have the legal grounds to fire redundant workers and has instead ensured the flexibility of the workforce, giving them odd jobs according to the needs of the enterprise. During the low season from April till October, when Teploset does not perform any revenue-­generating activities, these employees work 3–4 days a week, receiving minimum wage.18 The refusal to formally acknowledge implicitly understood realities is characteristic of post-­Soviet institutions adapting to the neoliberalizing context. They tend to keep their old forms while changing the inner principles of their work. This is reflected in Collier’s (2011) examination of the transformation of heating infrastructure in a Russian town, while Polese (2008) demonstrates the same logic regulating the transformations in healthcare and education in Ukraine: the legitimate embedded form (centrally and universally provided heating; comprehensive and free higher education and the full cycle of healthcare) remains intact, concealing the disembedded essence that adheres to the profit motive, often at the expense of public resources (privatized, fragmented and inefficient energy infrastructure; privatized healthcare; and education services making use of public infrastructure). The transformations in public transportation and housing in Kryvyi Rih, discussed above, also adhere to this logic. The extraordinary post-­Euromaidan conjuncture has given a new impetus to austerity measures in the ZhKH sphere. Between 2014 and 2019, the price of electricity for households rose by a factor of 3.2, hot water by a factor of 4.2, gas by a factor of 8.6 and heating by a factor of 11.5. This led to a new wave of indebtedness. The city elite was conveniently placed to criticize the hikes, putting the blame on the central government. On the eve of local elections in 2015, Vilkul launched a city-­wide programme of monetary compensation for the utility tariff hikes, which amounted to 500 UAH per year per household. This programme was maintained throughout Vilkul’s second term in office. Despite its modest size, it was appreciated even by staunch opponents of the mayor, such as Vira, a recently retired miner: Whatever they may say about how money should not be spent to buy ­votes – ­but excuse me, this Teplotsentral is plainly awful [kapets], pipes are constantly

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broken, it is just horrible. What is the state of the façades? Roads? And I adore how people say: [in mock Russian] well the budget has no money. I’m saying, are you even normal? We have such an industry in our city, we should have stray dogs running around with gold teeth!

Having different political dispositions, Vira and Misha nevertheless both expected high standards from the authorities. They accepted suboptimal solutions on the condition that they themselves are excused for failing to uphold high ‘formal’ standards such as paying full tariffs, avoiding illegal activities and distancing themselves from political patronage schemes. This tradeoff is encouraged by the elite. In April 2019, payments for heating reached the historically low mark of 65 per cent. Besides not paying, some city residents staged protests about the bad quality and high prices of heating, blocking traffic. Vilkul reacted with a tirade: ‘We used to build communism but now it’s obviously capitalism. . . . I can’t imagine a mayor of New York or Paris or London pleading someone to pay for housing or for natural gas or ­something . . . ­There, they grab you by your ears and kick you outside.’ He went on to describe the horrible arsenal of capitalist repressive tools and implicitly suggested a compromise: a lax attitude and some paternalist distribution in exchange for a certain level of payment and political loyalty. The history of hot water supply in Kryvyi Rih shows the dialectical relationship between discursive constructions and mundane economic changes. Material processes of decay and disinvestment, launched by a conflict between different moral economies, have eventually transformed the ideational landscape itself, completing the circle. This transformation reduced the list of essential goods rights considered fundamental rights. Moreover, it created previously non-­ existent venues for paternalist politics and politicized issues previously considered purely technical.

Conclusion During the three decades of Ukrainian independence, the issue of domestic utility services has gone from a mundane technical matter to a political issue of primary importance. This is the outcome of a hidden disembedding of the ZhKH sphere: in the 1990s, its inner logic shifted to market principles, but this shift was hidden by hyperinflation and the intentionally lax attitude of the state. Fiscal gaps generated by this incongruence were filled by ad-­hoc solutions: bar-

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ters and offsetting, accumulating debts, cross-­subsidizing and disinvestment. With the beginning of economic growth, the state tried to impose financial discipline on households, but they refused to recognize new tariffs as legitimate. The resulting standoff transformed the issue from a technical problem of outstanding debts to a political question of balance of forces between the social classes. The tension between two normative regimes opened the space for paternalist politics, where subsidies and other exceptions from market normativity are conditional on the good will of a local patron. This can be seen in the behaviour of Yuriy Vilkul, who portrays himself as a caring protector of the local community; someone who can save them from the ravages of ‘wild’ capitalism imposed by the central government but who cites the imperative of disembedded markets when he needs to affirm the centrality of his persona in the social protection of Kryvyi Rih residents.

Conclusion The post-­Soviet evolution of urban infrastructure in Kryvyi Rih followed a logic of fragmentation, based on a distinction between the weakly regulated private domain and regulated commonweal. In the case of public transportation, the municipal fleet enacts the double function of meeting the social obligations of the state and legitimizing the rule of the local elite. The privately owned fleet is disembedded but ubiquitous and efficient. For all the difference between the two regimes, they rely on one another: marshrutkas are only able to reap their profits thanks to municipal transport, which serves non-­ paying passengers. Conversely, the tokenistic municipal transport projects are only feasible in the context where the bulk of transportation is being done by minibuses. In the sphere of housing, a third property regime, personal, dominates over both private and public. It emerged as compensation for losses experienced by the subaltern classes during the crisis of the 1990s: the privatized apartment became the only element of stability, the household property that cannot be compromised by any external interference. For the state, this personal control has meant relief from the financial obligations tied to the maintenance of housing stock. Disinvestment has grown from a temporary fix into an essential trait of the political system. The heating infrastructure has remained entirely in the public domain, leaving no space for legitimate manifestations of the profit

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motive. This has led to a conflict of moral reasonings. The framework of reciprocity promoted by the local elite has been founded on the premise of market relations as a new norm that allows for occasional exceptions. For the working-­class population, however, the commercialization of heating remains illegitimate. This standoff has lasted for two decades, leading to cycles of disinvestment, generating politics of tokenism and paternalist gestures. Instead of wholesale and rapid neoliberalization, the state proceeded cautiously in all three cases, preserving tokens of embeddedness that allowed it to maintain patronage connections. This dynamic can be called politicizing in the sense of a discursive shift of purely technical issues into the domain of political contestation. However, it is depoliticizing if one understands politics as the process of public deliberation and decision-­making: the subalterns have been reduced to the role of atomized clients in patronage schemes.

Conclusion to Part II The social upheaval that accompanied the breakup of the USSR led to the formation of a new city-­level power bloc in Kryvyi Rih. Its ideology rested on the values of local autonomy and of the city understood as a moral community. The spirit of a mobilizational economy, which relied on the instincts of Stalinist modernity, found its new justification in the extraordinary conjuncture of the 1990s, when survival became the watchword. The survival conjuncture bore only superficial continuity with the preceding Soviet period, and in fact brought in new social mechanisms (e.g. the barter economy, a greater role of informality and patrimonial ties). These mechanisms were aimed at ‘domesticating neoliberalism’ (Stenning 2010), translating the new economic doxa into the local socio-­economic and political vernacular and inscribing it into the infrastructures of daily life. This hegemonic politics reinforced the lay imaginary of unequally embedded property regimes. Public property was constructed as the domain of the commonweal: something that ought to benefit first and foremost those who have been deprived access to the less regulated circuits of the private domain. The latter domain is discursively equated with the personal property regime, autonomous from all social obligations. The two regimes coexist, dependent on each other, allowing the local power bloc to preside over paternalist distribution schemes that do not cost much and are largely tokenistic in nature.

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The class alliance, born from a state of normalized crisis and structural shortages, is based on the ever-­present threat of further socio-­ economic deterioration. The incumbent elite presents itself as the social agent able to slow down or neutralize, at least temporarily, the economic demise of the population under its tutelage. In other words, its patronage is substractive: ‘Even where positive incentives are used, they are accompanied by threats, are of such little value that they are of negligible use in ensuring compliance, or are offered as a replacement for goods that previously had been regarded as entitlements’ (Allina-­Pisano 2010). In the post-­Soviet case, the political machine threatens to cut access to something that has so far been taken for granted (wages, infrastructure, welfare payments etc.). The ambiance of ‘chronic disaster’ (Shevchenko 2009) helps construct and justify a low-­cost, even if weak, hegemonic mechanism. The canvas of the political life of the city presented above is mostly structured by ‘livelihood struggles’ (Denning 2020) focused on redistribution and access to means of social reproduction rather than on the production process. However, the political drama also unfolds at the level of the enterprise. In the next part, I will analyse the mechanisms of reproduction of political domination within the industrial enterprises of Kryvyi Rih.

Notes  1. Like many other infrastructures, including housing and energy, public transportation cost very little in the USSR.  2. The emic term to describe social categories qualifying for various exemptions and special tariff regimes is lgotniki (pilhovyky in Ukrainian). It stems from the word lgota (Ukrainian pilha) – literally, ‘alleviation’. Unlike a subsidy, a lgota does not concern money transfers from the state to the welfare recipient but is the simple reduction or cancelling of the recipient’s financial obligation (although usually the functioning of a lgota implies quite complicated cross-­subsidies). It is difficult to translate this term, ubiquitous in Ukrainian socio-­political parlance, into English. In French, it can be roughly translated as assistanat/assistés, but the pejorative connotations of this French term are not necessarily present in Ukraine.  3. One of the reasons for this was a difference in energy sources. Combustible fuel for buses was susceptible to rapid price hikes or devastating shortages, caused by Ukrainian refineries’ dependence on oil from Russia. Electricity consumed by trams and trolleybuses, on the other hand, was domestically produced and subsidized. Their survival was ensured by the conservative character of post-­Soviet austerity: ‘Unlike buses that needed action to be fuelled and work, trams and trolleybuses needed action to be cut-­off the electricity grid and stopped’ (Vozyanov 2018).  4. From then on, the system of public transportation had no fare inspectors and no ticket booths at bus stops or functioning mechanical validators on board. The fare system was radically simplified: instead of a wide range of offers and types of fare, there were

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 5.

 6.  7.

 8.

 9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

only two options: buy a single-­use ticket upon boarding or claim the right to a free ride. The latter could be justified by informal reasons, such as the short duration of a trip. This mode of transportation was a priority signature project in the 1990s, co-­financed by the city and the state. It has kept its fare at the same low level as trolleybuses and trams, equally bearing the brunt of lgotniki, but its fare enforcement has functioned much better. Vilkul’s other p ­ roject – ­called ‘A City Without Outskirts’. This politicization did not concern the two more capital-­intensive transportation modes, tram and metrotram. The upsurge of purchases of new buses and trolleybuses since 2018 has not been accompanied by any comparable activities in rail transport. The progress in one area fed off the degradation of the other: in order to find money for ten buses in 2019, the city council had to cut the financing of the metrotram. The average age of metrotram cars is 30 years; the newest were acquired in 1995, while the oldest ones still functioning are 56 years old. Such modernization had already taken place in Mariupol, a city fully controlled by Metinvest before the 2022 invasion. There, the mayor allied with Rinat Akhmetov had boosted his popularity by erasing marshrutkas and introducing new additional buses and trams on a huge scale (Vozyanov 2018). A similar process has been taking place in Dnipro, the regional capital with a popular reformist mayor. The housing thus distributed to workers legally remained the property of the enterprise; however, residents could transfer their apartments to other people as a gift or as part exchange, as well as inherit them, which amounted to more than the usual number of rights granted to tenants. The monthly rent and utilities were kept at around 5 per cent of workers’ income. For all practical purposes, such an apartment was perceived as the property of the occupying family. The enterprises also continued the older practice of acquiring and issuing land plots for their employees to build individual family houses. Areas known as chastnyi sektor (‘private sector’, a neighbourhood consisting of single- or two-­family houses with gardens) can be found almost in every part of Kryvyi Rih, interspersed with zones of multistorey housing. The only exception was Kryvorizhstal, the steel mill resuscitated by the state. It kept distributing new housing for free even after the contested privatization of the factory. The two residential blocks built by AMKR in 2011 were the last pieces of mass housing ever constructed in Kryvyi Rih. It is true that the aggregate demand can be accommodated within the existing housing stock, given that the population of Kryvyi Rih shrank by a quarter between the early 1990s and 2020. This right is an element of transitional justice. Distributing housing among the adult population in the early 1990s served to legitimate the new politico-­economic regime, but thirty years later there are much lower expectations regarding the provision of free private housing. According to the law, apartment owners ought to create a condominium (OSBB, ‘the association of co-­proprietors of the apartment block’), while house owners (the city council or an enterprise) have to conduct a major renovation of the building (kapitalnyi remont) before transferring this property. This never happens, because neither have the resources. Suspicious of government initiatives concerned with property transfer, apartment owners are reluctant to create an OSBB or choose a managing company. As of 2020, only 8 per cent of residential blocks in Ukraine have chosen such a company themselves; 30 per cent have had managing companies imposed on them by the local authorities; and up to 40 per cent still do not have one (Linn 2020). Sometimes they are physically preserved at the cost of their functional role and

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appearance, thereby closing the ‘functional gap’ (Sýkora 1993). For example, most cinema theatres that had existed in Kryvyi Rih before 1991 if not destroyed were converted into chain supermarkets. This creation of ‘a capitalist space within a socialist shell’ (Venovcevs 2020: 6) is a concerted private initiative to transform public spaces. 16. There are even deeper parallels between the lay attitude to common (nicheynaya, literally ‘nobody’s’) property, which can be legitimately claimed by any resourceful owner (e.g. putting up a shed or digging a storage cellar on a lawn or a playground adjacent to the apartment block), and the classic Lockean understanding of the genesis of private property. 17. Heating season usually lasts from October 15 to April 15. This is the period when heating infrastructure is active. 18. Teplotsentral’s financial situation is even worse. Its vehicle fleet in 2020 consisted of around 60 units made in the 1970s and 1980s, out of which only 10–15 were functioning (Serdiuk 2020).

PART III

_ The Factory

What is the connection between a national politico-­economic landscape and power configurations on the industrial shopfloor? In his essay about ‘Americanism and Fordism’, Gramsci examines the specificity of political dynamics of interwar US, where the ruling class, unlike its counterparts in Western Europe, did not seem to need the wide array of civil society institutions to ensure its hegemony. Fordism provided ‘a skilful combination of force and persuasion’ that centred political life around production: ‘Hegemony here is born in the factory and requires for its exercise only a minute quantity of professional political and ideological intermediaries’ (Gramsci 1992: 285). This intuition deserves special attention in postsocialist settings. The domination of large Fordist industrial entities over the local political economy, inherited from Soviet modernity (Kotkin 1997), holds sway over the political imaginary of the post-­Soviet working class. The relative weakness of civil society in pre-­2022 Ukraine (Ishchenko 2018) offers another parallel with the conjuncture described by Gramsci. Despite the lack of trusted institutions promoting a convincing and widely shared national narrative from above or from below, there is no social breakdown. Instead of succumbing to anomie, Ukrainian workers implicitly gravitate towards a residual social project that owes a lot to Stalinist modernity, built upon the ultimate Fordist principles of enterprises as nodes of civilization. If this is so, the shopfloor should be a privileged fieldsite, likely to shed light on non-­verbalized shared assumptions about hierarchy and social order. What kind of hegemonic configuration is being reproduced on the post-­Soviet shopfloor? What are its varieties and dynamics? And

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what can it tell us about wider hegemonic configurations? Such are the questions that will be addressed in the following three chapters. In Chapter 5, I give an overview of Soviet industrial paternalism and its successor, the post-­Soviet factory regime. Chapter 6 examines the subsequent unsustainable evolution of this regime after the privatization and economic growth of the 2000s. Finally, in Chapter 7, I present two configurations that are more sustainable and legitimate than the typical ‘post-­post-­Soviet’ regime: the neo-­Fordist case of an oligarchic corporation and the extremely disembedded case of a small window-­making factory.

— Chapter 5 —

Informality and Hierarchies at the Post-Soviet Workplace

_ The massive industrialization of the Soviet Union, which started in 1929, has radically reshaped industrial relations. New factories, lacking any organizational or ideational legacy, became the meeting place of industrial bureaucracy, which replaced capitalist owners, and the Stalinist working class, recruited from peasantry (Connor 1991; Filtzer 1986). The industrial culture that emerged from this meeting defined production politics for decades ahead.

Soviet Plan-Fulfilment Pact Against Taylorism An essential element of the political landscape at the Soviet factory was the collusion between the director and the workers against the party state. The workers were interested in higher wages and a lower workload; the director’s primary interest lay in fulfilling (or, better yet, slightly over-­fulfilling) the plan. In order to ensure the cooperation of the workforce, the administration introduced an informal ‘plan-­fulfilment pact’. It would turn a blind eye to minor offences made by workers provided they would be prepared to invest extra energy when pressed (e.g. work overtime at the end of the month). This pact came into force despite the official policies of the government, which tried to instil labour discipline with draconian laws, including the criminalization of late attendance (Filtzer 1986: 67–68), and with the Stakhanovite movement (Siegelbaum 1990). Both were successfully sabotaged by factory directors.

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This pact was taken to a new level after Stalin. In 1956, workers were allowed to quit their jobs upon two weeks’ notice, which greatly increased their leverage in conditions of chronic shortage of skilled labour in the USSR. This pushed enterprises to compete for workforce by offering extra material benefits. Starting from the 1960s, a growing share of the Soviet national income was distributed via enterprises. They funded the construction of housing, created community centres (‘palaces of culture’) and sport centres, distributed cash bonuses and scarce consumption goods and organized the workers’ leisure by distributing putiovki (vacation vouchers) to resorts for adults and children. Many of these goods and services were not available through other channels. Ensuring this distribution was the main function of trade unions, which thus became the ‘left hand’ of factory management. The inaccessibility of consumption goods and services via other channels is what makes Soviet industrial paternalism special. In a society where money does not live up to its textbook ­definition – ­a universal means of ­exchange – ­the employee is not free to obtain the goods from a different supplier but remains tied to an employer. The latter, hence, becomes what Erving Goffman ([1961] 1990) calls a ‘total social institution’ (on the connection between Goffman’s concept and the enterprises under the state socialism, see Bridger and Pine 1998: 9). When widely reproduced on a macro scale, such paternalism evolves from an isolated management strategy into a special type of production relation, different from one based on free market exchange (Ashwin 1999: 15–17). Ultimately, Soviet industrial paternalism arose from the autonomy of the worker in the labour process, which was sufficient enough to influence the production rhythm on the scale of the enterprise. Despite persistent declarations of commitment to the Taylorist principles of ‘scientific organization of labour’, they never really took root in Soviet industry. Atta (1986) sums up the main structural reasons for this failure: labour hoarding that went against the Taylorist drive to minimize personnel; the structural incentive to increase the volume of output instead of profit; the uneven production process, in which periods of forced idleness coexisted with occasional ‘storming’ instead of the measured routine of a Taylorist shopfloor. The worker maintained immediate control over their own workplace and labour process. In order to manage such a labour process, the foreman had to possess significant expertise in each worker’s field, which became a precondition for gaining trust and respect from the team. Moreover, labour process relied on informal norms instead of official regulations.

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Rather than overt and formalized conflict, the Soviet workplace autonomy led to wide use of ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott [1985] 2000) directed against the management: alcoholism, slacking, absenteeism, pilfering, changing jobs. The early Soviet economist Yevgeniy Preobrazhenskiy correctly predicted this state of affairs in the mid-­ 1920s. Noting that the new economy eliminated competition and profitability as the main productivity drives, he found that it was informal working-­class pressure from below driving productivity (Preobrazhenskiy [1925] 2008: 237). Soviet enterprise was conceived ‘as a moral as well as a productive community’ (Ashwin 1999: 10). It produced a ‘labour collective’ – a fetishized social unit that helped displace the class conflict onto upper levels. In this conflict, the enterprise posed as a homogeneous community with a shared fate, represented by its director (Clarke 1993b: 27). The source of a director’s legitimacy lay in his ability to navigate the vagaries of administrative markets and deliver the results to his clientèle. Conversely, the large size of the labour collective was an important leverage in the bureaucratic bargaining, with its particular governmentality focused on ‘the population as a fixed variable’ (Collier 2011). Soviet industrialization produced a particular kind of modernity, centred around large industrial entities whose functions expanded far beyond pure production activities. Responsible for providing the means for consumption and leisure, and other means of social reproduction, these total institutions produced a solidarity between the dominant social group of managers and the atomized dominated workers. In the 1960s, this informal pact was reinforced with formal tools of industrial paternalism, administered by trade unions. On the micro level, Soviet industrial paternalism rested on a non-­Taylorized labour process that gave the workers considerable workplace autonomy. On the level of the enterprise, this assemblage of atomized economic subjects was discursively constituted as a ‘labour collective’, the homogeneous clientèle of the factory director. Such was the condition of the Soviet industrial field by the time of the Soviet collapse in 1991.

Post-Soviet Survival Pact Against Social Disintegration Unlike the former Comecon countries of Central Europe, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics did not leave behind the patterns of informality and patronage after the transition to the market econ-

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omy in the 1990s. Here, it was impossible to rapidly liberalize the economy and allow the market to do its job: ensuring profitability for successful enterprises that would shed labour and closing down the unsuccessful ones. As a result, successful enterprises would shed labour and become profitable while the unsuccessful ones went out of business. The reason was the deep anchoring of enterprises in social life discussed above. This embeddedness could not be easily undone: a rapid introduction to the market economy would have been tantamount to ‘returning to the nineteenth century’ given the lack of even embryonic market institutions to begin with (Ticktin 1992: 175). There was no substitute for ‘city-­forming enterprises’, which supplied vital services to ‘their’ population: they were socially indispensable even when economically not viable. Instead of shedding excessive personnel and modernizing production lines in order to accommodate market demand, the enterprises kept hoarding labour as well as all other resources. Local and national authorities supported this strategy. Keeping a large workforce compensated for the lack of investment funds in the new circumstances of hyperinflation and broken supply chains, the Soviet trends of undermechanization and aversion to disruptive innovation (Filtzer 1992: 18–19) were reinforced. Workers, on their part, had little choice but to accept this new conservative ‘survival pact’, which acknowledged their claims to a decent social wage in principle but could offer them nothing more than a reduced working week and wage arrears or payments in kind. An old joke from the 1990s, which still reverberates in today’s Kryvyi Rih, was told to me by an informant working in a mine: a factory director is eager to get rid of workers, but they keep coming to work even after he stops paying their wages and puts up a fence. When the director introduces a fee for entering the premises, the workers only ask about the price of a monthly pass. What was so magnetic about a job that did not pay anymore? Besides accumulating wage claims for the future, workers made use of the non-­monetary elements of social wage associated with the mere fact of being employed at the factory: subsidized vacation trips, summer camps for children, a land plot for growing food, modest ‘material aid’ in difficult personal situations, burial expenses covered by the union etc. The social wage ‘was, and remains, key to “norms and obligations” that are commonly taken together to constitute the “moral economy of the poor”’ (Morris 2018: 35). Another reward of keeping the job was physical access to equipment and materials that could be employed for various side jobs on the spot (khaltura) and/or stolen for private

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use elsewhere. Lax discipline, which had been the scourge of Soviet factories, was even worse in the post-­Soviet decade. Finally, maintaining social networks of co-­workers did not just reaffirm their self-­worth but also reinforced informal networks of mutual help. The epoch of liquidity shortage, broken supply chains and hyperinflation was described in detail by Michael Burawoy, who conceptualized it as ‘merchant capitalism’ (Burawoy and Krotov 1993). Faced with the imperative of survival, factory managers agreed to work at a loss, surrendering profits (and often eventually control over the enterprise) to traders, who were able to ensure supplies of inputs and to market the output, navigating between state-­owned manufacturing monopolies. Investment plans aiming at the modernization of main production lines were brought to halt, while resources were poured into expanding autarkic production of components and goods, including consumption goods for the employees (Crowley 1997). The era of ‘merchant capitalism’ was over by the early 2000s. Parastatal trading monopolies were dismantled or taken over by the more production-­oriented oligarchic holdings in the course of privatization (Paskhaver, Verkhovodova and Agieieva 2007). Money assumed its classic function as a fully-­fledged means of universal exchange after the end of hyperinflation and shortages, the ban on barter operations and the gradual liquidation of wage arrears. These changes, however, did not radically reshape power relations on the shopfloor. The new generation of ­owners – ­traders and ­oligarchs – ­soon realized that ‘[o]ld Soviet managerial practices are the only condition for them to work at the present technological level without endangering the authority of managers and owners’ (Morrison 2008: 7). Contrary to the experience of most Central European countries, where ‘legacy’ trade unions disappeared relatively quickly from the scene due to shrinking membership and lack of interest from the state (Bohle and Greskovits 2007; Iankova 2002; Ost 2009), in Ukraine they increased their influence on the macro level (Kubicek 2000) and retained it on the factory level. The post-­Soviet survival conjuncture, described above, implied a continued need for a body responsible for ensuring social peace and stability and implementing paternalist distribution ­schemes – ­functions familiar to post-­Soviet successor unions.1 Lay evaluations of the ‘official’ union almost completely depend on its perceived ‘generosity’ or ‘value for money’ (the 1% union membership contribution mandatorily written off wages for most workers). Unions are an important stabilizer ensuring the political quietude of post-­Soviet Ukrainian labour (Gorbach 2019).

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A new element of the national trade union scene was born in 1989 and has received a lot of academic attention: the post-­Soviet ‘independent unions’. Their independence has its limits, but this endonym carries the important message of independence from the enterprise administration. AFL-­CIO and similar Western organizations have been working with independent unions in post-­Soviet countries for a long time, aiming at a construction of ‘real’ social democratic unions, which were supposed to grow in popularity compared to the discredited ‘communist’ ones. These hopes were informed by the impressive potential demonstrated by the miners’ strike of 1989 (Borisov and Clarke 1994; Clarke and Fairbrother 1993a, 1993c; Siegelbaum and Walkowitz 1995). However, in practice the demand for the ‘old’ unions persisted, while the ‘new’ unions soon showed their limitations: they mostly united comparatively privileged male workers from ‘core’ professions, cultivating individualist narratives of competition and deservingness, and looked for outside patrons (Clarke and Fairbrother 1993a; Gorbach 2019; Mandel 2004). In a typical post-­Soviet factory, an independent union has minuscule membership. The union’s permanent state of war with the administration forms the militant but desperate habitus of its members, which, however, does not cancel the need for a welfare distribution fund (Volynets 2015). The administration, acting through the loyal ‘official’ union, is often able to rely on the fiction of the ‘labour collective’ and pit the auxiliary unskilled workers against the unionized core workers (Crowley 1997: 163). The post-­Soviet configuration aimed at ­survival – ­that is, maintaining cash flow and supplies rather than profitability. This teleology had obvious repercussions for capital investment, which was the lowest priority compared to more urgent matters such as paying wages or ensuring uninterrupted supplies. Programmes of investment, maintenance, workplace safety and personnel training fell victim to post-­Soviet survival austerity (Clarke 1993a). The scant inner resources of enterprises (rather than loans or FDIs) have been the main source of investment throughout all the post-­Soviet history of Ukraine, and essentially the industry has had to live off the physical capital accumulated in the Soviet years (Khaustov and Venger 2019; Matuszak 2012: 81). The deteriorating equipment, in turn, reinforces traditional Soviet patterns of undermechanized and non-­Taylorized ‘relations in production’. Labour hoarding persists as a way to compensate for the lack of reliable equipment: ‘reliance on labour rather than investment in plant is perfectly rational in view of very low wages, which make

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up a small fraction of production costs, and the high cost (because of scarcity of credit and high risks) of investment funds’ (Schwartz 2003: 51). Taylorist labour processes were never introduced because this would require major investments too. Instead, the old ‘craft’ logic imposes itself upon the labour process with new vigour: the workers’ discretion grows with the growing dependence on the expertise of individual workers who know how to run the ageing equipment. The post-­Soviet politico-­economic conjuncture reshaped shopfloor power configurations but did not ‘Westernize’ them. The Soviet plan-­fulfilment pact between factory management and workers gave way to the post-­Soviet survival pact. The key elements of this configuration are: workers’ autonomy in the labour process; informality and individual strategies as the preferred way of problem solving; the moral economy of social wage; chronic underinvestment and labour intensification; a successor union administering the social wage, ensuring social peace, and mobilizing the labour collective for the needs of the employer; an ‘independent union’ as a reservoir of skilled militant workers; weapons of the ­weak – ­tolerated so as to prevent organized resistance.

Conclusion The post-­Soviet workplace is a complex field of power relations, to a large extent informed by the legacies of Stalinist industrialization. Historically, it has occupied a very important place in the overall sociopolitical setup, defining the life conditions of the workers and shaping their lifeworld far beyond narrowly conceived classic wage labour relations. Structured by informal relations of trust and moral obligations, the workplace political configuration features a paternalist alliance between the management and the workforce. This moral economy is institutionalized in the schemes of corporate welfare, presided over by the legacy union. Social wage, highly appreciated by the workers, has been an element of utmost importance in the hegemonic toolkit of industrial management. It consists of the distribution of housing, consumption goods and cradle-­to-­grave social services, including, importantly, vacation infrastructure. This paternalism is rooted in the workplace autonomy that persists in the non-­ Taylorized labour process at the Soviet factory and gives individual workers political leverage. The new conjuncture that emerged out of the crisis of the 1990s relied largely on the same set of elements as the previous factory

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regime, preserved in order to ensure social survival. Reforming industry by restructuring it along the lines of the rationality of market capitalism was not a viable option in that socio-­economic context. However, the post-­Soviet regime was not a simple continuation of Soviet industrial paternalism. Among the important new elements were underinvestment and reliance on previously accumulated capital, even greater autonomy of the factory management from macro structures, and workers’ greater dependence on their paternalist employer. The end of the extreme period of the 1990s, the economic boom of the 2000s and the privatization of industry did not bring significant changes. Mechanisms developed to suit the needs of the crisis conjuncture remained in place even after capitalist normalization. The following chapter will explore this ‘post-­post-­Soviet’ factory regime in detail.

Note 1. The emic name for what is known in the literature as successor or legacy union is ‘the official union’ or even ‘the state union’ (gosudarstvennyi).

— Chapter 6 —

Paternalism in Decay Post-Post-Soviet Inertia

_ The change of ownership and the beginning of economic growth in the 2000s created conditions for a capitalist rationalization at Ukrainian factories. However, the changes did not encompass Toyota-­style flexibilization, Taylorization and automation. Such scenarios implied a rupture of links of embeddedness, which had not worked out well even in initially more marketized economies like Hungary (Mihály 2021; Swain 1998). In post-­Soviet conditions, such an overhaul was deemed too costly and disruptive for new owners, who preferred to keep to the old templates, gradually adapting them to the evolving general politico-­economic context (Morrison 2008). The result of such incremental changes has been a factory regime that I will call here ‘post-­post-­Soviet’, acknowledging the difference between the current configuration and its predecessors but also highlighting the continuity. I will begin by painting the picture of the post-­post-­Soviet factory regime at two mining enterprises in Kryvyi Rih. After that, I will focus on the case of AMKR, the steel mill where this regime has been disturbed by the arrival of a non-­Ukrainian owner.

The Mines: Repressive Informality Kryvyi Rih Iron Ore Combine (KZRK) used to be the corporation (trest) managing all underground iron ore mining in Soviet times. Currently, it includes four mines, each employing 1300–1700 people.1 The privatization of KZRK was a complicated, opaque and turbulent

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process. On the eve of the fateful presidential elections of 2004, Viktor Pinchuk, the son-­in-­law of President Kuchma, asked the industrial group Privat to privatize the enterprise on his behalf and hold it temporarily, in order to avoid the bad publicity of crony privatization (Gnap 2017; Golovniov and Vinnichuk 2018). Privat, the group run by Ihor Kolomoiskyi and Gennadiy Bogoliubov, bought KZRK from the state and then resold it to Pinchuk’s Interpipe, which installed its own top management. However, several months later, when the Orange Revolution ended the rule of Kuchma, a court reinstalled the old director, Fedor Karamanits. Having returned into the director’s seat, he raised wages by 30 per cent and mobilized miners to demand the return of KZRK to state ownership. The employees took turns sleeping in tents in front of the head office, protecting the paternalist director. After a two-­month standoff, Pinchuk lost the enterprise, but the state did not regain it: KZRK became the shared property of Privat and Rinat Akhmetov’s holding, Metinvest. One third of its output goes to the metalworking factories of Privat and Metinvest, while the rest is exported to the countries of the Danube basin. However, neither of the two owners associate themselves with KZRK directly and publicly. In the eyes of the workers, Karamanits remained the key figure representing the enterprise until his death in 2019. Sukha Balka is the other mining company, currently employing 4,000 workers. Unlike KZRK, from which it split at an early stage, Sukha Balka with its two mines showed extraordinary profitability and survival skills in the 1990s (see Chapter 3). As early as July 1996, Privat bought 30 per cent of its shares for $6 million, later establishing full control over the company. In late 2007, it sold Sukha Balka to Evraz, a Russian metalworking corporation. The latter started ‘rationalizing’ the organizational structure of the company, shedding a large part of the company’s ‘social sphere’ (resorts, children’s summer camps, health centres etc.). This social disembedding was accompanied by the dire consequences of the 2008 crisis, exacerbated by competition with KZRK and by the political falling out with the local power bloc. Starting from 2010, the management of Sukha Balka did not take part in important rituals such as the endorsement of Yuriy Vilkul for mayorship; it was excluded from the local association of industrialists; and the municipal press ignored Sukha Balka in its articles celebrating local industry. The Russian owners faced additional political difficulties after the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the war in the Donbas in 2014. In the spring of 2017, during a wildcat strike supported by the independent union,

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Evraz finally sold its Ukrainian assets at a loss. They were bought by DCH holding, controlled by the Kharkiv-­based oligarch Oleksandr Yaroslavskyi. Both companies lack a clearly visible owner figure, due to constant turbulence and conflicts. However, seen from below, there is an inertia in the power dynamics of the mines that is not seen from above.

Safety, Equipment, Time: Contested Flexibility Alexei, a miner in his fifties working in one of the Sukha Balka pits, greeted me with a tirade about a deadly accident he had narrowly escaped just before our meeting. A chunk of ore, which had been dangerously hanging above a passage used by miners, fell down, almost landing on the heads of Alexei and his younger workmate. Alexei had warned his bosses about this risk, but they had failed to do anything. This was not the first case of dangerous neglect: previously, Alexei had tried in vain to find wood to block an idle orepass and prevent a landslide. Alexei is not exceptional in his outrage about workplace safety; this topic was recurrent in my talks with all miners. Boris, working in the same mine, shared the details of his own accident involving a rock that fell out of an unprotected orepass and displaced his kneecap. There was nobody to help him: against the instructions, each location is manned by a single worker. When a medical nurse reaches a wounded miner, she uses a first aid kit bought with her own money. Understaffing combined with the drive to increase output is the reason behind a widespread problem with stythe (a dangerous concentration of suffocating gases in a mine after a blast). Contrary to safety rules, miners have no means of checking for stythe, while ventilation systems are always malfunctioning. When Boris raised this issue with upper management, he was reprimanded for working in the dangerous conditions in the first place. Alexei procured his own measuring device ‘for a bottle of booze’. But the management did not confirm him officially as a gas measurer, since this would reduce his extraction output. During my fieldwork, two miners died of stythe suffocation. Being fully aware of risks stemming from such practices, the employer aims at minimizing legal consequences and/or shifts them onto the workers themselves. Shortly before my field trip, in another mine, a miner’s eyes were wounded by a detonator; the manager told him to pretend that he had had a fight, but the doctor recognized the

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real cause of the injury. Sanctions followed for the worker responsible for handling the explosives: due to understaffing, he had been forced to give informal permission to people who were often unauthorized to handle the dangerous material. Informality helps increase surplus value in the cheapest possible way: through understaffing, pressure on the remaining workers to violate the rules in order to deliver output; outsourcing of the costs of safety measures to the workers themselves, and application of formal sanctions in the case of an emergency. A similar logic regulates the companies’ policies of disinvestment. Olga, a female miner at KZRK, told me that in the 1980s the mines were equipped with ‘shovers’ – wheeled mechanisms that pushed a load into the cage, which was then hauled up. After privatization in 2004, the shovers were left unrepaired when they broke down and gradually disappeared one by one. Citing the lack of funds for maintenance, the management instead installed winding machines, which are manually operated with hooks and cable wires. Miners routinely buy saws, hammers and boots at the local marketplace in order to use them at work. Equipment is often simply left to gradually wear down. Looking for reasons for this seemingly irrational behaviour of mine owners, workers cited corruption and rent-­seeking: instead of running the mine in a proper capitalist way, the owners or managers undermine it with their short-­termist policies. In other words, my interlocutors concluded that is a lack of profit motive that is responsible for the sorry state of their mines. But why do they perceive negatively the informal flexibility that used to be a natural part of the deal at the Soviet workplace? Illicit corner-­cutting for the sake of optimal production was normal practice in previous factory regimes. The arrival of the market economy maintained the informal pact but renegotiated it in favour of the management. Repressive informality is the management’s answer to corporate austerity. Its tacit character is illustrated by the conventional strategy of reducing the workforce and increasing labour intensity: the enterprise does not hire a new person in place of a retired worker but instead redistributes the workload among the remaining team. In the 1990s, this scheme used to benefit workers, who shared the ‘unused’ wages, calculated according to the full staff schedule and distributed among the smaller number of actual employees (Kiblitskaya 1995). In the post-­post-­Soviet corporate austerity conjuncture, pay systems are more flexible, and the former weapons of the weak are

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being taken advantage of: workers get the extra job but not the extra money. Constantly switching between formal and informal management modes, bosses impose a double bind on employees, as stated by Zhanna, a miner from KZRK: At the beginning of each shift, I sign a paper declaring that it is working well, that I am responsible for keeping it like that, in the case of a breakage I have to stop it and demand a repair. But none of this happens, and they can come at any time and draw up a report that it is not working well, report me and fire me for negligence.

Contrary to fearing that automation will eliminate jobs, widespread in the world capitalist core countries (Benanav 2020; Smith 2020), the miners of Kryvyi Rih can hardly imagine it as a realistic threat. ‘This is because they live in the 22nd century, or on Mars!’ –remarked Olga, supported by her co-­worker. If anything, the number of working hours demanded by the enterprise from a worker has only been growing, in line with the wear and tear of equipment. One of the three most discussed issues among the workers, beside wages and safety, is the encroaching lengthening of shifts. The non-­Taylorized labour process in the post-­post-­Soviet conjuncture relies on workplace autonomy and informal agreements as much as its predecessors did. The important difference lies in the changed power differential. The new owners have preserved all the external attributes of the traditional factory regime but changed its character through defunding production processes. What is more, external incentives (the social wage) are also gradually vanishing.

The Slow Demise of the Social Wage In the immediate post-­Soviet period, both enterprises offered large scale in-­kind cradle-­to-­grave services, adjusted to the severe economic crisis conjuncture. The guaranteed access to a range of basic products and services was an important element of individual survival strategies. In the hyperinflationary environment, it effectively tied the workforce to the enterprise even when the latter was not able to respect its monetary commitments. In the boom years, this mechanism lost its fundamental importance but was not eliminated because of its high symbolic significance. The crisis of 2008–2009, followed by the end of the commodities supercycle a few years later, prompted the mining holdings to do away with some elements of corporate welfare. Others remained but received little investment.

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Figure 6.1.  Sport trophies of KZRK workers on display in the corridor at the local PMGU head office. Photo taken by the author in March 2019.

Nevertheless, the management does not make a secret of its use of the remaining facilities as a means of social control. When Inna refused to perform unpaid extra tasks beyond her job description, the manager warned her that he had attended special courses and knew ‘ways to make the working class work’. When she asked him what he meant by that, the manager mostly spoke about access to a recreation facility (turbaza). In a fitting illustration of the falling importance of corporate welfare, Inna retorted that she would not dream of going to the turbaza with him and other members of the administration, preferring instead to spend her free time with family and people she liked talking to. However, her partner Misha regularly participates in lotteries organized by the union, hoping to win a seaside vacation voucher. Access to recreation facilities has been shrinking both in terms of quality and quantity, but it still remains an important tool of corporate paternalism. My interlocutor from the PMGU union leadership at KZRK explained at length that the in-­kind services provided by the union (e.g. a guaranteed right to funerary services) are a much more attractive element of welfare than monetary payments, which can be deval-

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ued. He cited the case of a retired former miner who got seriously ill and applied to the union for financial aid; however, it turned out that several years before that, upon retiring, he had filed a lawsuit against the enterprise, demanding compensation for his degraded health after years of work. This practice is not uncommon among the workers: the court usually orders the enterprise to pay a one-­off compensation that is roughly equivalent to 5–10 months’ wages. But it comes at a cost: in the eyes of the KZRK management, the lawsuit put that miner outside of the moral community of the enterprise. Having received the compensation ordered by court, the mine veteran could not hope for any amicable aid from the union afterwards. In the opinion of the PMGU boss, this was not a profitable arrangement. Other elements of classic Soviet corporate welfare have mostly withered away. Asked about factors connecting them to the enterprise besides wages and vacation trips, my informants only mentioned two things: healthcare insurance and bottles of mineral water at the workplace.

Upscaling Paternalism On further reflection, many workers mentioned norms guaranteed by law that were part of the ‘social package’ of their company. The following is a dialogue between Inna and Olga is exemplary: O: I have to tell you that it is still ­prestigious . . . ­you can afford sick days paid 100% . . . I: You can afford paid pregnancy and childcare leave . . . O: You have a vacation . . . I: There are these miserable ten [days of] social [vacation], paid based on your average income. That is, if you are a single mother, there you go.

Most of the perks they mention are norms enforced by national legislation. However, they are seen as exceptional conditions not easily found elsewhere, particularly not in the informal economy. Given the large gap between the formal obligations of the ruling classes and their actual implementation, normalized in the 1990s, the very fact of respecting the minimal legal guarantees is in itself an extraordinary feature. Thus the enterprise itself has gradually shifted from being the principal provider of all means of subsistence to functioning as a transmission belt between the state and the workers/citizens. Many of my interlocutors saw factory management as part of the street-­ level bureaucracy that impersonates the state for the popular classes

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(Gupta 1995). Some of them even used the term ‘state factories’ to describe the large Soviet-­built industrial enterprises, despite the well-­ known history of their privatization. In the symbolic domain, these factories remain the responsibility of, and to an extent part of, the state. Several factors made the new conjuncture different from the post-­ Soviet survival mode. First, the mechanisms of the moneyless state-­ owned economy of the 1990s were no longer in place. Second, the resources on which enterprises had relied in the 1990s were also ­gone – ­either exhausted or consciously shed (e.g. social infrastructure). Finally, the new conjuncture featured a strong party political dimension: the changes in the political landscape after the Orange Revolution of 2004 introduced the atomized popular vote as a new and important variable (Wilson 2005). Expectations that the state would increase social protection of strategic voter groups from particular economic sectors and professions were indeed met by the government of Yuliya Tymoshenko. In the autumn of 2008, it passed a law ‘on the prestige of miners’ work’ (pro prestyzhnist shakhtarskoyi pratsi), which guaranteed the miners free higher education for their children, vacation vouchers and aid for accident victims. It also contained some promises about housing (never fully implemented) and limited the rate of income tax applied to miners’ wages to just 10 per cent.2 Most importantly, this bill set a threshold for miners’ pensions: they cannot be lower than 80 per cent of a miner’s average wage during the period of activity. A miner’s pension also cannot be smaller than three minimum subsistence wages (prozhytkovykh minimumy). The latter clause protects female miners, with their small wages. Even if some of these legal norms have not been implemented or have met opposition, they are important at the level of agenda-­setting promises, establishing direct meaningful ties between the government and workers. These guarantees make comfortable the traditional norm of early retirement.3 The management of the mines is the greatest beneficiary of these schemes, which prevent workers from leaving and thus help maintain the factory regime that otherwise would become unsustainable. Sergei from Sukha Balka explicitly stated that the hope for a privileged retirement is the one factor keeping him from fully joining the informal economy: Were it not for the mine, I would achieve more with air conditioners, with private business, and my health would be better. But I guess I’m not brave

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enough. A friend of mine threw a fit and left, while I am too stingy to let these eight years go. Then they will be counted in the pensionable service, but as ordinary work .

The 2020 Strike: Dissipating Paternalism, Enduring Consent The demise of the paternalist legitimacy in the mines can be illustrated by the 2020 strike at KZRK. During July–August of that year, the management launched a reassessment of job descriptions, notably for underpaid feminized professions that involved managing the mechanisms in the pit shaft. It had a clear intent to requalify the professions as non-­harmful and end the ‘first list’ privileged pension regime for them (see endnote 3). Male miners in the core professions, better paid and not concerned by this move, were divided on whether to support the protests of their female colleagues. However, the derisively small gift (200 UAH, or $7) that each employee of KZRK received to celebrate Miners’ Day on 30 August had angered the more privileged factions of the workforce too. As the last straw, the miners of the most technically dilapidated mine of KZRK, Oktiabrskaya, received extremely low August wages. The wage drop reflected the small amount of output, which was caused by lack of investment in new, deeper levels of extraction. The miners sent a delegation to Serhiy Novak, the new general director of KZRK, to plead for an improvement in their incomes, but they did not succeed. When the new payslips turned out to be as modest as the previous ones, the miners of Oktiabrskaya began a wildcat strike: on the morning of 3 September, twelve people on the night shift refused to get out of the mine, and a number of miners from the following shift went down only to join the underground protest. The conventional reaction to a wildcat miner strike is the arrival of the top manager: he is supposed to go down into the mine, listen to the strikers and reach an agreement based on some immediate promises. This ritual had been enacted during two previous wildcat strikes in the same mine that I had observed in 2019. Contrary to this convention that relies on informal personal ties between the director and the workers, Novak refused, suggesting that the protesters send a delegation to his office. When such a delegation arrived, the conversation ran against the script of paternalist mutual acknowledgement. The miners were outraged with Novak’s arrogant behaviour; he failed to introduce himself and refused to answer the miners’ questions, which he judged irrelevant. Novak’s attempts to shift the blame by citing external obstacles such as the late arrival of fittings

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or ­complicated interactions with the state bureaucracy did not suffice: he did not establish himself as a leader of the labour collective and thus showed himself to be unconcerned with miners’ interests. When the embittered strikers decided to remain in the mine for a second night, the general director cut their telephone connection to the outside and attempted to prevent the transport of food and water to the mine. In its official statement, the management interpreted the strike as a criminal offence. This attitude prompted the extension of the strike and its radicalization. The company’s other three mines were soon also paralysed. The number of strikers peaked at 393 people. The movement received support from politicians arriving from Kyiv, and even the local chapter of the PMGU, the loyal ‘legacy’ union, eventually expressed its solidarity with the strikers. The miners’ speeches and banners contested the logic of disembedded profitability, insisting that the mines had worked better when they belonged to the state and suggesting that they be nationalized. However, far from being socialist, the main agenda of the strikers concentrated around the ideal of a paternalist manager. They criticized Novak not for being the CEO, whose interests are by definition opposite to those of the workers, but rather for highlighting this difference of ­interests – ­something that a proper embedded mine director would not do: ‘He is a financier, not a general director, he only cares about money’; ‘He is a liquidator and everyone knows that, he came to destroy the kombinat’. In light of this paternalism shifting upwards, the miners turned towards the state. They paid a lot of attention to the visits and speeches of high-­profile politicians, and at one point a group of miners went to Kyiv themselves. They spent several nights in tents next to the president’s office, trying to meet with Volodymyr Zelenskyi and alert him to the situation. More importantly, the protesters appealed to the city mayor Yuriy Vilkul. His response was surprisingly enthusiastic: for the first time in his decade-­long career of mayor, he went out to talk with protesters. The mayor assured the miners of his full support, offered them legal aid and organized a supply of food and medicine to the strikers underground. However, he said that he was powerless to impose anything on a privately owned enterprise: ‘Forget this word, “the city khoziain”. I am the khoziain of sewage, something else, but not of the ­city . . . ­I don’t know [about the poor technical state of the mines] and I don’t want to know, I am not a khoziain’. Similar to the protagonists of Anastasia Piliavsky’s book about the Kanjar caste (2021), the Kryvyi Rih miners see themselves as

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‘nobody’s people’: they are desperately looking for a patron to take care of them. For the strikers and their supporters, the administration of the ­mines – ­the traditional ­patron – ­no longer fulfils this important role, and so they look for protection elsewhere, from the office of the president and the national leadership of the NPGU, to the city mayor. Far from striving for social equality, they place their bet on social asymmetry to help them advance. In the words of Piliavsky, ‘in hierarchical judgment, inequality is a problem only when it does not entail obligation, and the solution lies in getting those with more to give and do more for others’ (Piliavsky 2021: xxxv). This helps to explain the contradiction in the discourse of the striking miners. Protesting against the decay of patronage mechanisms, within which they are clients, they portray this state of affairs as the advent of ‘slavery’. This term has been used multiple times by the strikers and their supporters to describe their work conditions. At first glance, it makes little sense: slavery is the opposite of a disembedded labour market where all agents are free, even if poor or jobless. And yet, for the miners seeking paternalism, just as for Piliavsky’s Kajars, slavery is created by a situation in which the pre-­ given inequality of wealth and status is not accompanied by mutual obligations linking the powerful to their clients. The strike at KZRK lasted 43 days. It ended with a signed memorandum that promised increased wages and confirmed the special retirement regime. Moreover, the strikers were promised one-­off material aid, retroactive wage recalculation and non-­persecution. The management also agreed to pay for each day spent underground by the strikers. The strike that contested the decay of industrial paternalist schemes was pacified by the patrons reiterating their commitment to such schemes. Moreover, the majority of the KZRK miners did not take any part in the strike, being passive observers or even benefiting from the situation to earn a good name in the managers’ books by working as scabs wherever it was possible. Thus, despite its long-­ term decomposition, the post-­post-­Soviet industrial paternalism is still in place and strong enough to control the workforce in principle.

Conclusion The evolution of power configurations in the mines of Kryvyi Rih over the last decade has been the default scenario for the post-­Soviet factory regime. It largely corresponds to what was written about comparable cases in Russia (Morrison 2008) and elsewhere in Ukraine

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(Gorbach 2019). The need for a radical restructuring of industrial relations and the labour process is widely acknowledged by the management and the owners, but it is too costly and disruptive to be implemented. In the post-­Soviet politico-­economic environment, marked by chronic instability, short-­term planning and liquidity shortage, such a disruption would entail unacceptable risks. Instead, the management uses ad hoc cost cutting tactics and is raising output while preserving and relying on the existing social structures. These tactics are nevertheless far from simple repetition of age-­ old repertoire. The post-­Soviet survival pact relied on a number of premises that were unknown to the previous plan-­fulfilment pact. Subsequent mutations of the post-­Soviet survival pact have responded to evolving post-­S oviet capitalism with its peculiar dynamic. The ‘socialist’ appearance hides capitalist practices, permanently recast and reinvented in response to the changing environment. The general direction of the changes in the mines can be summed up as a slow but continuous renegotiation of hegemonic norms of informality in favour of the management. The latter has been gradually shifting its responsibilities for ensuring a smooth labour process for the workers and line managers, and its responsibilities for ensuring the social reproduction of labour power are being taken over by the state. Intensification and flexibilization of labour accompanies the renegotiation of hierarchies of national and industrial citizenship and belonging. In Marxist terms, these developments can be interpreted as the continuation of the formal subsumption of the labour process by capital. Instead of introducing new technologies that would increase relative surplus value, we see readjustments aimed at increasing the absolute surplus value. This strategy makes sense in the context of insider privatization. The lack of investments in capital allows for not only an increase in the mass of surplus value but also staves off the growth of the organic composition of capital, ensuring a comfortable level of profitability. This ‘temporal fix’ (Harvey [1982] 1984) chimes with the basic instincts of the native capitalist class: (1) minimizing inputs, maximizing outputs, and taking them out of the national jurisdiction into offshore havens; (2) investing resources in political influence, using the state to protect and expand one’s property. The following section will offer a look at what happens when an enterprise ends up in the hands of a foreigner.

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Permanent Conflict at AMKR: When an Intruder Comes Built in 1934, the Kryvyi Rih metalworking factory was further expanded during the postwar decades. In 1974, the factory, known as Kryvorizhstal, launched a new blast furnace, the largest in Europe. In the 1990s, it survived the crisis by mobilizing political resources on the local as well as national levels. Vadim Gurov, a former shop director at Kryvorizhstal elected to parliament, convinced the government to cancel the burden of taxes and debts, which helped lift the enterprise out of the abyss. On the local level, the city took up the burden of the factory’s social assets while merging some mining enterprises and the local coking plant into Kryvorizhstal. As a result of this concentration, the number of employees reached 60,000. Having come back onto the profitability track thanks to these efforts, Kryvorizhstal did not need an efficient owner to lift it out of misery. Nevertheless, despite the massive opposition of the local elite, in 2004 the central government sold the enterprise to two Ukrainian oligarchs, Rinat Akhmetov and Viktor Pinchuk, for $0.8 billion. One year later, after the Orange Revolution, the new government nationalized Kryvorizhstal and resold it to the UK–Indian Mittal Steel corporation for $4.8 billion. Later, the corporation merged with Arcelor, thus formally reuniting Kryvyi Rih with its erstwhile Belgian investors from the 1880s. Since then, the factory has been known as ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih (AMKR). It remains the largest foreign-­owned enterprise in Ukraine (24,000 workers). It represents a particular variation of the post-­post-­Soviet factory regime: here, the decay of industrial paternalism is inhibited by permanent social conflict at the enterprise.

Political Pressure and Forced Generosity During the reprivatization campaign of 2005, Mittal was locally the least preferred bidder, as they were associated with the dangers of a disembedded ‘wild capitalism’ – massive layoffs and cutting corporate welfare. Vadim Gurov argued that the factory needed a Ukrainian investor, with whom, ‘as with the previous owners, it is possible to somehow arrange things and solve questions’. He drew attention to the fact that Mittal had just shed 30 per cent of its workforce worldwide, whereas a native investor might be reasonably expected to keep hoarding labour and preserve the main elements of the social wage.

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Fears of a disembedded foreign capitalist were stoked by local industrialists and their allies in the PMGU, the loyalist legacy trade union federation of metalworkers and ore miners. The factory’s PMGU president, Yuriy Bobchenko, drafted nineteen demands, which were included in the new privatization agreement, almost doubling the cost of the purchase for Mittal Steel. The new owner had to commit to raising the average wage at the factory to the industry-­ wide level; indexing wages on a monthly basis; raising the lowest wage at the enterprise above the officially calculated minimum subsistence income (prozhytkovyi minimum); guaranteeing the payment of the annual 13th wage; keeping the staffing level unchanged for five years; refraining from any cuts without the union’s agreement; keeping the amount and cost of subsidized vacation vouchers (putiovki) at existing levels; continuing the construction of free housing for employees; maintaining social services such as funerals or heating fuel supply; introducing free healthcare insurance and founding a clinic, and so on. This privatization package was unprecedented for Ukraine. The legacy union, which usually functions as the management’s auxiliary and helps ensure social peace at the enterprise, turned into a powerful adversary of the new owner of AMKR. Bobchenko joined the Party of Regions, which represented Rinat Akhmetov’s interests in national and local politics. Street protests organized by the city chapter of the PMGU to demand wage raises at AMKR were reinforced by the ‘solidary’ participation of the workers of other industrial entities of Kryvyi Rih, notably those belonging to Akhmetov. It was impossible to imagine the opposite situation, in which the PMGU leadership would bring in workers from AMKR to mount pressure on Akhmetov. The handicap of foreignness slowed down the adaptation to the disembedded market rationality, which was easier for indigenous capitalists. In June 2009, amidst falling demand for AMKR’s steel, the union blocked the plans to introduce a three-­day working week for 18,000 workers. Instead, the factory had to accord additional partially paid vacations and offered a new round of voluntary redundancies. Other Ukrainian metalworking factories fired 8,000 people each in 2009. ArcelorMittal’s factory in Kazakhstan’s Temirtau also conducted layoffs during that year, which was difficult for the metal industry. However, AMKR had to refrain from making compulsory redundancies. For excess workers who did not wish to quit, the factory created a ‘labour reserves shop’ (tsekh trudovykh rezerviv), paying them a wage approximately equivalent to unemployment benefit.

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In February 2010, Viktor Yanukovych, an ally of Rinat Akhmetov, won the presidential elections. Oleksandr Vilkul, a CEO at Metinvest, became the new regional governor. The new power bloc used the political opportunity to redistribute industrial assets in its favour: in May 2010, Metinvest seized control over YuGOK, pushing out managers affiliated with Privat. In this context, Yuriy Bobchenko went to Kyiv and resumed his public attacks on the ‘antisocial’ policies of AMKR. A compromise was reached, and at the local elections in the autumn, AMKR lent its lukewarm support to Vilkul’s father Yuriy, who became the new mayor. Starting from 2010–2011, AMKR regularly sponsored various ‘partnership projects’ with the city council, renovating urban infrastructure. After the end of the transitional period in 2016–2017, AMKR was able to outsource some auxiliary shops. However, these new subsidiaries (Steel Service and the Casting and Mechanical Plant) were created at a relatively late stage. They are still symbolically included in the labour collective of AMKR: both the management and the unions mention them along with AMKR proper in their official statements, and their employees retain rights to many elements of the company’s corporate welfare. In 2021, AMKR claimed to be the only enterprise in Ukraine’s metal industry still paying the 13th wage to its employees. After Bobchenko’s retirement from the post of PMGU president at AMKR in August 2017, his position was taken by Natalia Maryniuk, the former head of AMKR’s legal department. The large union, whose militancy was animated by the intransigence and political connections of its leadership, was now headed by a person that used to defend the management from the union’s claims and lawsuits. However, even after this change of leadership, the union did not return to the conventional track of total subservience to the management. The conjunctural arrival of an investor lacking the ‘indigeneity capital’ (Bayart and Geschiere 2001; Retière 2003) has created a self-­reproducing variation of the post-­post-­Soviet factory regime, in which the decay of paternalist elements of the previous regimes is further inhibited by a permanent low-­intensity industrial conflict.

Corporate Welfare, Union Politics, Individual Strategies Unlike the mines with their asymmetrical two-­union scheme, AMKR is a much more complex landscape. Besides the large legacy union, there are not one but ten ‘independent’ trade unions, competing for

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the allegiance of 24,000 workers and with the embattled administration. Informants from the activist core of ‘independent’ unions are well aware of the problematic aspects of the ‘service model’ of a trade union, traditional for the post-­Soviet area. Many of them regularly attend seminars and workshops with foreign colleagues, discussing how to develop the alternative model of a ‘real’ – that is, ­militant – ­union. In practice, however, all of these unions rely on traditional distribution mechanisms. Membership figures are the central source of any union’s legitimacy, and the militant elite also lures new members with vacation plans and monetary handouts. A newly created union launched a recruitment campaign in February 2020: it promised to give 500 UAH as a present to every woman joining before 8 March. Another union attracted special attention thanks to its policy of paying 500 UAH once every three months to its members. In terms of membership, this union is only second to the PMGU and boasts almost 1,500 workers. The administration is the main source of funding for these distribution schemes (see Figure 6.2).4 The unusual attention of the public to the welfare of employees at a specific enterprise, caused by the embattled position of the foreign owner, led to the creation of a new political market. Unions that compete on this market are as much vehicles of political mobilization against the owner and mechanisms of welfare distribution as they are tools for criminal-­political activities. In the midst of a joint union struggle against the management in 2018, the NVF union was shaken by a scandal: its leader was expelled after having been found guilty of embezzling large sums of money, using it to buy property in Bulgaria. Another large union leader, Vasylenko, is a former marketplace director and small entrepreneur who did two prison terms (illegal possession of firearms in 1994 and throwing explosives at a political rally in 1999). While talking to me, he was wearing a hat with eye slits that can be used as a balaclava. Vasylenko is reputed to command significant resources of violence. At the same time, his deputy, Valentin, used to be a member of the city council and considers himself to be first and foremost a ‘human rights activist’. Legal expertise is another key resource for workers seeking to resolve their individual problems or industrial conflicts. Appeals to legal regulations are much more pronounced at AMKR than in the mines, where they coexist with the informal normativity; the management’s attitude is also more legalistic. Thus, procedures that are

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Figure 6.2.  AMKR’s social expenses in 2017, UAH millions from a total value of 340.6. Source: the website of AMKR.

routine formalities at other enterprises (such as signing a new collective agreement) are bitterly contested at AMKR. On the ground level, this situation sustains demand for people like Valentin: a military retiree with lots of free time, some legal expertise and great skill in interacting with bureaucratic bodies. Rather than stimulating mass activism of the working class, the political pluralism at AMKR has only reinforced patronage schemes by fragmenting and multiplying them. These schemes accommodate individual survival tactics as opposed to collective action. A case in point is Vladimir, a veteran worker of AMKR, who joined the NVF union when he needed a putiovka (vacation voucher), which he could not get from the PMGU. Having received what he wanted from his new union, Vladimir left for a vacation. Upon returning to work, he found out that he needed to pay an urgent visit to his family in Russia. He filed another request to take leave, but the boss said that he would not sign it unless Vladimir left the militant union. This was promptly done: Vladimir changed union again and enjoyed an additional vacation. Vladimir’s story is typical: ‘the Arcelor worker

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wanders between union cells that can give him ­something – ­which at least is better than outright begging in the subway’, concluded a former union activist. The multiplicity of unions offers multiple opportunities to navigate obstacles individually but not so many chances for class formation. The permanent conflict and the forced generosity of the management at AMKR have created political opportunities for trade unions. The competition for brokerage of resources distributed by the management ultimately aims at transforming relations of brokerage into those of patronage, where the union acts as an independent actor. This competition is codified in the language of resistance against the illegitimate elite, but it does not lead to the creation of genuine collective action of the working class. Instead of becoming focal points of class formation, trade unions reinforce the logic of paternalism and atomized survival strategies.

Paternalism with No Positive Feedback Loop Like most AMKR employees, Vladimir is always ready to unfold a litany of antisocial policies of the factory management. He remembers with nostalgia the DIY singer-­songwriter festival, Constellation of Talents, which was regularly held before the privatization but cancelled by the new owner. Most of my interlocutors from the mines would not have cared to list this loss among their grievances, but for Vladimir this was a serious indictment against the foreign owner. Other austerity measures on his list included substituting a vitamin drink for carbonated water; irregular supplies of the water; refusal to finance the funerals of the worker’s parents if they did not work at AMKR themselves; refusal to allow a stepchild to the corporate New Year party for the employees’ children; and irregularities with transporting workers to their workplace. Generally, Vladimir and his co-­workers reacted to these issues much more bitterly than the employees of the mines, where the general level of expectation seemed to be lower. The golden age of the enterprise evoked by Vladimir below was the short period when Kryvorizhstal was the property of the two Ukrainian oligarchs. In his memory, the survival pact of the 1990s lasted right until privatization, which brought about prosperity, and the prosperity lasted until the second change of owners: – They used to give us food there: you could survive on pasture forage, so to speak. But generally it was misery. And then, when our bosses, the entre-

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preneurs, bought the factory, we used to get wage raises every quarter. Every quarter. And we were ­guessing – ­will it be 15 per cent or 20 per cent this time. – Was that in 2004? – When Akhmetov bought this factory. So we had a wage raise every quarter. We were like bees in clover [kak syr v masle]. We brought home appliances, everyone; we refurbished our homes, people bought flats, took and paid loans to buy cars. This was a glorious time for us. Now it is over, of course.

This picture does not correspond to the information available from the press archives and other literature: wages at the factory had started growing already in the late 1990s. The short and turbulent period between the first and second privatization (June 2004–October 2005) could not possibly fit the picture of prolonged prosperity painted by Vladimir. And the reprivatization, as we have seen above, did not bring the changes as abruptly as Vladimir describes: ‘When the Hindu bought it from us, he put it like this: “Why should I raise their wage? They have clothes to wear, shoes to put on, food to eat; I see no rationale in raising their wage. If you want wage, get rid of people”. Otherwise he wouldn’t agree.’ However, this perspective is valuable precisely because of these distortions. Vladimir obliterated the five-­year long period of growth under state ownership, associating it exclusively with the misery of the 1990s and attributing the economic success to the ‘efficient national owner’. This is not a result of the informant’s political bias: speaking about current political events, Vladimir showed himself to be a vehement supporter of the nationalist agenda, which normally associates Akhmetov with sinister pro-­Russian influence. But the ‘political’ Akhmetov of media discussions, impersonating oligarchy and corruption, is different from the depoliticized Akhmetov, known on the everyday level as the owner of local industrial enterprises with the highest wages. ‘The Hindu’ (as Lakshmi Mittal is commonly known in Kryvyi Rih) has found himself in a paradoxical situation. AMKR was the last industrial enterprise to stop building housing and distributing it for free among its workers; it keeps many other generous paternalist schemes, but they have failed to improve the owner’s legitimacy among the workers. Patron–client relations are asymmetrical: when a gift from the more powerful party of the exchange is so great that it cannot be repaid by the receiving party, it generates the link of obligation. In one sense, the industrial paternalism at AMKR is less ­degenerated

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than in the mines because of the greater volume of invested resources. In a deeper sense, however, the decay is greater in the metalworking factory, where paternalism has stopped fulfilling its main ­function – ­generating the respect and obligation that legitimizes the dominant position of the patron.

Between the Street and the Courts: Protracted Conflict in 2017–2021 In May 2017, Kryvyi Rih lived through a series of episodes of workers’ militancy, which deeply marked the political imagination of my interlocutors. The mines of both KZRK and Sukha Balka were stopped by a strike that lasted two weeks and brought the miners a 20 per cent raise. AMKR was also a site of strike action. However, the conflict at the metalworking mill followed a pattern that differed from the traditional miners’ repertoire. There being no experience to provide any template of action, the metalworkers took a more radical path: after the end of a mass demonstration, they proceeded to spontaneously storm and occupy the administration building of the factory. This had never happened in the mines. Very quickly, the management of AMKR made convincing concessions, which included wage raises up to 70 per cent, when the mines were still in a tug-­of-­war. This successful riot was not formally endorsed by the unions, but it marked the beginning of a protracted conflict between the management and a coalition of unions that lasted for several years. The new offensive was headed by the new PMGU president Natalia Maryniuk in 2018. Contrary to the conventional informal and spontaneous script, Maryniuk formally declared industrial action. This was an unprecedented move, since the legal procedure is so convoluted that it renders organizing a strike practically impossible. After initial success, the management filed a lawsuit. After a trial that lasted many months, the PMGU lost the lawsuit. The coalition of ten unions collapsed after this defeat, but the conflict did not dissipate. In March 2021, the PMGU issued a stern public statement, reminding management that workers had not seen any wage increase since 1 May 2019. Six other unions joined the campaign and demanded a 36 per cent raise for everyone, citing the clause in the collective agreement about an 18 per cent raise each year. On 19 March, the general director, Mauro Longobardo, put an end to the negotiations by announcing a unilateral 5 per cent wage increase. The demonstrative intransigence of the management led to a wave of union mobilizations that lasted over a month. Protesters blocked the road and called for an Italian strike. On 1 June, Longobardo

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agreed to start negotiations anew. According to him, from 2022–2024 the management would guarantee regular wage increases proportional to the officially recorded inflation level plus 1 per cent. In exchange, the unions would refrain from all protests and strikes. The PMGU and five other unions, representing the larger part of the workforce, categorically rejected this offer. The three-­year plan of wage raises amounted to almost nothing, given that indexing wages to inflation was an already existing legal norm. Citing the exceptional profits reaped by AMKR in 2021, the PMGU leader accused the management of disrespecting the workers. Facing a new surge of conflict, Longobardo issued a statement of his own, accusing the unions of corruption and egoism. This round of explicit hostilities between different unions did not help either side to assert their legitimacy among workers. While AMKR employees are not inclined to trust the CEO, an illegitimate foreigner, they agree with Longobardo’s argument regarding the corrupt unions: the idea that unions are lazy, corrupt or sold out is quite popular, and it is reinforced by the ambiguity of popular expectations of an efficient union (a rich and generous patron distributing putiovki and at the same time a committed fighter for the workers’ cause, meticulous when preparing strikes). The long standoff between management and unions at AMKR shows that generalized discontent, more pronounced there than in the mines, still does not give birth to autonomous social structures that could become points of crystallization for class consciousness refined by this group’s organic intellectuals. What we see instead is the persistence of the ideological construction of the labour collective, on behalf of which all actors claim to act. The poor legitimacy of the management does not translate into a legitimation of the unions as authentic leaders of the masses. Instead, a large proportion of the ‘masses’ has developed a cynical attitude to all competitors, seeing them as equally corrupted factions of the elite.

Conclusion The unique place of the metalworking mill in the national and local symbolic hierarchy was one of the factors that made its factory regime evolve from the default scenario. The second factor, the arrival of a foreign owner, was partly conditioned by the first: the privatization of a less important asset would have caused less outrage, and the isolated showcase of an ‘honest’ reprivatization would not have taken place at the factory.

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The political conjuncture that conditioned the reprivatization put the social wage at centre stage. The new owner was unable to cut it significantly even in a gradualist manner, which was preferred in the mines. The intersection of several important political narratives (nostalgia for the stability and prosperity of the late Soviet decades; reluctance to accept the domination of outsiders; the normative meritocratic ideal of industrial work, which should be well paid; hegemonic discourses of human rights and freedom of speech) and structural factors (competition between different blocs of the ruling class; a commodity boom ensuring sufficient profitability; recently modernized equipment; the large size of the enterprise) created an opening for the proliferation of trade union militancy. The militancy, however, relies on the distribution mechanisms provided by the enterprise itself rather than on massive membership and worker unrest. In the long term, the resultant power configuration is no more stable than the default one found in the mines. What differs are the concrete ways in which social conflicts tend to manifest themselves at the enterprise and the different political openings they might create.

Conclusion After the structural conditions sustaining the post-­Soviet factory regime faded away and the extreme survival conjuncture was gradually dismantled in the early 2000s, a new power configuration emerged at the industrial workplace. It functioned according to the demands of the money economy, in which enterprises were privatized and the profit motive defined all their activities. Nevertheless, this new configuration carries a large number of legacies from its predecessor in a ‘post-­post-­Soviet regime of production’: it is clearly different from the preceding one but also clearly derived from it. This regime, pathological from the point of view of economic rationality, retains the non-­Taylorized character of the labour process and the concurrent mechanisms of informal bargaining with the autonomous worker, as well as the complex architecture of corporate welfare and the loyal legacy unions administering it. The new element is the chronic disinvestment and corporate austerity, which helps the management renegotiate the informal pact with workers in its favour. Undermining the negotiating position of the workers, this slow decay of industrial paternalism also eats into the legitimacy of the

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owner and management. The workers see them as plundering outsiders rather than the legitimate leaders of the labour collective. Simultaneously, part of the paternalist legitimacy has been recuperated by the government, which has taken over the responsibilities for the social reproduction of the workforce. From a technical point of view, this regime is suboptimal, since it prevents a shift from absolute to relative surplus value extraction. Unable to accomplish the real subsumption of the labour process, the enterprises remain stuck in an extensive mode of economic development instead of a Toyota-­like intensive mode based on technical innovations. However, such a shift would entail risks, costs and disruptions that are unacceptable to new enterprise owners. Instead of launching classic neoliberal managerial transformations, they chose to tacitly introduce new power configurations that ensured a residual paternalist consent, an undisturbed production process on the old technological and material basis, and the extremely low costs of capital upkeep. These low costs allow owners to preserve the machinery of the social wage and thereby help to protect their property rights in the case of a politico-­corporate conflict. These rights may be compromised from the outset by the non-­ indigenous provenance of the owner. In order to reinforce his legitimacy, such an owner is even more slow and cautious in dismantling the legacy paternalist schemes. This forced generosity inspires little in return: instead of creating moral ties of obligation, it spawns a political market for trade unions that maintain permanent conflict between the workers and the management. The two variations of this regime produce slightly different patterns of industrial conflict: sporadic and spontaneous wildcat strikes conducted by the active minority of the workforce, versus less intensive but temporally more evenly spread permanent conflict. Neither of the two patterns involve the construction of autonomous class structures and bottom-­up solidarities for collective action. In both cases, the legitimacy of the owners and management is very low, but the weak dominant group maintains its position thanks to the weakness of the dominated. This production regime co-­evolved with the global economic conjuncture of the early twenty-­first century. The commodity supercycle helped Ukrainian producers of metals and other commodities to retain the weak paternalist schemes embedded in the domestic political scene and gain considerable profits without much technological innovation. In this sense, the post-­post-­Soviet factory regime is an integral element of neoliberal global capitalism, however different

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it might be from the classic neoliberal managerial templates. In the long term, however, this regime is not sustainable, since it feeds on exhaustible material, technological, moral and organizational legacies of previous conjunctures. In the following chapter, I sketch the two possible directions of its evolution into a more sustainable model of factory-­level hegemony.

Notes 1. Here and throughout the book, the data on employment, production and sales figures of the enterprises refer to the pre-­2022 situation, unless stated otherwise. 2. The tax cut was cancelled by amendments to the Tax Code passed in 2014. 3. Since 1956, the government has been keeping two lists of professions entitled to privileged retirement. The first list (pervyi spisok) consists of professions with harmful (vrednye) labour conditions, including the underground work of miners and the ‘hot shops’ of metalworking enterprises. Fifteen years of work in such professions grant the right to retirement at 50 for men; for women, the minimum service record is 7.5 years, after which they can retire at 45. The second list (vtoroy spisok) consists of professions with ‘hard’ (tiazhelye) labour conditions, notably open pit workers at quarries, who enjoy slightly less privilege. Pension age is 55 for men and 50 for women. Following the highly unpopular reform in 2011 that raised the retirement age for women working under normal conditions to make it equal to that of men (60 years), in 2015 the post-­ Maidan austerity coalition passed a similar law for the special pension regimes, raising the retirement age for women to 50 and 55 years, respectively. Even after this very ill-­received reform, the pension ‘lists’ regulated by the state are the most important incentive tying the worker to the mine. 4. Besides the membership fees that are set at the traditional rate of 1 per cent of workers’ wage, each union receives monthly funding from the enterprise to finance ‘culture, sports, and health activities’ (kulturno-massovaya, fizkulturnaya i ozdorovitelnaya rabota). At AMKR, this funding is set at 0.5 per cent of the payroll. This sum is distributed among the eleven unions proportionally to their membership. The largest part of the factory’s social expenses – putiovki – is also channelled through the unions.

— Chapter 7 —

Politicized Embeddedness, Depoliticized Disembeddedness New Factory Regimes

_ This chapter analyses two factory regimes that are sufficiently different from the typical configurations analysed above to be constructed as separate models. One of them is a neo-­Fordist extractive enterprise founded in the Soviet period and currently owned by a vertically integrated corporation that has a clearly established owner with political ambitions. The other is a relatively small window factory founded in the 2000s. Its owner is also politically engaged, even if on a much smaller scale, but the factory is completely disembedded, lacking all the typical paternalist schemes. Despite these differences, the two regimes have some common features, which are also present in the default model treated in the previous chapter: the non-­Taylorized labour process and the informal mode of regulation. However, unlike the post-­post-­Soviet model, they present a picture of more sustainable domination.

Resurgent Fordism at Metinvest: A Company Town in the Making The first case analysed in this chapter is Metinvest, the mining and metalworking wing of the SCM corporation, which belongs to Rinat Akhmetov, officially the richest Ukrainian oligarch. In Kryvyi Rih, SCM owns the city’s four mining and processing mills (GOKs): the Central (TsGOK), Northern (SevGOK), the Inhulets (InGOK) and the Southern (YuGOK).

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The Return of the Khoziain: Metinvest Establishing Itself in Kryvyi Rih TsGOK was conceived as loss-­making by design (planovo ubytochnyi): the value of its output was not supposed to cover its production costs, which were compensated by the state. The breakup of centralized chains of supply and funding put TsGOK on the brink of bankruptcy by 1996: its output was too expensive to compete on the market. The ownership structure of TsGOK was opaque and fluid, lacking a clear, competent and local ­manager – ­a khoziain. It was Volodymyr Movchan, the general director of TsGOK, who initially took up this role. However, with the normalization of the economy at the beginning of the new decade, he started curtailing paternalist policies. According to Movchan, various subsidies and other paternalist schemes he had launched in the extreme period were now nothing more than obstacles on the way to high monetary wages. The switch to a disembedded model was generalized: in 2000, all the GOKs shed their housing and social infrastructure, transferring them to the city. Collier (2011) describes the same normative ideal at work in a mid-­ sized Russian industrial town: the city needed a khoziain, but general directors of city-­forming enterprises, who used to fulfil this role, had vacated this position when they shed ‘social’ assets and commitments. Local governments, for their part, did not have the resources required to take up this role. The post-­Soviet quest for a city khoziain, a local notable prepared to take upon himself responsibility for the city, is at the core of the Metinvest story in Kryvyi Rih. In October 2003, the local and national press discussed the hostile takeover (reiderskiy zahvat) of TsGOK by Rinat Akhmetov’s SCM corporation, which installed 29-­year-­old Oleksandr Vilkul as the new general director. One year later, SCM ended up legally owning 94.3 per cent of TsGOK’s shares. The new management reopened the mine closed by previous owners and reinvigorated the ‘social sphere’, even adding a new element: a one-­ off 1,500 UAH ($300) payment to workers for each newborn child. Not all disembedding changes were reversed: Vilkul did not reintegrate outsourced enterprises; neither did he assume responsibility for housing and other infrastructure transferred to the city council. The triumphal return of embeddedness in some highly visible areas was made financially feasible by quietly continuing disembedded practices elsewhere. The northernmost kombinat, SevGOK, followed a similar trajectory. The new general director Kolesnik explained that the era of embed-

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ded enterprises was over: ‘Gradually, SevGOK is transforming from a city-­forming enterprise (which it used to be previously) into a simple profitable extractive enterprise that will provide well-­paid jobs to the residents of Ternivskyi and other districts.’ This vision contradicted lay paternalist expectations, which were presented in a condensed form in a letter published in the municipal newspaper. Its author is a woman whose father, a SevGOK worker, was killed in a deadly workplace accident in 1963. Forty years later, she reminisces: We have grown up a long time ago, our children have grown up, too, and we even have grandchildren already, but since that very time for me and my sister the word ‘SevGOK’ has been meaning something very reliable, paternally [po-batkivsky] caring. In the hardest moments (they exist, let’s face it) material aid is the Northern kombinat, children’s camp is [also] SevGOK, the apartment that we received was also provided by the kombinat. And now, forty years after that tragic night, a warm word of compassion, memory and grief is again [coming from] SevGOK.

In the summer of 2004, Akhmetov’s corporation acquired a controlling stake of SevGOK and quickly assumed its responsibilities as a patron, which the previous director had publicly disavowed. The average wage, which had amounted to 700 UAH in January 2004, had grown to 1,250 UAH in January 2005. The new collective agreement contained clauses about the free transportation of workers’ children to and from corporate summer camps, the payments for newborn children and the zero interest mortgage loan for employees. This reinforced paternalism came with reinforced repressive capacities. In September 2004, the loyalist PMGU union of SevGOK published an ominous letter on behalf of the whole labour collective, in which it condemned the ‘incendiary’ and ‘populist’ activities of the two militant unions ‘stirring up trouble’ at the enterprise. The author of the letter remarked that these two unions had been losing members because they ‘have not noticed that the times have changed, and the people, too’. After the arrival of the new owner, known for his violent methods of capital accumulation in Donetsk, the newspaper reported that the combined membership of the two once powerful independent unions had shrunk to just 500 people, and their voices were marginalized. The journalist was astonished by the peaceful character of the labour conference at the end of that year, which set it apart from the conflict-­ridden conference in 1999. Contrary to the fragmented configurations of the 1990s, the new paternalism focused on the owner rather than on the factory director. The new moral community was coterminous with the corporation rather than with the enterprise. The Soviet model of a labour

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c­ ollective symbolically represented by the factory director (Ashwin 1999; Lebskiy 2021; Piskunov 2018) fitted with the new politico-­ economic environment and legitimized a khoziain owning/protecting a whole city, region or potentially the nation. The two other GOKs followed slightly different paths, rejoining the Metinvest empire at later stages. InGOK, a city-­forming enterprise for an isolated district of Kryvyi Rih, fell under the operational control of Smart Group, owned by the Russian businessman Vadim Novinskiy. In 2007, Smart Group merged its mining and metalworking assets with Akhmetov’s SCM, thus bringing InGOK into Metinvest. The last GOK to join Metinvest, YuGOK, had the most turbulent history of changing owners: Yuliya Tymoshenko’s company YeESU lost it to Privat, which later sold its stake to the Russian Evraz Holding. In 2010, the minoritarian shareholder Vadim Novinskiy installed new, loyal management at the enterprise, which was fully integrated into Metinvest in 2017. Metinvest’s traditional strategy has been to incorporate local elites into its own patronage pyramid, treating its ‘factory towns’ as extensions of the corporate structure (Matsuzato 2018). The same logic of embeddedness works at the lower levels of the enterprise, creating a factory regime that can be called ‘post-­Soviet neo-­Fordism’. It consists of taking the paternalist moral economy more seriously than did the inertial ‘post-­post-­Soviet’ regime, investing considerable resources into the reproduction and evolution of the social wage mechanisms, generating loyalty, and weaponizing these mechanisms in the politico-­economic struggle. This regime plays a crucial role in manufacturing consent both inside and beyond the factory gates. Focusing more closely on YuGOK, the following section discusses its double life as an economic and a political asset and the repercussions this has on workers’ political attitudes. After this, I examine in detail the paternalist toolkit employed by the management of YuGOK. The last section will analyse the investment and managerial strategies that correspond to this neo-­Fordist regime.

Negotiating the Field: Loose Talk Costs Jobs My initial fieldwork plan was to focus on employees of SevGOK, counting on their availability due to their geographical proximity to my key informants from KZRK and to the social proximity between independent trade union organizers across the city’s industrial enterprises. This strategy did not work at Metinvest. Neither of my informants, living close to the ‘SevGOK village’ and well inserted in the

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local social life, were able to think of any acquaintance working at the enterprise who would theoretically consider talking to me. The union activists, in their turn, also had no contacts at Metinvest. In the end, I found other means to reach Metinvest ­employees – ­using the private networks of a different gatekeeper, an insider occupying a managerial position at YuGOK. The theme of ‘politics’ sprang up regularly in my talks with employees of Metinvest. This is partially explained by the explicitly political nature of the employer. Not only is Rinat Akhmetov a household name, perceived almost as a synonym for ‘oligarch’. At the time of my fieldwork, his protégé Oleksandr Vilkul was a presidential candidate and leader of the Opposition ­Bloc – ­the party that represented Akhmetov’s interests through the ‘East Slavic’ identitarian agenda. Here, workplace hierarchies are directly built into a political machine run by the owner of the enterprise, which sets Metinvest employees apart from other industrial workers in Kryvyi Rih.1 On average, they are much less willing to discuss their job with a stranger, and when they are, they double check the anonymity guarantees (whereas at AMKR one person refused to talk precisely because of the anonymity, which he thought prevented his criticisms from being heard). A member of the enterprise administration runs the Facebook group for employees of YuGOK; unlike those of KZRK, Sukha Balka and AMKR, it is strictly moderated. The rules specifically prohibit ‘political slogans, appeals, and all that has to do with societal discord’, and the content mostly comes down to birthday greetings and funny videos. Maintaining a large clientèle of loyal employees and their families is useful for an employer who has electoral ambitions. This political machine is efficient and cheap: relying on threats rather than vote buying, it delivers results without significant costs (Frye, Reuter and Szakonyi 2019). However, it is not omnipotent. The number of voters dependent on Metinvest’s owner in one way or another is at least 10 per cent of the city’s population of voting age (23,000 employees together with their families), but the voting outcomes at the presidential elections in Kryvyi Rih were just marginally more favourable for Vilkul compared to nationwide, and much more favourable for the ‘anti-­system’ winner of the ­elections – ­Volodymyr Zelenskyi (89% against 73% nationwide). Even if Akhmetov’s legitimacy is relatively high, it is not readily translated into support for his political projects.2 The paternalist alliance at Metinvest empowers the patron but is also actively sought by clients. They accept social inequality as a

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given fact and try to get the best out of it, without necessarily losing their own agency. What are the incentives allowing this pact?

Generous Welfare, Clear Benefactor Like in the classic Soviet model of corporate welfare, the union at Metinvest is the driving belt ensuring social control. To perform this technocratic, depoliticizing role efficiently, the union ought to be a monopolist; competition on the market of unions renders the ‘official’ union much weaker, as the case of AMKR attests. The history of YuGOK’s union dates back to 1952, the year when the Soviet government created the administration of the enterprise yet to be built. The union already existed before the mass hiring campaign began. Its main tasks revolved around the satisfaction of workers’ everyday needs: temporary housing and food. The ‘garden plot taskforce’ (ogorodnaya komissiya), the first official body created by the union, distributed land plots among workers’ families and tilled them by the spring of 1953. Since that period, the union has been providing YuGOK workers with heating fuel and soap. In the 1990s, various militant unions emerged, voicing workers’ anger at the disembedding processes. The militancy only subsided with the arrival of Metinvest, which raised wages, strengthened patronage ties and eliminated dissent. The PMGU’s monopoly was restored: in 2019, it accounted for 99.7 per cent of employees. The remaining 0.3 per cent (22 persons) were unaffiliated. During my February interview with the PMGU president, a former head of YuGOK’s HR department, he was inspecting branded backpacks and hats to be distributed among employees’ children at the seaside summer camp in Berdiansk. At other Metinvest GOKs, employees pay 10 per cent of the cost of their children’s seaside vacation (700–800 UAH in the prices of 2018–2019); YuGOK is proud to charge even ­less – ­400 UAH for 21 days, including travel costs. In 2018, 678 children took part in the programme. For its 6,500 adult employees, in 2018 YuGOK offered 1,041 ‘health-­improving’ (ozdorovitelnye) 18-­day-­long trips to its spas in the Carpathian Mountains, and 2,500 14-­day-­long trips to the seaside, in Skadovsk. For the latter, an employee pays 7–7.5 per cent of the cost (450 UAH); their spouse employed elsewhere pays 30 per cent. Unlike many other enterprises, YuGOK kept its own sports palace with a newly restored swimming pool. The union membership is open to retired workers; they can make use of all the benefits by paying a symbolic 1 UAH monthly.

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This largesse goes well above the minimum norms prescribed by the legislation or by corporatist institutions. Every enterprise is legally obliged to give the unions at least 0.3 per cent of its payroll fund to finance ‘cultural, sports and health activities’. The industry-­ wide agreement raised this figure to 0.5 per cent. However, in practice YuGOK’s union receives up to 4 per cent. The management gives well above the required minimum but frames it as a gesture of good will: instead of writing down the 4 per cent target in the collective agreement, it prefers to maintain flexibility. Flexibility also remains the guiding principle of the distribution of welfare: there is room for informal discretion. As a result, 29-­year-­old Dmitry had enough informal connections to get a job at YuGOK (his father had been working there for decades), but he was not counting on getting discounted trips to the seaside any time soon. Social wage generates loyalty but also disciplines the workforce. Despite the seeming continuity, the renewed paternalism at YuGOK is driven by the profit motive, different from the output-­ oriented inclinations of the Soviet period and from the survival-­ oriented conjuncture of the 1990s. The leaflet of YuGOK’s PMGU union recounts the heroic milestones of its Soviet history, from gardening plots to the massive construction of housing, daycare and leisure facilities. However, this historical excursion is followed with a statement about its mission in the ‘new time’: All changes come laden with new possibilities. The normal, stable work of the enterprise depends on business-­like, partner-­like [delovyh, partnerskih] relations between the owner of the enterprise and the labour collective. The approach to the very organization of the production process is changing, and it all draws on how much of the produce can be sold and on how to dispose of the revenues gained. Today, working according to this scheme allows the enterprise to create additional payroll fund, to have resources for the extension and enlargement of social benefits [lgoty] and guarantees.

The generosity of YuGOK’s paternalist schemes is here explicitly conditioned by the economic conjuncture and by the social peace at the enterprise. Rather than being a staunch defender of the workers’ cause, the PMGU internalizes the imperative of flexibility and prevents the administration from implementing measures that could be viewed as illegitimate by the workers. Recently, the management wanted to cancel the right to seven additional days of vacation as compensation for overtime work. The union president crunched some numbers and showed them to the bosses: ‘I’m saying: look, the turnover for the last few years is 3,820 people. 3,820 people who

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had this right have already left, and now 3,820 [newly hired] workers already don’t have it. Wait a couple more years, and there will be nobody left! No need to agitate people today, this is a natural process.’ The administration accepted his point of view and stepped back. Viacheslav, the veteran mid-­level manager whose general attitude to the union is quite ironic, remembered this story and said that this is the one good thing the union had done, for which he is very ­grateful – ­his vacation allowance is 35 days. Recently hired people like Dmitry, on the other hand, will only have 28 days, even if the general image of the paternalist enterprise persists. A similar combination of industrial paternalism with post-­Fordist flexibility is present at other famously Fordist enterprises, such as the Indian corporation Tata. Just like Metinvest managers, Tata can dismiss corporate parenting of employees much more easily than before: ‘it is the ongoing reference to the durable and fixed models of corporate paternalism, cultural superiority and Tata benevolence that allows Tata managers to enact and rationalize the demands of a changing workplace’ (Sanchez 2016: 122). In both cases, slow neoliberal transformations are presented as the necessary evil needed to save the overall paternalist culture of the company. The hope for an eventual return to the traditional regime (which is absent from the mines) provides an important balance to the discourse of corruption and decay. The neo-­Fordist system of relations at YuGOK thus comprises elements of classical Fordism and a number of in-­built flexibility mechanisms that make it adaptable to post-­Fordist global and national economic realities. YuGOK’s paternalist toolkit is more lightweight and flexible than appearances suggest.

Investment in Conservation Unlike miners at KZRK and Sukha Balka, informants from YuGOK do not give much thought to issues of workplace safety but to complain about the abundance of annoying instructions and trainings. A rare Facebook post critical of Metinvest featured a white-­collar woman taking photos of SevGOK workers who did not hold on to handrails while using stairs in the quarry. She received her portion of online insults, being labelled as a thief (stealing other people’s hard-­ earned money by reporting a safety violation that leads to a bonus cut). However, this despotic use of safety rules is different from that routinely observed in the mines: here, repression is driven by the

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legal-­rational urge to implement the rules rather than by the desire to shift the burden of austerity lower down the hierarchy. The overall ‘normalization’ of labour discipline at the GOKs after the relaxed norms of the 1990s did not bring a radical restructuring of production processes. Reliance on the resourcefulness of autonomous workers, resting on the principles of informality and on the piece-­rate payment, remains fundamental for the labour process. In the words of Nikolay: ‘Whenever a good drill operator has a spare minute, he will not just sit ­around . . . ­he knows what’s wrong with his drill. He will climb in there, oil it, check it, bang the bolts. He knows that if he does it now, he will drill more.’ Investments in capital equipment at Metinvest follow the same conservative strategy. Instead of buying new equipment, the management commits to regular capital repairs (kapitalnyi remont). This strategy allows the company to save funds while maintaining the current production tempo, even if the potential for technological growth is cut short. Eleven out of YuGOK’s thirteen drilling machines were designed in the 1970s and produced no later than in 1991. Their obsolescence would not affect output in the short term: even if all drilling operations stopped completely, the quarry would still be able to extract iron ore for quite a long time. Instead, the investment policy prioritizes dump cars, haulers and loaders to maximize quick returns. Hiring policies and resource management resemble the creeping austerity-­driven informality in the mines and at AMKR. Despite the unchanging nominal staffing structure, Viacheslav is almost unable to fill vacant positions: the HR department refuses to approve new hires. Production managers have to put the increased workload on the existing labour force, but also to submit proposals regarding ‘rationalization’ (i.e. intensification) of the use of existing equipment. This practice comes extremely close to the classical Stalinist search for ‘hidden productivity reserves’ (Zhou 1992) despite the established norms. The classic problem of ‘soft budget constraints’ under state socialism (Kornai 1980) took an unexpected twist decades later, when the legacy approach based on the imperative of maintaining output clashed with superficial attempts to import ‘lean’ practices oriented towards profit. The conflict between different understandings of efficiency is further complicated by the presence of a third, political logic. The political ambitions of the owner of Metinvest assign additional value to the employees of the company, beyond their economic performance. Discussing the prospects of automation, Nikolay explained: ‘I ­suspect that they are even afraid of ­it . . . ­This will allow [them]

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to cut the ­personnel, cut everything. I was writing scientific papers, making such projects. My supervisors told me: what will people do then? It’s not possible, Kolya, think about the people!’ The political use to which Metinvest puts its embedded low-­ technology policies can be illustrated by an article published in the municipal newspaper on the eve of the 2007 parliamentary elections. Under the title ‘Metinvest’s attitude to workers shocks Western advisors’, the author describes an unnamed business advisor from the US who is shocked to discover the huge cost of social programmes and wage increases at Metinvest. Imploring the management to invest in the labour productivity instead, he exclaims: ‘You need to understand that it is profit which defines everything in business, and you have to finally learn to be inhumane!’ The CEO of Metinvest replies to him that the company offers ‘an alternative model for Ukraine’: ‘The socialist one is no more, but the Western one, in which profits come before people, does not suit us either. We have a different mentality.’ He boasts that the wages at Metinvest are comparable to those in the EU, even though productivity is much lower, and pledges to continue this ‘policy of humanity’ even if this goes against purely economic calculations. Sacrificing the objectives of increasing the shareholder value through technical and managerial modernization, Metinvest prefers to invest in paternalist obligations connecting the company to the communities in which its enterprises are situated. Conservation of suboptimal technologies allows the accumulation of ‘wealth-­in-­ people’, important for maintaining and justifying the ownership of the enterprise.

Conclusion Metinvest demonstrates a route from the default post-­post-­Soviet configuration to a more stable production regime capable of reproducing itself. It consciously follows the policy of embeddedness, re-­establishing but also renegotiating traditional links between the enterprise and its social and physical environment. Informal flexibility, resting upon the imperatives of resourcefulness and a piece-­rate payment system, coexists with attempts to introduce formal flexibility for the purposes of ‘lean’ production. The resulting ‘Fordist-­not-­Taylorist’ agenda stipulates continued and uninterrupted production with soft budget constraints, relying on generous but conditional discretionary distribution of rewards, generating political loyalty to the owner. The latter uses his production

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assets to harvest the social capital of patronage and convert it into political capital in local and national arenas. The investment policy underpinning this configuration is ultimately conservative. Rejecting ‘Toyotist’ recipes, the management maintains profitability at a sustainable level by choosing a very slow tempo of equipment modernization. In the long run, this strategy lead to the company’s downshifting in the global division of labour. This neo-­Fordist model is not an isolated case. Having privatized the Temirtau metalworking factory in Kazakhstan at an early stage (in 1995) and with no domestic competition, Lakshmi Mittal was not disadvantaged by being a foreigner like he was in Kryvyi Rih; his company follows the same patterns of limited investment in machinery renewal and labour hoarding (Trevisani 2018). ArcelorMittal inserts itself in the local moral economy by weaving together local ethnic patterns and Soviet institutional legacies into what amounts to invented traditions that legitimize and indigenize the company (Trevisani 2019). Workers’ paternalistic expectations of the union and the management, based on the idealized image of the Soviet workplace, which underpins the neo-­Fordist regime, are salient in the Russian automotive industry, much to the chagrin of ‘independent’ unions (Morris and Hinz 2017). Across the post-­Soviet space, this model allows the new private owners of enterprises to benefit from the legacies of informal taut planning, to exert social control through the discretionary distribution of monetary and in-­kind remuneration, and to legitimize themselves as local patriarchs representing the labour collective and in turn the whole local community. Identifying the whole town or region with a fluid category of stakeholders (e.g. metalworkers and miners) reinforces the economic and political powers of the embedded owners, which in turn prevents them from carrying out the restructuring of the enterprise (Morrison 2008: 216).

Disembedded Autonomy at Screenwind: An Owner in His Own Right The second case of a stable factory regime examined in this chapter is different in that it represents a greenfield factory, created anew in the post-­Soviet period and hence lacking any direct organizational legacies. Screenwind3 as a company is part of the post-­Soviet ‘garage economy’ (Seleev and Pavlov 2016). Initially, a couple of friends used the shelter and the infrastructure provided by the garage to start a

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small-­scale production of plastic windows in 2001. Besides providing basic infrastructural necessities and the space for working-­class masculine sociality (Morris 2018: 90), garage cooperatives provide anonymity to producers operating on their premises: the ‘garage economy’ is usually ‘grey’ – not registered officially and not bound by regulations in the fiscal, sanitary or labour law domains. This section shows how such disembeddedness from all legal and moral obligations paradoxically spawns a model of legitimate domination at the workplace. When Screenwind had grown above the garage scale, the two founders of the business rented the premises of a former poultry factory in the middle of a low-­rise inner suburb. Screenwind is not the only enterprise occupying the large territory of the now defunct factory: it shares the area with a logistics company, a car repair shop, a fallout shelter and a boiler house. Despite this variety of tenants, the map of the locality on Wikimapia4 categorizes most of the places in the area as ‘former’: ‘the ruins of the former administrative complex’, ‘former taxi park’, ‘abandoned industrial object’ etc. The low-­density inner suburbia (chastnyi sektor), in which the factory sits, is a vast area filled with single-­family houses with small land plots. It is not frequented by anyone except local dwellers and Screenwind workers crossing the area twice a day. To the north, the area is delimited by a regional highway; the trolleybus stop sits between a school and a defunct shoe factory. The other limits of the area are two apartment blocks built by AMKR, an oncology hospital, small strips of cultivated forest and agricultural fields. The crisis of 2008 almost killed Screenwind. To avoid bankruptcy, the owners reached a deal with a window producer from Dnipro, the regional capital. Since then, it has been partially owned by the Dnipro company, and at least part of Screenwind’s production orders come from them as subcontracting. The partners from Dnipro helped Screenwind establish links with Spanish customers, who receive massive weekly supplies of Kryvyi Rih windows under another brand, used exclusively for export. The rest of the orders come from the domestic market; coming directly from individuals or companies on an ad hoc basis, they are small, much more complicated and diverse. In terms of inputs, Screenwind is quite globalized: some of its fittings and profiles come from Dnipro and Brovary in Northern Ukraine, while other brands of fittings arrive from Germany. The glass for the windows is produced in Japan and the US. Screenwind was created in the context of the national boom of individual housing refurbishment that began in the mid-­2000s, after

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the effects of the economic growth started reaching households. In the late 2010s, domestic demand was supported by the national energy efficiency campaign: aiming to reduce its dependency on Russian natural gas used for heating, the state hiked heating tariffs and started subsidizing housing isolation projects. Thus, having initially benefited from the global commodity boom, Screenwind then reaped profits from Ukraine’s structural energy deficit. To learn about the labour process and factory regime in ‘new’ factories, I spent two months working at Screenwind as an assembler of fittings. The account that follows is based on participant observation data collected during this period as well as on follow-­up in-­depth interviews with employees at the factory: my foreman, members of my team, a worker from another section and two female white-­collar employees.

Extralegal Territory: No Claims in the Private Realm Contrary to the preceding cases, for Screenwind an informal labour process and power relations go hand in hand with informal (irregular) employment. To get hired, I was asked to bring a standard set of documents, but when I said I had lost my workbook,5 they were very flexible. The only non-­negotiable requirement, besides a lung scan, was a bank account at Privatbank, the largest financial institution in the country. When it turned out I was one of the rare Ukrainians who did not have one, the HR department agreed to use the account of my relative. It was needed to pay wages by private bank transfer. Whereas large factories pay the worker’s income tax (18%) and military tax (1.5%) as well as significant contributions to social security funds (22% at the lowest, but much more for hazardous workplaces), Screenwind only pays a 1 per cent bank commission fee above the actual wage. The latter can also sink below the officially defined minimum, especially in low season; but in high season (summer–autumn), net wages at Screenwind can compete with those at AMKR or other large enterprises precisely because of the absent fiscal burden. Thirty per cent of workers are employed formally, for the purposes of accounting. For such workers, the enterprise agrees to pay part of their taxes, so their net wage does not diminish as drastically as it could; this policy is the best-­known element of Screenwind’s ‘corporate social responsibility’, advertised among the workers. Wages are not the only factor heavily affected by the extralegal regime of labour relations at Screenwind. During the hiring process,

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I had to sign a statement to say I had passed the workplace safety rules course when I had not. This would be unthinkable for employees of the Metinvest GOKs, KZRK and even Sukha Balka, however much they complain about their own dysfunctional workplace safety. There were instead other rules, and again it did not matter if I read them carefully before signing: these were regulations concerning absenteeism and the principle of accounting for time worked. The piece-­rate pay system, normalized across the whole post-­ Soviet space but usually moderated by various protective legal clauses, exists in its naked form at Screenwind: there is no sick leave as such and no paid vacations. Taking an unpaid vacation during high season is frowned upon but possible for valued workers. As for sickness, as long as it is justified, the employer simply ‘allows’ the worker to return once they are healthy enough. If an employee has to take leave for personal reasons, they can approach the boss and get his approval for a week-­long absence, which might not be as easy at the large factories. Workers are encouraged to purchase their own work wear. Some wear uniform jackets from their previous employers (e.g. a different window-­making factory or the municipal waterworks), but most use ordinary clothes that are too old to be worn elsewhere. For its part, Screenwind provides one pair of gloves per month to each worker. There is no fixed lunchtime, but for people who are willing to take a break there is a makeshift canteen: several tables, two microwave ovens and a fridge, all set in a narrow corridor connecting two buildings (see Figure 7.1). The average working week consists of three to four twelve-­hour shifts. Each functional section of the workforce is divided into two brigades, which alternate between night and day shifts on a weekly basis. The shift supervisor communicates the schedule for the coming week via a mobile messenger every weekend, so there is no long-­ term planning. Sometimes, his messages are met with disdain and semi-­ironic comments in the group chat, but they are never explicitly challenged. The shift supervisor rebukes this timid opposition by citing forces beyond his control and insisting that the pressing schedule is not his personal choice. The ultimate flexibility of wages and working schedule is not mitigated by corporate welfare. There are no unions of any kind at Screenwind and no systematic elements of the social wage. The workers do not expect anything of the kind; some of them mentioned the unpaid week-­long idleness in the New Year period as an element of the employer’s generosity.6

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Figure 7.1.  The improvised canteen at Screenwind. Photo taken by the author in March 2019.

When a worker’s wife was diagnosed with cancer, and when another worker’s mother died, solidarity funds were collected among fellow workers. The enterprise only offered to automatically deduct the stated sum from each volunteer’s wage. Teambuilding efforts, like collective picnics, are exclusively ‘for the third floor’ – that is, white-­collar staff. The other vital function of legacy unions, that of mediating serious conflicts, also remains unfulfilled. Legacy unions are unable to mediate serious conflict, a vital function. Any attempt to raise ‘voice’ is ruthlessly repressed. My foreman Saniok, a highly valued employee, was regularly selected over less experienced workers to work extra shifts. In one such instance, Saniok refused to do a night shift, citing personal reasons: on that day, his grandfather had a birthday, and Saniok had planned to spend the evening with the family, drinking a lot of alcohol. The shift supervisor threatened him with a fine to no effect and Saniok was fired. A few minutes later, the production manager (nachalnik proizvodstva) called him on the phone to ask what the matter was. After Saniok explained his position, the manager told him that his two family members employed at Screenwind, his stepfather and wife, would also fired from their jobs. The shift supervisor, meanwhile, drove to the home of a drug user who had been fired two days earlier. Arriving at midnight, he told the wife of the ex-­ worker to wake him up; he promptly gave him amphetamines and brought him to the factory to work the shift. A few days later, another

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­ anager phoned Saniok and told him that he could go back to work m ‘if he had calmed down’. Thus, even minor instances of individual defiance are rooted out rather than negotiated. As for collective protests, there have not been any at Screenwind. Collective discontent with the management style comes up regularly during after-­hours drinking sessions. Workers realize that the permanent shortage of personnel gives them leverage. However, plans for a wildcat strike or another form of collective protest never come to fruition. Despite venting frustration in informal conversations, in practice the employees of Screenwind accept working conditions that would be deemed outrageous at any legacy enterprise. What gives Screenwind and similar SMEs their legitimacy is a particular understanding of private ownership. The colloquial definition chastnik (‘private owner’), commonly applied to such small factories, originates from the Soviet realities of housing and the retail trade, referring to an owner of a small private house (as opposed to an apartment in modern urban housing), and/or someone who sells their own agricultural produce at a farmers’ market. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the term was extended to cover new small producers, retailers and transport operators as opposed to ‘traditional’ large manufacturing enterprises, ‘regular’ state-­owned stores and municipal transport. Unlike them, chastniki found themselves in a legal grey area: in this formative period, they often operated without any permission or licenses, being for all practical purposes exempt from the fiscal and regulatory regime obligatory of a ‘normal’, publicly owned enterprise. The duality of regimes, already analysed above for housing and public transportation, also plays out in industrial production. Although AMKR, the mines and GOKs were privatized a decade and a half ago, they are still more or less explicitly claimed as public property or for the commonweal. Often, people call them ‘state-­owned’ (gosudarstvennye) enterprises: the fact that they have private owners does not dismiss their peculiar status in the local moral economy. A ‘natural’ distinction is drawn between the industrial giants built in the Soviet era, whose workers are subject to state regulation and entitled to social wage, and chastniki, which are part of the pure and legitimate domain of private initiative. This perception is true both for informants working at Screenwind and at the legacy enterprises. Misha, the miner from KZRK who was fighting fiercely for every bit of social wage he was entitled to, labelled the management’s reluctance to pay what is due as corruption. Thinking about starting his own business after retirement,

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Misha was not looking forward to the frequent check-­ups and was annoyed about the hefty fines the state imposes on entrepreneurs who employ workers informally. In this situation, he thought that it was the government inspector rather than the entrepreneur that is corrupt. In the private domain populated by chastnik employers, every government intrusion is illegitimate. The ‘big’ private property is conditioned by its social embeddedness: it ceases to be legitimate when the enterprise disembeds itself from the social tissue, hence the routine calls of strikers and protesters at legacy factories for nationalization. Similar demands for nationalization are hardly imaginable in the case of Screenwind: however bad the policies of the owner might be, the workers feel that he acts on his own terms, with his ownership rights not conditioned by the lay norms of industrial paternalism or even by legal norms.

Labour Process: Craftsmen and the ‘Making Out’ Legal regulations of the labour process are also irrelevant at Screenwind. This enables classic legitimation mechanisms that connect remuneration to personal prowess and manliness. Michael Burawoy (1979) described these mechanisms in his study of a car factory in Chicago. Turning the labour process into a competitive game of ‘making out’, workers voluntarily intensified their labour, greatly increasing output. This gamification, combined with the Fordist system of social protection, constituted what Burawoy called a hegemonic labour regime. The micro-­economic settings of Screenwind have no traces of Fordism. Nevertheless, workers there do perform an enormous amount of work by turning the production process into a game, stimulated by the piece-­rate payment system. The whole production cycle takes place in one shop. At the back of the building, workers cut long plastic Z-­profiles to size. At the next stage, three teams join the cut profiles together to make window frames and sashes. I was part of a team that attached metallic fittings to the perimeters of a sash. The sashes are then joined to the frames and passed on to the glazing area. At the front of the shop, quality control (QC) checks every window and if necessary will summon someone to eliminate a defect. The ready items labelled by QC are then loaded into trucks. Despite the clear continuity of the whole production chain, there is no conveyor belt dictating a common rhythm. Each team accumulates finished items in piles, and the next team picks them up at its own tempo (see Figure 7.2). Depending on the circumstances, a

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Figure 7.2.  View of the factory. Window sashes are stacked ready to be taken by my team and equipped with metal fittings. Photo taken by the author in April 2019.

team can drown in materials left by under-­performing workers from a previous shift or amassed by the over-­performing team at the previous technological stage, or be starved of work, or sometimes waste an entire shift doing hardly anything because of a slowdown at the back end of the factory. My team consisted of five people: Yarik, a 19-­year-­old guy, cuts metal fittings to size; the other four men attach these fittings. Saniok is the foreman and arguably the most experienced worker; he has worked at Screenwind for six years; Artem’s service record is two times shorter, but he is almost as quick and experienced as Saniok. Andrei, around 19 years old, had been working at Screenwind for half a year, after a very patchy career path. Finally, there is Yulik, who is in his late 20s; until 2016, he worked in a Sukha Balka mine but then moved to Poland and found a job at a large window-­making factory. His stay at Screenwind was temporary, limited by the period needed to renew his Polish work visa. I was the sixth member, but I soon took the place of Yulik, who quit the job. The key to earning a lot of money is processing as many sashes with as few defects as possible during the 12-­hour shift. Every sash ‘costs’ 3 to 4 UAH; each takes a couple of minutes for Saniok and Artem. The high standard set by them means they do up to 250 sashes during a productive 12-­hour shift. Instead of the cooperation of mutually dependent team members with tasks divided among them, the team remains a set of four (except Yarik) inherently auton-

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omous processes, externally coordinated by a network of informal relations. Each worker defines his own tempo, invents his own order of operations and optimal bodily postures, which become his craft; the workers also demonstrate resourcefulness in solving problems that are normally supposed to be solved by the management. A good part of the shift is inevitably spent scavenging, which requires both resourcefulness and diplomacy. Even on the best days I had to make do with two screwdrivers instead of three. It is the workers’ task to find tools and fittings: every shift starts with transporting two overloaded carts with fittings from the warehouse. The woman in charge of the warehouse yells at the workers and can refuse to collaborate. In a moment of self-­reflection she once reassured me that ‘if someone asks nicely then [she] will always give it’. Negotiation skills and ‘emotional labour’ (the regulation of one’s feelings to suit the needs of the labour process; see Wharton 2009) are indispensable for successful labour performance in the classical sense. Traditionally resisting all attempts to impose a ‘scientific organization of labour’ from above, the post-­Soviet workers invent individual quasi-­Taylorist systems, rationing every gesture and every second. At after-­hours drinking sessions, they passionately discuss and compare their personal labour skills. The aim of this atomized self-­imposed Taylorism is to maximize individual gain rather than to rationalize the collective labour process. This makes it difficult for the owners to realize some of their ‘corporate social responsibility’ measures: the production manager had to bribe a foreman with an increased wage rate to make him accept a deaf member into the team. Even then, nobody wanted to ‘waste their time’ teaching the new man their trade, and he dropped out in a couple of weeks, having failed to learn all the tricks on his own. Yulik was always comparing the organization of labour at Screenwind to the window-­making factory in Poland, where he normally works. Every day he expressed his disgust at the constant shortages and unnecessary complications of the labour process due to outdated equipment and manual labour. At the Polish factory, Yulik normally made 150 windows during an 8-­hour shift. At Screenwind, much more demanding and intensive manual work gives the same ratio (225 windows per 12 hours). In other words, the same results can be achieved by a more capital-­intensive, mechanized and streamlined labour process with more minutely distributed tasks. The labour process at Screenwind compensates poor mechanization with social embeddedness. The factory feeds on the ties of kinship, using them to boost loyalty and productivity. It also exploits the

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individual need to assert one’s personal worth in terms of professionalism but also masculinity, which is coterminous with being a ‘jack of all trades’ (Morris 2013). The smooth labour process relies on the workers’ ‘soft skills’ of diplomacy and resourcefulness. Contrary to the classic imagery of automation leading to a primitivization of functions and labour shedding, the workers at Screenwind stand closer to the ideal type of pre-­industrial craftsman engaged in the putting-­out system: an autonomous worker fully controlling their labour process and bearing full responsibility for the amount and quality of output. Seeing the number of orders to be fulfilled by the end of the week, the workers get the full picture of the production process and share the management’s interest in delivering the final results as fast and as good as possible. Far from being an archaic aberration, this labour process reproduces the neoliberal logic of the autonomous homo economicus (Brown 2015: 79–84). The neoliberal subjectivity is paradoxically born in the post-­Soviet factory.

No Claims, No Obligations: Neoliberal Subjects Instead of the ‘Labour Collective’ Unlike pre-­capitalist craftsmen, workers at Screenwind are recruited from the less qualified sector of the labour force. I had no problem getting a job at the factory even though I have no qualification in or experience of manual labour. A large proportion of the workforce consists of unskilled (including very young or female) or deskilled (e.g. former miners) workers. Inside the factory, the workforce is two-­tiered: there is a core of comparatively well-­paid workers with long service records, great accumulated craft experience and sometimes close personal connections with the management. The rest are transitory employees, who often stay no more than a month or two before leaving the factory, discouraged by the low pay and the high workload. The core workers, like Saniok and Artem, can earn considerable ­wages – ­Saniok calculated that with all the seasonal flexibility he had made 110,000 UAH over the previous ­year – ­that is, 9,200 UAH ($340) monthly on average.7 Saniok does not see any problem in overworking as long as it pays: he takes pride in working six 12-­hour-­shifts per week in the high season. He sees his career at Screenwind as a steady accumulation of skills and prestige. Similarly, Artem explained that he had had to work a lot before he finally ‘started working for himself’ and making good money. This was the career track available to Andrei and potentially to me: according to the shift supervisor and

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to Saniok, I had the potential to pick up the necessary skills and earn a decent living at Screenwind. These ‘respectable’ entrepreneurs of the working-­class self (Morris 2012), who make use of the low entrance barriers and possibilities for meritocratic growth at Screenwind, despise the other part of the ­workforce – ­transitory or ‘accidental’ employees. ‘Yes, they hire everyone. There are always lots of alcoholics. And junkies. Yes, they should write an ad, like you know these flyers [advertising therapy] – “Drug dependency? Alcoholism? – Come to Screenwind!”’ – quipped Saniok. However, the ‘peripheral’ workers of Screenwind also have the attitude of autonomous and self-­sufficient neoliberal subjects. Being more vulnerable, they do not demonstrate much disdain regarding their vulnerability, readily accepting their precarious careers as entrepreneurial selves. For Yarik, Screenwind was but an episode between his work as a bartender at a movie theatre and a next adventure. He relished his financial independence from his mother and sister, even if he still owed them money, and saved on transit by walking to the factory. Regarding his spending priorities, he was torn between attending the movie theatre (sometimes in another city, if the film is rare) and getting a new tattoo. Andrei, on his part, had had half a dozen jobs over the last couple of years: before coming to Screenwind, he distributed advertising leaflets in Kryvyi Rih, worked as a bartender at the seaside and in the mountains, assembled bicycles and household items in Moscow, picked cabbages and worked at a factory in Poland, and assembled electrical wires in Lviv. He was proud of this track record, which showed his great and variegated skills and adaptability. Despite having chances to grow professionally at Screenwind, he did not cling to the factory and shared plans to leave after the end of the high season. Stressing the imperative to ‘develop oneself’, Andrei wanted to start his own business at some point. His life plan was to accumulate enough money to avoid relying on the chronically underfunded public pension system (to which he did not contribute). The two groups shared the same attitude of self-­reliance: they both presented their informal employment at Screenwind as their own choice, which reflected their striving for personal freedom from the Fordist social wage and lifetime employment schemes. Both Artem and Andrei shared a passion for ‘working for themselves’. Their self-­ worth was derived from their ability to ‘hustle’ (krutitsia), to engage in various activities for self-­provisioning in a hostile ­world – ­an imperative taken from the 1990s.

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What matters for our context is that this attitude legitimizes the utterly informal factory regime at Screenwind. The workers do not have any claims on the factory management and owner, perceiving them as equal counterparts who buy their labour power rather than as potential patrons. However, the absence of such claims also means that the owner cannot claim loyalty from his employees. The founder of Screenwind, a member of a small liberal party, attempted to mobilize his workers during the local elections of 2015. One morning, at the end of the night shift, managers asked workers to stay and listen to the speech of a candidate from the party. The result was disastrous: the workers, falling asleep after the night shift or anxious about wasting the precious time of their day shift, silently waited until the end of the long speech about the need to rejuvenate local councils and fight corruption. The ‘meeting with constituents’ hardly moved any of them to vote for the party. Andrew Sanchez, who studied the politics of work in Jamshedpur, the company town of Tata, shows that in the shadow of this paternalist giant there are other, small and radically disembedded employers. Similar to Screenwind, which exists in the shadow of Metinvest and AMKR, the metal scrapyard Lohar in Jamshedpur has no welfare scheme or even legal employment. Having no expectations from the employer, workers construct themselves as autonomous subjects and benefit from the flexibility of their informal employment by taking days off for their drinking binges. Their political perspective is more fatalist than that of the employees of large enterprises: whereas Tata workers are angry at corrupt unions and capitalists that violate social norms, Lohar employees are not attached to a particular system of norms or promises that can be broken. To them, social problems are more diffuse; one cannot assign responsibility for them to any specific social ­agent – ­they constitute part of the given social landscape that is ‘life’ (Sanchez 2018). My Screenwind informants have no expectations of or attachments to their employer, constructing themselves as autonomous economic subjects. This relieves the employer from paternalist obligations to his employees, but it also makes him unable to benefit from moral obligations on their part.

Conclusion The lack of organizational legacies from the Soviet and immediate post-­Soviet periods has allowed the Screenwind management to create a factory regime that is very different from those observed in

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the mines, at AMKR, or at Metinvest. Combined with the ideational legacy of the post-­Soviet industrial labour process, this has produced a hyper-­flexible, utterly informal factory regime in which the power balance is resolutely tilted in favour of the management. By virtue of being a new factory created by a private entrepreneur, Screenwind escaped the obligations of post-­Soviet corporations. By virtue of being situated in a post-­Soviet industrial city, however, it was able to tap into the culture of the ‘negative autonomy’ of the labour process. The costs of production are minimized on all accounts; high profitability is achieved thanks to the embeddedness of the enterprise in the pre-­existing social and political fabric. Politically, the resulting factory regime has several implications. First, the legitimacy of the management and owner in the eyes of the workers is extraordinarily high: the factory is perceived as the exclusive domain of the employer, who is not bound by any obligations of a legal or customary character. Second, these relations are supported by and reinforce the ‘entrepreneurial’ spirit of workers, who may consciously flee the modicum of social stability guaranteed by the typical post-­Soviet factory regime, choosing a riskier and more precarious career in the informal economy. This choice may correspond to the general political outlook rejecting ‘the Soviet’ in favour of a widely understood ‘Europe’. Finally, the lack of obligations on the employer’s part towards his employees leaves him without the right to make reciprocal claims, constructing his personnel as his political clientèle. The fiction of a labour collective dissolves at such enterprises, leaving bare individualist strategies. The difference between Screenwind and the ‘large’ factories is not their size but their history. Recent literature gives us examples of other greenfield post-­Soviet enterprises, larger than Screenwind but featuring the same factory regime.8 The ubiquity of such cases in the post-­Soviet area (Morris 2012) allows for the conclusion that the peculiar combination of uncontested laissez-­faire attitudes and the informal responsibilization of workers is the preferred solution for post-­Soviet industrial managers to the dilemmas of waning resources and unfinished Taylorization. These conclusions may be extrapolated, with reservations, to other parts of the world. India had no history of a state socialist labour regime, albeit it had its own Nehruvian development push that promoted Fordist industrialization. Ethnographies from there report similar cases in which skilled male garment workers actively avoid employment at Fordist factories compliant with laws. They seek instead more precarious employment, whose piece-­rate payment

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system allows them to gain greater income, use the labour process to prove their masculinity, ‘be their own bosses’, and still be protected by the social networks of kin, caste and friendship (Carswell and De Neve 2018; De Neve 2014). Do such workers fit the definition of neoliberal subjects? This term has figured in this section, but its use was restricted to referring to the workers’ self-­perception, especially on the shop floor. Just like the disembeddedness of Screenwind from legal regulations turns out to be the flipside of its embeddedness in the moral economy of different property regimes and obligations, the entrepreneurial selves eager to take risks and betting on autonomy turn out to be ‘quintessentially non-­neoliberal subjects whose lives continue to be shaped by family relations and domestic responsibilities, and whose entrepreneurial success is as likely to rely on the support of kin, caste, and friendship networks as on individual skill, ability or drive’ (Carswell and De Neve 2018: 331). The quest for personal autonomy, reinforced simultaneously by the legacies of the state socialist labour process and by the postsocialist aversion to state socialist mediocrity (Kalb 2019), is a powerful ideological representation that often hides structures of a deeper embeddedness enabling the disembedded production regime.

Conclusion The two stable factory regimes that emerge out of the decaying post-­ post-­Soviet configuration rely on ideological justifications that are diametrically opposed. One of them is a Fordism reassembled to fit the requirements of post-­Fordist global capitalism and the non-­ Taylorized labour process. Being deeply embedded in pre-­existing paternalist expectations, it modifies them to make them suit the realities of privatized industry, governed by the regime of corporate austerity. The lack of investment in productive capital is compensated by investment in the political capital of the owner. The second regime is a disembedded factory that resembles a pre-­ capitalist collaboration of autonomous craftsmen. Being similarly non-­Taylorized, it derives its legitimacy from the vernacular understanding of legitimate private property, which is constructed as a logical continuation of personal property, where the sovereignty of the enterprising individual cannot be compromised by any intervention form the outside, including fiscal or labour regulations. For all its disembedded self-­representation, this regime is also embedded

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in the lay moral economy, networks of kinship and friendship, and other cultural phenomena. The neo-­Fordist regime at Metinvest combines rigid paternalist mechanisms of social protection on the level of the enterprise and on the city scale with a flexible labour process relying on workers’ ‘negative autonomy’ on the micro scale. Grassroots resistance attempts face heavy-­handed suppression and tend to articulate with nationalist politics, salient on the macro scale but locally marginal. The resulting stable power configuration reinforces the owner’s political capital locally and nationally. This model arises across the post-­Soviet landscape, proving to be an efficient, if not optimal, production regime that marries local cultural, political and institutional legacies with the constraints of contemporary post-­Fordist capitalism. Articulating with a wider national project of a ‘humane capitalism’ and hierarchical merit-­based distribution, it offers an attractive ideology for paternalist electoral machines with a technocratic–populist discourse. The second model is possible in the workplace that has no paternalist legacies that would underpin the neo-­Fordist ­regime – ­that is, new, mostly small enterprises. Relying on the same non-­Taylorized industrial culture, it produces a hyper-­flexible factory regime. It legitimizes the management and the owner by constructing the category of an autonomous entrepreneurial self, which discursively encompasses both the owner and the workers. This ideological construction liberates the employer from paternalist claims and expectations, but it also makes him unable to benefit from the social capital of a patron and mobilize his workforce for electoral ends. Similar to the neo-­Fordist regime, the disembedded model is found elsewhere in post-­Soviet countries and ­beyond – ­within new enterprises that offer their workforce greater potential incomes, mobility and a feeling of empowerment in exchange for greater precarity. Just like the default post-­post-­Soviet regime, the two regimes analysed here rely on postsocialist legacies. However, contrary to the former’s inertia, they construct themselves through active engagement with these legacies, refashioning them to better fit the given economic and sociopolitical conjuncture. This refashioning results in two configurations that seem to be diametrically opposed to each other. Viewed from a higher level of abstraction, their co-­presence in the same social and geographical space reinforces both of them. Occupying different niches, they co-­constitute the post-­Soviet industrial political culture in the making.

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Conclusion to Part III The roots of power configurations at contemporary post-­Soviet industrial enterprises lie in Stalinist industrialization. Being the main carrier of Soviet modernity, the factory was designed to fulfil a wide scope of social and political functions beyond production activities, which made it an effective patron of the town in which it was situated. The undermechanized and non-­Taylorized character of the labour process was compensated for with the extraordinary mobilization of human labour (Gill and Markwick 2019). The greater agency of workers coupled with generalized shortage and lack of profit motive led to the emergence of an informal paternalist pact between the industrial management and the workforce. This pact was renegotiated and restructured according to the needs of the crisis-­ridden survival conjuncture of the 1990s. In this period, the strategy of labour hoarding and the political importance of the paternalist factory director relying on the loyal legacy union and commanding authority over the town were reinforced at the expense of capital investment. A gap grew between formal regulations, preserved as a promise of normality, and informal patterns of the labour process, conflict resolution and welfare distribution imposed by the conjuncture. The gradual end of the ‘survival regime’ of the 1990s did not lead to a radical restructuring of power configurations on the shop floor. The new private owners chose to put on hold the plans to completely uproot the ways their factories had been working until then. The inherited complex architecture of the social wage, embedded corporate paternalism, and the negative autonomy of the labour process was usually kept in place. Its subsequent transformations were defined by the different satisficing strategies realized by new owners and managers in varying circumstances. The default strategy, realized in the two mining holdings based in Kryvyi Rih, has been to keep to a minimum the scope of interventions in the inherited system. Its readjustments were aimed at intensifying labour processes within the given (and ageing) technological framework. The inputs are minimized by allowing the system of social wage and institutions of corporate paternalism to gradually lose their relevance and attraction. Meanwhile, the maximization of outputs is achieved by turning the weapon of informality against the workers. The state sustains this precarious configuration by taking over the functions of the main patron to whom the miners should address their claims.

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Another variation of this inertial regime has developed at AMKR, which found itself in the midst of a national political crisis caused by competition between the factions of the ruling elite. The struggle for power on the national level brought in a new owner, an outsider not well versed in the local vernacular of patronage. This initial radical disembeddedness paradoxically made him better preserve the institutions, embedding the enterprise in local social relations. However, these mechanisms did not help the owner to substantially consolidate his power at the enterprise. Instead, they provide resources for multiple competitors for social power at and beyond the enterprise. An alternative, more activist strategy boils down to reviving the Fordist style of industrial and political governance through patronage. Metinvest ceaselessly builds its reputation of ‘creator’ as opposed to ‘plunderer’. The ultimate manifestation of this reactivated embeddedness is visible in the ‘company towns’ of Donbas, where Metinvest established itself as a total institution. The policy of non-­Taylorized Fordism, more firmly rooted in political structures on the macro and micro levels, appears to be more sustainable due to its reliance on autonomous sources of social power. In all these cases, the overlapping social, economic and political communities allow the employer to manufacture consent on the basis of social blackmail rather than investment. Like on the city scale, the patron–client relations on the level of enterprise are subtractive and not additive for clients: they are not so much enticed to gain through cooperation as threatened with loss through non-­ cooperation (Allina-­Pisano 2010). This paternalism, which allows the stabilization of power relations at a cheap cost, is made possible by the capital accumulation made in previous conjunctures, as well as by the moral economy of survival formed in the 1990s. Finally, a totally different twist can be observed at greenfield enterprises created after the crisis of the 1990s. The lack of organizational continuity and the historical legacy of the private domain’s exceptional status, condensed into the figure of the small entrepreneur, allowed Screenwind to escape the post-­Soviet corporate welfarism as well as common legal obligations towards the state and employees. Normative images of the labour process underlining autonomy, resourcefulness and universality of skills combined with the new figure of the working-­class entrepreneurial self. What results from these factors is the extremely stable link between an ‘independent’ employer and his ‘entrepreneurial’ employees. So far, the accidental welfarism at AMKR, laden with conflict, is closest to the scenario of capitalist ­normalization – ­erosion of

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i­ nformal mechanisms governing the workplace and the emergence of the working class as a class-­for-­itself through explicit and formal mobilization and contention. However, even the pronounced and unending conflict at AMKR does not go further than the fractured militancy typical of Chinese and Indian workplaces: a ‘widespread contestation that cannot scale up from firm-­based politics to an industry-­wide or national movement’ (Nair and Friedman 2021: 34). Instead of the consolidation of a class-­based collective identity, the struggles remain fragmented and atomized. On the other hand, mobilization initiated from above is a political mechanism favoured by the default factory regime in the mines, and especially by the neo-­Fordism of Metinvest. Of the four strategies of survival mentioned by James Scott (1976: 204–25), the Metinvest case is a clear representation of the fourth: reliance on oppositionist structures of protection and assistance, which here takes the shape of an industrial employer. The other three ­strategies – ­local forms of self-­help, individual mobilization of resources from the external economy, and state-­supported forms of patronage and ­assistance – ­are present in various combinations in all other cases. This reproduction of patronage relations does not necessarily spell doom for democratic class-­based politics. For Charles Tilly (2007: 78), authoritarian patronage pyramids are an important medium through which subaltern groups can be involved in macro-­level political processes and discussions. This is one of the possible developments for the neo-­Fordist factory regime. However, the atomized nature of these configurations in Kryvyi Rih, which remain more individualist than classic patronage politics, lead to a different kind of politicization: passive resentment, politicization of identities or striving for individual distinction. These forms will be treated in detail in the next part of the book.

Notes 1. The enterprise has the full array of known tools for political mobilization of employees, making use of the administrative and industrial hierarchy. Not only does the management oblige the workforce to participate in demonstrations (this practice is very real at Sukha Balka, too), it has been trying to directly influence the vote of its workers. During the last electoral campaign, YuGOK workers received phone calls from pollsters who knew their names and asked questions about their attitude to Vilkul. The employees perceive this meddling as an annoying trade-­off for otherwise decent working conditions. 2. When dissent is voiced, it often acquires political colours, namely those of Ukrainian ethnic nationalism. This is the only clearly articulated political alternative at the enter-

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3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8.



prise; however, it is extremely marginal. No more than fifteen people came to the nationalist May Day event, organized by Svoboda Pratsi. This is despite the fact that the nationalist union has cells not only at Metinvest but also at the pluralistic AMKR. The name of the factory is fictional. This online map aggregates local expertise on the urban space and built environment. The comments and descriptions found on Wikimapia can often provide the most detailed and up-­to-­date information about obscure structures and areas. Workbooks were introduced under Stalin to take account of a worker’s career path. The HR department keeps the workbook during the whole period of the person’s employment, noting important events: hiring, promotions and honourable mentions, reprimands and penalties, and dismissal or quitting. Widely criticized for its redundancy, this booklet is still required for official employment. Its paper form was rendered optional in 2021. One rare instance of non-­wage remuneration is a small bonus paid to workers who use bikes to commute. Some workers consider this unjust, and this encouragement has little practical sense in a city like Kryvyi Rih, with long distances and no bicycle infrastructure. Nevertheless, the owner insists on this policy, seeing it as an element of his company’s progressive and European face. It is advertised on Screenwind’s website. This figure is greater than the average wage in the Dnipro region in 2018 (8,900 UAH before ­taxes – ­i.e. $280 net) although smaller than the average net wage in the mining ($390) and metalworking ($350) industries in the same year. One such enterprise is ­Fujikura – ­a Japanese factory producing electrical wiring for cars in Western Ukraine. There, workers are forced to work overtime and take shortcuts; formal rules are routinely sacrificed to the needs of the production process, working shifts are arbitrarily prolonged, and the flexible wage system offers an efficient tool of social control. Like at Screenwind, the factory suffers from an enormous workforce turnover (Semchuk 2018). All these circumstances were not outrageous or surprising to Andrei, who spent several months working at Fujikura before he joined Screenwind.  Another similar case is a Russian confectionery factory created after 1991. Being part of a multinational corporation, it stands out from its other factories by the large proportion of manual labour and the old age of its equipment. Standard legal protection does not work in practice, temporary workers are willing to work additional hours, and ‘core’ workers do not differ that much from the ‘peripheral’ (Pinchuk 2021).

PART IV

_ Everyday Politics

Having analysed the changing relations of power and moral economies interacting with politico-­economic processes on the levels of the city and the enterprise, in this part I will uncover the level of interpersonal relations and attitudes, which structures and is structured by the political convictions and general worldviews of my working-­ class informants. Understanding politics as ‘the control, allocation, production, and use of resources and the values and ideas underlying those activities’ (Tria Kerkvliet 2009: 227), I will be mostly interested here in everyday ­politics – ­mundane expressions and acts, low-­profile behaviour, which is often considered non-­political by the actors themselves but which amounts to resistance, support, compliance, or modifications and evasions of existing power structures. By analysing such statements and practices, I will uncover the way in which political and economic structures and techniques resonate with vernacular political language. We will see which cleavages and hierarchies are produced on the elementary level and how they contribute to the dynamics of the politico-­economic landscape. This part is divided into three chapters. The first deals with the process of building hierarchies in the midst of the working class, borrowing from the Bourdieusian framework of distinction strategies. I will show how this approach, often discarded as unrealistically Hobbesian, can improve our understanding of the popularity of individualist frameworks among the post-­Soviet working class. The following chapter will relate these locally reproduced distinctions to the political identities produced on the national scale, demonstrating how the two frameworks speak to each other, enriching

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the lay imaginary of worth and deservingness with macro-­political, ethnocultural, geopolitical and class values. In the final chapter, I will examine political attitudes that stem from existing hierarchies and value systems: an aversion to ‘politics’ as a disembedded field dominated by the corrupt elite.

— Chapter 8 —

Distinction and Class Strategies of Self-Valorization

_ Previous chapters have highlighted the atomized, individualist character of workplace struggles in Kryvyi Rih. When a contentious event does happen, it usually follows the pattern of a short-­lived spontaneous outburst, not sustained by institutionalized grassroots collective action. This pattern is so powerful that the very term ‘strike’ in the local vernacular came to signify a mass riotous protest, distinctive from the dictionary meaning of an organized downing of tools. However, collective militancy of any kind is comparatively rare in the culture of individual informal negotiations and private survival strategies. They prevail over collective forms of action and organization, which constitute class in the sense of E.P. Thompson ([1963] 1980), making one wonder: is it possible to speak about a Ukrainian working class at all? In this chapter, I will take a closer look at the individualist politics of distinction that permeate the workers’ milieu in Kryvyi Rih. The first section examines the distinction of activism, which creates opposition between the self-­designed enlightened militants and the masses that they are supposed to protect. In the second section, I link this opposition to the deeper patterns of distinction based on the hierarchies of cultural capital that speak to the lay vision of linear progress. The last section will inspect personal trajectories and strategies of working women and men, shedding light on their everyday activism and social embeddedness, which do not fit into the binary of ‘isolated militants vs impassive masses’.

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The Virtue of Activism: Promethean Individuals Media reports about the big strike that shook the city in May 2017 conveyed a picture of class solidarity and egalitarianism in a movement widely supported by the local population. Inside the movement, an alliance of ‘independent’ unions allegedly enjoyed hegemony. Clearly, there were reasons for scepticism about the unrealistically shiny image of overwhelming militancy and class solidarity. Going into the field, I was prepared to take the jubilant narratives of local militant union activists with a pinch of salt, looking for fissures and hierarchies behind the facade of unity and equality. However, the judgements and positions offered by these interlocutors presented a completely different picture: that of a ceaseless competition for status and resources. During subsequent talks with less politically engaged informants, instead of trying to discover hidden hierarchies and struggles, I ended up having to look for solidarity and horizontal ties hidden behind lay narratives that seemed to confirm the old Hobbesian trope of atomized and inert masses, the legacy of the ‘totalitarian’ school of Soviet studies.

Independent Unions: The Self-Proclaimed Nobility There are people who understand what a union, and a workers’ movement, is. But there are also other people who come over and say: ‘I’m paying you, so you go ahead and defend me.’ Excuse me, nobody pays me. Do you mean that one per cent [of the wage taken as union fees]? Then go read the laws and the statute, which you signed, and agreed to, upon joining the union. You haven’t even seen it really. And when you read it, come back and tell me whether you pay something and to whom. I don’t need such people in the union. That’s how I’m talking to people. I’d better have two people with whom I can go anywhere, rather than such scum which will sit and wait until I do something for them, wait and see if I win or fail and what is going to become of me. I don’t need you people like this. It’s not a union; it’s bullshit. Just like at the war: you did not fight in a war, but I did. And I would have shot you first. Not the enemies, but I personally would. Because my back is not covered because of you!

This angry monologue was the first thing that the head of the NPGU cell at AMKR uttered after I pushed him to go beyond the usual media-­oriented narrative about the workers’ grievances and invited him to discuss the nature of the workers’ movement he represents. For Leonid, a former activist of the Afghan veterans’ movement and an ambulance driver for AMKR’s medical service,

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irresponsible and selfish workers were the main obstacle to the success of his union, second only to the factory management and corrupt state officials. Opposing the ‘service model’, NPGU promotes the model of an ‘activist union’, relying on the hard core of militants committed to the struggle against the management. This model promotes a distinct worldview, in which self-­valorization as selfless and committed militants is supported by contempt for the so-­called ‘banana unions’1 that have no other role but welfare distribution. The clientelistic membership of such unions, craving for money and putiovki with no overarching political agenda, is also inferior in the moral order resting on the hierarchy of selfless commitment. Most union leaders have a personal background in activism in the wider sense of the word. Stepanovich, the head of the NPGU city chapter, spent several decades working in the mine and participated in the big strikes of the 1990s. Others’ trajectories had a lot to do with sociopolitical activism beyond the workplace. Leonid made a career in the Afghan veterans’ movement before he grew disillusioned with its allegedly corrupt leadership and left it. At one point, he ran at local elections; later, Leonid went through several trade unions, looking for genuine activism. Valentin, an important figure from another union, is a retired military officer. Having finished his military career in 1989, he has become a typical professional activist: member of a district council, aide to a local politician, organizer of a teachers’ strike, anti-­corruption whistleblower in the customs office, and above all a person deeply engaged in the ‘defence of human rights’ (pravozashchitnaia deyatelnost). His trade union career, which started in 2014, has been a continuation of this activist habitus, hardly rooted in any first-­hand shop floor experience. He accepted an offer to join the militant union at AMKR ‘primarily because I live close to the factory, and my mother had worked there for twenty years’. The ethos of a selfless fighter for the people’s cause, rooted in the ideology of Russian populists of the nineteenth century (narodniki) and endorsed in Soviet propaganda (see Figure 8.1), is the attitude shared by most activists of ‘independent’ unions. Widely respected in principle, it understandably becomes the guiding life principle for only a small minority. Viktor Veretelnikov, featured in the KVPU newspaper Aspekt, gained this missionary attitude during his military service in the war zone in Eastern Ukraine. Upon returning back home and coming back to work at AMKR, he met Stepanovich and joined the NPGU. He volunteered to bring 1,500 new members into the union: ‘I thought everyone would run into the independent union

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Figure 8.1.  Monument to Danko, the main character of a short story by Maxim Gorky, at one of the squares of Kryvyi Rih. In order to lead his tribe out of the wilderness, Danko ripped out his own heart, which glowed and showed the way to the people. Photo taken by the author in April 2019.

as soon as I called them. But they are all so indifferent, even in my own railway shop #­2 . . . ­I just can’t understand where they come from, being like this!’ Bitter experiences like this reinforce the distinction between the typical ‘passive’ workers and the Promethean activists, who see themselves as a small but brave counter-­elite. The high ‘quality’ of such a counter-­elite is valued more than the quantity of the average workers, who are only interested in mundane goods: ‘Thank God, we are 350 people; 350 is few, but all of the 350 are really there’, stated Leonid. He went on to draw the picture of ungrateful inert masses exploiting the heroic minority: ‘Someone struggles, gets stripped of his bonuses for this struggle, and others then receive a wage raise and think: what idiots! I did not do anything, and I got my money from the ATM just as well! Union work is thankless.’ Igor, the president of the NPGU at Sukha Balka, underlined the difference of habitus between an activist like him and an average worker: ‘For them, it is easier to go to Poland than to fight. He goes there and earns

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twenty grand. While you are staying here, facing conflicts on your own. Because as a union president, you are behind the wheel.’ Instead of sustainable and institutionalized collective interest representation, ‘independent’ unions are more efficient as a vehicle for external validation of individual moral worth. This is clear from the story of Vira, a militant female miner who scandalized the management of Sukha Balka by starring in an independent documentary about working conditions in the mine and by organizing a mediatized symbolic protest on Women’s Day. These and other feats clearly singled her out as an independent personality who knows her legal rights and is unafraid of repression unleashed by the administration. Her activities were hardly coordinated with anyone, but she did join the NPGU cell. However, instead of using her union membership to develop a culture of collective grassroots protest at her workplace, Vira quit her job a few weeks after the documentary had aired. She did it immediately after reaching the pension age, having calculated the timing beforehand: ‘I already knew that I would retire when I was joining the NPGU, I did it on ­purpose . . . ­I quit the normal union and joined NPGU not because I was very committed [ideyna], just to get on their ­nerves . . . ­Of course, if I had been planning to keep working there, what could I have done? I would have talked to them.’ The ‘independent’ union is the positive pole in the moral landscape of the enterprise, proximity to which can confirm the individual’s high morals, as opposed to the non-­choice of staying in the ‘normal’ legacy union. However, Vira did not see it as a tool in the long-­term process of class formation.

Non-organized Workers: Confirmed Hierarchy, Contested Roles The activism-­centred moral hierarchy is more salient than the authority of professional union militants. Vira’s friend Zhanna used to work at KZRK, the other mining company. A long-­time member of the NPGU, she spent a lot of effort trying to convince her co-­workers to be more assertive against the administration. However, her proactive position was not appreciated by the union leadership and even less by her non-­activist colleagues. Zhanna left the mine and moved to look for job in Poland. This is how she explained her decision: ‘Complete lawlessness [proizvol] at the mine, degradation of the collective as well as the union. I am not receiving support from anyone, I only face criticism and curses from imbeciles who agree to all conditions.’ Zhanna explicitly included the NPGU union in her list of passive ‘imbeciles’. Not knowing the language, she still asked me for

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contacts (local ‘activists’) in Wroclaw, in the hope of finding worthy friends. In her quest for like-­minded souls, she relies on personal connections and individual traits rather than on organizational or political allegiances. Often, workers turn the tables by assigning the NPGU to the negative pole of their moral landscape. The ‘independent’ union is classified together with the administration and the ‘official’ unions that promote passivity and stifle people’s presumed anger. Boris, a miner at Sukha Balka, is renowned for his militant attitude towards the bosses. He fiercely opposes the idea of a union’s participation in a strike, arguing instead for a purely self-­organized, spontaneous walkout or sit-­in. For him, Igor, the NPGU leader at the mine, is nothing more than a weakling who rose to success thanks to the union activities, which are marked with the stigma of elite corruption: ‘Have you seen his Facebook photos? Not bad, huh? Such nice ­shoes . . . ­while he used to be just a schmuck.’ A similar attitude could be observed during the KZRK wildcat strike in May 2019: the ‘independent’ union leaders who arrived at the scene and negotiated on behalf of the strikers were met with the common distrust reserved for all ‘bosses’. While the self-­assigned nobility of ‘independent’ unions is assimilated to the vilified elite, the work of distinction goes on within the popular milieu. Accusing one’s fellow workers of being cowardly and passive was a recurring motive in my interviews. Boris complained: Our people are like this: horses [koni]. Silent horses, wankers [chmyri]. Seventy people are sitting at the meeting, two or three are asking questions. As for the rest, they are scared as fuck. Then the meeting ends, and he runs up to me: why didn’t you ask this, why didn’t you ask that. I just want to beat them up. They are the reason everything is like this.

Saniok, my foreman at Screenwind, formulates this distinction in terms of having or lacking ‘personality’ (kharakter). A person with kharakter should have the strength to assume personal responsibility and exercise agency. But this personal trait is rare. Olga and Inna, activist miners at KZRK, are convinced that 80 per cent or 90 per cent of people are willing to delegate decision-­making to a leader in order to avoid the responsibility for possible failure. Most people, according to them, are too weak, cowardly and lazy to be activists. This, in turn, leads to the lay cult of a strong personality, able to challenge power holders in a frontal attack. Thus, Boris’s most heroic feat, recounted several times by him and by common friends, consisted of confronting the PMGU president in the mine’s parking lot:

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‘I’m saying, do you know that they have added working hours for us? He says, well, what can I do? I’m saying, what are you here for? . . . Grab your things and fuck off out of here if you can’t do anything. I’m saying it just like that.’ Union activists try to build their justification strategies on this culture, creating legends about their heroic deeds. Here is Igor’s account of an episode during the 2017 strike: So I’m walking in and getting down [the shaft] on my own. I know how to do it all. On the halfway they cut the electricity, stopping my carriage after I got 300 metres below the surface. I still reached the depth of 1,300. I took a risk and got out of the cage, into the shaft, and slowly climbed down the skipway rope. It was long, hard and scary. Double or quits. I run and hear them say: ‘Where is your leader now?’ I’m running all wet and greasy and shouting: ‘here I am!’ The directors’ eyes popped out: ‘how did you get here?’ They were telling the guys that I had left.

This posturing relies on exaggerated masculinity traits, but it is equally valid for women. Olga and Inna recounted a Soviet joke about a school warden who looks like Karl Marx, causing confusion among the children. The history teacher asks him at least to shave off his beard, but the warden says: ‘I can do that, but what shall I do about my brains?’ Olga and Inna recognized themselves in this joke, claiming exceptional personal qualities. The cult of a conflictual attitude towards the illegitimate elite takes a highly individualist modality, producing a contradictory narrative. Thus, Sergei, a miner from Sukha Balka, repeated many times that the main problem is that most people around him are punch bags (terpily), too timid to dare speak their mind against the boss. But when asked what can be done to solve the social evils that abound, Sergei explained that most problems can be solved by changing one’s own attitude and becoming more positive about the world. He cited the American motivational author Louise Hay to prove his point: ‘you should start by making the world a better place around you, for example by taking the trash out of a park; but first of all by getting rid of all the trash that sits in your head’. References to the ideology of small deeds and calls for a ‘change from within’ paradoxically coexist with the accentuated militancy of many informants. The imperative of defiance and activism produces social hierarchies that are not pegged to any formal criterion or structure, remaining fluid and intuitive tools for creating distinction within the working class. At the same time, this ideology does not help to produce a culture and structures of resistance, limiting the latter to periodic emotional outbursts.

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Class Contempt and Contempt of One’s Own Class Vira is an illustrative case of the contradiction between the collectivist general premise of the virtue of activism and its individualist practical realization. This contradiction is the result of the changing self-­perception of the working class. Vira explicitly rejects collectivism and proclaims herself ‘individualist’. However, she also clearly positions herself on the social map together with other workers, acknowledging that her habitus is much closer to that of the other manual workers than to that of her cousin, who occupies a white-­collar position at the same mine. The strike of 2017 threw light on their social differences: We have completely grown apart precisely because however nice he is, we still see the situation in a radically different manner. His wife treats me like her personal servant! . . . I have not seen one normal person among the [engineers]. Even my brother, whom I liked a lot, sometimes cannot hold it. Once he got drunk and said: ‘well whatever, anyway, you and I are at the opposing poles’. That’s exactly right!

Vira is painfully aware of the weight of class structures defining her life perspectives. These objective limits are routinely reinforced in the popular discourse that justifies inequalities by imputing inferior human qualities to manual workers: laziness, stupidity, alcoholism. This is the dominant language of the intelligentsia, which provokes two types of reaction on the part of the workers: defiant outrage and acceptance of the inferior status. In his work on the moral significance of class, Andrew Sayer lists possible responses to contempt: (1) warranted shame; (2) warranted refusal of other’s contempt; (3) defiant shamelessness; (4) misplaced shame; (5) and unwarranted but still overriding shame (Sayer 2005b: 158). He claims that the latter two options are the most common among the subaltern: they tend to accept the valuation that relegates them to the lower rungs of the moral hierarchy, feeling shame for their imagined or real traits constructed as deficiencies. However, this is only part of the story in Kryvyi Rih. Responses 2 and 3 were not uncommon among my informants, who acutely perceived the class contempt directed against them in everyday communication but refused to acknowledge it as warranted. Instead, they build their politics on a defiant reaction to such contempt, reciprocating by discursively diminishing the worth of people distant from the material production process. Soviet legacy narratives glorifying ‘the man of toil’ (chelovek truda) certainly play a role in this process. In practice,

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all of these analytically distinct reactions most often can be found together, contributing in varying proportions to a contradictory amalgam of working-­class consciousness. ‘The ongoing vilification of the postsocialist worker as a dangerous, denigrated, and worthless leftover of a demonized past’ (Manolova 2020: 507) goes hand in hand with the promotion of a new engine of social ­progress – ­the middle class. The new model implied depoliticized and individualized strategies of achieving self-­reliance and the ‘good life’. Members of the working class did not remain enclosed in their stagnating habitus but actively attempted to adopt new models of personhood and middle-­class dispositions in order to legitimately claim upward mobility. This decomposition of working-­class culture, which has been traditionally conceived as very distinct and disconnected from the status anxieties of the middle class (Hoggart [1957] 1971; Skeggs 2011), goes against much of the existing literature based on Western European cases. It has been by no means linear or ordered: my informants have been clinging to their working-­class identity in some respects and at the same time shedding it in favour of middle-­class sensibilities in others. The cult of activism analysed above results from the combination of these two contradictory tendencies: the vilification and the adoration of the working class. Whereas in the Soviet Union the role of Danko who leads his kinsmen into modernity was accessible to the working class through a career in the party, the new regime allowed people to bypass all formal institutions to assume this role on an individual level. However, distinction on the basis of activist virtues can only be achieved against the backdrop of a passive crowd. For most of my informants, the ideal of social justice involves hierarchies based on personal merits rather than egalitarian distribution. Personal inclination for activism is just one possible proxy to measure these merits. However, there are no material and fixed criteria that would allow us to reach a socially agreed upon vision of these virtues. Their speculative and variable nature leads to private symbolic hierarchies, which are not demystified because of their individual character: there is no public sphere in which they would clash against each other. This is true for activism but also for other middle-­class features that the working class attempt to appropriate on an individual level: culture and manners, inherent freedom and openness, concordance with the imagined direction of social progress.

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Upbringing, Freedom and Linear Progress When asked about the social group with which she identifies, Zhanna explained: ‘I position myself as working-­class intelligentsia. Or labour intelligentsia. Because I read a lot, and talk to many people, and do my job in a professional ­manner – ­I am very competent as a specialist. Therefore I think I do constitute a part of the working-­class intelligentsia.’ This reply, complete with the reaffirming last phrase, shows the way in which class distinctions function among post-­Soviet workers: the claim to an ‘intellectual’ status that elevates the manual worker above her peers in the symbolic hierarchy. Among the criteria allowing people to count themselves as part of this advanced group are the consumption of legitimating cultural or intellectual products and exposure to experience extending beyond the typical routine.

Consuming Culture A passion for reading is one of the most frequently occurring tropes in the narratives of my working-­class informants. Not only Zhanna’s friend Vira but also her adversary Olga, independently of each other, claim to have grown up in households full of books and been raised by educated parents. The same goes, in turn, for their children. Olga’s friend Inna underlined that her son ‘grows up in a refined [intelligentnaya] family. [We are] intelligentsia with working-­class professions. Well, it happened this way [tak poluchilos].’ She insisted several times that there are many highly educated people working in mines, including herself, who end up there as a result of unlucky circumstances, objective forces that misplaced such people. The insistence on being out of place due to adverse structural factors is especially typical for women. All of my female miner informants told a strikingly similar life story: raised in loving and smart miner families, they were prevented by socio-­economic circumstances from developing their promising careers elsewhere and made a point of getting a job in the mine, despite the parents’ resistance, attracted by the social wage offered by mining companies. The passion for books, on the contrary, is not an exclusively female attribute. Inna’s boyfriend Misha mentioned that he always takes a book into the mine; he enjoys reading despite the bemused attitude of his colleagues. According to him, he has had this exceptional trait since his boyhood: bored by the primitive literature syllabus at school, in class he secretly liked to read a ‘serious’ book,

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Mikhail Bulgakov’s mystical novel The Master and Margarita. When the teacher discovered this, she could not scold him for being so advanced. Gosha, a miner from Sukha Balka, also claims to stand out from among his peers due to his love of reading: ‘They tell me, “There is a movie about this. You should better watch the movie.” I’m saying, “Ok, I got it, sure, I will watch a movie”. It’s useless to even argue with some of them.’

Open Mind and ‘Culturedness’ Besides reading, workers cited other habits and personal traits that distinguish them from their allegedly less civilized peers. Inna and Olga made the point that ‘not all miners drink: most would sip a bit of something like red wine, and that’s all.’ Distancing themselves from the banal types of working-­class leisure activities, they said they like going to the beach and swimming naked at night. Not long before our talk, they had had such an outing, ‘without alcohol, just with tea and coffee in thermoses.’ Vira is more explicit in distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate types of hobbies and consumption patterns: for example, travelling to see other places as opposed to cultivating potatoes, buying iPhones or new jackets and eating a lot of meat. She cited the example of her neighbour, who used to be a well-­off miner in Soviet times: his family ate only expensive and fresh food from the farmers’ market and spent vacations at the seaside, but they failed to give education to their children. Vira’s parents were poorer and did not eat out, refraining from the conspicuous consumption typical of well-­ paid miners, but managed to accumulate more educational capital. Valorization of tourism and new experiences, compared to the stationary lifestyle of the stereotypical working class, is also present in the narrative of Gosha: The other day someone asked me: what are you going to do on your birthday? I say, I don’t know, maybe we will order sushi, rolls, eat them. Or maybe we’ll go visit some place. He’s like: do you seriously eat them [sushi]? – Yes, why? – Yuck, how can someone eat them! – Have you tried them? – Well no, I’m just thinking what kind of food can that be. So you have not tried them? – No, I haven’­t – ­Well I’ll be damned, how boring your life is!

The lack of exotic experience delegitimizes political and other opinions held by such people. Gosha recounted his argument with a miner in Donetsk, who claimed that Western Ukrainians were in favour of rehabilitating Nazi collaborators. When it turned out that

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this miner had never left the Donetsk region, apart from going to seaside resorts, Gosha told him that he was not qualified to express judgements about regions he had never seen personally. All these hierarchically organized oppositions can be synthesized in the emic term of ‘culturedness’ (kulturnost). Coined by the Russian intelligentsia in the 1870s, this term means the state of belonging to modern civilization, foreign to contemporary Russian peasants. It was widely popularized in the course of the Stalinist ‘cultural revolution’ in the second half of the 1930s, when the party abandoned utopian transhumanist projects and set about spreading kulturnost among Soviet citizens as its main aim. Similar to Norbert Elias’ ‘civilizing process’, this implies introducing standards of cultural consumption, clothing and appearance, self-­discipline, and expanding one’s cultural horizon. These standards were actively promoted as the necessary requirement for belonging within the socialist modernity (Volkov 2000). The progressist framework urging popular classes to adhere to modernist ideals of ‘culturedness’ is still active. Today, it is disconnected from any kind of socialist ideals but has retained its regulatory function, internalized by the working class.

Internalization of the Class Stigma The hierarchy in which industrial workers occupy the lowest steps is regularly reinforced by the intelligentsia. Most of my non-­working-­ class interlocutors (a doctor, an accountant, an engineer, an NGO activist) casually made quite harsh remarks about the inferior cultural qualities of the workers. The emic post-­Soviet term for the lower classes, alluding to their brutish and unreflexive nature, is bydlo – literally, ‘cattle’ (Djagalov 2011; Morris 2021). This dominant condescending discourse produces resentment. During the interview with Inna, I mentioned, half-­jokingly, that my grandparents belonged to the labour aristocracy, meaning their relatively privileged positions in the industrial hierarchy. She took the metaphor at face value, interpreting it as an attempt to degrade the ordinary, plebeian workers. This misunderstanding provoked the following monologue on her part: Sure, plebs will be plebs. . . . Once, journalists came to us, they wanted to film something, and one of them was holding a tripod in his hand. He says, could you hold this thingy? I’m asking, do you mean the tripod? His eyes almost popped out. I’m saying, why did you decide that only idiots work in a mine? There are very intelligent people here, who just have no other choice. Of course I can hold your tripod.

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However, this defiance is accompanied by the internalization of the very hierarchy in question. Agreeing with the pessimistic diagnosis of their class in general, my informants tried to justify their own personal worth by vilifying the masses. Dmitriy, a worker from YuGOK, suggested limiting the citizenship rights of pensioners and people with insufficient civic culture: ‘You come to the polling station and pass something like an IQ test, but on the issues of state institutions, history. If you do not pass the test, you are a moron, you will choose the wrong candidate, go away. But [it is impossible because allegedly] everyone is equal, we are humanists and have to respect everyone.’ Describing her cynical, dumb and passive colleagues, Zhanna used the very word that outraged Inna: plebeians. Admitting that they can be as frustrated about social injustice as she is, Zhanna delegitimized their frustration for being too materialist, and hence morally unworthy: – How is injustice formulated? Low incomes? – No, those bastards have cars, and they ride and have fun while I don’t have money to drink. – That is, inequality. – Yes, envy. And it does not push them towards anything useful.

In order to explain this corruption of the people, she mobilized the concept of ‘mentality’ (mentalitet) – a very popular term, frequently used by both the workers and by Ukrainian public intellectuals. It implies a certain set of innate psychological traits, allegedly typical for people living in a given geographical area or belonging to a given ethnic, racial or social group. Elaborating on her difference from ordinary miners, Vira said that she feels out of place in this social milieu and tries to minimize social contact. She contrasted this to her experience at a polling station during the 2016 municipal elections: I was so shocked, I wrote a praise on Facebook: people of Kryvyi Rih, forgive me for thinking bad about you! All of a sudden, normal people with normal faces are coming to the polling station, 30–35-­year-­old guys and girls, they come and vote. Normally you live, you go down into the mine, you talk to some grannies here and you think that it’s really horrendous. I was so stunned by people with normal faces coming and voting for changes in this city!

Vira’s choice of words follows her social allegiances: her speech is full of online middle-­class references used by the self-­designed ‘people with normal faces’ on Facebook.

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Distinctions based on essentialized moral differences within the working class are not new. Olivier Schwartz describes a worker with an ascendant personal trajectory from a former mining community in Northern France: he admits he has no interest in maintaining social connections with people living in traditional miners’ houses, who ‘do not strive to evolve’ (Schwartz 2002: 78). However, contrary to the French example, the moral differentiation of workers in Kryvyi Rih has no similar ‘materialist’ explanation: a successful career in the new economy versus the stagnant careers of miners who could not adapt. Here, the distinction is based on ‘idealist’ criteria, which prevent a systematic theorization of social groups branded as inferior and superior.

Freedom and Youth Besides the classic hierarchies of taste and culture described above, distinction within the Ukrainian working class covers two other oppositions: freedom versus slavery, and youth (future) versus old people (past). The Enlightenment vision of history as a linear movement, ossified in the vulgar Marxist scheme taught in Soviet and post-­Soviet schools, is hegemonic both for lay Ukrainians and for intellectuals. In the post-­Soviet version of this framework, progress is coterminous with personal ­freedom – ­after all, it was the slogan of freedom that justified the breakup of the USSR and the subsequent socio-­economic transformations. Deficiency in terms of freedom is also the main criticism made against previous regimes in the official narratives of the post-­Euromaidan Ukrainian state. Most contemporary social problems, however far they might be from the problematics of personal freedom (e.g. low incomes, increased state regulation or any kind of social injustice), are likely to be discussed in terms of ­slavery – ­or its local variety, serfdom, which was in force until 1861. Vira mentioned serfdom several times in reference to the mine. On the day of her retirement, she wrote on Facebook: ‘I am a free woman!!! Farewell Engelhardts! Farewell serfdom! So far I haven’t decided whether I will write poetry or paint.’2 Olga used the same term to describe some of the NPGU coal miners from the Donbas, who were enthusiastically expecting the establishment of Russian sovereignty over their region: ‘I told them that they reminded me of serfs; they were just waiting for the master to come and judge us.’ The notion of slavery was extensively used in the rhetoric of activists supporting the miners’ strike in 2020. Young generations occupy a special place in this moral landscape: values of and hopes for social and cultural progress are imputed to

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the youth, sometimes ‘progressive’ traits are assumed to be inversely correlated with age in an almost automatic manner. After Olga accepted my Facebook friendship request, she told me she enjoyed the influx of young and smart people brought into her online feed by algorithms. She went on discussing the typical set of positive personal qualities allegedly possessed by the young generation: resolve and bravery, a clear and critical mind, openness to the new. Zhanna borrowed some books from her politically engaged friends in Kyiv in order ‘to understand the interests of the youth, what it propagates within the masses [neset v massy]’. These two hierarchies, age and freedom, are intertwined, producing an individualist moral map of unequal ‘mentalities’. ‘Internal freedom’ has been imputed to the youth (which can be defined in many ways: the generation that grew up after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the generation that was born in independent Ukraine, the generation that participated in the Orange Revolution of 2004 or in the Euromaidan of 2014) – an imagined combination of having a free spirit, thinking independently and being part of a culture of revolt, opposed to the inner state of ‘spiritual slavery’, which defines inferior lifestyles and tastes. This deficiency is an individual responsibility, which has to be dealt with on a personal level.3

Looking for Respectability Beverley Skeggs used the Bourdieusian framework to look at the claims and norms of the British female working class. Her argument is centred around the notion of respectability and its importance for members of the working class. Considered by default to be lacking moral respectability, they struggle to prove the contrary. The individual assessment here is subject to constant renegotiation, hence the constant emphasis on personal improvement in every ­respect – ­appearance, bodies, mind, housing, relationships, career perspectives: ‘in order to improve they [female workers] had to differentiate themselves from those who did not or could not improve. They were continually making comparisons between themselves and others, creating distances and establishing distinctions and tastes in the process’ (Skeggs 1997: 82). This drive for constant improvement in order to prove one’s worth, dictated by generalized class position rather than by particular socio-­economic trajectories, is closer to the worldview of Kryvyi Rih workers than the ordered process of class fragmentation described by  Schwartz. Such an urge to improve oneself cannot but be competitive, and distinctions proliferate. Skeggs notes the

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individualist ­character of responses to classification, structured by the external gaze: It thus seems unlikely that the actions of these women are likely to lead to class politics, to class organization or even to class consciousness of a directly articulated form. These women are highly sensitive to issues of class and difference but they have no discourses available for them to articulate it as a positive identity. Their class struggle is waged on a daily basis to overcome the denigration and delegitimizing associated with their class positioning. (Skeggs 1997: 95)

Personal worth here is proportional to the vastness of one’s inner world, personal depth and pronounced individuality. These are traditional traits of the middle class, which postulate ‘interiority as a form of superiority’ (Skeggs 2011: 497). Working-­class members borrow this ideology to draw dividing lines in their midst. According to Skeggs, respectability is a counterpoint to this conformist position; the working class mobilizes this concept as the foundation of a different, autonomous system of values. Trying to prove their worth, her informants ‘defend against misrecognition and devaluation, through the performance of respectability and by reversing dominant symbolic moral values’ (Skeggs 2011: 503). My research does not indicate the presence of a strong autonomous moral system produced by an inversion of dominant middle-­class values. Performance of respectability is indeed at the centre of the distinction strategies I observed, but the respectability is conceived of in the same terms as individualization and imitation of the middle-­class lifestyle.

Personal Trajectories: ‘Activists’ Despite Themselves Developing her thesis about autonomous working-­class value practices, Beverley Skeggs (2004) draws a distinction between the middle-­ class exchange-­value perspective, focused on converting between different forms of capital for the sake of its overall accrual, and the use-­value perspective. The latter, allegedly more typical for the working class, is centred on the inherent value of things and practices rather than on their strategic implications: ‘not all people want to engage in, or can access, the value practices necessary for becoming a capital loaded fetish form of value. They may have better things to do with their time and energy’ (Skeggs 2011: 508). This reasoning is intended to counter the traditional moralizing discourse that labels the working class as lazy and unwilling to

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‘develop’ themselves in the sense of increasing the exchange value of one’s habitus. However, post-­Soviet workers have had less socio-­ economic space, compared to their contemporary British colleagues, to realize projects autonomous from the dominant mechanisms accruing personal capital. In other words, they have been much more involved in the flows of personal exchange value, internalizing the logic of capital accrual, which Skeggs refutes, and acting upon it. The ability to ‘spin’ or ‘hustle’ (krutitsia; vertetsia) in the formal and informal economy, navigating towards the ideal of decent consumption standards amid the adverse conditions of post-­Soviet transformations, has quickly become, and still remains, a key criterion for increasing personal worth. The importance of this ability to self-­exploit and apply constant effort to juggle various forms of capital one possesses to prevent its devaluation, if not to increase it, is manifest in the popular proverb that translates as ‘You have to spin if you want to live’ (Khochesh zhit – umey vertetsia).4 This normative activism implies increased flexibility (preparedness to change one’s routine) and workload (taking on several jobs at the same time, in addition to household and agrarian chores). These traits command both empathy and respect. They can be compared to the ‘Stakhanovite model’, which Olivier Schwartz found in a French mining community: initially forced onto miners by the despotic factory regime in the early twentieth century, it did not disappear with the growth in standards of living in the following decades but was in fact reinforced by the new socio-­economic conditions, becoming a moral norm far beyond the gates of the enterprise. Working hard and working a lot has become a proof ‘that one disposes of a reserve of forces and that one is prepared to deploy it generously: not listening to one’s fatigue, not saving effort, not counting one’s time’ (Schwartz 2002: 290). The vernacular ethic judges the ‘lazy’ and praises those who work hard. In Ukraine, historical Stakhanovism never took root, but the lax attitude to formal work-­related demands coexisted with genuine commitment to hard work in informal frameworks. This ambiguity has been reinforced by the post-­Soviet ‘involution’. Most of my informants had several jobs, paid and unpaid, and were simultaneously bitter and proud about their workload, usually framed as being above reasonable expectations. Similarly, most of them have been proactive in discarding their routines and ‘embracing change’, demonstrating the adaptability demanded (but not acknowledged) by liberal reformers.

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Figure 8.2.  An example of resourcefulness as an individual strategy of social reproduction: a public lawn that has been appropriated by the owners of a nearby house, who use it to grow food. Photo taken by the author in July 2018.

This kind of ‘activism’ in the private sphere is usually too self-­ evident to be noticed by those longing for the conflictual ‘activist’ habitus in the public sphere. In what follows, I will try to uncover it by tracing the personal trajectories of my informants. This is not an attempt at building an exhaustive typology, but rather an examination of possible variations in the proactive disposition of post-­Soviet workers. This disposition is not only classed but gendered; it can be better grasped by looking at various reasonably widespread individual strategies in which it finds its realization.

Precarious Women: Juggling Jobs and Home Commitments Inna and Olga, the two friends working at a KZRK mine, consistently focused on two themes when talking with me. The first was the overwhelming passivity of the Ukrainian working class, penetrating every aspect of the workers’ existence and defining them. Inna and Olga admitted their own implication in the alleged sin of ­atomization – ­lack of initiative and entrepreneurial spirit. The second

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theme consisted of their attempts to absolve themselves by pointing out their significant activist efforts in the domain of factory politics and taking positions in nationwide political debates. Behind these explicit narratives, however, were details, insignificant from their point of view, that shed light on their everyday socio-­economic practices, which, as it turned out, hardly painted a vilified image of ­infantile atomization. Inna finished school and entered a university in the north of Russia. Her father, as well as both of her grandfathers, were miners in Kryvyi Rih; her mother was an accountant in public organizations. Having spent a year at the maths faculty, Inna changed her mind and was accepted to a mining university in Moscow. Her father, who had by that time divorced her mother and moved back to Kryvyi Rih, then persuaded her to move in with him and enter a local mining college. In Kryvyi Rih, Inna gave birth to a daughter, whom she was raising while studying and working as a medical nurse. But soon afterwards, her grandfather died, and she could no longer count on his miner’s disability pension (regress), which was her most important source of income. In 1996, she moved in with her mother’s parents and got a job in a mine using her connections. She started a family with the father of her second child, but later he left her, and she ‘was left with two children and a shitload of problems, with loans which I had not taken’. Inna’s daughter was a student in Kyiv at that point. In order to become financially independent, she moved to the extramural education format (zaochno) and started a job at McDonald’s, making a career there. Inna, while working in the mine, found herself a side job at an advertising agency, distributing leaflets in the street and posting ads on walls. Two years later, the agency was struck by the economic crisis, and Inna had to look for another side job: she spent the following two years taking care of an 86-­year-­old woman who could not walk. Among her other employment experiences was a gig at the local electoral commission. Currently, Inna and her son live together with her new partner, Misha. At the time of the interview, both were approaching their retirement age, counting on their miners’ pensions, which would augment their regular wages elsewhere. Her daughter was advancing in the McDonald’s hierarchy, and Inna wanted her to use this opportunity to emigrate. The daughter’s economic independence is a source of pride, but Inna still regularly sends her small household items and homemade food. Inna’s mother is still working: she had kept her accounting job after reaching retirement age but had not long shifted to less demanding work as a receptionist in a municipal bureau.

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Figure 8.3.  Makeshift food cellars in a residential area in Kryvyi Rih. Photo taken by the author in June 2019.

Despite an improvement in her financial situation since she had moved in with Misha, Inna was still unable to help her mother or her daughter. She had to do the laundry manually for half a year while her washing machine was broken; days before our talk, she had finally managed to buy a used washing machine online. It was cheaper to pay for the delivery from another region than to buy the same washing machine in Kryvyi Rih, with local prices generally high. Having purchased the washing machine, Inna invited Olga, her friend and co-­worker living in the same neighbourhood, to make use of it and pass by her place with dirty laundry on her way to the mine, which she could collect after her shift. Olga, for her part, let Inna use the space in her cellar to store her jars of canned food that everyone makes in late summer (see Figure 8.3). These are some of the many routine elements of horizontal ties of mutual ­aid – ­the non-­monetary exchange that may involve reciprocity or not, depending on the level of kinship and friendship ties involved. Far from being a helpless social atom with no survival skills, Inna does her best to adapt to adverse socio-­economic circumstances by finding jobs (including her basic job in the mine, which

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contradicted the gender and class expectations of her family), taking economic risks and mobilizing her social network as a safety net. The importance of non-­market food exchange in Eastern Europe has been highlighted in academic literature. Relying on kinship and close friendship ties, the network of subsistence food production and exchange serves to further reinforce these ties, sustaining a system of economic support autonomous from the market (Smollett 1989). Individual land plots massively allocated for such subsistence production in the 1990s are still in use by a large part of the working-­ class population. The role of land plots in alleviating the burden of the economic crisis is usually exaggerated (Clarke et al. 2000). Instead, it is a cultural institution that not only helps reinforce social ties necessary for survival but also cultivates the political ideal of autonomous neoliberal subject, an ideal citizen who only counts on himself and does not expect handouts from the state. Homegrown food ‘solidifies the symbiosis between corrupt and careless governance and popular activity’ (Ries 2009: 202–3). Inna’s personal trajectory and the socio-­economic survival toolkit at her disposal are quite typical for working-­class women in the mining milieu. One possible variation would be union activism, exemplified by Olga. Olga married at a young age and quit her studies, becoming a housewife. When she left her husband, she had to start a career in the midst of the economic crisis. Employment in a mine, with its social wage, was the only possibility to gain economic security. Having obtained the mine job thanks to her father’s connections, Olga was able to pay for housing utilities, secure a place in a kindergarten for her son and make sure there was enough food for them both. She switched to an underground job as soon as she could, intending to retire at 45 and then combine the miners’ pension with a wage income from a simple job. These long-­term calculations, which can serve as an example of rational homo economicus thinking, were ruined in 2015, when parliament increased the retirement age for women like Olga and Inna to 50 years. Olga is a member of the NPGU. Gradually, she became one of the union’s informal leaders at the mine. Between my two field visits, she was picked by the national leadership of the NPGU to spend several days training in Bucharest. During the 2020 strike, Olga was one of the few local trusted representatives of the peak-­level head of the NPGU. She was speaking on behalf of the miners at the city council and was continuing to educate herself regarding legal issues, becoming a trade union cadre.

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Another variation is non-­institutionalized activism of Vira. Her parents worked in the hard conditions of Northern Russia to earn a privileged ‘northern’ pension, only to see these plans dashed by the breakup of the USSR. Having graduated from the local university in 1992, Vira was part of the first cohort not involved in the postgraduate work assignment ­system – ­that is, there was no guaranteed employment. She had a number of odd jobs, married, had a child, became a housewife, divorced and managed to get a job in the mine. Having retired, Vira found a cleaner’s job at a nearby café and started giving private piano lessons. But her main passions have focused on the private sphere, notably knitting and embroidery. She tries to market these skills online. Talking to me, Vira consistently made the point that she is not a miner anymore and has other interests now. Her activist persona is disconnected from her workplace struggle; instead, it is subjectively rooted in the national political field. Vira is heavily invested in online struggles waged by nationalist conservative followers of the former president Poroshenko. For her, activism means participating in the war effort in the East, volunteering for the army, and protesting together with the nationalist civil society against the alleged anti-­ national policies of president Zelenskyi. Vira does not have many close friends in Kryvyi Rih; instead, she often visits friends in Kyiv and Lviv. Through Facebook and other virtual spaces, she draws a connection between her isolated private life and ‘big’ politics. Online discussions of Kyiv intelligentsia interest her more than local events. In her study of economic transformations in a village in Ukrainian Bessarabia, Deema Kaneff shows how the market creates remoteness. The project intended to help villagers integrate into the global market has created their remote position in both a spatial and temporal ­sense – ­by creating geographical distance between the village and the markets and by introducing a temporal distance between their modern self-­perception and the rural design of the embroidery they considered backward but were supposed to reproduce (Kaneff 2020). In Vira’s case, she creates these distances on her own, voluntarily discarding locally grounded social, political and economic connections in favour of situating herself on a wider, national scale, even if she can only occupy a remote and marginal position on that map. As with the Bessarabian villagers, Vira’s remoteness is not only spatial but temporal: her folk crafts are discordant with the spirit of urbanist modernity that has been underpinning the development of Kryvyi Rih. However, in her case the dissonance is ambiguous: being ‘out of time’, her embroidery can be considered either too backward or too

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progressive for Kryvyi Rih. The latter vision rests on the assumption of the backwardness of all things Soviet and industrial, opposing them to the progressive European values of post-­industrial ethnonationalism. Hence, Vira’s political allegiance and her choice of hobbies and even of language for everyday communication isolates her on the local scale but rewards her with a virtual affiliation to the imagined nationwide community of agents of progress. It is possible to achieve distinction by inscribing oneself into wider imagined communities without economic and social self-­ marginalization. This was the case for Irina, a friend of a PMGU union leader at KZRK. She belongs to the same generation whose career plans were stalled by the collapse of the USSR. She married a miner; her husband worked for twenty-­one years before retiring, and he now receives his pension and disability aid. Irina, for her part, has become a new-­age healer (tselitelnitsa), basing her methods on a loose interpretation of Indian Vedas, reimagined as sacred scriptures of ancient Slavs. Irina was very impatient and unwilling to discuss anything beyond her talking points, centred on applying esoteric reasoning to justify a pan-­Slavic ethnonationalist stance. Thus, she stated that presidential elections are overrated, since the very term president reveals its true nature: ‘p-­resident’ means ‘poslannyi rezident’, a resident spy sent by external forces. A ‘real’ government, like the Soviet Union before Gorbachev or the Russian empire before the USSR, does not have any presidents. She insisted on discussing such riddles based on folk etymology and got suspicious if I did not show enthusiasm. Noticing that my name in her Viber contact list is written in Latin script, Irina accused me of betraying my native language in favour of ‘vicious’ English: after all, we are all Russians, while Ukraine is just a name for the outskirts of the Russian area, she reminded me. Finally, when I kept insisting on discussing her biography, she abruptly ended the conversation, saying she had no time for abstract discussions. Irina’s schedule seemed to be full, indeed. As a spiritual healer, she keeps her clientèle constantly involved with the help of an active Viber group, where she regularly posts wise sayings and images. She explained to me her position in the hierarchy of merit: ‘The population of our city is boarish [bydlovatoe, literally meaning ‘cattle-­like’], but I’m trying to pull them up. Anyway, I have lots of like-­minded people all over the world.’ She belongs to post-­Soviet conspiracy-­ theorizing intellectual networks that can be compared to Vira’s networks of Ukrainian nationalist intelligentsia.

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Like Vira, Irina was unable to find self-­fulfilment from a normative career track, blocked by the post-­Soviet transformations, and valorized herself through distinction from the ‘masses’, who have less legitimate cultural capital. Both of them insert themselves into an imagined meritocratic community on a wider scale (the NPGU and global unions arguably play the same role for Olga too). However, unlike Vira, Irina finds a way to convert this symbolic capital into social and economic forms, carving out a respected niche in the local community for herself. Her followers are mostly recruited by word of mouth, horizontal social networks being of utmost importance in the process. In terms of postsocialist survival strategies, her trajectory can be interpreted as following the advice of liberal reformers, who recommend that the working class be inventive, educate themselves and create jobs for themselves in the new post-­industrial economy. Rather than mastering IT skills or opening a creative startup, the ‘new economy’ in a mining town is more efficiently implemented through monetizing neo-­pagan syncretism with far-­right political overtones. Joining or starting a para-­religious group or movement, with or without a political agenda, is quite a popular way to plug into far-­ flung social networks, which can bring resources from the outside. This can explain the post-­Soviet religious revival that embraces various forms of Christianity, Eastern religions, the teachings of Carlos Castaneda and L. Ron Hubbard’s scientology (Lindquist 2000; Urbańczyk 2017).5 Finally, one more typical feminine trajectory in Kryvyi Rih ends in emigration. Zhanna’s background is roughly the same as that of the women discussed above. She was born into a mining family, graduated in the 1990s, got a job in a mine, married, divorced and married again. After her second divorce, she found she was unable to afford the same lifestyle as before. In order to pay her bills, she had to sell some personal objects of value and was facing the prospect of selling her flat. Contrary to received wisdom, Zhanna did not wait until retirement. In 2018, she quit the mine and went to look for jobs in Poland. Her employment abroad has not been easy: she started out at a factory for medical equipment but did not last there long. Her next job was in the kitchen of a restaurant. Despite being overqualified for such jobs, Zhanna remains in Poland, seeing no prospects for herself in Kryvyi Rih. Emigration is a strategy that has been growing in popularity since 2014; however, it is more typical of men.

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Adventurous Men: Taking Chances with Life In the spring of 2019, when Zhanna was still settling down in Poland, my co-­worker at Screenwind, Yulik, was back in Ukraine after working at a Polish factory. A young man in his twenties, he used to work as a shot-­firer in a mine. Despite the promise of the pension plan, he decided to quit and emigrate. In Poland, he found a job at a large factory producing windows for the Western European market. When his residence permit expired, he returned to Ukraine to wait until a new one was ready. It was during these several weeks of waiting that we met at Screenwind: in his own words, he was there in order to avoid boredom and the degradation of his skills rather than to earn money. Another colleague at Screenwind, Andrei, was even younger (he was 21 when we spoke) and more willing to change jobs and locations. He had spent his last two years of high school attending a college on Saturdays, thus obtaining a degree in IT simultaneously with graduating from school. However, the degree did not help him get a job in the lucrative and prestigious IT industry. Having no money to continue education, Andrei was officially employed at a gas station. Half a year later, he found an informal job at an ad agency that paid roughly the same wage but offered an easier workload and a regular schedule. After a few months, Andrei decided to find a better paying summer job. Together with his cousin, they picked apricots from trees growing in public spaces, sold them and bought tickets to Odesa, where they were hired as waiters. At the end of the summer, they wanted to repeat the success they had had with seasonal work and in the winter got jobs at an expensive ski resort in the Carpathian Mountains. There, the income of the two cousins was even higher: besides receiving wages and tips, they were able to inflate prices on the menu, appropriating the difference. After this experience, they found employment in Western Ukraine, at a Japanese factory producing wires for cars. From there, they moved to Moscow to assemble Chinese bicycles at a small informal factory and also engaged in door-­to-­door sales of household appliances. Unable to find a fixed job in Russia, Andrei took a risk with farm employment in Poland: from there, he quickly moved to a furniture factory. Having spent three months at this job, he returned to Ukraine and got a job at Screenwind. Andrei does not want a hazardous job that provides pension plans and formal employment; he prefers to count on himself and was aiming to ‘develop himself’ by starting his own business. This hypermobility is most pronounced in the cases of the youngest and least socially attached informants. Prospects of emigration are

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more complicated for workers with family responsibilities. Saniok, my foreman at Screenwind; Gosha, the miner from Donetsk; and Nikolay from YuGOK, all married with children, were equally hesitant about going to work abroad. Nevertheless, this option remains on the table for all of them, and even Alexei, in his fifties, discussed it as a viable scenario, citing his friend of the same age who is now a truck driver in the EU. None of my informants showed a particular emotional attachment to the place where they spend years of their life. The necessity to ‘spin around’ in order to survive was understood and pronounced by Gosha very clearly, without any ideological embellishments: ‘My mom says, nobody needs you there [in another country]. Well, I’m telling her, nobody needs me here, in my own country, either! If I do not hustle around, who needs you? They will just throw you into the street. And that’s all, you are a bum. Nobody gives a shit.’ One of the pragmatic reasons offered for changing workplace was to develop and prove their skills. Saniok was prepared to quit Screenwind despite the good reputation he had there. He was happy to look for another window-­making factory, where he would be able to learn how to work with new kinds of metal fittings: ‘I don’t doubt myself, I will stretch and do more [windows] than everyone else. Well, maybe not. But I would like to see someone who does more [windows] than I do. Just out of curiosity.’ Maintaining and developing one’s skills generally may be more important to men than keeping their current job. No less important is acquiring new skills through various side jobs (for an analysis of a similar gendered difference in dispositions among Indian workers, see De Neve 2014). In the lay perception of the working-­class male self, skills and prowess are proof of one’s masculinity and personal worth as they guarantee a certain income and tolerable standards of living in any socio-­ economic context. Men accept the rules offered by liberal economists and turn themselves into neoliberal subjects, who only depend on and invest in themselves; however, this autonomy is inscribed into the framework of intense horizontal interactions. These informal social networks, established in typical places of masculine working-­class sociality such as car garages, serve to circulate information on employment opportunities and reliable workers; they also allow the mobilization of discounted or free labour of peers and the chance to solicit other help or financial support. The interplay between this ethos of garage laissez-­faire and the reliance on wider social structures, including the enterprise and the

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state, is visible in the case of Misha, Inna’s boyfriend. Born in the early 1980s, he had spent nineteen years (half of his life) working in mines. Beyond the generic biography of a sedentary miner, he did not fit the stereotype: he had long hair, liked rock music and motorcycles, and had done contract work in the Kosovo peacekeeping force. At the time of our second talk, Misha had been disqualified from working in the mine because of his failing heart. He hoped to find a new place at Metinvest or AMKR, but in the meantime he was also considering other sources of income. Showing off his masculine qualities, Misha discussed the possibility of mugging people but concluded that he could not do this to women. His analysis of metal pilfering, which cripples the city’s infrastructure, was quite rational: ‘A miner earns 10,000 UAH, a kilogram of copper costs 300 UAH. A workstation weighs 100 kilograms, you get one third of your wage immediately for it. Who would not do this?’ Emigration was also one of the options that he had considered. However, Misha cannot leave the country because he owes 25,000 UAH to two banks. He was quite calm about his situation of indebtedness, typical for Ukrainian workers: I’m not paying, and I will not. First of all, this is a civil, and not criminal, fraud. Secondly, once there have been three payments, it is not a fraud anymore. . . . They can confiscate apartments in lieu of loans, but you can register a child there, and they can go fuck themselves. The apartment is put under arrest for ten years; the child is 6 years old, in ten years he will be 16, still underage, and the flat is not under arrest anymore. VTB bank started demanding something, but I said: ‘well just try to do something, you are a Russian bank’ [i.e. your negotiating positions are weakened by the political climate in Ukraine]. I know that in two years I will make a counter-­claim, and they will have to cancel the loan.

Misha’s main bet, however, was on his tinkering skills. In his garage, he had accumulated an impressive set of tools. Besides his skills with heavy machinery, typical for working-­class men, he sold computers and audio appliances, assembling them from spare parts he procured from various places. This expertise helped him establish friendly relations with a doctor in the hospital where he was undergoing treatment: having ‘cleansed’ the doctor’s computer, Misha was rewarded with a bottle of cognac that the doctor had received from another patient. He was also relieved from the informal obligation to make a payment in kind, customary in Ukrainian hospitals. Informal economic activities were typical for my informants in their spare time, even when they were employed: installing and maintaining air conditioners, working as taxi drivers and ­delivering

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heavy items etc. The importance of the garage as a liminal space of working-­class masculine sociality, which ‘works to reinscribe pre-­existing identities as “deserving” workers and bearers of moral worth’, has been underlined in Jeremy Morris’ book on Russian workers (Morris 2018). Some of the DIY practices might not even have any obvious economic purpose, serving primarily to reinforce the values of autonomy and ingenuity (smekalka), important for these men (Morris 2013) – like Viktor from AMKR, ceaselessly tinkering to improve his residence block. However, usually this is not a disinterested hobby but rather a strategy of ‘portfolio employment’, dictated by the imperative of ‘spinning around’ to survive economically. In her work on everyday life in late 1990s Moscow, Olga Shevchenko identified two lay values that were central to the attainment of social stability: domesticity and the household (as opposed to wider networks of belonging) and autonomy from the external milieu. She showed that this drive for autonomy, far from the atomization thesis, implies ‘a conscious cultivation of largely informal and particularistic connections and loyalties’ (Shevchenko 2009: 9). Moreover, this cannot be considered a Soviet residue, since the role of these skills for survival in post-­Soviet society is much greater. Shevchenko was analysing Russian intelligentsia, a different social class in a different country, and the similarity of her conclusions to my observations of Ukrainian workers allows me to speak of autonomy and self-­sufficiency as social values regulating all post-­Soviet societies. She interprets this insistence on autonomy as a way to domesticate the permanent post-­Soviet crisis but also as a social critique. Here is her commentary on the fortified metal doors with which Ukrainian and Russian households equipped their apartments on a mass scale in the 1990s: This act very visibly affirmed several things at the same time: distrust and skepticism toward those officially charged with the responsibility of protecting citizens, a fundamental conviction of a universal moral decline (in terms of both the proliferation of potential burglars and the apathy and disengagement of the neighbors), and an eagerness and capability of the household in question to resolve the issues of self-­protection by its own means. (Shevchenko 2009: 114)

A similar logic can be seen in the investment of all economic resources of the household in durable goods, apartment renovations and makeshift car shelters. By protecting themselves from inflation, accidents and criminals, these households are doing the job of the

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state. The project of becoming autonomous is hence both ‘a moralistic indictment of the times, and an effort to cope with them’ (Shevchenko 2009: 116). Asserting their proactive and self-­sufficient personalities, post-­Soviet citizens are not so much becoming neoliberal subjects as criticizing the failure of the state to fulfil its obligations. They replace the state in areas from which it has withdrawn, but this replacement has not been normalized in the lay moral economy.

Conclusion The individual trajectories of my working-­class informants are all deeply embedded into the social fabric, which consists of informal horizontal networks of mutual help as much as more formal vertical patronage ties. This imbrication of the individual within the collective and of the formal within the informal (Morris 2019) is consistently misrecognized. The normative landscape of Kryvyi Rih workers is paradoxically dual. An early study of the business ethic of post-­Soviet industrial managers and owners (Kharkhordin 1994) found not one but two ethical systems: the corporate ethic of mutual help and embeddedness, hegemonic among the ‘red directors’, and the individualist ethic of smaller private entrepreneurs, centred on the notion of samostoyatelnost – ‘a belief in the inherent worthiness of living independently, of standing on one’s own feet’ (Kharkhordin 1994: 418). Both of these systems of values are simultaneously present in the worldview of my working-­class interlocutors. Believing in the values of mutual help and social protection, they expect the state and employers to live up to these ideals. At the same time, however, they are no less committed to the values of samostoyatelnost, striving for autonomy from paternalist tutelage. This latter disposition may be read as an internalization of neoliberal ideology, and it does speak to the postsocialist doxa; however, the quest for autonomy cannot be reduced to an imported ideology. Present in the negative autonomy of the post-­Soviet workplace; in the social structure of the post-­Soviet prison population, relying on the unaligned majority equally distant from the administration and criminal power structures (Vavokhine 2004); in the choices made by workers in favour of precarious but independent economic activities, this impulse is an organic part of working-­class values. On the abstract level, collective action and mutual help constitute a widely shared normative ideal, contrasted to the bleak ­representation

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of the real state of things: an atomized and passive society devoid of initiative and solidarity, helpless against the rapacious elite. Workers give different reasons for this situation: the legacy of the Soviet regime, the destructive effects of the post-­Soviet transformations, the backward mentalitet. Ignoring empirical examples of solidarity from their own life, my interviewees plug into the miserabilist criticism of their society. This pessimistic diagnosis that overemphasizes structural inertia paradoxically combines with the individualist ideology, accenting the role of personal agency. My interlocutors fatalistically conclude that collective action is impossible and nothing can be changed ‘in this country’ while affirming that ‘in the final instance, everything depends on us’, on personal attitudes and behaviours. This ambiguity grows out of the post-­Soviet state’s withdrawal from the spheres that are considered its responsibility. Personal autonomy and self-­sufficiency have not become absolute social values, but rather provisional norms regulating the society during the permanent postsocialist crisis. Contrary to the idea of ‘learned helplessness’, Ukrainian workers have learned how to be autonomous despite their best wishes. This activates strategies of distinction, allowing a worker to contrast their positive individual features against the negative social background. Hierarchies thus constructed within the working class imply the superiority of personal traits associated with the middle class: entrepreneurial, educated and creative. These values have been easily internalized because they relate to the indigenous Soviet values of smekalka: inventiveness, autonomy, and good upbringing. The new, ‘progressive’ aspect they received in the postsocialist discourse has turned them into tools for building new intra-­class hierarchies. Disrupting the reproduction of working-­class solidarities and autonomous values, these hierarchies articulate neoliberal dynamics in the socio-­economic domain and populist trends in national politics. The most prominent historic example of such ‘authoritarian populism’, Thatcherism (Hall 1983), relied on support from the British working class, structured by attitudes comparable to those described above. Drawing moral boundaries is an expected response to growing inequality and social insecurity, compatible with individual projects of asserting personal worth in the unfavourable socio-­economic context of downward social mobility. These conditions have led to the rise of nativist populism in postsocialist countries that used to be exemplary cases of successful transition prior to the 2008 crisis (Kalb

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and Halmai 2011). Arguably, the same mechanisms were behind the subsequent wave of right-­wing populism in the WENA countries (Cramer 2016). However, the stark difference between these cases and Ukraine is that the latter does not have a clear ­underdog – ­a social group that is universally perceived as inferior and can be assigned the role of the vilified ‘Other’ in the populist scheme. The lack of such a negative reference point leaves unfinished the process of creating a national moral community. Instead of constituting it by aggregating individual strategies of distinction into a national popular identity, the Ukrainian working class follows a different path. Lacking a shared ideological framework, lay hierarchies of deservedness combine with competing political projects and geopolitical projections. This will be analysed in the following chapter.

Notes 1. This is the term employed by independent union activists for legacy unions. It comes from the more widespread concept of ‘yellow’ – that is, loyal to the management, unionism. 2. Engelhardt is the name of a nobleman whose serf was the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko. Thanks to Shevchenko’s iconic status as ‘national prophet’, Engelhardt’s name posthumously became shorthand for a cruel slave owner. The phrase about poetry and painting also has to do with the national mythology around Shevchenko: when the Russian Tsar sent him into exile, he explicitly prohibited him to write or paint. 3. ‘To squeeze the slave out of oneself, drop by drop’ is a famous aphorism by Anton Chekhov. 4. This dictum was popular in the Soviet period, referring to the extraordinary efforts required to procure certain consumption goods under the state socialist regime. In the post-­Soviet decades, it has been reassessed, its undertone shifting from slight social criticism (i.e. ‘it is not normal when one has to go beyond oneself to ensure an acceptable standard of living’) to assertive normativity (i.e. ‘you have to be proactive if you want to survive, such are the rules of life’). The latter is the most widely accepted meaning in post-­Soviet Ukraine. 5. Another option, popular among women, is offered by multilevel marketing schemes, pioneered in the post-­Soviet space by cosmetics producers such as Avon and Oriflame. Having less explicitly political or religious undertones (but nevertheless conveying a coherent ideology of individualist success), this activity also relies on informal economic exchange embedded in local networks of kinship and friendship (Schiffauer 2018).

— Chapter 9 —

Mapping Lay Virtues on the National Political Landscape

_ Strategies of distinction are enacted on the micro level of everyday interactions. However, they need to be situated in a wider context in order to grasp their place in the reproduction and change of a given politico-­economic and moral order. The context that interests me here is the macro-­level landscape of identities. It offers concrete patterns through which individual strategies can be realized, giving them political ­sense – ­rendering them recognizable and replicable beyond a specific interaction. By assuming sociopolitical roles available on the national scene, social actors legitimize their personal attitudes and trajectories, making them elements of a larger story, and hence relatable. Identities are often used by the dominant classes to structure the politico-­economic field and maintain a certain social ­order – ­for example, welfare is rationed according to the more or less deserving identities of the receivers (Heller 2020; Stubbs 2019). The dominated classes have less say in the construction of identity politics, but they are usually well versed in employing pre-­existing identities and tropes to navigate relations with the state and other powerful agents (Carswell and De Neve 2018). The abstract Bourdieusian scheme depicting the universal logic of the hierarchized habitus is animated by the particular sociocultural context in which it functions. This context is not static. Following Benedict Anderson (1983), I highlight the malleability of ethnonational identities and of the imagined communities that they animate. In this chapter, I will treat several dimensions of the national identity landscape. The first section will examine the notion of class-­

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as-­identity. I will look at its emic meaning and interrogate the self-­ identification of my informants as ‘workers’. The following two sections will deal with the ethnolinguistic divide structuring the political field of pre-­2022 Ukraine. I will analyse the articulation of the ethnonationalist Ukrainian identity, dominant in the public sphere on the macro scale but minoritarian locally, with individual strategies and hierarchies. After that, I will turn my attention to the way these hierarchies align with the competing nationalist identity, which figures here as ‘Eastern Slavic’. Finally, I will uncover a third, global identitarian dimension, in which most of my interlocutors, whatever their ethnolinguistic camp, find themselves on the same peripheral pole, opposed to the normative image of ‘Europe’.

Class as an Emic Category On which grounds can we label people figuring in this work as members of the working class, and what can we mean by this? Can we use the term ‘class’ when referring to industrial workers who hardly create any class institutions and collective practices, as we have seen in the previous chapters? Subaltern groups have a long way to go before they crystallize into specific classes in the process of class struggle (Galastri 2018: 59). The conditions of exploitation and subalternity that they all share distinguish their life from that of the dominant classes, but as long as economic antagonism remains theoretical and implicit, the Gramscian tradition prefers to use the concept of subaltern groups. However, ‘working class’ is also an emic concept. My interviewees readily applied it to themselves and to their peers, using it as a neutral classificatory term, borrowed from Soviet-­era positivist sociology with its omnipresent questionnaires that assigned people to one of the several defined statistical categories: workers, ‘employees’ (sluzhashchie, roughly equivalent to white-­collar workers and managers), students, pensioners, military etc. Workers (rabochie, or more colloquially rabotiagi) are everyone who does manual work, whether employed by large industrial enterprises like AMKR or the mines, by small factories like Screenwind, or by non-­industrial entities where they perform auxiliary functions (drivers, electricians etc.). They may also be self-­employed, combining the legal status of entrepreneur with the social position of worker. What are the other elements of this emic image of social structure, and how do they stand in relation to one another?

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Vernacular Image of Social Structure Immediately next to the rabotiagi stands the category of ITR (inzhenerno-tekhnicheskie rabotniki, ‘technical and engineering employees’). They are not managers; rather, these are white-­collar employees of industrial enterprises, having no access to special pension regimes and often underpaid. Their life conditions (regular working hours in the office, a greater amount of scholarly and symbolic capital) bring them close to the factory management. The ITR thus occupy an ambiguous position: being a subaltern group in some ways more precarious than the workers, they are often treated by the latter with suspicion as collaborators with the bosses. The top management of industrial enterprises are amalgamated with the other elite factions (the administrative and political leadership of the city, rich entrepreneurs not directly connected to the industrial giants) into nachalstvo, or ‘the bosses’: the elite, clearly distinguished from everyone else. Finally, other subaltern groups present in the workers’ lifeworld are biudzhetniki (low-­paid public sector employees, including doctors and teachers) and pidpryiemtsi (‘entrepreneurs’: small and midsize autonomous economic agents, whose activities are not directly linked to industrial production and are mostly focused on services, such as marketplace sellers, owners of cafés or barbershops). Pensioners are often also perceived as a separate social group with interests that are not reducible to those of workers or biudzhetniki. Relations between all these groups are fluid: sharing an interest in one area (e.g. wanting a better welfare system), they may have opposing agendas in others (e.g. competing claims for place in the symbolic hierarchy; opposing ideals of market regulation and of redistribution).

Working Class as the Deserving Class Divisions and competition are widespread among economically active workers. The lines of division often reinforce gender inequalities, by associating them with moral economies of merit based on the intensity of the work and on skill (Lapshova and Tartakovskaya 1995: 161). The plans of the KZRK management to scrap the special pension regime of the feminized auxiliary workforce in 2020 did not meet significant opposition, and the massive strike only began as a response to reduced wages for ‘deserving’ male employees. The two main criteria of merit of hard and/or dangerous physical work and high qualifications stand behind the lay version of the

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labour theory of value, the popularity of which puzzled Stephen Crowley (1997). Most conflicts around the distribution of value, both inside and outside the factory walls, arise from the conviction that one ought to receive proportionally for how much one works. This conviction becomes clearer when one steps aside from the intricacies of divisions among subaltern groups and interrogates, as Gosha does, the construction of distinction between workers as a single group and the elite: Those sitting in the HR department are surely someone’s wives. And we are paying them money, with these very hands. While those bimbos are sitting over there. Try to get something from them! They are looking at you like you are some rabble: why are you even here? I remember a phrase: ‘Yuck, they smoke like a chimney and then they are coming in right afterwards! Go take an airing, why do I have to smell your cigarettes?’ I’m thinking, are you completely out of your mind?

A video recording from a meeting between striking miners and Serhiy Novak, the CEO of KZRK, shows the attitude of the management. Novak became the interim head of the enterprise in late 2019 after the death of Fedor Karamanits, the paternalist ‘red director’ who had ruled over KZRK for seventeen years. In September 2020, miners supporting the strike demanded to see Novak and recorded the meeting. When the CEO enters the room, his first words are: ‘I’m listening. Who are you?’ One of the miners replies: ‘And who are you in fact? We haven’t ever met yet.’ Novak says his name and dismisses the stream of outraged exclamations, saying that he is not prepared to answer ‘spontaneous questions’. The miners, baffled by the broken code, remind him about the practices of his predecessor: ‘Fedor Ivanovich always used to get down into the mine and talk!’ To which the CEO replies with a rhetorical question: ‘And what did this lead to?’ Novak’s condescending and stubborn manner of communication only further enrages the workers. However, what is notable in this episode is the conclusions they make: ‘He is a financier, not a general director; he only cares about money’; ‘He is a liquidator, and everyone knows that; he came to destroy the kombinat.’ Behind the superficial picture of class-­conscious workers confronting the management as a matter of principle one can see a more complicated landscape. The miners do not hate Novak because he is a boss but because he is an illegitimate boss. He does not follow the democratic paternalist repertoire of post-­Soviet industrial management, which makes him a bad manager. The motives of profitability, put forward by Novak, strike the workers as outright cynical: a

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l­ egitimate boss should care about the continuity of production processes and of the labour collective, rather than about profits. The Sukha Balka miners and the AMKR metalworkers formulated the same criticism of their respective employers, which is that the owner of the enterprise (Yaroslavskyi at the Sukha Balka, Mittal at AMKR) does not care and is leading it to bankruptcy intentionally, sucking all value out of it without investing in the factory’s future. The ruling owner is thus guilty of being a vremenshchik (time-­server), not interested in the long-­term perspective of the enterprise. Another version was that it is the top management that diverts resources, stealing from the absentee owner, who is just as interested as the workers in the good functioning of the enterprise but who does not possess all the information about it. The problem is not the capitalist ruling class per se but the rapacious, arrogant and short-­sighted elite that has usurped the rightful rulers. Viacheslav, an ITR from YuGOK, expressed the same mindset when he criticized the chairy (mispronounced loanword eichary, literally ‘HR people’), who are now in command, obsessed with profitability and cost-­cutting, contrary to the proizvodstvenniki (‘the production people’, engineers who care about the smoothness of technological processes), who used to be the ultimate decision-­makers before privatization. Viewed from this angle, the workers perceive themselves not as a social class occupying a particular place in the process of capitalist production, but rather as representatives of a separate social corporation: the employees of the industrial sector. Antagonism between the members of this corporation (provided that they follow a given paternalist script) is less important than the differences between them as a whole and the rest of the society. Belonging to this corporation is a valuable part of one’s identity, as can be seen from the outraged reaction of three female ITRs working at KZRK: ‘[The president] Poroshenko has mentioned five priorities for the development of Ukraine: there is agriculture, IT, some other stuff, but no industry!’ They do not recognize themselves in his vision of society, which overlooks the most salient part of their identity. The normative script can be conceptualized as informally regulated paternalism with a democratic attitude. Top personalities should be wise and caring but also respectful and able to solve problems without excessive recourse to the letter of the law. Mutual respect between members of the dominated and the dominant groups is orientated towards organizational and economic continuity. The emic picture of social structure, hence, features several overlapping pyramids of nested identities. The pyramid that is based on

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one’s aggregated amount of capital positions the widely understood subaltern population in opposition to the elite. It coexists with the view that divides society into corporations (heavy industry, agriculture, public sector, self-­employed etc.) and makes power differentials within these corporations less pertinent. The resulting complex and fluid landscape of identities resembles the classic description of the Nuer social structures by Evans-­Pritchard (1940): they are regulated by the constant tension between the tendencies towards fission into segments and their fusion into an entity of a larger scale. The competition between three class schemes recently identified by students of labour in peripheral capitalism does not hold in Ukraine: depending on the context, my interlocutors can subjectively agree with Jan Breman’s (2004) infinite gradations of the marginalized working poor; with Jonathan Parry’s (2020) clear distinction between the formally employed labour aristocracy and the more precarious population; or with Andrew Sanchez’ (2016) picture of a consolidated class consciousness based on the rejection of the corrupt elite. My informants see themselves as an economically important subaltern group deserving distinction, respect and recognition but not receiving it from the elite. The latter is accused of illegitimate activities aimed at personal gain, which threatens the existing social and economic structures and drives, widening inequality. However, this is not the whole picture: this self-­perception of a class, largely shared by all my informants, coexists with ethnolinguistic self-­ identifications, superimposed on the landscape of class.

Enlightened Individuals: The Symbolic Capital of Ukrainian Nationalism When I explained to Zina, a civil engineer in her sixties working at KZRK, that I was interested in workers and their political culture, her reply was unequivocal: ‘We mostly have sovki.1 They are known as vata.2 They are opportunists.’ Zina went on to draw direct links between the backwardness of people around her and their political views (criticism of Ukrainian nationalism) and ethnicity. Commenting on her manager, an ethnic Russian with the ‘Russian world in his head’, she expanded her theorization: Russians are very different from Ukrainians, that’s what I think. Ukraine is anyway a European country if you look at its mentality. Maybe not fully

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so, since we were in the Soviet Union for a long time and there was a lot of Russian influence, there are also some local traits, of course, but still we are not like the Russians at all.

Ukrainianness as Middle-Class Subjectivity Like most local inhabitants, Zina has been Russophone all her life. Kryvyi Rih remained a predominantly Russian-­speaking city throughout the ‘soft’ Ukrainization in 1994–2010 (D’Anieri 2007) and the ‘codified territorial bilingualism’ in 2010–2014 (Csernicsko and Ferenc 2016). The policies of the central government changed after the Euromaidan uprising in 2014, putting forward a much more forceful nationalizing agenda and securitizing the already politicized linguistic problematics (Maksimovtsova 2020). This has pushed Zina and many other people to switch to Ukrainian in their everyday communication, as part of their overall post-­Euromaidan political and identitarian transition (Pop-­Eleches and Robertson 2018). The markers of cultural capital discussed in the previous chapter are firmly fixed on the national political map for Zina. The middle-­class features of activism, good upbringing, education, openness to change, personal initiative, and inner freedom are all connected to the support for the Euro-­Atlantic ‘civilizational choice’, the Ukrainian language, and liberal economic reforms. Conversely, the opposite features are associated with the working class. This conflation of ethnopolitical identity with social status could be interpreted as a direct expression of Zina’s class position, elevated compared to the working-­class milieu she lives in. However, the same set of attitudes was demonstrated by many other of my working-­class informants, who projected the same negative personal and political qualities onto their social peers. Vira, whose strategies for distinction were presented in the previous chapter, replicated Zina’s narratives. Having similarly switched to the Ukrainian language only a few years ago, she explained her reasons and how they are perceived by her peers: I just don’t want Putin to come here and ‘liberate’ me because of my Russian language. Although, yes, I am Russophone and I never studied Ukrainian, such is life. But this [switch] was perceived purely as my acting up. Well I’ve learnt [how to deal with such an attitude] a long time ago: yes, sure, I’m a bit cuckoo, you know. Now I’m just suddenly bent on the Ukrainian language, that’s all. Also, I’m reading books. Never mind me.

The ardent patriotism in her narrative is connected not only to her choice of language but also to ‘reading books’. Vira makes the

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most out of her minority position by associating Ukrainian nationalism with activism and high cultural capital. This is a fairly typical association. Nikolay, a foreman at YuGOK, spoke Russian when discussing work-­related issues but switched to Ukrainian when the conversation moved to the problems of what he calls ‘national self-­ determinateness’ (natsionalna samovyznachenist). According to him, Ukrainians are ‘not determined as a nation’, by which he means there is a lack of national pride and strong national identification.

Ethnicization of Virtues Other researchers have already conceptualized the ‘exclusiveness of civic nationalism’ when publicly proclaimed and widely accepted programmatic points of civic nation-­building end up falling back on and legitimating the ethnocultural divisions that existed before (Brubaker 2019; Zhuravlev and Ishchenko 2020). Nikolay illustrates this process: he began his argument by mentioning his mother-­in-­ law, an ethnic German from Russia who does not even understand Ukrainian despite having spent most of her life in Ukraine. Even so, said Nikolay, she was never forbidden to use Russian, and she supports the Ukrainian war effort against Russia wholeheartedly. However, he did not stop at this affirmation of inclusive civic patriotism and continued: I am Russophone myself. Well, I think in Russian. This is bad. [switches to Ukrainian] With my child, I speak Ukrainian. Well, I’m trying to. [switches to Russian] Not always: when I am having an argument, yelling at her, of course I switch to Russian. [switches to Ukrainian] When we’re doing homework, or I’m explaining ­something – ­that happens in Ukrainian. My mom is a Ukrainian language teacher; grandma has always spoke Ukrainian. [switches to Russian] ­Grandpa . . . ­well . . . My mother-­in-­law is from Russia, and now, after all that mess, she is not saying that Russia is bad, but she would never say that anyone has ever [discriminated against] her in any way.

The invocation of civic inclusiveness seamlessly connects here to a clear ethnolinguistic hierarchy, which becomes a normative force regulating all social interactions. This blurred vision is at least partially generated by the policies of the post-­Soviet state, which was ‘not inclined to differentiate between the civic nation and its titular ethnic core, thereby contributing to the popular confusion of these two identities’ (Kulyk 2014: 214). The roots of these policies were in early Soviet policies of building an ‘affirmative action empire’ (Martin 2001), in which every polity was more or less exclusively reserved for the locally dominant ethnicity. Ethnicity, in turn, was

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dubbed ‘nationality’ (natsionalnost) and at the same time constructed as a primordial trait: Nationality was institutionalized into the Soviet system as a category of identity, a passport to privilege (or discrimination), and a claim to political power in national republics. Moreover, the idea of nationness fluctuated between a more contingent understanding of nationality as the product of historical development to a more primordial sense that nationality was deeply rooted in the culture, experience, mentality, and even biology of individuals. Soviet theorists held contradictory views: that national differences would eventually grow less distinct and Soviet peoples would meld into a single Soviet people; and that nationality was passed on, like genetic traits, from one generation to another. Even as class evaporated as an official status in Soviet life, nationality became ever more primordial. (Suny 2005: 98)

This approach has hardly changed in independent Ukraine. Paying lip service to the multiethnic character of the country’s population, the official discourse systematically conflates the two meanings of ‘Ukrainians’, ethnicity and nationality. Moreover, the Russification policies of the 1970s and 1980s have created the massive category of Russophone ethnic Ukrainians. Declaring Ukrainian as their native language, many of them never use it in practice. The concept of native language has been a matter of one’s ethnic identity rather than of factual language use (Kulyk 2014). In the new Ukrainian state, it has also become a matter of political loyalty. Nikolay, Zina and Vira are not isolated exceptions: the same logic was evident in other cases. For example, Uncle Vitya from the Screenwind factory never spoke a word about politics during the two month-­long everyday interactions I was able to observe. It was only after I prompted him to talk about elections that this pretty ‘typical’ Russophone worker confessed that he had voted for nationalist candidates. His explanations resembled those of Nikolay and the others; however, he considered politics a private matter that does not need to be shared with anyone else. The Ukrainian nationalist outlook discussed here is explicitly in opposition to everything ‘Soviet’, which is associated not only (and not so much) with socialist ideology but also, more importantly, with Russian imperialism and with backwardness (lack of modernity). However, these official premises are not all equally internalized by carriers of the ideology. During our interviews, Uncle Vitya shifted between positive and negative evaluations of the Soviet Union, not paying much attention to the contradictions: politicians should be simple people, as was the case in the USSR; on the other hand, those who are nostalgic about cheap sausage in the USSR

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have simply forgotten how disgusting it used to be. Another inconspicuous Russophone nationalist voter, Vladimir, who works at AMKR, made a revealing slip of the tongue when explaining the benefits of tomos, the separation of the Ukrainian orthodox church from the Russian patriarchy, initiated by the nationalist president Poroshenko (Shestopalets 2019): ‘It is good because the Russian [priests] will not be able to make propaganda; they won’t be able to bless the rockets aiming at the Soviet Union, I mean Ukraine.’ Here Vladimir borrows a cliché from Soviet patriotic propaganda, fitting it all too easily into a narrative that is supposed to be its complete opposite. Contrary to the official narrative forged by intellectuals, his nationalist feelings do not exclude a certain identification with the Soviet Union. The pragmatic function of a ‘pro-­Ukrainian’ political identity is visible in lay narratives associating all things properly Ukrainian with a high amount of cultural capital. Zhanna insisted on distinguishing the proper Ukrainian language that she strives to speak from its non-­normative varieties that signify a rural background and disconnection from the centralizing nationalist civilizing project: ‘when I come to Cherkasy or Kyiv, I hear clean Ukrainian language, without an admixture of Western Ukrainian, where they have Romanians, Hungarians, and ­Poles – ­too many admixtures, I don’t like it. But in Kyiv and Cherkasy it is beautiful, I adore it.’ Speaking of her former colleagues, who harassed her because of her pro-­Ukrainian convictions, Zhanna mocked their ­speech – ­a regional variety of Ukrainian with a heavy admixture of Russian constructions (Hentschel and Reuther 2020). Paradoxically, being Russophone, she despises their native Ukrainian speech in the name of a refined linguistic code that neither of them masters. Activist credentials also feed in to the identitarian landscape. In the lay imaginary, being pro-­Ukrainian means by default being more politically active, even if the opposite is not necessarily true. Politically active and culturally competent Ukrainian patriots thus stand in complete opposition to the passive and dumb majority, whose political loyalty is in doubt. The superficial role of ideologies employed to manifest one’s distinction against the less culturally advanced majority brings together the far right and the liberal LGBT+ advocacy groups. Nominal enemies, they may find such an alliance acceptable, provided that it distinguishes them from the common enemy. Olga’s half-­brother, a drag queen prominent on the local LGBT scene, told me approvingly of such cooperation:

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– In Odesa, the LGBT ­organizations . . . ­are friends with the [far-]right organizations. And it is all fine. Because they have a common agenda: Odessa is our native city. – As in, ‘against the vatniki’? – Yes. And it is also a good example that one can be friends [with political opponents].

This ‘friendship’, based on a thin patriotic identity, persists despite deep ideological differences among liberals and nationalists. The ‘right convergence’ of liberal nationalist civil society (Ishchenko 2020) shows that the social divide perceived from outside as purely identitarian has a lot to do with class distinction, the ‘pro-­Ukrainian’ identity being a proxy for middle-­classness and the ‘Eastern Slavic’ one for socially stagnant lower classes. Other scholars have theorized how members of the working class may make use of ‘the capital of autochtony’ (Retière 2003) or ‘national capital’ (Skeggs 2003) to promote their social position. A lot has been written about the processes whereby the ‘headlines of nations’ hide ‘subtexts of class’ (Kalb and Halmai 2011), including examples of this in post-­Soviet Russia, where the working-­class agenda expresses itself in the language of the ethnic (Sokolov 2005). However, the process described above is different: instead of holding on defensively to its working-­class habitus, redefining it as deserving, my informants attempt to commit the act of mass migration from their class position to the middle-­class one, using the latter’s political identity as camouflage. Instead of a defiant solidifying of the working class under a false flag, centrifugal processes are contributing to its further atomization.

Flaunting the High: Anti-populist National Populism These attitudes often generate confusion. Many superficial academic accounts uncritically retransmit this narrative, in which the rational, anti-­populist civic vanguard of society is facing the politically inert majority, captured in the paternalist symbiosis with oligarchs and lesser bosses and in dead-­end socialist nostalgia (Wejnert 2020). Such texts fit the widespread simplistic understanding of populism as an antonym of democracy. A more attentive and critical analysis, however, identifies the ‘Euro-­Ukrainian’ worldview as being no less populist than its competitor. It fits the understanding of Cas Mudde, who describes populism as a thin ideology dividing society into the vicious elite (the oligarchs), the pure people (the ‘true Ukrainians’), activist people-­defenders (the nationalist civil society), and sinister

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‘others’ (the sceptical popular classes) (Mudde 2004). Within the framework of discourse theory, advanced by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (Laclau 2005; Laclau and Mouffe 1985), one can easily identify the populist ‘equivalential chain’ rallying a number of diverse social groups (war veterans, pro-­EU liberals, nationalists, NGOs, intellectuals) around the empty signifier of ‘European Ukraine’, thus constructing the ‘people’. The third approach to populism yields the most interesting analysis of this political outlook. According to Pierre Ostiguy and Stephen Moffitt, populism is not an ideology or a strategy but rather a political style, which consists of ‘flaunting the culturally low’ – cultivating rude manners normally associated with lower classes, thus winning their sympathies by way of scandalising the establishment (Ostiguy 2020). Authors that follow this school, for example, interpret Brexit as a ‘symbolic class struggle’ (Westheuser 2020). In this sense, the specificity of the ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ populism is its inverse sensitivity, namely ‘flaunting the culturally high’. Contrary to the norms of traditional local political culture, which requires the elite to make token references to the ultimate sovereignty and wisdom of popular classes, the pro-­Western political identity is built upon self-­distancing from the ignorant masses and imitating the virtuous intellectual elite. Whereas the mayor of Kryvyi Rih makes ritual gestures indicating his closeness to the ‘regular people’, nationalist miners despise him and his target audience, constructing themselves as part of the ‘true people’ together with the cultural nobility populating the national public sphere. How do these models of populism relate to nationalism; what is the clearest emotion in the attitudes described? To understand how the two concepts relate, it is useful to analyse the meaning of the term people, being central to any populism. Rogers Brubaker lists three meanings in the populist discourse: (1) plebs, or commoners, which are owed recognition and redistribution; (2) demos, which is owed sovereign power; and (3) a culturally, morally or politically bounded and distinct people, which is owed protection against outsiders. These three analytically distinct meanings are usually conflated in practice, posing as different attributes of the singular people. Those who speak on behalf of the people employ simultaneously all three registers: the plight of the underdog, the plea for democracy, and communitarian reasoning. This conflation generates a wide zone of overlap between populist and nationalist discourses. The ‘vertical’ appeal to the people is often at the same time ‘horizontal’, representing the elite as both the illegitimate usurper on top and the culturally foreign outsider (Brubaker 2019).

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In our case, the ‘horizontal’ ethnic nationalism, directed against outsider (pro-)Russians, articulates the ‘vertical’ populist tropes of honouring and empowering the underdog, with elitist distinction patterns. However, this is only one part of the political landscape; the following section will analyse the narratives of the opposing camp.

Enlightened Technocracy: The ‘East Slavic’ Nationalism The hierarchy reconstructed above is not hegemonic across all the working class. It coexists and competes with another moral order, more deeply anchored in the traditional landscape of autonomous values of the subaltern. Borrowing somewhat from the conventional attitudes of the working class striving to build and preserve its own self-­reliant moral universe, this alternative hierarchy, however, is not as autonomous or egalitarian as the templates upon which it relies. For all its rhetorical valorization of ‘simple working men’, this older frame is also structured by an implied moral hierarchy, at the top of which one finds enlightened technocrats. Being a mirror image of the ‘pro-­Ukrainian’ hierarchy, the competing system similarly speaks to the national political field, putting Soviet nostalgia and the ‘East Slavic’ identity (Shulman 2005) at the top of the moral ladder and relegating Ukrainian nationalism and pro-­Western sentiments to the bottom. Alexei, a miner in his fifties working at Sukha Balka, embodies the social and political attitudes prescribed by this system of values. He appreciates the rebel spirit in his peers; mistrusts the bosses and despises those who make deals with them, which is fully in line with the ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ model. Contrary to the latter, he and his colleagues do not tend to dismiss the bulk of the working class and the older generation as stupid, backward or irrelevant. To the extent to which various social groups can be ordered in terms of their moral worth, Alexei would put his own kind, miners and other industrial workers, at the top while assigning various activists comprising civil society to lower rungs.

Equating the Ukrainian with the Political The key criteria in this ranking process have to do with the perceived productivity of a given group, its utility for society in the purely economic sense. How does this classic Saint-­Simonianist productivism, allergic to all politics, speak to the national political and iden-

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titarian landscape? Based on my archival research, I argue that it remained apolitical (that is, technocratic, agnostic in terms of party politics, and oriented towards the dominant Russophone identity but not problematizing identities per se) until the mid-­2000s, when Ukrainian party politics with its competitive identity agendas started taking root in Kryvyi Rih. At that point, the new generation of local elite rearticulated this technocratic common sense and tied it to the ‘East Slavic’ identity. This framing was not contested by the opposing ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ camp, which did not compete for a wide working-­ class audience, seeing other social groups as privileged partners to coopt into its own hegemonic bloc. The Russophone and Orthodox identity made its way into the moral landscape, whereas new paternalist captains of industry occupied the vacant niche of caring factory directors. As a result, Alexei seamlessly connects nostalgia for Soviet internationalism and egalitarianism with aggressive contempt towards Euromaidan activists, who in 2014 challenged the authority of a government composed of big businessmen, and the riot police, who specialized in violently dissolving workers’ protests. What mattered was their linguistic and regional identity, perceived as alien. The insistence on ethnic cleavages in the dominating discourses pushed him to choose sides reluctantly: ‘I did not use to care at all about language: when I was in the army, there were Uzbeks, Kazakhs. Under the Soviet ­Union . . . ­they taught us that all peoples are ­friends – ­that is how I grew up. It’s different now: you are a katsap,3 you are old people who watch too much TV. What’s your problem with those people? They are the same as us, for fuck’s sake!’ Even though Alexei remains committed to the fundamental narrative centring on ‘normal people’ not involved in politics of any kind, his own presumably neutral worldview is visibly skewed towards one of the two poles of national politics. Declaring his lack of interest in politics, he nevertheless has clear electoral preferences, supporting Oleksandr Vilkul, whose political agenda comprises respect for Soviet war veterans, preservation of industry, Russophone identity and Russian Orthodoxy.

Resentment for the Upstarts Defying the hierarchies that valorize patriotic activism and condemn the passive masses, Alexei replies by inverting them. He lamented the stupidity of ‘brainwashed’ people who support the Ukrainian nationalist interpretation of history and politics. For Alexei, they are victims

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of propaganda, unlike him, who relies on traditional common sense formed in quieter times. In the end, the picture comes down to an opposition between ‘civilized Soviet people’ and ‘stupid nationalists’. This opposition was clear in the speech of Viacheslav, when he described the political situation at YuGOK: Around 80% are normal people, i.e. they understand that the economy is a shambles and so on. But around 20% are very . . . [knocks on the table, referring to their ‘wooden heads’]. Some are members of that Svoboda party. All of them are such nationalists. For example, I have two brothers working at the drilling machine, Vova and Serioga. They are generally qualified professionals. Vovka is alright, moreover he’s also a musician. But Serioga is in Svoboda, and he has such tunnel vision, there’s no point in even talking about politics. One can talk only about work, about production.

Additional undertones of this attitude, crucial for understanding its relation to social hierarchies, can be analysed in the case of Anokhin, a PMGU union leader in one of KZRK’s departments. Answering a question about his union’s reaction to the Euromaidan protests, he told a story about a worker who went to Kyiv to take part in the protests: He went there, got 200 UAH, got his mug punched, came back by train dazed, spent ten days in the hospital, paid 1,000 UAH for treatment. Then he went out and started telling how he had stood up for his civic stance. Why he went there and what he gained. He wanted the trade union to reimburse him. He didn’t want a putiovka to the health resort, he wanted money.

The allegation that the worker was paid to participate in the protests devalues not only the protests but also the person, representing him as a cynic and a hypocrite. His alleged misfortunes add an element of comedy, as do his attempts to present himself as a genuine protester afterwards. Finally, his demand for monetary reimbursement makes him a despicable character. Importantly, Anokhin presents the worker as someone who claimed to be better than the rest of his co-­workers: engaged in a genuine political activity with a noble cause. However, his attempt to rise above his colleagues in the meritocratic hierarchy backfired and he fell below them. This mistrust towards all holier-­than-­thou attitudes is an important factor structuring the majoritarian ‘East Slavic’ political identity of the working class in Eastern Ukraine.4 People gravitating towards the opposing identity are constructed not just as stupid but rather as upstarts whose claims for a higher social status based on certain personal virtues (wisdom, courage, honesty) are unfounded. This is why this milieu appreciates activism mostly in its unorganized

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and very local form: all steps towards formalization and growth of a movement arouse suspicion of its becoming part of the corrupt and cynical world of politics.

Identities Performed: Two Public Rituals The difference between the way the two identities work is visible in my observations of two public commemoration events that took place at the same location, separated by an interval of one day. On 22 February 2019, Kryvyi Rih celebrated the 75th anniversary of its liberation from the German army. This commemoration, traditional since the Soviet times, has been reinforced by the local governing elite faction, which has rearticulated its traditional themes (Soviet patriotism, mourning war victims and celebrating the victory) in defiance against the central government’s attempts to nationalize public narratives and rituals. That year, the commemoration was restricted by the law on decommunization, which prohibits display of Soviet symbols. Despite the caveat made by lawmakers for communist symbols and historical figures connected with the Second World War, the traditional display of the regimental banner of the Red Army unit that liberated Kryvyi Rih could not take place. A government commission had confiscated the banner for legal review in 2018 and never returned it. This time, there were no red flags of any kind during the event: the vintage military vehicles were adorned with national flags of Ukraine, while a big flag of Kryvyi Rih was one of the centrepieces of the parade. A platoon of Cossack reconstructors, standing beside the cadets of local military colleges, was another new element of this traditional Soviet ceremony (see Figure 9.1). The soundscape was also made politically correct: contrary to the usual settings, there were only two wartime Soviet songs playing from loudspeakers before and during the event, the rest being contemporary Ukrainian music. Without discussing explicitly the ongoing military conflict in the Donbas, the master of the ceremony mentioned soldiers of this war alongside local Second World War participants, Afghan war veterans and heroes of socialist labour. The audience for the event, which took place on a weekday, was largely brought in by bus, one of which was branded with the AMKR logo: the largest industrial enterprises of the city sent their employees to take part in the gathering organized by the city authorities. The VIP section was represented by the city mayor Yuriy Vilkul and his son Oleksandr; other members of parliament from Kryvyi Rih, belonging

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Figure 9.1.  Preparations for the military parade. A platoon of Cossack reconstructors, standing beside the cadets of local military colleges, are a new element of this traditional Soviet ceremony. Their presence attests to a partial integration of the ethnonationalist agenda into the older ritual. Photo taken by the author in February 2019.

to the same faction controlled by Rinat Akhmetov; the former mayor Liubonenko and the heads of district councils; top managers of all major industrial enterprises, including the Indian CEO of AMKR; and the traditional (i.e. affiliated to Moscow) Orthodox church leader. Besides the latter, only three other people were mentioned by their names: the Vilkuls and one of the MPs, Kostiantyn Pavlov. Despite the context of the presidential campaign, there were no speeches by the ­politicians – ­only a very general speech by the anonymous master of the ceremony. After the laying of wreaths commemorating the fallen, the lighting of torches and a small parade and fireworks, everyone was invited to light a candle in a nearby church, built in 2012 next to the war memorial: its interior is devoted to the military, reinforcing the link between Orthodox Christianity and ‘East Slavic’ patriotism. On the following day, a very different public gathered at the same spot to commemorate the anniversary of the Debaltsevo military operation in 2015, in which Ukrainian troops and volunteer battal-

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ions had to retreat from a Russian assault. The Heroes Park, initially conceived as a memorial to Soviet soldiers in the Second World War, has subsequently been reimagined as a place dedicated to all military heroes, including the war in the Donbas.5 The number of people present was much smaller; many were wearing military fatigues. Other details, like patriotic melodies set as cell phone ringtones, indicated a high level of personal commitment to the cause. After the salvo made by the organizers from their personal firearms, a chaplain of an Orthodox church loyal to Kyiv gave a speech about the essential differences dividing Russians and Ukrainians: among other things, Ukrainians are innately democratic and have never needed a tsar to govern them. After the speech, which ended the gathering, the core group of veterans and families of the dead soldiers made their way to the cemetery. These observations illuminate the multilayered structure of political discourses: the ethnic Ukrainian discourse imposed by the central state is dominant but not hegemonic in the city. The ‘Eastern Slavic’ identity is hegemonic; it is perceived as the default norm, reinforced by the local elite through routine social practices. It is troubled by the policies of the central government, perceived as an illegitimate intrusion. The locally dominant political discourse avoids politics to maintain credibility: the key political figures are present and named, but they stop short of discussing divisive ongoing issues or even mentioning elections. At a lower rung, one can find genuine carriers of the ethnic Ukrainian identity who are dominant in the public sphere on the macro scale but feel persecuted and resentful on the scale of the city. Contrary to the ‘East Slavs’, who are locally hegemonic and therefore not pressured into public contestation, the ‘ethnic Ukrainians’ are much more vocal in the public space and more ‘political’. The two identities may even coexist in one person, being negotiated on an ad hoc basis. Thus, one of the leaders of the KZRK miners’ strike in 2020, Antonenko, is a veteran of the war in the Donbas, who fought in the two most legendary battles against the Russian troops in 2014 and 2015. This personal background was prominent in narratives sympathetic to the strike, and Antonenko himself did not hesitate to brandish his military awards and to wear fatigues while speaking on behalf of the strikers: he presented the strike as his third battle for the same cause of human dignity. There are no reasons to suspect that he was doing it strategically, performing patriotism. And he was no less sincere when he supported the incumbent mayor Yuriy Vilkul, who represents the opposite identity. In an

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online ­discussion, Antonenko replied to a critic who accused the strikers of being blind tools in the politicians’ hands: ‘As for patriots, I have never considered myself a patriot, even though I went through Ilovaysk and Debaltsevo. WE STAND UP FOR OUR RIGHTS, THE RIGHTS OF WORKERS, you must have messed it up, friend.’

Victory Day: Agency in the Face of ‘Hidden Transcripts’ The unequal presence of the two identities in the public sphere, in turn, reinforces prejudices against the ‘dumb masses’, presumably unable to formulate any consistent ideology of their own. However, they find other ways to manifest their agency, which is evident from the other observed event: the celebrations of the Victory Day on 9 May. After the Euromaidan, the nationalist government tried to move away from the official celebrations of this day, judging them to be an arm of Russia’s ‘hybrid war’. The Russian government has indeed successfully merged the cult of the ‘Great Victory’ with its political agenda, using the memory of the Second World War to justify its internal and external policies (Malinova 2017; Wood 2011), notably the invasion of Ukraine (Laruelle 2016). Regardless of this recent politicization, Victory Day remains an important commemorative event for many Ukrainians, even those who oppose Russian expansion. Being unable to forbid the celebrations, the Ukrainian government has been trying to shift the accent onto another ­date – ­8 May, which it presented as the pan-­European day of mourning for all the victims of war and of reconciliation between Ukrainians who were fighting on different sides. In this light, the 9 May celebrations are heavily policed and discursively presented as a barbaric relic of the Soviet time, an attribute of people who rejoice in bloody triumph instead of mourning the fallen. The lay attitude was palpable during a striking miners’ gathering on the eve of the holiday, on May 8. Talking among themselves, workers made allusions to the date, saying that on the following day they would be storming the Reichstag (i.e. the mine management), like the Soviet Army in 1945. Another miner reminisced about his grandfather: having returned from the Second World War a hero, decorated with many awards, he must be nothing short of a criminal according to the official anti-­Soviet narrative. In other words, it is safe to say that the Soviet Victory Day is appreciated locally, despite the central government’s attempts to tone it down, and that this genuine appreciation cannot be dismissed as a simulation imposed by the local elite on the indifferent population.

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On the 9 May, the official celebration began at dawn with a solemn march headed by the Vilkuls and other members of the local elite (priests, industrial managers, members of parliament). In his speech, which was taking place shortly after the electoral defeat of the incumbent nationalist president Poroshenko, Oleksandr Vilkul said that ‘the grandsons of the losers have temporarily overcome the grandsons of the victors’ of that war but that the situation was hopefully about to change. He insisted on calling it the ‘Great Patriotic War’ – the conventional Soviet name that had been dropped during the decommunization ­campaign – ­and reminded the public that ‘even when the central government has cancelled all benefits, the city has expanded the programme of veteran support’, financing it with its own funds. Afterwards, Vilkul went to the regional capital, Dnipro, to take part in the oppositional ‘Peace March’, taking with him dozens of people from Kryvyi Rih. Two buses with those people were attacked on their way to Dnipro: unknown people in balaclavas hurled stones at the presumed vatniki, accusing them of being pro-­Russian. On the one hand, the role of the local elite in maintaining the ‘East Slavic’ identity is manifest in this account: most people would not have come to the pre-­dawn celebration and would not have gone to Dnipro were it not for administrative pressure and for the organizing force that arranged the buses. The rituals reinforcing this identity cannot be called a grassroots movement. On the other hand, however, they were not completely orchestrated events. The agency of laypeople has been shown by a series of police reports published on that day in Kryvyi Rih. The list of offences reported by police and Security Service officers included: a 17-­year-­old man wearing a red flag with the hammer and the sickle; a man wearing a hat with the red star; another man wearing a T-­shirt with forbidden symbols under his jacket; a young woman wearing a jacket with the Soviet coat of arms on it. The Dnipro region, where Kryvyi Rih is situated, led the way in terms of displays of forbidden symbols on that day. Within the typology of public rituals proposed by Don Handelman ([1990] 1998), the two commemorative events treated in the previous section were ‘events that present the lived-­in world’ – mirror images of social realities, which arouse emotions but do not really impact these realities. Contrary to these, the Victory Day chain of events can be classified as Handelman’s ‘event that re-­presents the lived-­in world’. This is a carnivalesque sequence that carries comparison and contrast in relation to social realities and thus ‘may raise possibilities, questions, perhaps doubts, about the legitimacy or the validity of social forms, as these are constituted in the lived‑in

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world’ (Handelman [1990] 1998: 49). Put differently, the event of re-­presentation carries in its script an indication of existing social conflict, which is not solved but exposed in the course of the ritual. Similar to medieval carnivals analysed by Mikhail Bakhtin (1965), the Victory Day in the post-­Euromaidan Eastern Ukraine lays bare the sociopolitical tensions that are hidden or repressed in normal life. The subaltern classes subvert the central government’s public transcript of mourning and national loyalty. Despite the visible and important role of the local elites in the episodes described above, the agency of the working-­class participants is no less clear. Its vast scale and underground character, reminiscent of counter-­culture, tempts one to classify it as an instance of James Scott’s ‘hidden transcripts’ (Scott 1990). In this interpretation, the population of Kryvyi Rih, subjected to the rule of the central government, rejects public rituals intended to confirm its authority and instead develops its own language of resistance. However, the academic criticism of Scott helps us better understand the complex ‘class position’ of an ideology. In an early critical essay, Susan Gal makes an inventory of the problematic points of Scott’s framework: social rituals are presumably only performed by the weak, while the powerful do not have to act; emotions seem to be primordial and universal fixed responses; the universal dichotomy of the dominant and the subordinate assumes that they are always clearly separable and definable; the binary of hidden and public transcripts is also overly simplistic (Gal 1995). All of these counter-­ arguments are valid in our case. Vilkul and other politicians, invisible in Scott’s framework, also perform rituals confirming their authority, investing a lot more resources than their subjects. The latter’s response varies from accepting and confirming the ritual to rejecting it explicitly. The local elite, performing the role of patrons to the population of the city, simultaneously occupies a subordinate position in its relations with central government. The same behaviour on the part of the subaltern population can be simultaneously read as performance of a public transcript set by the local elite and as the resurgence of a hidden transcript undermining the authority of the centre. Most importantly, a Gramscian reading of this episode, contrary to the perspective of Scott, will interpret it as a routine process of the reproduction of hegemony both on the local and national scale rather than a precedent for open rebellion. The local elites have reinforced their image as protectors of ‘authentic’ identity against the illegitimate central government, associating it with neoliberal austerity and

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an alien cultural agenda. The loyal segments of the working class have cooperated in this ritual. At the same time, the dominant position of the central government has not been threatened by this ‘resistance’ in any way. Loyal to the identity offered by the national elite, the local minority symbolically reunites with it in the performance of indignation. Thus, all the participants of this complex play have confirmed their initial positions, reproducing the nested hegemonic system rather than challenging it from either direction.

Europe Above All: Peripheral Projections The two identities described above do not exist in a hermetically enclosed national universe: global connections are important for constituting and maintaining them. Despite the opposition that exists between them on the macro level, the two imaginaries coexist within the same moral geopolitics on the wider scale. They both share the vision of ‘Europe’ as a civilizational ideal of social and moral progress and of economic development. The manner in which they connect to this ideal, however, differs. For the ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ identity, the connection is straightforward: the West, or Europe, is situated at the top of the hierarchy structuring its worldview, representing the pinnacle of the global civilizing process. This process, imagined as linear and cumulative, is not complete in Ukraine, whose current conjuncture is seen as a conflict between pro-­Western civilizing agents and the backward orientalized masses with inferior political standpoints (pro-­Soviet, pro-­ Russian, Asian, or simply apolitical). In this narrative, Europe stands for either a civilizational ‘home’, a primordial essence to which one should return, or for a summit of human civilization that one should conquer in a linear evolutionist manner. In both understandings (which are often combined), Europe or the WENA area in general is the natural reference point used for the justification of one’s political, moral or aesthetic stance. The essence of Europeanness here is often conflated with a neoliberal reform agenda and with integration into US-­led military and political ­alliances – ­as was the case for post-­1989 Central Europe. The link is more complicated in the case of ‘East Slavic’ identity. Why is Europe important to people whose immediate political sympathies stand in opposition to the EU, NATO and other ‘Western’ phenomena, up to and including parliamentary democracy and liberal capitalism? The answer lies in the intellectual history of the

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East European region, whose peripheral geographical position has been structuring its public sphere since its very inception in the early nineteenth century. In imperial Russia, this global positionality stood in the centre of the debate between ‘Westernists’ (zapadniki) and ‘Slavophiles’; the latter, arguing for Russia’s Sonderweg and rejecting the import of political and cultural institutions from the West, still defined their very political identity in terms of its relation to Europe. In the twentieth century, the civilizational primacy of the capitalist West was self-­evident for the Bolsheviks, who imported institutions, skills and technologies from the WENA region. The imperative of ‘catching up with and overtaking the West’ remained the dominant theme of Soviet policies and public narratives in the postwar decades up to the end of the USSR. Even when the capitalist West was designated an enemy, it was recognized as more advanced technologically and civilizationally. This peripheral character of anti-­Western discourse was made much more obvious during the crisis of the 1990s, when the superiority of the West seemed evident in all respects. References to practices and standards, real or imagined, of WENA, became a natural part of the ‘East Slavic’ political narrative, even in its most anti-­Western varieties. Far from being a specific geographic entity, Europe becomes an empty signifier on which both ideologies project their own values in order to justify them. One of the most evident projections is that of activism. Vasylenko, the union leader at AMKR, sketched a continuum stretching from the easily mobilized population of Europe, prepared to fight for their rights, through the local activists in Ukraine, striving towards that ideal, to the utterly un-­European working-­class majority: ‘I don’t know what kind of people live in France, but I see that they get into the streets. Here, [the bosses] will stamp their feet and that’s the end of the story: We will fire you tomorrow, we will do so-­and-­so with you tomorrow, and this affects them very much.’ For the ‘East Slavic’ Alexei, French Yellow Vests protests are the incarnation of the proper militant spirit, contrary to Ukrainian nationalist militancy focused on the chimera of dignity. Similarly, the West is associated with ‘culturedness’ and with firm commitment to patriotic values. Europe is perceived as a land of material wealth, the rule of law and social equality. Alexei appreciated that his friend who got a truck driver’s job in the EU enjoyed much higher standards of living there. According to Misha, you can easily buy real estate in France. The basis for these imputations is the indisputable prosperity of the WENA region. The very fact of those countries’ dominating position

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in the global economy and politics serves as a reason to assume their superiority and strive to imitate them. Correspondingly, labelling a desired social practice as European, or Western, justifies it in the eyes of the public. This rhetoric, actively practised by Ukrainian intelligentsia in the media, is also employed by the working class. For example, the grade system of calculating wages, introduced at AMKR in the previous decade, allows for flexibility based on the manager’s subjective evaluation of the employee. In the economic press, the new system was hailed as a step away from the rigid and outdated Soviet tariff system, towards the dynamic and reasonable Western standards. Today, disgruntled AMKR workers discussing it in their Viber chat argue that ‘this system has been forbidden in America because a court has proven that people are not cattle to be evaluated.’ The (likely invented) legitimation by an American court is important to people pushing their claim in Ukraine. An even more explicit example of this logic is found in an anecdote regularly told by Valentin at public events. The story goes as follows: I once talked to Jean Jouet, the French CEO of ArcelorMittal. I asked him whether the value of the metal produced here is the same as at the company’s French sites. He said yes. Then I asked whether the wages are the same as well, and he said no. I asked why, and he said: but you are not Europeans! I argued that we are situated in the centre of Europe, but this did not lead to anything.

The claim to a generally accepted attribute of the ‘good life’ (here, the €1,000 wage) is thus justified by the claim to a European identity. Instead of condemning global inequality, it is ­reaffirmed – ­this affirmation accompanies the claim of having a place among rich countries. This instinct of solidarity with the globally powerful sometimes leads to bizarre developments, such as the condemnation of the Black Lives Matter movement by both the ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ and the ‘East Slavic’ public opinion leaders in Ukraine. Both ideologies interpreted the protests as an assault on the privileges to which Ukrainians should be entitled, being white Europeans (Djagalov 2021; Gorbach 2020). In a similar way, contemporary Latvians claim the colonial heritage of the Livonian order as a justification for their Europeanness today. Dace Dzenovska (2013) describes how the expansionist past, brushed over in today’s Western official narratives, is celebrated in Latvia as a proof of the country’s belonging to the top tier of the global hierarchy shaped by that violent history.

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Describing ‘the death of the social’ in the neoliberal era, Nikolas Rose (1996) wrote about the growing saliency of personal identification with an informal, often identity-­based collectivity, which becomes more natural than the allegiance to the national political space. Here, the identitarian imaginary expands beyond the macro level, moralizing and naturalizing global hierarchies. Claims to better standards of living are grounded in one’s cultural, ethnic or civilizational identity, rather than in a universalist vision of social justice. Valentin repeated his story at every mass gathering of workers (I heard it twice) because it elicits a strong positive reaction: we deserve to have a good life because, and inasmuch as, we are Europeans. This logic leads to permanent questioning of one’s identity, now that it subjectively defines the horizon of realistic claims. Most of my informants started discussing whether and to what extent Ukrainians are Europeans at some point in our interviews, without being prompted to do so. For Olga, ‘We can never be Europe. We have a different mentality. Corruption is deeply rooted.’ Three female white-­ collar employees of KZRK admit that ‘we have no culture and history like they do in Europe.’ Often, the gap is presented in quantifiable terms: thus, according to one informant, ‘the difference between Ukraine and Austria is 50–60 years’. The naturalization of the global wealth gap can be illustrated by the following story. In March 2019, the central government launched a campaign of lung scanning to fight a tuberculosis epidemic. The queue to one of the trailers with scanning equipment, consisting mostly of old women, formed as early as 6 AM because the lung scanner at the local polyclinic was broken. One of the women concluded after hours of waiting: ‘And they are saying that we are abroad! No, we will never become abroad!’ This exclamation makes sense if one understands the word ‘abroad’ (zagranitsa) to mean ‘Europe’ in the speech of someone who is not well versed in current political vocabulary. It reveals the inner logic of the shared vision: in order to improve collective standards of living, one has to change one’s very nature, transforming oneself into a ‘foreigner’. The emptiness of the normative ideal of ‘Europe’ makes it a useful discursive tool. Volynets, the leader of the KVPU, mobilizes it to promote his agenda of trade union rights and a regulated market as easily as his liberal opponents use the idea of Europe to defend the liberal market. For Nikolay, Europe means trade unions that are not involved in the corporate patronage schemes, whereas Anokhin, a PMGU union leader at KZRK, deeply involved in such schemes, sees in Europe an example of a trade unionist governing a whole

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c­ ountry – ­Lech Walęsa. Uncle Vitya, my co-­worker at Screenwind, noted the dissonance between the factory’s contracts on the European market and its own lack of Europeanness, which is manifest in the lack of investment into equipment. Vladimir, who works at AMKR, underlined that Europe is the source of all useful technologies, like thermal insulation for housing. Finally, for Gosha, a miner at Sukha Balka, Europe is an example of social equality: ‘I have read about the Czech president today: he has no security guards at all! [A journalist] asks people: what if someone kills him? –“Well let them kill him; it’s easier for us to elect a new one than to feed the retinue.” Now that’s what I call life.’ These projections do not have to reflect the actual state of things in real-­life Europe. Misha touched upon the topic of LGBT+ rights, which has been the subject of heated and violent public debates in post-­Euromaidan Ukraine. He constructed an image of modest and inconspicuous European gays to oppose the idea of lecherous native homosexuals. Zhanna, on her part, shared a Facebook post with the following text: I like the electoral system in Denmark. Biudzhetniki, state bureaucrats, pensioners, students, convicts, the military and everyone else who does not pay taxes do not have the right to vote there. Only those who pay taxes vote. And taxpayers are very serious people. That is why they have not had neither populists nor leftists, radicals or other idiots in power. As a result, Denmark is always one of the three richest countries in the world! A smart country!

This description, manifestly false on the factual level, is important evidence of the power of the normative image of Europe. Post-­Soviet Ukrainians place themselves in the middle of the global hierarchy of merit, with Europe and other WENA countries at the top and the bottom places accorded to African, Asian and Latin American countries. This division, roughly corresponding to the Cold War-­era First, Second and Third worlds, holds despite the fact that many ‘inferior’ countries overtook Ukraine in macroeconomic indices a long time ago. When this fact is evoked, it only serves to reinforce the lamentation over the sorry state of things in today’s Ukraine, which has fallen to the ‘low’ of Honduras or Nigeria. However, it does not lead to the re-­evaluation of the hierarchy itself; in the public imaginary, Ukraine remains essentially more European and hence more deserving than countries with a non-­White population. How can we theorize this self-­orientalization that permeates the Ukrainian public sphere? One way of making sense of it is globalizing

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the Bourdieusian framework of distinction and habitus. Originally, it described a relatively self-­contained society, whereas in the postsocialist condition ‘the reference points in relation to which the middle class constructs itself are found both inside and outside the local class structure’ (Crăciun and Lipan 2020). The uneven and combined development of global capitalist economy finds its reflection in the symbolic sphere, which equally extends to the global scale. The habitus of Ukrainian workers is structured not only by their social distance from the Ukrainian middle class but also from various social classes populating the countries of the global core and periphery.

Conclusion In 2014, Ukraine went through a massive ­crisis – ­the Euromaidan uprising and the subsequent ­war – ­that catalysed transformations in the political conscience of the working class. It condensed characteristic post-­Soviet attitudes to politics and aligned them with identitarian agendas offered by the national political elite. Kryvyi Rih workers were pushed to choose one of the two political identities: the ‘ethnonationalist’ one, minoritarian in the city but dominant in the country as a whole, or the ‘East Slavic’ one, locally hegemonic but oppositional on the national scale. The latter identity is a target of ruthless criticism on the part of intellectuals belonging to the former one, dominant in the public sphere. ‘East Slavic’ Ukrainians have been found wanting in terms of education and upbringing, as well as in terms of their civic virtues. Relegated to lower rungs of the imagined scale of human merits, they also find their citizenship rights constantly put in doubt by people claiming to possess a superior set of traits tied to the ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ identity. The ‘East Slavs’ respond with resentment sufficiently well described in the academic literature on populist attitudes of the working class (Cramer 2016; Kalb and Halmai 2011; Szombati 2018): feeling that their social status is threatened, they react with hostility and defiance towards the ‘upstarts’ from their own midst and towards their enablers from the ruling classes. This resentment is tied to the identitarian agenda offered by the oppositional factions of the elite that maintain the hegemonic bloc with these workers: anti-­Western scepticism, suspicion of liberalism and Ukrainian ethnic nationalism, token commitment to the Russian Orthodox Church, and affirmation of the traditional Soviet vision of historical memory.

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The ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ camp, on the other hand, produces a less conventional anti-­populist populism, in which strategies of distinction are linked to the appreciation of the Ukrainian language and ‘Western civilization’. However unorthodox, this cleavage is not unique or new. The orientalist division of society along similar lines has been documented by Sedef Arat-­Koç, who analysed ‘a culture war over class habitus’ between the secular middle-­class ‘White Turks’ and the conservative rural masses in the 1990s and early 2000s (Arat-­Koç 2018: 396). The orientalist othering of ‘civilizationally incompetent’ losers of transition also took place in Poland (Buchowski 2006: 476). Such inner orientalism does not necessarily need ethnic identities to put in motion liberal populist mobilization. Thus, in Russia the elitism of the liberal intelligentsia (Djagalov 2011) does not translate into an identity conflict. In culturally homogeneous Bulgaria, the same divisions were articulated during the two consecutive waves of mobilization in 2013: ‘social’ protests in the winter were looked down upon by the middle class, which, however, enthusiastically accepted the ‘moral’ protests in the summer (Medarov 2016; Znepolski 2019). Much like in Ukraine, the actual social background of the participants of the two protest campaigns was not as neat as presented in mediatized discourses: a ‘bourgeois’ movement may in fact consist to a large degree of working-­class protesters, who nevertheless misrecognize themselves as bourgeois. One of the criteria of the distinction in Bulgaria as well as in Ukraine is the atomized character of the middle-­class movement, as opposed to the organized mobilization of the paternalist masses: ‘the bus is the negation of authentic civic activity, supposedly driven by spontaneous self-­organization’ (Tsoneva 2017: 121). Similar societal division is structuring Romanian politics, coming down to an opposition between the lower classes, often involved in clientelist schemes, and the middle class, with a Westernising and anti-­corruption agenda. Instead of nativism or ethnic nationalism, this division relies on and reinforces the boundary between ‘civilized people’ who want a ‘normal’ life and the ‘backward’ masses. This distinction is bound to racialize the latter, even if the ethnic component of the narrative is explicitly denied (Kiss and Székely 2021). The Ukrainian political cleavage is more explicitly associated with ethnic identities. However, just like in Romania or Bulgaria, ethnic identities are not the underlying essence of the division but rather its accidental expression. One must take seriously the words of many adherents of both camps when they say they are not ethnic Ukrainian

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or Russian nationalists. The root of the political cleavage is the perceived moral difference between the self and the other rather than ethnic animosity. The horizontal appeal of nationalism, directed against ethnically or linguistically marked outsiders, is linked to the vertical appeal of pure populism, directed against the elite (Brubaker 2019). This national populism, however, also contains a powerful ethical judgement. Some researchers call the resultant antagonism a ‘recombinant populism’, impossible to classify as left or right (Dragoman 2020). But how exactly are these attitudes produced and reproduced on the micro level? The following chapter will throw light on the lay perceptions of political elites and politics as a separate domain of social life. The analysis of individual attitudes will help in understanding the paradox of mass aversion to politics and to all collective action, which is not evident from the account presented above.

Notes 1. Sovok (singular form) is a derogatory term referring to someone nostalgic for the Soviet Union or whose views or behaviour, objectionable in the eyes of the speaker, make them ‘Soviet’. It has been in use since the early 1990s. 2. Vata (literally, cotton wool) derives from vatnik – a political slur that has spread in Ukraine since Euromaidan. It refers to a person sympathetic to Russian jingoist and authoritarian nationalism. Originally, vatnik was the name of a cotton wool-­padded jacket worn by the working class, soldiers, peasants and prisoners in the Soviet Union. 3. Ethnic slur used to refer to Russians. 4. The same logic of resentment may likely structure the opposite ‘pro-­Ukrainian’ identity of popular classes in Western Ukraine, where Ukrainian language and ethnic identity are associated with lower social status. 5. This period of the war took a heavy toll on the population of Kryvyi Rih: the city supplied a disproportionate number of mobilized soldiers to the Donbas, many of whom were killed.

— Chapter 10 —

Political Attitudes and Attitude to Politics Apathy and Authoritarian Anti-corruption

_ In the previous two chapters, I analysed the ways in which Eastern Ukrainian workers build and pursue survival and distinction strategies, articulating them with elements of the landscape of political identities imposed on their lifeworlds from the macro scale. In this chapter, I will take a closer look at the workers’ attitude to the very domain of the political, conditioned by the developments mentioned above. Following Chantal Mouffe (2005), I ‘prefer to speak about the social construction of the political (as a universe that is thought and uttered in various manners by social actors), rather than about politics (referring to political life defined around electoral competition and exercise of representative mandates and other functions defined by the institutions)’ (Arnaud and Guionnet 2005: 17). My goal here is to understand the mechanisms forming the largely anti-­political worldview of the Ukrainian working class, which renders it susceptible to various populist forms of politicization and weakens its collective agency. In the first section, I will describe the workers’ rejection of politics understood in the conventional sense of parties and ideologies. Next, I connect it to the pervasive inefficiency of attempts at collective organization, which breeds disempowerment and political cynicism. I trace the reproduction of the image of a homogeneous corrupt elite in the third section. After that, I analyse the workers’ attempts to sketch a positive political ideal, which finds its expression in penal populism. Before concluding the chapter, I present my observations from the period of presidential elections in 2019, won by a comic

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who managed to embody the gist of the attitudes and expectations discussed here.

Avoiding Politics in Kryvyi Rih The 2020 strike at KZRK was a huge political event in itself, which was, moreover, unfolding against the background of elections that threatened the rule of the incumbent local elite. Given this rich context, one would expect the miners held heated political debates. However, the main theme of the discussions I was able to observe in the miners’ online groups was precisely the negation of all the political dimensions of their struggle. Involvement in politics was not perceived as an asset but rather as a grave accusation thrown against the miners by those who wanted to discredit them. Here are some reactions to the suggestions that the strike was political in one way or another: what a load of rubbish! How dare you? . . . Have you been brainwashed? Why lie? What does that have to do with it? Do you think it’s comfy to sit in a mine for almost a month? Have you heard or read even a word about politics from these miners?? To hell with politics! My husband is sitting in the Oktiabrskaya mine for a DECENT salary! Let someone help our miners and I won’t care about his political allegiance.

Politics here is portrayed as a separate domain, external to the people expressing these thoughts. This isolated domain contains rich financial, administrative and other resources, which can help people solve their everyday problems. But the downside of receiving these resources is the risk of moral corruption implicit in any contact with the world of politics. Allegations of maintaining connections with this powerful, distant and morally tainted world will cast a shadow on one’s reputation, which has to be fiercely defended. Interaction with the political domain can be justified in apolitical terms as a deep personal motivation, as opposed to a political ideology. The latter is always just a cover for sinister backhand deals. Non-­ideological interaction should materialize in ‘concrete deeds’ done with little or preferably no ­publicity – ­otherwise it is just morally suspect hot air. The explanations of one of the miners sum up this attitude: You guys, many political parties are now starting to write how they helped the miners, so here am I writing once and for all: the mines Rodina, Ternovskaya,

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Gvardiya (those which have been evacuated) have always been saying and will keep saying that WE ARE AGAINST POLITICAL FORCES, WE ARE SIMPLE WORKERS WHO FIGHT FOR OUR RIGHTS. Now I’m reading posts about how nobody helped the miners except Milobog.1 I’m telling you as it is: the first to respond was Viktoriya Samoylenko, after the extraordinary session [of the city council], the city mayor provided hot meals and medicines to all the mines. All we heard from Milobog was his and his team’s screams. Mikhail Volynets also provided aid to us. There are other people who don’t want to be discussed, because they were doing it guided by their soul [ot dushi] and not by cheap populism. Among those who helped with food was also the chain of grocery stores FAYNA and ordinary concerned city residents. So don’t say and write stupid things.

Legitimation by certified lack of political motives works both ways. Supporters of the miners vehemently denied any connections of the strikers to the world of politics in order to render their struggle a legitimate bread-­and-­butter issue, devoid of any political calculations. At the same time, the striker quoted just above speaks from the position of uncontested legitimacy, distributing proof of apolitical purity to politicians: he distinguishes between those who quietly provided palpable and concrete aid, ‘guided by their soul’, and those who ‘screamed’ about their support for the miners, being ‘cheap populists’. Similar attitudes were manifest in another episode: an invasion of politics into the Viber chat of AMKR employees. The group boasted around 1,500 members and was created by a retired steelworker and former union activist, who promoted it widely as a censorship-­free platform for all employees of the enterprise. In the spring of 2021, the group was shaken by a protracted conflict around the appropriateness of political statements and arguments. Policies of Ukrainian president Zelenskyi and of his nationalist predecessor, the war in the Donbas and Russia’s role in it, ethnicity and history, the USSR and the Second World ­War – ­these topics crowded out more mundane discussions, which provoked fierce resistance. Each time the chat turned political again, several people quietly left the group while others raised their voice in protest, requesting a ban for those who talk about politics. Views on ‘political smartasses’ were variegated: some chat members thought they were plainly stupid for buying the narratives imposed by the elites; others suggested that they are paid by the management of AMKR to infiltrate discussions and sow discord, preventing workers from organizing around the campaign for wage increase. One way or another, most people agreed that politics is a

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dirty thing and has to be avoided. Political topics are perceived as a nuisance that bring down everyone’s mood: ‘Zhenia, please don’t start, it’s a holiday, let’s be quiet at least today. Nothing will change in a day, we’ll have time to discuss everything, let’s talk about more positive things.’ Being political was a sign of mental deviation for one of the workers, who reacted to a political video in the chat: ‘Natali, have you been possessed by the spirit of Yevgeniy [the ‘politician’ to whom the previous quotation was addressed]? Don’t watch scary stories and monologues of tsars and monarchs, and don’t make others watch them. Everyone’s mental health is disturbed.’ The owner of the group concurred with the general mood: ‘Our society is so politicized that some people are already so tired of politics they probably want to get on a submarine and descend onto the seabed, cutting all connection with the outer world. I understand them . . .’ This disgust with politics cut across the political cleavages: people promoting ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ and ‘East Slavic’ narratives received equal treatment. One commentator made a point of mixing the slurs from both camps to make his point: ‘I’m sorry but who should get that wage increase? Apes, separatists, “the conscious” [nationalists, svidomye], vyshivatniks,2 cattle (that voted for an animal, and they turned out to be 73%3), political connoisseurs and simple boors [khamy].’ Here, the lack of culture is associated with political enthusiasm of every colour and opposition to apolitical mobilization around a tangible and specific issue of demanding a wage increase. Politics is something that obscures the picture and prevents people from articulating their joint interest and acting upon ­it – ­something completely opposite to the textbook definition. These attitudes are replicated elsewhere in the working-­class milieu in Kryvyi Rih. My co-­worker at Screenwind, Artiom, never uttered a word about politics. He kept silent when other people discussed it and often simply walked away. Answering a direct question about his attitude, he said he is not interested in politics and did not want to talk about it at all. Our younger colleagues showed much more interest in the ongoing presidential elections; they keep watching videos about the campaign and discussing it. However, their interest was due to the anti-­political character of the candidacy of Volodymyr Zelenskyi, an outsider famous for his TV series mocking the world of Ukrainian politics. In their discussions, Zelenskyi was stated as a good politician insomuch as he is not a politician at all. Yulik said he does not trust him because he lied about not having a business in Russia. ‘I used

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to know him personally and respect him but not anymore, now he has shown himself to be yet another politician and manipulator’, explained Yulik. This was not convincing enough for Andrei, who still believed that Zelenskyi is an honest ­person – ­that is, not a politician. My co-­workers then discussed the incumbent president Petro Poroshenko, whom nobody likes. Yarik had no idea what Poroshenko did before suddenly winning the election in 2014. Yulik informed him that Poroshenko was the founder of the now vilified Party of Regions. He used the occasion to confirm that Poroshenko is a bad person precisely because of his long political background. Even when a person is quite political by all objective standards, their subjective attitude to politics as such stays the same. The worldview of Alexei, a miner from Sukha Balka, was analysed in the previous chapter; with his clear ‘East Slavic’ sympathies, he can hardly be characterized as politically indifferent. However, he also perceives politics as a pernicious influence ruining authentic human sociality and spreading corruption: A guy from work tells me: I stopped talking to my kum. 4 One is for Yanukovych, the other one is for Yushchenko. Fucking hell! I’m saying, is that a problem? Ok, you are for Yanukovych, he is for Yushchenko. Drink together and get over this. No, they stopped talking with each other. Because of what?! Americans are alright, they got what they wanted. First they ruined [the country], and then they are destroying the minds. Americans don’t need Ukraine: they will fight Russia until the last Ukrainian. That’s what I think of it. Now there’s Zelenskyi. Look, you used to be a good showman. Klichko5 used to be a good athlete. And now what? Everyone is laughing at him. And now at this one, too.

The familiar picture of the corrupt world of politics articulates here with the political frame according to which it is the US administration that manipulates every event, which will lead to war with Russia and the downfall of Ukraine. This articulation allows Alexei to avoid contradictions: for him, his very conviction about the actions of the US government lies outside the sphere of politics. This sphere rather comprises intense political debates, which pit people against each other, ‘zombifying’ them via the television. A suspicious attitude to politics is similarly part of the opposing worldview. For Olga and Inna, the two union activists at KZRK, their everyday activism had nothing to do with politics. Neither did their anti-­Russian ­convictions – ­these are rather axiomatic truths that are not for political discussion and deliberation. When they discussed

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politics, they sought to underline the instrumental mode of their involvement: O: I’m telling you once again, everyone treats politics as a source of revenue. For example, I regularly work at elections. I’m just making money. I: I tried twice, and I don’t want anymore. In the electoral commission? O: In the commission, and as a campaigner as well. That is quite nice money. I: Yes, yes, yes. Also, as an observer [during the vote count]. O: They pour so much money in there that it’s a shame not to take it. Especially given our poverty. I spent a week working at the elections, and I got my triple average [monthly] wage. That’s not bad. You can repay your loan that way.

If politics is a sphere of cynicism and exploitation, the only rational way of engaging with it is to exploit it more cynically than it exploits you. One way or another, being politically active means being fooled or consciously fooling others. This moralistic attitude shows in the monologue of Leonid, the NPGU union leader at AMKR: Take a look now: there are lies all around, there’s no truth. . . . Look at the parliament: they have elected 450 dumbasses. How many of them are there really? Not more than 129. ‘Let’s do something before the miners, the Afghan veterans, and everyone else comes [storming] into parliament! We have to do something before the elections because if the people come inside we’ll be in trouble. We have to pass some idiot draft bills.’ Actually, there’s no need for any draft bills. There is a normal system of laws. But everything that was created by these, those and the ­others – ­it is all rotten. This all should be completely torn down now.

Thus, the normal and fair pre-­existing system is distorted by politicians attempting to perpetuate their high social status through manipulation. The political domain of competing party programmes and ideologies occludes the harmonious domain of eternal and self-­ evident truths. This imaginary resonates with Katherine Cramer Walsh’s analysis of the perception of politics in the US Midwest: The Old Timers typically describe ‘politics’ as consisting of elections, debates involving Democrats and Republicans, and occasionally elected officials carrying out their duties. They consider politics as controversy and the stuff of people who lack common sense (where ‘common’ is defined by the way the Old Timers think about the world). Specifically, talking about politics is ‘opinionated’ talk; unless a person holds controversial opinions (opinions that diverge from their own), the conversation is not political. (Cramer Walsh 2003: 38)

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Cramer Walsh’s ‘Old Timers’ are a group of rich old men in a provincial US town who made their wealth in the preceding decades. Their class position is, thus, quite different from that of Kryvyi Rih miners and metalworkers. Nevertheless, the similarity of their approach to politics as social discord, distortion and confusion pushes the search for common traits in their social position. Both groups have won their symbolic capital under previous socio-­economic conjunctures and are now facing its devaluation. Commanding less respect than in the past, a respect to which they believe they are entitled, both groups see their opinions subjected to doubt or explicit contestation, which contradicts their claims to moral authority. ‘Politics’ here stands for a hegemonic ­crisis – ­a crisis of the naturalized system of values and hierarchies that underpins and explains the socio-­economic order. The invasion of politics amounts to a closure, not an opening up, of the public sphere. From now on it is usurped by the illegitimate elite, which tries to justify itself with the help of unconvincing ideologies. New political projects are perceived as artificial and cynical. This worldview naturally leads to a suspicious attitude towards civic talk based on the premise of the common good. In her book that lent its title to this section, Nina Eliasoph writes about the quest for authenticity that devalues ideological discourses as dishonest: ‘Many Americans avoided speaking in terms of principles when principled talk can be so dishonest, and eloquence so unfairly distributed. Deeds alone should show intent; talk is cheap’ (Eliasoph 1998: 43). In the post-­Soviet space, this lack of ideological confrontation is especially pronounced. Ideologies are perceived as insincere ploys concocted by elites to trick simple people. The confusion and eclecticism spawned by this attitude turns the political field into an arena of confrontation between good and evil instead of political deliberation. Hence the popularity of political frames of civilizational conflict and moral interpretation in Russia, observed by Karine Clément (2018). If these trends have been present for a long time in the US and are very strong in Russia, they are even more pronounced among the Ukrainian working class. According to the results of a Gallup global poll published during my fieldwork, Ukraine had the lowest level of trust in its government in the world for the second year in a row. Whereas the global average proportion of people trusting their government was 56% and the post-­Soviet median 48%, the Ukrainian figure was just 9%. The language of morality, personal integrity and cultural identity fills the space vacated by the language of sociopolitical projects. This

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Figure 10.1.  Space designated for political advertisement and information concerning the presidential elections is fully occupied by private ads offering jobs, loans, home refurbishment services, money for hair and transportation services. Photo taken by the author in April 2019.

is where Ukrainian workers seek explanations for their social predicament. Even more numerous, however, are those who repress all political reflection whatsoever, concentrating on their activities in the private ­domain – ­this was captured on the image of a board for political agitation, which had been spontaneously transformed into a platform for private advertisements (see Figure 10.1). This retreat of the downwardly mobile social group from the discredited public domain into the private sphere is examined in more detail in the following section.

Powerlessness, Moralization, Retreat into the Private Writing about the postsocialist condition of the Romanian working class, Henry Kideckel noted that ‘[w]orker disaffection at the discrepancies between themselves and others is widespread, prompting their occasionally angry politics but more often their utter frustration and resignation’ (Kideckel 2004: 58). But why does this frustration

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not translate into strong political opinions, discussions and eventually movements? I connect the anti-­political attitudes of Ukrainian workers to their pervasive feeling of powerlessness. In her book about apolitical Americans, Nina Eliasoph distinguishes ‘volunteers’ and ‘private people’. Both groups avoid politics, albeit in a different manner. The middle-­class volunteers may have reasonable political views when they discuss them in private; however, they tend to eschew all political talk frontstage, presenting their public concerns as motivated by purely private interests. By doing so, they minimize the risk of discouragement that might arise from discussing broader issues they can do nothing about. Powerlessness here is masked by the expression of self-­interest and focusing on close-­to-­home issues that can be solved relatively easily. ‘Private people’, on the other hand, discuss politics more openly, but in the same detached and passivist manner as one would discuss the weather or other things beyond one’s control. The world of politics for them is ‘an inert, distant, impersonal realm, a boring and scary jumble of facts that did not really touch life’ (Eliasoph 1998: 131). This world is only really accessible to those who ‘have all the facts’; what matters is a technical knowledge of issues, rather than convictions. As a result, the realm of politics is closed off, since the technocratic legitimacy crowds out the space for discussion. Since ‘regular’ people do not know all the details of every political event, political debate for them does not serve any practical purpose, apart from attention-­grabbing; in having ideas above their station, ‘political people’ foolishly imagine they can have an effect on politics. Finally, there are also ‘cynics’ – people who have strong and informed political opinions but who cultivate their disengagement, being ‘smart enough to know that they could not do anything about the problems’ (Eliasoph 1998: 154). All of these positions are recognizable in the postsocialist space. Analytically distinct, they usually blend together in varying proportions, defining the general anti-­political attitude of post-­Soviet workers. They are ‘volunteers’ when they strategically exclude politics from the AMKR chat discussions, because political talk can only demotivate. They are ‘private people’ when they put down ‘smartass politicians’ in their midst; they show hubris in discussing issues that are outside of their sphere of competence. And they are also ‘cynics’ when they conclude that despite their lack of technocratic expertise they do know the most important thing about politics: that it is beyond their control.

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This reasoning produces the ‘neo-­nationalist’ outlook (Kalb 2021), which covers leftist indignation with the growing economic inequality, but also the rightist support for the principle of merit-­based unequal distribution, as well as culturalist ideological frames that interpret the social world in terms of ethnic or civilizational conflicts. In Hungary, it pushed the ethnically majoritarian population of provincial towns towards the conservative party, who voiced their socio-­ economic anxiety in the language of race and morality (Szombati 2018). In Poland, the moralistic frames of just redistribution and of social control over pathological groups shared by supporters of the conservative government give them the sense of social normalcy and good moral standing (Gduła, Dębska and Trepka 2017). At the same time, this worldview is itself pathologized by the Polish oppositional liberal middle class (Ost 2018). In Russia, this social dynamic of poverty and powerlessness similarly crystallizes as passive support for the person at the pinnacle of the state (Clément 2018). The pre-­2022 Russian regime crucially relied on political demobilization (Matveev 2017). The depoliticization of the Ukrainian public leads them in a different ­direction – ­away from the consolidated support of a strong personalist regime. A typical precursor to the ascent of an ‘illiberal’ right-­wing government like those in Hungary and Poland is ‘the popular rejection of the dismantling of the postsocialist commons by neoliberal social democrats’ (Kalb 2019). In the Ukrainian political field, however, there has never been clear-­cut structuration of socially progressive neoliberals and socially conservative nationalists. The general attitude remains anti-­elite and anti-­political tout court. Nevertheless, it grows out of the same habitus of powerlessness, reinterpreted as a virtue. Thus, during the arguments about the appropriateness of political posts in the AMKR chat group, one of the members wrote the key phrase: ‘Let’s discuss everyday [nasushchnye] issues, and not politics. We surely don’t influence politics.’ The feeling of powerlessness accompanies the resolutely pessimistic evaluation of the general situation and long-­term tendencies in the country. In the words of my white-­collar female informants at KZRK, all in their 50s, ‘The situation only keeps constantly getting worse, and this has been going on for the last 29 years. Throughout this whole time we have been waiting for the beginning of Ukraine’s development, but nothing happens, and our whole life has almost passed.’ Saniok, my foreman at Screenwind, took the same position of dismayed spectator on the eve of the presidential election:

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I can only repeat after the song: “The elections are on, the candidates are faggots.”6 I don’t think that anything will change. I just don’t see the future; I don’t even want to look at it. I don’t know what’s going to be, it’s all getting worse and worse. We are not even steering into; we’re diving into this shithole (v zhopu). That’s what I think.

Neither Saniok nor other informants think they are in a position to influence the course of events, and even when they consider it disastrous there is nothing they can do beyond having inconsequential discussions. Instead, their attention is focused on the private sphere, where they feel they do have some influence. Gille writes about postsocialist ‘over-­valorising everyday peace and quiet, routine and ­calculability – ­in sum normality’ (Gille 2010). This normality, as opposed to the routinized crisis or ‘chronic disaster’ ravaging the public sphere (Shevchenko 2009), does not have a place for political language. Contrary to the public sphere, which is constructed as a domain of incessant commercial and political advertisement, the private sphere is non-­ideological and hence authentic. The word ‘propaganda’ is a marker of insincerity and backhanded motivation in the speech of my informants; the positive connotations of the word (e.g. ‘the propaganda of a healthy lifestyle’), which used to be typical in late Soviet speech, are rarely present. An antithesis of the world of politicians moved by self-­interest is children and other objects of supposed genuine common ­interest – ­people and things that are not political (Thévenot 2019). Analysing a similar gravitation towards the private among the working-­class French in the 1980s, Olivier Schwartz coined the concept of ‘the privatism of the poor’: the less economic resources are controlled by a person, the more time they spend in the private sphere: ‘The multiplying exclusions in the economic, residential, scholarly ­systems . . . ­only increase the central organizational value of the family’ (Schwartz 2002: 523). Apolitical, technocratic methods of managing the household thus become more relevant than the abstract principles of political deliberation in the public sphere, hardly present in lived reality. Private informal networks of kinship and close friendship become the horizons of the workers’ social life. The dynamic between the private and public domains is illustrated by my conversation with an employee of the city museum of Kryvyi Rih. Seeing a visitor who was not a school teacher accompanying his class (the most typical visitors to the museum), she immediately concluded that I came with the aim of finding out a way to get back

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wartime decorations of my grandfathers. According to her, this is the most popular motive pushing individuals to visit the ­museum – ­trying to recuperate valuable historical items from the public domain, to which they were transferred by the previous generation of more civic-­minded parents. Efforts to construct a collective memory out of private objects in the late Soviet decades have been replaced by a movement in the opposite direction: the collective narrative has been breaking down into a multitude of isolated private memories7 and material embodiments. The outlook centred on the private sphere is conservative, but this conservatism is pragmatic rather than ideological. The museum guide shared some of her personal political views, namely her outrage about the decommunization policies that went as far as confiscating the wartime banner of the Soviet troops that liberated the city in 1944. However, she was not a communist; what offended her was the attack against the normality of the public space. The initial political marking of that space was ­domesticated – ­that is, ­depoliticized – ­a long time ago. It is precisely its perceived non-­political character that the non-­nationalist population of Kryvyi Rih would like to protect.8 The prism of the private sphere is moralizing and idealist. The political vision, which seeks to identify and address structural problems, is crowded out by the tendency to reduce them to individual character faults. Here is how Gregory Schwartz, who studied workers in Western Ukraine, sums up his observations: ‘The problems workers faced were understood as ones of managers’ morality and character, rather than results of demands and pressures of the market economy, and the place that Ukraine occupies within it’ (Schwartz 2020: 8). The fight against corruption fits this outlook, allowing a suitable generalizing conclusion: inequality, underdevelopment and other problems arise because the people at the top ‘steal too much’, and the cure is to replace them with other, honest people, instead of experimenting with deeper systemic changes in the politico-­economic architecture. An episode from my observations illustrates this attitude. The May Day celebration organized by a leftist group from Kyiv connected to the local chapter of the NPGU union featured a speech by the economist who had analysed the strategies of tax avoidance in the Ukrainian iron ore extraction industry (Antonyuk et al. 2018). The gist of his talk was that the bulk of the morally condemnable schemes involving tax havens are currently legal, which is why the workers need to form their own party, get represented in parliament and change the laws. The speaker received a lot of genuine attention from many workers. However, their takeaway from

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the speech was completely different from the message he wanted to deliver. The working-­class commentators repeatedly reminded him about countless other ways in which the owners of the mines ‘steal’. They spoke about manipulations with the procurement of tools and equipment and about alleged under-­the-­counter amounts of ore, extracted from the mine but not properly accounted for in the company’s documents. The speaker insisted that all these outright illegal practices are but a fraction of profits shifted out of Ukraine through the perfectly legal under-­invoicing of iron ore exports. However, the miners kept returning to the problem of ‘corruption’, which, in their view, was much more damaging. This approach is politically immobilizing: instead of pushing towards collective action that can remedy the situation, it aims to identify and blame those responsible for it. For all their interest, the miners were not going to use the information about alleged and real corruption other than to confirm their pre-­formulated conviction about the corrupt nature of the elite and its moral responsibility for the poor state of society. The focus on individual wrongdoings, elevated to the status of the main social problem, collapses the traditional structure of the ideological field, with its left and right flanks, into a simpler picture of an opposition between the corrupt and the decent. The redefinition of political legitimacy on the basis of morality helped cement a coalition of moral entrepreneurs and eventually brought it to power in Poland (Heurtaux 2009). Studying political attitudes in Slovakia, Nicolette Makovicky and her co-­authors noticed that for all the differences between the far-­right nationalist conservative Marian Kotleba and the progressive liberal pro-­EU NGO activist Zuzana Čaputová, their electorate significantly overlapped: many people considered voting for either of the two. This ideological blindness results from the substitution of a political polemic with debates about civility, morality and personal integrity: Key to these discussions was the term ‘decency’ (slušnosť), evoked in equal measure by liberal civic activists and conservative centrists, as well as anti-­ system groups on the far right. . . . Part of the appeal of political figures such as Kotleba and Čaputová was their commitment to the restoration of inner ­truths – ­such as common ­decency – ­that lie within the folk (ľud, Volk). As such, contemporary European fascism and contemporary European liberalism draw from a common well. (Makovicky, Larson and Buzalka 2020)

This quest for ‘decency’ sheds light on the competition between two moral orders. On the one hand, my informants were outraged

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over the injustices brought about by hopelessly corrupt politicians and demanded a ‘normal life’, roughly corresponding to the Weberian ideal of disembedded legal rationality. On the other hand, in practice they followed a different moral order, built on obligations before kin and friends. This duality is typical for countries whose political life revolves around the idea of the anti-­corruption fight: the standards of ‘decency’ are incredibly fluid and depend on the position of the actors involved. Catherine Wanner (2005) identifies this misrecognition in her studies of the Ukrainian elite. The abstract call for ‘decency’ in the eyes of the law and the concrete need to remain ‘decent’ in terms of the vernacular moral economy reproduce each other: Stigmatization [of corruption] is general, concerns public morality, is usually abstract, and when nourished by reference to personal experiences, this is often in a context where the complainant sees himself as a ‘victim’ and/or considers that the rules of proper behaviour have not been respected; shame, which is fundamentally situational, plays upon another register, that of the pressure of the family circle and its networks, that of ‘what will people say’, and this register favours rather than impedes the practices of the corruption complex. (Olivier de Sardan 1999: 47)

The distinction, then, is drawn between those who are in politics and hence get the chance to steal (on a scale that matters to society), and those who cannot participate in this massive transgression. The postsocialist working class sees the state as a tool of private enrichment from which they are cut off. ‘Our people are made to steal, and whoever gets into politics will end up stealing’, said Olga at some point. Her friend Misha was quite open to the prospect of petty mugging or stealing, all the while condemning the elite for embezzling money. To him, these practices are very different because of the enormous power differential between him and the elite. The idea of unequal distribution of social capital was parsimoniously expressed by Alexei: ‘How will you fight? The kum of the mine director is a state prosecutor. My kum is a fucking locksmith!’ The perceived powerlessness of my interlocutors discourages them from taking an interest in politics, which lies outside of their control. Their economic and political deprivation pushes them into the private domain, the domain of normalcy, technocracy and non-­ ideological authenticity. This stance, ultimately political, is subjectively formulated as resistance to politics. Rejecting structural and generalized frameworks (political ideologies), the workers instead focus on moral explanations of the social world, valuing personal ‘decency’ above all political declarations. The following section will

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examine the vision of political elite corresponding to these dispositions.

Constructing the Other: Powerful, Corrupt, Inauthentic A large part of my interlocutors’ monologues belong to the genre of post-­Soviet everyday talk that Nancy Ries calls ‘litanies and laments’: ‘a genre that asserts the innocence of the relatively powerless (which is, paradoxically, a form of moral power) . . . a collective complaint about a subservient social position and a contradiction of the “official story”’ (Ries 1997: 89). Exploring power relations, these monologues provide moral commentary that helps construct and reinforce their collective identity as ‘good people’, whose suffering and endurance attest to their honesty and morality. This collectivity of the weak and virtuous is opposed to that of the powerful and corrupt. The unbridgeable victim–villain dichotomy is reinforced in everyday talk; paradoxically, the anti-­political discourse brings people together under a shared political identity. This discourse offers no way to change the lamentable state of things through collective action. The only hope it proposes is that of an extraordinary savior figure: society can only be redeemed by rare individuals, whose integrity and wisdom are innate. Nancy Ries observed such elitist eulogies addressed to the late Soviet human rights activist Andrei Sakharov; in my field, the same attitude is clearly recognizable in the speeches of workers and union activists, convinced that they are doomed to subalternity unless a ‘decent’ personality acts on their behalf. The overriding dichotomy between the powerless and powerful conflates various dominant institutions, groups and factions into one entity, involved in governing and allocating resources. Similar to the postsocialist Serbian workers (Kojanic 2017), my Ukrainian interlocutors amalgamated them all in a syncretic concept of vlast (literally, ‘authority’), which stands in opposition to liudi (people) or narod (the singular people). In their understanding, vlast is not just an analytical aggregation; it implies a certain level of subjective connections that make the elite a Thompsonian class-­for-­itself. Boris, a miner from Sukha Balka, was convinced that the only way forward would be a complete overhaul of all the leadership because ‘The whole top, almost all the bosses are connected. It’s not like I came from there, I came from there, we don’t know each other. They are all related.’ Hence the impossibility of making any choice from among

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the options offered by the institutions of representative democracy. The only reasonable choice, in his view, would be in favour of ‘a person without the black spot’ – an outsider untainted by previous implication in the political elite, such as the comedian Zelenskyi. In his analysis of Czechoslovak liberal dissidents, Gil Eyal shows how they were focused on personal authenticity, which was presumed to give them pastoral power over the general public. Not unlike Christian sectarians, they set up a parallel legal-­cultural domain, morally superior to that of the governing regime (Eyal 2000). The same anti-­political, individualist and moralistic attitude prevailed among the late Soviet intelligentsia, which rejected the entire state socialist system as irreparably flawed (Yurchak 2006). The subaltern ‘normal people’, equally distant from both camps of discourse production, responded by rejecting both kinds of authoritative discourse, distancing themselves from the enthusiasts of the regime as well as from its critics (Kurtović and Sargsyan 2019). Retaining the moralist and anti-­political criticism of the regime, the subalterns have expanded it even further, condemning all political talk as insincere. Rejecting official political narratives as falsified or biased, the post-­ Soviet litany offers various vernacular explanations of the world uncovering sensational truths allegedly hidden behind the surface. Thus, ‘slavery’ is a very popular concept in such lay accounts. My interlocutors like to insist that they are nothing more than slaves if one takes into account their low incomes, hardly sufficient to cover basic life costs. Slavery was mentioned in almost every public speech that had to do with the 2020 strike, signifying anything from low wages to dangerous working conditions to an arrogant style of communication. This rhetoric is born from workers’ efforts to explain the persistent limitations of their habitus. Seeing few signs of efficient and visible Soviet-­style state repressive and ideological apparatuses governing society, the workers nevertheless find that their life chances remain quite restricted. There is no intrusive party-­state to externally regulate their trajectories, but somehow they are still limited in their choices, despite the declarations of the mainstream ideology that nothing stands in the way of an individual determined to pursue the path of ‘self-­development’. Rejecting structural explanations, the voluntarist worldview generates pervasive suspicion that the elites govern (upravliayut) and monitor (kontroliruyut) the lives of the subaltern classes directly and secretly. The invasion of political messages in the workers’ chat is thus seen as a deliberate plot by the management, rather than something to be taken at face value.

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The imagined total but hidden control also extends to the sphere of culture and knowledge production, where the coexistence and competition of different historical and social truths gives away their politicized nature. Here is what an AMKR worker had to say about the usual historical polemics on Second World War memorial days: I will tell you one thing: several more governments will change, a few more generations will pass, the world will change again, everything will be rewritten, and I will not be surprised if this war is completely erased from the world’s history, or if everything is simply written in a different manner. I won’t say anything more for now.

Conspiracy theorizing is a way to make sense of the chaotic and unjust world for subalterns, for whom politics is a distant game of elites. Discussing the Covid-­19 vaccination in the AMKR chat, sceptics represented their lifelong interactions with the state as an endless chain of dispossessions and wondered why the same government would all of a sudden make a U-­turn and distribute vaccines for free. A malicious secret agenda was the only rational explanation in this framework. Politics is constructed as a domain of smoke and mirrors to dispel. The situation is complicated by the confusion between conspiracy theorizing that has no empirical basis and the actually existing political conspiracy that enables state capture by private interests. Given that the information on both types of illicit collusion has the same ­status – ­common knowledge without any legal ­confirmation – ­it is not easy to discern between the good and bad types of conspiracy discourse (Marinov and Popova 2021: 3). To the fluidity and inconsistency of political discourses, my interlocutors oppose the authenticity of their own convictions, the proof of which lies in their unchangeable nature. But if the only worthy political opinions are those which people hold as their inner convictions, changing them would mean compromising one’s own personal integrity. This leaves no space for agonistic politics, turning every debate into an antagonistic conflict between good and evil. Within the political field, this conflict opposes ethnic nationalists and the carriers of the ‘East Slavic’ identity. On another level, it results in the opposition between the working class and the politics as such, incompatible with proper human sociality. Everyday attitudes of Kryvyi Rih workers are anti-­political both by their own account and in the sense of politics as a public sphere open for pluralist democratic contestation. However, politics in a

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wider sense is quite present in the speech of my interlocutors, most of whom regularly draw connections between their everyday experience and the broader world, extrapolate their personal circumstances onto the economically defined community of fate, and draw normative conclusions guided by their vernacular morality, emotions and sense of justice. What political programmes emanate out of this disposition?

Paternalist Technocracy, Authoritarian Anti-corruption I want a default. I want all this economy to crash, so that the IMF does not suck anything out of us anymore, and then the people will rebuild everything again. Then they would just kill off all those oligarchs and understand that they need to use their own brains to restore the country and to survive. I realize this is radical, and also unreal, because nobody will allow this to happen. Because since we have already been put on the list of the third world countries, we will not get out of this.

This redemption plot, sketched by Zhanna while she was still working in the mine, has a number of important elements. She envisions a violent economic and political crisis as the only way to bring about the political change that will empower the people and rid it of the corrupt elite. However, she is quick to admit that it is not a viable scenario, because it goes against the interests of the powerful elites ruling the world on a global scale. I argue that it is precisely the feeling of one’s own collective political powerlessness, discussed above, that leads my interlocutors to seek redemption in authoritarian scenarios, where justice is brought by violence inflicted onto elites by the state apparatus in a top-­down manner. Radical renewal of the elites is the main theme of every reflection on what a positive social change in Ukraine should look like. The current elites are generally seen as illegitimate usurpers who remain in positions of power thanks to their personal connections and empty ideological phrases. When asked about his voting intentions, Misha replied with an old joke: ‘As for the candidates, I would take them all out into the field, make them face the wall and shoot them between the eyes.’ One of the lay criteria of good governance suggested by my interlocutors is the ability to ensure state capacity. The longing for a powerful state is not necessarily a sign of undemocratic politics; state weakness is here congruent with the generalized socio-­economic chaos that characterizes the whole post-­Soviet history of Ukraine.

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It is telling that even Zhanna, right before declaring her desire for an ultimate crisis, identified the second presidential term of Leonid Kuchma in 1999–2004 as the best time she can remember. This period was characterized by the increasingly repressive state apparatus, attacks against journalists and the parliamentary opposition, as well as the formation of the oligarchic class. Zhanna is quite sensitive to such issues, but in this case other dimensions turned out to be more salient: Of course, not being interested in politics we did not understand how the country was being carved up, how it all was being sold at rock-­bottom prices and we were being transferred into the state of slavery together with those enterprises. But the economic stability was high, people started living a normal life, doing refurbishments, buying things and ­equipment – ­even though they were taking loans for it, but they were able to pay them off quickly because wages had risen and were stabilized. It was Kuchma who signed a decree obliging enterprises to pay wages on specific dates of each month.

The state’s capacity to regulate economic and political markets efficiently is understood as a proxy for the general well-­being of the subaltern classes. This breeds scepticism, if not hostility, towards purely ‘political’ protests that further weaken the state. Thus, on 20 March 2021, liberal and nationalist activists organized a large rally in front of the president’s office in Kyiv. They demanded the liberation of Serhiy Sternenko, a nationalist politician accused of murdering and kidnapping political opponents (on Sternenko’s vigilante activities, see Shukan 2019). For the liberal NGOs who massively supported Sternenko’s cause, the whole trial was unjust, based on bogus charges, politically motivated and corrupt. Fearing an escalation, the police did not prevent the protesters demonstrating their rage, up to and including breaking the doors of the president’s office and spray painting the entrance. This provoked the following comment from a member of the AMKR chat: ‘And here we are, wanting a “just” wage! If rampage [bespredel] takes place next to the roost of the country’s boss [khata pakhana strany] and nobody is accountable for this, why on earth would a capitalist make concessions?’ According to this logic, a state that can protect itself from destabilizing agents will also have sufficient resources to limit the power of oligarchic elites and protect subalterns. Alternatively, state capture by corrupt elites leads to state failure. Commenting on Ukraine’s post-­Maidan trajectory, Gosha concluded: ‘Sooner or later it will be carved up, like it used to be all the time. Throughout all of its history, Ukraine was constantly under someone else. Now it’s finally over,

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you’ve got independence; work, you guys, you wanted an independence. So why are you stealing, asshole? Just because.’ This reasoning reinforces technocratic authoritarianism, opposed to the corrupt domain of political ideologies. Until 2020, the leadership of Belarus used to be consistently one of the most popular in Ukraine, according to polls. Food imports from Belarus were so popular that some Ukrainian producers were trying to pass their own for them: allegedly the Soviet industry standards, still regulating production in Belarus, are healthier and more organic than the newer Ukrainian and EU standards. Alexei expressed the longing for a political leader like the Belarusian president Aliaksandr Lukashenka, known as ‘the father’ (batka), who has allegedly preserved industrial potential and the well-­being of the country with ruthlessly authoritarian methods: I hurt for my country [za derzhavu obidno]: all the [military] equipment was in Ukraine. So rich. Belarus did not have shit, but Batka . . . Here, they have been stealing for thirty years, people are paupers, the country is pauperized, I don’t know. It’s time to shoot everyone already, shoot them all. You enter Verkhovna Rada [parliament], close your eyes and you won’t hit a wrong target.

China represented another archetypal model of a modernizing dictatorship that ensures economic growth and redistribution by being ruthless towards corrupt officials. For Gosha, Xi’s China and Pinochet’s Chile are equally valid examples of an efficient anti-­ corruption policy. Seeing an authoritarian state as the only agent able to bring order into society, he was wary of revolutions and other manifestations of the subaltern classes’ agency because political mobilizations are nothing more than manipulations, in which elites exploit unwitting people for their cynical ends: They should be all killed, like in China. Some revolution, I don’t know. How many of them have taken place, so weird. People gave their lives in order to live better, but in fact, the stealing got even worse. . . . I don’t know what has to happen to make our country normal. Should everyone just kill each other? Or some dictatorship, a Pinochet? To execute them all and put his own people in their place. Or like China. Here, we need to be like China: once you steal something, it’s a firing squad. And nobody will steal.

According to memes reposted by Kryvyi Rih workers, China is not only extremely strict with its officials (‘over 10 thousand corrupt officials have been executed in China from 2000 to 2009. Today, China flourishes’) but also extremely generous with its workers: one of the memes alleged that the retirement age in China has been lowered to

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55 years for men and 50 for women, and every pensioner is entitled to an annual trip to one of fifteen countries, among which are Cyprus, the Netherlands, Egypt and Greece. The pension system imagined in China corresponded to the neoliberal defined contribution system, which seemed to Ukrainian workers fairer than the greying-­out and collectivist pay-­as-­you-­go system: In China, there is no Pension Fund, but there are pensions! During the whole life, a part of one’s wage is put aside onto a frozen account, and the person cannot spend that money. Nobody, not even the state has the access to it. And when the Chinese retire, their account is unfrozen. Pensioners become very wealthy, they start living their life to the fullest and travelling! And when a Chinese pensioner dies, the remaining money is transferred to the relatives. Perfect!

Another fantasy in the same vein was offered by Singapore, whose economic success was widely ascribed to its autocratic regime. The administrator of the AMKR chat offered the following utopia: I like the way it is in Singapore. They say there are no prisons there, and only three types of punishment: a fine, a public beating with sticks aired on the TV channels, and a humane execution with an injection. After the death sentence is passed, they give the convict six months to be acquitted, after that they give him a shot and the soul is gone. I wish they sent our members of parliament to Singapore for a year on probation. Whoever returns from Singapore alive and not beaten with sticks a year later deserves to be a member of parliament. There have been no murders in Singapore for around twenty years, and they have forgotten about corruption long ago.

The appeal of a strongman weeding out nepotism and corruption with brutal repression transcends classes in Ukraine. Pinochet, mentioned by Gosha, has been an iconic figure for the post-­Soviet liberal intelligentsia for decades, representing the ruthless fight against socialists and all sorts of incompetent populists. Several weeks after our talk with Gosha, at the height of the presidential campaign, the Chilean stadium executions were approvingly cited by a campaign staffer of the incumbent president Poroshenko. Singapore, too, was popularized by liberal journalists, who extolled Lee Kuan Yew’s policies. Among other historical figures praised in Ukraine as bulwarks against clientelism and populism and promoters of technocratic governance are Margaret Thatcher and Otto von Bismarck. Ironically, the subaltern classes have reappropriated these liberal icons, imbuing them with a slightly different sense. In the interpretation of my informants, Bismarck is foremost an enemy of the useless and parasitic state bureaucracy and not the nationalist conservative

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nobleman who fought against the socialist revolutionary menace. Even the archetypical enemy of miners, Margaret Thatcher, was cited favourably by Olga as a strong woman who fought corrupt elites and their obsolete policies in the name of social progress. In the same way, the disembedding policies of Lee Kuan Yew and Augusto Pinochet were toned down in this narrative, while the accent was placed on their disruptive anti-­elite violence. The workers projected their own social ideals (paternalist social protection, authoritarian anti-­corruption and technocratic commitment to economic growth) onto these figures. A poll about political attitudes and the competence of Ukrainians conducted in 2021 showed not only the expected general lack of interest in politics (47% are not interested, and this proportion is greater among the youth). More interestingly, respondents attributed powers to the president that he does not have (to decide on the state budget, to dismiss local councils, to regulate tariffs and taxes). Mayors and other local leaders were also systematically imagined to have more powers than they really have. The poll showed confusion sown by the illegible multitude of parties and institutions and a demand for ‘a man of destiny’ able to claim personal responsibility. At the same time, there was no consensus as to which historical figure is the ideal politician: Stalin figured there alongside the wartime nationalist leader Bandera, Russian emperor Peter the Great, and Angela Merkel. That is, ideological visions are not unanimously shared, if at all relevant for assessing the ‘quality’ of politics; what really matters is the concentration of political power and the will to use it for the benefit of the powerless. In his classic analysis of a development project in Lesotho, James Ferguson conceptualized development policies as an ‘anti-­politics machine’. Presented as politically neutral projects aimed at improving local standards of living, they help entrench the state and depoliticize poverty (Ferguson [1990] 1994). During the 1990s, the global agenda shifted from development to anti-­corruption: it became the new global consensus, a technocratic ideology bridging all political cleavages. This discourse accommodates the logic of the free market argument against corruption, while often omitting the democratic argument (Krastev 2004b). Corruption is constructed as the main obstacle on the way towards national development, but it remains a blurry concept with a constantly expanding definition. The obsession with corruption leads to a growing distrust of government ­institutions – ­which, in turn, only reinforces the conviction that they are infested with corruption.

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For all the real problems of informality and patronage, which structure postsocialist political economies, these phenomena are not as unique and globally unprecedented as the lay imaginary presents them. Doing his research in India, Jonathan Parry observed his interlocutors’ similar conviction about the extremely high level of corruption in their country. He showed that it is this very conviction, exaggerated by all practical measures, that pushes most people towards illicit transactions (Parry 2000). The corruption discourse is a performative response to grievances that have been traditionally addressed through political action. In the words of Ivan Krastev, ‘Anticorruption sentiments are driven not by the actual level of corruption but by the general disappointment with the changes and the rising social inequality’ (Krastev 2004a: 71). Anti-­corruption becomes the only language that anti-­political individuals can use to speak about politics and express their grievances. Replacing ideological politics with a moral choice between a corrupt government and clean opposition, this language is responsible for the advent of unstable ‘protest vote democracies’ in Eastern Europe (Krastev 2004a: 69–70), involving occasional mass mobilizations. Having no clear political agenda, these mobilizations (Maidan of 2004 and Euromaidan of 2014 in Ukraine) focus on abstract demands for ‘dignity’, ‘European life’ and ‘justice’. The discourse of corruption helps define the very domain of the political and draw the boundaries of the state: ‘it plays this dual role of enabling people to construct the state symbolically and to define themselves as citizens’ (Gupta 1995: 389). Moreover, the systemic (as opposed to episodic) corruption discourse helps build a critical and cohesive class consciousness, pushing the subaltern population to identify the elite, rather than other subalterns, as the agents responsible for all negative manifestations (Sanchez 2016). However, this view of corruption as a structural force also demobilizes the workers, making resistance senseless in their eyes: ‘if diverse elites are believed to deliberately and effectively cooperate with one another in an attempt to divest working people of their security and standards of living, then the collective power which they possess seems all the more difficult to counter’ (Sanchez 2016: 90). Both the state and the citizenship produced by such a discourse are quite specific. The state is the embodiment of elite corruption, a tool captured by oligarchs and other villains, the materialized vlast (power), but this same vlast is a provider of rights and entitlements, the protector of freedoms and the guarantor of material redistribution. It is also the provider of order, the agent who ought to exercise

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punitive justice against the corrupt elite. This triple idea of the state has been conceptualized in Julia Eckert’s work on India. The relative weight of each aspect changes according to the political and economic conjuncture, and all of them are responsible for redrawing boundaries of citizenship, distinguishing between ‘the legitimate and illegitimate, worthy and unworthy, genuine and fake citizen’ (Eckert 2005: 26). Often, the workers’ systemic view of corruption can go along with the ‘episodic’ view (Sanchez 2016: 128), which often finds cultural explanations for corruption and thereby attributes it to the culturally distinct other. The hierarchies of deservedness might not necessarily coincide with ethnolinguistic cleavages, transcending identity politics. Justifying themselves in front of the liberal public, far right movements in Ukraine constantly reiterate that their main aim is to fight corrupt bureaucrats and politicians, excluded from the moral community. One such far right politician quipped that his agenda includes ‘ethical cleansing’. Demands for hard-­line policies addressed to the state, known as ‘penal populism’, express the same desire for a technocratically established order that will protect society from chaotic ‘politics’. The social demand for technocratic governance freed from politics is well known to Ukrainian politicians. Many presidential candidates in the 2019 campaign, both ethnonationalist and those appealing to the Russophone population, bet on the image of a politically indifferent expert in technical ­issues – ­an image that is only too familiar on the local level. The stereotypical image of a ‘trusty manager’ (krepkiy khoziaistvennik) has become an object of parodies and sarcasm in the liberal public sphere, which associates such politicians with patronage and corruption, presenting them as a Soviet residue. However, this paternalist technocratic discourse has also been borrowed by a grassroots liberal party that claims to break completely with the habitual patronage practices and to embody ‘real, European’ politics. Here is how the party’s website introduces Latsis, the owner of the Screenwind factory and a member of the party’s local chapter: he ‘never took part in political projects but he understands the city’s need for competent young and decent leaders’. According to Latsis, a mayor ‘is just a manager of the project called “The City”, and his economy should work well’. The punitive and the managerial dimensions of the anti-­corruption drive come together in the desire for efficient technocracy not constrained by politics. The ideals sketched in this section were highlighted during the presidential election of 2019. The challenger to the traditional politi-

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cal elite, the comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyi, satisfied the crucial condition of ‘not having the black spot’ of an insider, but how good was his response to the demands of an authoritarian anti-­corruption politics geared towards state capitalism that at the same time leaves enough space for the private initiative of the working class? In the following section, I will present my observations from the period of the presidential campaign and its aftermath.

Presidential Elections Viewed from Below Electoral moments are rarely studied in their own right as transformative social events highlighting values, claims and dispositions. One rare example is a recent analysis of a local election in an Indian municipality, where the voters’ desire to retain good connections with all the local dignitaries pushed them to lie massively, reassuring every candidate of their support. The consequences of these lies, produced by a clash between patronage pyramids, grew out of proportion, and the general mistrust tore the social fabric, which was not repaired even several years after the election (Govindrajan 2018). The research cited above was grounded in the situation itself, analysed on the micro level of a relatively closed community. My approach, instead, is informed by a more open perspective that acknowledges the ‘transcendentality of situations’ (Berger and Gayet-­ Viaud 2012: 15–16). The observed situation is not an object of interest per se but rather a point of entry that opens onto other levels and dimensions, crystallizing the contradictions and backgrounds that are valuable beyond the immediate context of the observed event. With this perspective in mind, what insights did my observations of the electoral campaign of 2019 contribute to the main research problematic of this study? The 2019 presidential election saw the incumbent president Petro Poroshenko confronting an unlikely competitor: Volodymyr Zelenskyi, an actor and producer whose comedy show was famous for making fun of politics and politicians. From 2015 to 2019, he starred in the popular TV series The Servant of the People, playing the role of a humble schoolteacher who becomes famous after his rant against the pervasive corruption, misery and inefficiency is recorded by one of his students and posted online. The teacher is then elected president of Ukraine and has to confront the world of politics, going against its conventional ways. One of the episodes features his dream, in which he arrives to the tribune in parliament to deliver a

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speech in front of hostile corrupt deputies, takes two machine guns and shoots indiscriminately everyone present in the debating chamber. This scene, as well as the general message and mood of the show, captured the feelings and attitudes of my interlocutors, presented in the sections above. Zelenskyi’s nomination in real life had great resonance thanks to a strategic use of resources offered by 1+1 media holding, where he worked. The holding is owned by the oligarch Ihor Kolomoiskyi, self-­exiled in Israel after a falling out with President Poroshenko in 2015. This gave grounds to suspect that Zelenskyi is Kolomoiskyi’s puppet, but he still managed to present himself as an independent businessman who does not owe anything to his business partner.9 For the first time in Ukraine’s recent history, elections were discursively centred around a choice between politics and anti-­political ‘decency’. The central question for my informants was whether Zelenskyi’s claim of being an outsider was trustworthy. The incumbent president’s campaign was built around the nationalist slogans of ‘Language, Army, Faith’; it extolled the virtues of political expertise as opposed to the inevitable blunders of a novice and spread the fear of an imminent Russian invasion in the event of Zelenskyi’s victory. None of these themes was relevant for the majority of my informants. What mattered was the sincerity of the anti-­political message, which was called into doubt; some of my informants were hesitant to vote for Zelenskyi because they suspected backhand deals between him and the oligarchs he criticized. But if Zelenskyi’s sincerity could be doubted, there was no doubt about the insincerity of his incumbent rival, the son of a Soviet functionary, an oligarch, a co-­founder of the Party of Regions and a born-­again nationalist. The distinction between the ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ and the ‘East Slavic’ political camps, mobilized by Poroshenko to present himself as a virtuous pro-­ European nationalist, was irrelevant for people who saw both camps as equally corrupt. One immediately observable trait that my interlocutors associated with the corrupt side of politics is its complexity. They saw an intention to fool people behind the multitude of lookalike parties and institutions. Identifying with Zelenskyi as an outsider in this complex world, they were afraid that Poroshenko might corner him at debates by ‘talking politics’ – something at which no normal person should be expected to excel. On the next day after the debates, my co-­ workers were rather content with Zelenskyi’s performance: instead of Poroshenko, who just kept dismissing all of his opponent’s claims as incompetent, Zelenskyi showed some proper creativity by invit-

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ing people to send him questions they wanted to ask. He read them aloud, around ten questions at a time, and suggested Poroshenko choose which one to answer. Proper politics for them is neither a competition of expertise nor a competition of ideologies and programmes, but rather a competition of wits. The emic verb zagruzit (‘to load’) helps one to understand this attitude: the ability to ‘load’ an opponent in a public conversation, to be quick, witty and eloquent, to make your opponent pause and search for words is a valuable personal trait for the working class, no less important than prowess in a physical fight. Drawing direct parallels with their everyday lives, Andrei and Yarik understood good politics to be the art of speech and presentation. Once you have a good idea, what matters is to stick to it and to rhetorically win over the opponent, ‘loading’ him with creative stunts and wits. This reduction of politics to external performance in the case of the ‘passive’ working-­class majority chimes with the quest for inner ‘passionarity’, which preoccupies the activist faction and nationalist liberal civil society. This term comes from the parascientific theories of Nikolay Gumilev, the Soviet historian who conceptualized the history of humanity as a succession of ‘passionarian explosions’, akin to seismic eruptions, provoking migrations and conquests. A high or low degree of passionarity to him is an innate quality of an ethnos, which signifies its predisposition to expansion. In the Ukrainian everyday vocabulary of the 2010s, this concept was adopted in a slightly different mode: for nationalist and liberal observers, passionarity is rather an individual positive trait, a person’s predisposition to take an active political stance and to stand up for their values. The ‘passionaries’ (pasionarii) are opposed to the majority of the population, passive, uninformed and uninterested. In the context of the 2019 elections, this distinction was activated by supporters of Poroshenko, who saw themselves as passionate activists among a sea of indifferent and uneducated voters of Zelenskyi. It harks back to the theories of the Ukrainian fascist writer Dmytro Dontsov, who interpreted human history as an interaction between two anthropological types: the ‘knights’, a caste of warriors and rulers, and the ‘Provençaux’ (provansaltsi), the inert masses who do not have strong opinions and should not have a say in politics (Erlacher 2020). However, between the two nationalist ­moments – ­Dontsov and ­Poroshenko – ­one can spot a similar valorization of an uneven propensity for activism in the Soviet concept of aktiv – the informal body of loyal and active members of any given collectivity, on whom the leadership can rely and who constitute its succession

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pool. What matters here is the vernacular character of this distinction; its relation to the political–humane divide; and its aversion to the idea of agonistic political debate. The activist passionaries, like my informants supporting Poroshenko, already know the truth and need to convert others rather than engage in polemics with them. At the same time, others do not believe in the rational deliberation process either, relying rather on rhetorical performance. By lending one’s sincere support to a presidential candidate, even to the anti-­system outsider Zelenskyi, one is not fully apolitical anymore. How do supporters of Zelenskyi rationalize their objective engagement with the corrupted world of politics? They activate the attitude that I call pre-­emptive scepticism. During a lunch break at Screenwind, the team that works on non-­ standard custom ordered windows was listening to the story of their colleague: he was telling them about his recent trip to Uman, a town in central Ukraine, where he got into an argument with a local taxi driver, who supported Poroshenko. The driver threatened to call in his local friends and beat him up for supporting Zelenskyi, but the colleague scared him away with his willingness to fight. After this heroic account, he asked: ‘What happens if Zelenskyi wins?’ His comrades replied, alluding to the profession of their favourite candidate: ‘Nothing, we’ll just laugh while staying hungry. Yeah, now we’re weeping, then we’ll have a laugh, that’s all.’ This pre-­emptive disenchantment with Zelenskyi persisted after his victory. Another lunchtime talk on a random topic finished with a generalizing self-­consolation: ‘But now we have Zelenskyi, so everything will change! ­Or . . . ­he will change himself, haha!’ Contrary to the young Andrei, who confessed that Zelenskyi embodies his last hope for a clean politics, the others acted more cautiously, preparing themselves for the possibility that a miracle may not happen this time: politics will likely remain what it is now, Zelenskyi will probably disappoint, and a sceptical attitude needs to be maintained in order to preserve mental balance and basic self-­respect. Researching political attitudes of precarious social groups in France, Céline Braconnier shows that economic and social marginalization does not always lead to a lack of interest in politics. Sometimes, extremely marginalized people are very invested in the political process: ‘It is as if the political kept embodying for these populations the hope for change, unlike for other, less fragile groups. Nevertheless, these attitudes, rather conducive to participation, do not systematically extend into the sphere of practices’ (Braconnier 2015: 180). That is, even those who hope a certain election or another

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political event will lead to improvement do not take their hopes seriously enough to mobilize behind ‘their’ candidate. A wiser option is to curb one’s enthusiasm, maintaining the traditional sceptical posture. Having won the election, Zelenskyi surrounded himself with a host of close friends. Many key government positions (the heads of SBU and the President’s office, many ministerial posts and the leadership of parliament) were distributed between the president’s closest followers or former employees; other positions were taken by experts having a technocratic aura and celebrities from the world of sports and culture. This patrimonial inclination did not compromise Zelenskyi in the eyes of his ­supporters – ­as long as the new team of managers did not employ members of the old elite, it was still regarded as a meritocracy. Hiring close friends is a reasonable policy within a framework that judges politics through the lens of family relations.10 Zelenskyi made sure to remain within the anti-­political, private domain by staying away from all ideology. SN, the pro-­president party de facto created in mid-­2019, announced libertarianism as its ideology. In November of the same year, the party leader declared an ideological shift towards ‘something between liberal and socialist views’. Three months later, the party’s ideology was redefined as ‘Ukrainian centrism’. This lasted for a year, until in February 2021 the head of the party mentioned ‘radical centrism’ among its ideological priorities. This eclecticism does not disturb the voters, who see ideologies as a superficial element that does not highlight real intentions. What were the first steps of the newly elected president in Kryvyi Rih, his native city, and how did his voters react to them? In July 2019, three months after his electoral victory and a few months before the parliamentary elections, Zelenskyi visited Kryvyi Rih to talk about the renovation of the local airport with the mayor of the city, Yuriy Vilkul. The tone he used and the arguments he offered were exactly the kind of anti-­system politics that my interlocutors must have hoped for. Here is their conversation about the lack of funds needed for the renovation, recorded by the press: – Find money and help your native city. Your family can help, too. . . . Can you find money in your native city that has been electing you as a mayor for so many years? We as the government can support the runway, this is our strategic task. And you as a mayor should gather entrepreneurs. Do you want to be a mayor in 2020? – Well, maybe even afterwards. – Oh that’s too long [Kuda uzh dalshe]. (Sevostyanova 2019)

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Zelenskyi dismissed the language of legal formalities and political procedures and switched to a mode of sincerity and ‘real talk’, tearing down false decorum to relativize the omnipotence of the local elite in the face of the supreme direct representative of the people. The accusations implied in his words were implicit; he did not threaten Vilkul with lawsuits and legal punishments but made it clear that his wrongdoings are not a secret to anyone. Switching from the legal to the moral discourse, Zelenskyi offered a path towards repentance and achieving social harmony. On the same visit, Zelenskyi had a conversation with the top management of AMKR, in which he touched upon the issue of the environment, Kryvyi Rih’s permanent problem. With its open-­hearth steel furnaces and coke chemical plant, AMKR is the main contributor of air pollution, which has caused high levels of cancer and other diseases. The management of the company had refused to let in environmental inspectors sent by the government, citing private property rights. When the general director of AMKR predictably mentioned the programme of partnership whereby the factory renovates trolleybuses, sidewalks and parks, Zelenskyi said this was not enough and suggested that AMKR ‘apologize financially’ to the thousands of people who got cancer because of the factory’s postponed modernization (Tytarenko 2019). After this conversation, AMKR was visited by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). The officers spent the whole day at the factory and decommissioned the newly installed continuous-­casting machine, which they allegedly found was a source of radiation. This heavy-­handed approach was ambiguously received by workers. One type of reaction was to support the crackdown against the crooked management, which was allegedly in bed with Poroshenko’s ­government – ­the kind of reaction Zelenskyi probably counted on, associating all the evils with the old corrupt elite and promising to put an end to such practices by whatever means possible. Some workers speculated that ‘the Hindu’ had himself asked the new government to rein in managers who steal his profits whilst claiming he personally is an important investor interested in the development of the city. However, other workers took the side of the management and decried the outrageous actions of Zelenskyi and the SBU. According to them, this was an illegal encroachment on private property, and the conflict in general would end in the financial ruin of the factory, which would leave them unemployed. The conflict between radically disconnected anti-­politics and embedded paternalism was created by the election of Zelenskyi,

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which saw workers faced with a real-­life choice between discarding corrupt politics tout court or benefiting from the social contracts that embed such politics. A year later, this conflict was made clear in the KZRK miners’ strike of 2020. Expecting little from the mayor, who embodied the old elite, miners had much greater hopes for president Zelenskyi. Many of them expected him to speak out in support of the strikers from his native city, against the oligarchic owners. His silence on this issue was often explained by the sabotage of the media, belonging to the same oligarchs, and of corrupt officials. A delegation of miners went to Kyiv and spent several days and nights in front of the president’s office, trying to speak directly with Zelenskyi. Their mission failed: neither Zelenskyi nor his representatives met with the miners, and he never mentioned this issue publicly. Zelenskyi’s lukewarm attitude was probably due to the process of his quiet rapprochement with the most powerful oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, who owns 50 per cent of KZRK. The candidate nominated by SN for the mayoral elections was Dmytro Shevchyk, the general director of one of Akhmetov’s major mining enterprises, TsGOK. By joining forces with the oligarch who controls the bulk of the city’s economic assets, Zelenskyi hoped to accumulate enough resources to achieve a symbolically important victory in his hometown. Shevchyk also kept silent about the miners’ strike. His rhetoric built on the general promises of economic modernization and political renewal. However, these talking points were not convincing for the miners, who felt abandoned by the president for whom they had voted. Vilkul’s team certainly did not get rid of the ‘black spot’ that marked them as the old and corrupt elite. However, they managed to deflect this negative image to a large extent onto Shevchyk and, by extension, Zelenskyi. The workers, having already prepared themselves for disenchantment beforehand, concluded that Zelenskyi was a ‘sellout’, which ate into his team’s political capital, namely the image of a new and different kind of politics, with the incumbent team, instead, activating the paternalist moral economy. This sequence of events between the two elections shows the limits of anti-­political convictions. Demobilizing embittered subaltern classes, they can lead to major electoral surprises that redraw the political map of the country, like the presidential elections of 2019. However, it is not sustainable on its own. Partly, this disposition undermines itself with the universal distrust on which it is built: the utterly pessimist outlook that rejects all politics does not make exceptions for political figures that may benefit from it in the short term.

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More importantly, this outlook coexists with the moral economy that validates economically embedded politics (and, conversely, the politically and socially embedded economy). Behind the anti-­political negation one can uncover the affirmation of paternalist, even if old and corrupt, politics. Tainted due to the general rejection of politics and elites, this affirmation is too weak to build a proper hegemonic alliance between the elite and the subaltern classes. However, the redistributionist imperative that it maintains at least on the declarative level, along with the ‘non-­intrusion pact’ between the rulers and the ruled, is sufficient for keeping up the weak hegemony of post-­ Soviet elites.

Conclusion Active distancing from politics is the most prevalent kind of political attitude among the working-­class Kryvyi Rih residents. This passivist position is usually the negative backdrop of activist distinction strategies analysed in the previous two chapters. The opposition works both ways: for many of my ‘passivist’ interlocutors, all official, non-­spontaneous activism stands suspiciously close to the inherently corrupt domain of big politics. However, the divide is more complicated: many workers who build up their activist capital separate it semantically from politics, to which they are equally hostile. Politics is seen as the domain of the powerful and corrupt, out of control of the powerless and moral. Being unable to participate in politics in any meaningful way, the workers conceptualize it as a classed activity. Instead, they concentrate on their family life, the private sphere being the only domain remaining under their control. This withdrawal from the public sphere is ultimately a political act, but it is nevertheless rationalized as staying away from politics. The habitus of the powerless is rationalized through the ideology of privatism. The focus on private life lends framework to judge political developments: they are evaluated from the point of view of ‘decency’ and morality, rather than on the basis of a specific ideological system of views. The ideological blindness, the refusal to take political convictions seriously, stems from the persuasion that they are all just publicity ­stunts – ­which is reasonable, given the plasticity of the Ukrainian political scene since the early 2000s (Wilson 2005). From this perspective, what really matters are ingrained moral convictions and personality traits rather than superficial political slogans and

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colours. In that case, the only political struggle worth defending is exclusionary antagonism framed as the struggle between good and evil, rather than agonism between negotiable points of view. The political ideal stemming from this outlook can be called authoritarian anti-­corruption. However, the repressive element of the workers’ positive programmes is not an end in itself. It does not come from fascination with authoritarian rule as such but rather from the realization of one’s own political weakness. Given the utter pessimism and demobilization of the working class, the only force that can realistically bring about the desired rule of law, economic growth, redistribution and care is an authoritarian government benevolent towards the subalterns and hostile towards the self-­serving elites. This utopia is concretized in visions that impute it to actually existing foreign political regimes: mostly Belarus and China but also heavy-­ handed regimes featured in neoliberal propaganda. The economic and political marginalization of workers reshapes their political vision along the lines of morality and vengeful justice but also of technocratic efficiency. The ideal of this apolitical politics is punitive and managerial technocracy that concentrates political power in the hands of a single agent, who uses his powers to benefit the weak. This combination is known as ‘technopopulism’ (Bickerton and Accetti 2021; Castellani 2018), or centrist ‘valence populism’. It rejects consistent ideologies, instead building on non-­positional issues like anti-­corruption, morality, interpersonal loyalty, transparency, democracy or anti-­establishment. This was the kind of regime established by Volodymyr Zelenskyi after the elections of 2019. Weak neopatrimonialism and lack of any ideological commitment correspond perfectly to the lay concept of good governance: ideologically neutral, focused on efficiency and ‘humane’ – that is, embedded in kinship and friendship networks. Postulated openly, these traits are interpreted as signs of anti-­political authenticity, distinguishing Zelenskyi from the world of scheming corrupt elites and bringing him closer to the world of the subaltern. Two years into his first term, Zelenskyi remained the most popular politician in Ukraine through 2021, which is not typical for an incumbent president in Ukraine. But this discursive operation is manifestly not enough to maintain power structures in the long term. Anti-­politics as a publicity stunt is unable to build hegemony on its own, as it does not have the support that would result from redistribution and other steps towards building a class alliance in the socio-­economic domain. Paternalist moral economy coexists with anti-­political scepticism and imposes

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its imperatives. The resources that would permit the fulfilment of such imperatives are concentrated in the hands of the traditional elite, especially on the local level. This elite thus remains on top of the situation, even if it never commands the full trust of the population. The alliance between the elite and subaltern classes remains permanently unstable and ridden with distrust and disenchantment, but it survives thanks to the embedded policies and rhetoric of the traditional elites and to the pervasive demobilization of the subalterns.

Conclusion to Part IV The deep economic crisis known as the period of postsocialist transition in Ukraine was also the crisis of social structures. Instead of a revival of class politics that the optimists expected after the fall of the party-­state regime, what followed was a decomposition of the working class as a class-­for-­itself. The political space deserted by grassroots collective movements and organizations was filled with informal and personalist social connections of two kinds: vertical (clientelist) and horizontal (private). The strategies of survival that flourished in the 1990s and have remained in place ever since were individualist not in the sense of completely atomized persons; the basic unit to which they catered was not an individual stricto sensu but their closest kin and friends. What came instead of the collectivism of the public sphere was as much the individualism as the familialism of the private sphere. These strategies concerned both economic and social survival: they defined ways in which people validate themselves as social beings, reflecting on their place in the hierarchies of merit as well as in the political and economic pecking order. The importance of this existential questioning and the massive scale of the reappraisal of post-­Soviet working-­class selves was attested in the literature that analyses the crisis of masculinity and the new gender dynamics that followed the Soviet collapse (Ashwin 2000). In the most general terms, these strategies can be divided into two stylized categories: privatism and distinction. Privatism is a name for the political habitus that rejects politics as such, identifying it with the elite and even more generally with the postsocialist period, marked by instability, growing inequality and negation of conventional hierarchies. Suspicious of all ideologies and by extension of the public sphere in principle, it centres around the private sphere, specifically around kinship and friend-

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ship ties, as the only reliable and stable element in social life. It harbours authoritarian redemption visions, which are in this worldview the only realistically imaginable way of setting the score straight with the omnipotent corrupt elite: taking the weakness of the demobilized subaltern classes as a given, it puts all hope on a strong government that can rein in the illegitimate elites and install a just social order. Being anti-­political, privatism per se is external to ongoing political debates. However, within the main political cleavage in Ukraine, privatism would systematically tend to lean towards the ‘East Slavic’ political identity. Being critical of politics, it is by extension often critical of all the postsocialist statehood that brought politics into social life. This harks back to the lay political science of the late 1980s and the early 1990s, when the main division separated ‘communists’ and ‘democrats’. People who supported ‘communists’ in that debate were not necessarily communists per se, nor were they opposed to democracy; these terms were misused to signify a division between the party of order, with its social conventions, hierarchies and political feedback mechanisms, and the party advocating a complete social overhaul, which should not necessarily be democratic (Baysha 2014). Similarly, thirty years later people who reject politics are neither authoritarian nor socialist by nature. Their position is rather informed by their personal experience of democracy and politics, marked by social chaos, economic impoverishment and political impotency. Distinction strategies, treated in the previous two chapters of the book, are more visible and accessible for study. This is notably due to my middle-­class positionality, which facilitates rapport as long as my informants strive to imitate the middle class in their everyday attitudes and political behaviours. However, this disposition is in fact secondary because it defines itself in opposition to the politically inert majority. The better visible activist minority tries to distance itself from it by accumulating cultural and ‘activist’ capital. Contrary to privatism, the distinction-­oriented habitus is more often individualist in the narrow sense of the word, focusing on the trajectory of a specific person and their closest kin. In terms of the major political cleavage, it often borrows the optimistic transition discourse and the orientalist view of the passive and paternalist masses from the liberal nationalist camp. Being explicitly interested in politics, it is equally apolitical in the sense of rejecting the process of political agonism and constructing political interactions in terms of antagonistic clashes between pre-­existing agendas articulated with moral virtues and vices. More often than not, politi-

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cal struggle in this camp is understood in the sense of mechanically assembling all the people already possessing the right views and taking the reins from the hands of those whose views are objectionable. The key is for all the good people to just get together rather than to find convincing arguments in favour of their position or change it under the influence of others’ arguments. Both dispositions are thus rooted in the politico-­economic context of the post-­Soviet crisis. The paternalist social contract that emerged in the early 1990s to soften the transition has formed the basics of the post-­Soviet moral economy, technocratic and survival-­ oriented. However, this contract, formed in the extreme conditions of a fragmented and destabilized administratively run economy, failed to deliver equally satisfying results later on, when the integration of Ukraine into global commodity flows and the privatization of industrial assets reshaped the system of economic stimuli and sanctions. The situation also worsened due to the gradual depletion of resources (physical capital but also technologies and the demographic resources of a skilled workforce) accumulated in the Soviet era and consumed by the post-­Soviet accumulation regime, which did not replenish them with new investments. The diminishing returns from this social contract were eating into the legitimacy of the elite. As a counteracting tendency, a new legitimation tool emerged in the 2000s: identitarian polarization, which restructured the political field and introduced additional motives to support a given faction of the political ­elite – ­its ethnolinguistic identity. This mechanism sustained the ‘pluralism by default’ (Way 2015) during several electoral cycles, but the growing political polarization that was inherent in it finally led to a major political and military conflict, which has been going on since 2014, closing off all possibilities of moderation. Additionally, while this identitarian dynamic temporarily allowed for pluralist politics among the elites, it only further contributed to the political disenfranchisement of the subaltern classes. The only mode of political participation available to them, beyond voting, has been to join vertical clientelist political machines or participate in anti-­political valence mobilizations deprived of organization or ideology (Zhuravlev and Ishchenko 2020). In the end, these developments only reinforce the two types of political attitudes identified above. The combination of the ‘non-­aggression pact’ between the elites and the subaltern classes and measured paternalist political gestures has resulted in the lowest possible level of legitimacy for the elites and the neopatrimonial political order they represent. This satisfic-

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ing equilibrium that rests on the demobilization of the subaltern classes provides just enough legitimacy to the incumbent politico-­ economic system. It can last without falling back into full-­scale social disintegration and chaos, but it is not enough to create a sustainable and secure hegemonic alliance between the elites and some sections of the popular classes. The brittle quasi-­hegemony that ensues is a Gramscian organic crisis (Stahl 2019), which may last indefinitely until there is an external or internal impulse powerful enough to reshape the sociopolitical setup and enable a more sustainable hegemonic strategy.

Notes  1. Yuriy Milobog, a lecturer at the local pedagogical university, ran against Yuriy Vilkul at the mayoral elections of 2015. Having no background in politics, he almost defeated the incumbent. In 2021, Milobog became a member of the city council, elected on the list of Syla ­Liudey – ­a grassroots liberal party styling itself as the only real opposition to the politics of oligarchic patronage.  2. Vyshivatnik is a term that was invented in response to vatnik, to mark Ukrainian ethnic nationalists as allegedly unreasonable and narrow-­minded as their pro-­Russian opponents. The term refers to the embroidered shirt (vyshyvanka), the widely employed symbol of Ukrainian ethnicity.  3. The very number 73 per cent became a political marker after the second round of the 2019 presidential election, when that amount of voters supported Volodymyr Zelenskyi. In the political vocabulary of ‘anti-­populist’ Ukrainian nationalists, ‘73%’ stands for the poorly educated and gullible populist electorate.  4. Kum/kuma is a kinship status in Slavic countries: referring to the godparents of one’s child, it can be compared to compadre in the Spanish-­speaking context. In practice, being someone’s kum does not require any religious procedures; in the everyday language, it may simply mean close friendship.  5. Vitaliy Klichko (Klitschko), the renowned boxer who became the mayor of Kyiv in 2015.  6. Vybory-vybory, kandidaty pidory. This very popular (thanks to this offensive word) refrain comes from a song written for a Russian comedy film in the mid-­2000s. The movie, which features a group of artists hired to help a businessman with criminal connections get re-­elected as a regional governor, makes fun of post-­Soviet politics, showing it to be a violent and cynical world glossed over with empty speeches and spin doctors.  7. The same principle conditioned the popularity in the 2010s of a new ritual of collective commemoration of the Second World War – ‘The Immortal Regiment’. People march with photos of their relatives who fought in the war, thus representing it in a ‘humane’ and familial dimension instead of the militaristic tone of official celebrations in Russia. Initially conceived there as a grassroots response to such celebrations, this march quickly gained in popularity in both Russia and in Eastern Ukraine. However, by the end of the decade this initiative had been politically appropriated by the Russian government.  8. This is a good moment to ponder on the limits of the political. The traditional limited understanding of this domain is of a set of activities centered around ­governments

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and ­elections – ­a narrow phenomenon, compared to the myriad of non-­political domains (music, education, sports, etc.). Since the 1970s, social scientists have been denaturalizing the non-­political and expanding the political. The state has become one of the many terrains for power struggles. The political penetrates all social relations, to the extent of being naturalized, taken for granted, like the domain of the non-­political used to be previously. I generally uphold the predisposition to look for signs of power relations and inequalities in seemingly apolitical interactions and circumstances. And yet, I agree with Candea (2011) that having denaturalized the non-­political we should not fall into the symmetric pitfall of naturalizing the political.  Should we take my interlocutors’ rejection of politics at face value? What should we make of their ­claims – ­for example, that their resistance to the nationalizing policies of the Ukrainian state is not political? It is certainly true that this resistance objectively fits into the political struggle between different elite factions. Moreover, it is political in the wider sense, as long as it concerns the issue of popular participation in political decision-­making. But it would be a mistake to ignore the point of view of the very people who wage this political struggle and who claim that it is not political. It is important to see where they draw the limit between the two domains and to understand their reasoning before blankly declaring everything ‘political’.  9. There were undoubtedly connections between Zelenskyi and Kolomoiskyi that went beyond simple over-­the-­counter business ties. However, the oligarch’s influence on the new politician later turned out to be not as powerful as many had suspected. Only a fraction of deputies elected on the list of Zelenskyi’s party Servant of the People in the autumn of 2019 represented the interests of Kolomoiskyi. The oligarch’s influence on Zelenskyi waned, and in 2020 they had a serious falling out. Privatbank, the largest private bank owned by Kolomoiskyi, had been nationalized in 2017. He expected the new president to overturn this decision, but it never happened. 10. This style of governmental appointments was initially demonstrated in the TV series The Servant of the People: the new president, Zelenskyi’s character, hired his old friends for key positions after all the typical procedures of ensuring transparency and impartiality had turned out to be compromised by the oligarchs and old politicians. The protagonists concluded that the only way to fight the corrupt system is to rely on trust and honesty within their intimate circle.

Conclusion

_ This book was aimed at exploring the workers’ relation to politics in two senses: relation as attitude and relation as structured interaction. The duality of this enterprise distinguishes it from studies focused exclusively on the first, discursive dimension. It also differs from approaches that see workers’ political attitudes as a simple reflection of their class position or imputed cultural specificities. I argue that the construction of workers’ political subjectivities is mediated by a number of conflicting structures and processes acting on different scales. Taken together, these structures and processes constitute a politico-­economic context that shapes, and is in return shaped by, the moral economy of the Ukrainian working class. On the macro scale, the moral economy discussed here is defined by the semiperipheral character of Ukraine’s economy. In this, historical legacies of the state socialist regime have been supplanted by the impact of the economic crisis of the 1990s. Finally, there is no separation between the economic and the political domain. The peripheral position of Ukraine as a new nation state in a post-­imperial context manifested itself in the 1990s in the form of structural macroeconomic imbalances that threatened its survival. These were limits in industrial output markets and sources of input for the manufacturing industries as well as energy consumption. To attenuate these disequilibriums that arose in the new conditions and underscored Ukraine’s dependence on external trade, the elite consisting of former Soviet industrial nomenklatura had to preserve old patterns of economic and social governance, transforming them in a creative manner but not discarding them in favour of new models. The creative transformation that assured the survival of the

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new politico-­economic entity involved the profound interpenetration of economic, political and cultural domains. Hence the need to analyse them together as intersecting and cross-­cutting relations. The interplay between economy, politics and culture as a combined set of relations creates the specific conditions for social reproduction that construct the contemporary Ukrainian working class. It also helps us understand the specificities of ruling class formation in Ukraine and notably oligarchy. The product of the political leadership’s conscious efforts to develop a national bourgeoisie, oligarchs concentrated both economic and political assets, constructing a neopatrimonial system of domination that relies on a weak co-­optation of industrial workers, dependent on their employers, and public employees, dependent on the government. The accumulation strategy of this regime consists of riding the waves of global commodity cycles without much reinvestment in economic or social spheres. Chronic austerity has been accompanied by tacit class compromises dictated by the fear of a social explosion. Such class compromises have reshaped the conditions for working-­ class politics and redrawn the lines of everyday politics in Ukraine. The weak legitimacy of the system of oligarchic democracy was reinforced through a growing ethnolinguistic polarization between two competing identitarian projects, the ‘Eastern Slavic’ and the ‘ethnic Ukrainian’. Nationalism turned out to be the most efficient ideological register for articulating the struggle between competing neopatrimonial pyramids. The new cleavage toned down the competition of socio-­economic projects, offering instead a competition of civilizational projects articulated in both ethnocultural and geopolitical terms. This system was destabilized by a polycrisis of 2012–2015. The end of the global commodity boom coincided with an escalation in geopolitical tensions around Ukraine and with identitarian polarization within it. The ruling elite, consolidated under the banner of the Party of Regions, faced falling profits because of the negative global market dynamics and the trade wars with Russia. Its redistributive capacities were reduced, dragging down its political legitimacy. The Euromaidan uprising, the Russian annexation of Crimea and the military conflict in the Donbas that ensued reinforced the ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ identity and marginalized the ‘Eastern Slavic’ one in the public space. A crisis of representation was manifest during the presidential elections of 2019, won by Volodymyr Zelenskyi, an ‘anti-­political’

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comedian whose sole electoral promise was to remove the old political elite. Neither the new president nor the nationalist opposition have produced a convincing ideological project that could mobilize important sections of society and identify a new and more viable accumulation strategy than the dependence on global commodity cycles. This book analysed these shifts on the scale of a city. The post-­ Soviet period in Kryvyi Rih has been marked by the ascent of a new local power bloc, which based its legitimacy on an ideology of technocratic neutrality, localism and embeddedness, presenting the city as a moral community, opposed to the politicking on the national level. The elite coalition of the 1990s centred on the figure of the mayor-khoziain and local industrial management. It used mobilizational economy methods to adjust the city to the realities of the market economy. Global neoliberalism was locally domesticated by systemic underinvestment that helped slow down economic demise. City elites also procured additional tools of governance by integrating themselves into economic and ideological competitions on the national scale. After the privatization of local industrial assets, the rulers of Kryvyi Rih became part of a nationwide oligarchic pyramid represented by the Party of Regions, which placed its bet on the ‘Eastern Slavic’ identity. This ideology was articulated with a locally specific range of political outlooks: from ardent approval of the paternalist khoziain protecting the populace from the ravages of the market, to dismay about the stagnation of local life and the isolation from the dynamism of the national public sphere, produced by these paternalist policies. These actions left their material imprint on the city infrastructure, which has become an object of both politicization and depoliticization. Centralized publicly owned systems suffer from fragmentation and creeping privatization due to systemic underinvestment. At the same time, these systems are the focus of moral claims that emphasize the public character of goods. The satisfaction of these claims, even if on the tokenist scale, is essential for the political legitimation of the ruling elite. The issue of housing, which had been highly political in the late Soviet era, lost its salience after the privatization of flats in residential blocks and the end of the population growth. At the same time, heating and other utility tariffs, which had not been an issue previously, became the chief political problem in twenty-­ first century Kryvyi Rih, when the marketization of energy distribution went against the local moral economy. As for municipal public transport, it disappeared during the economic crisis of the 1990s only

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to reappear later in a new role: with limited technical capacity as a transportation system but with huge importance as a local patronage tool. This diverging dynamic is due to the emergence of different property regimes in response to the colliding pressures of the national economy, the city identity and a new set of privatization logics. Public property has been reimagined as the social tool that ought to benefit the least privileged. The private domain, less regulated and associated with better quality, took over as the default form of property in the field of social infrastructure. It is discursively equated with the personal property regime, the domain of unbridled autonomy from legal and informal social obligations. The coexistence of these regimes allows city elites to preside over cheap but efficient paternalist distribution schemes. In addition to its analysis of the city, the book develops further understanding of the different industrial sites that inform the local moral economy and set the stage for everyday working-­class politics. Born out of Stalinist industrialization, the Soviet factory regime was not Taylorized. Wide workplace autonomy and heavy reliance on paternalist informal regulation were the traits bestowed upon the post-­Soviet factory regime, which was shaped by the survival conjuncture in the 1990s. As crisis was normalized, so were the social forms spawned by it. The survival mode remained in place as the period of economic growth began in the 2000s. Privatized enterprises kept the complex architecture of social wage and paternalist informality. The resulting post-­post-­Soviet factory regime, defined by the avoidance of disruptive innovations, preserves familiar patterns of surplus value extraction while maintaining social peace. This unstable factory regime may evolve in two opposing directions. One strategy consists of re-­embedding the new oligarchic owner by reviving a Fordist style of industrial governance, with large enterprises and surrounding company towns. The non-­Taylorized Fordism, acting both inside and outside the enterprise, is more sustainable in the long term, providing the oligarchic patrons with autonomous sources of social power in return for relatively modest investments. Another variant of legitimate domination at the workplace relies on the opposite reasoning and celebrates the autonomy and entrepreneurial selves of workers, who are discursively equated with their employer. This operation seeks to efface all paternalist obligations. It is possible at rare greenfield enterprises, which have no Soviet legacy.

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These processes contribute to shaping individual strategies of economic survival and symbolic distinction, as well as mental maps that orient workers in relation to the political domain. The deep economic and social crisis that marked the birth of the Ukrainian state led to a decomposition of the autonomous public sphere of the working class. In its wake came networks based on kinship and friendship, focused on attaining interests of individuals and small kinship groups. The ambiguity between solidarity and self-­reliance continues in an outlook that puts great emphasis on structural factors beyond the influence of powerless individuals but paradoxically combines it with the individualist ideology underlining agency and success. Values that are emphasized in interviews are, for instance, individualism and inner depth, education and upbringing, and idealist activism. These discursively drawn moral boundaries do not correspond to the practice of these people, whose economic survival strategies rely on wide horizontal networks of self-­help. It is, thus, not exactly correct to insist on the complete atomization of the post-­ Soviet working class, as was typical in the academic literature until recently. Ukrainian workers did not constitute themselves politically as a class, but they are not social atoms completely isolated from one another. This individualist collectivism articulates with the two main identities offered by the domestic political market. The locally majoritarian ‘East Slavic’ identity is a target of ruthless criticism on the part of intellectuals belonging to the nationally dominant ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ one. The ‘East Slavs’ respond with the typical resentment towards the ‘upstarts’. The ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ camp, on the other hand, produces a less conventional anti-­populist populism. Taken together, the worldview formed by these circumstances creates a near total rejection of politics, which is associated with an unidentified elite, and with postsocialist instability and inequality. Rejecting belief in the agency of the working classes, authoritarian visions lay all hope on a powerful political agent that can rein in the illegitimate elites and install a just social order. Such an agent has not yet been seen on the political horizon, but abstract reflections of my informants revolve around the ideal of a resolute political force that has to materialize and set things straight. The lack of space for agonism and compromise that conditions this vision of authoritarian anti-­corruption can be explained by the political disenfranchisement of the worker population, whose avenues of political participation in the course of the last three decades have

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been limited to joining clientelist political machines or participating in episodic anti-­political valence mobilizations. This political passivity, sustained by calibrated paternalism on the part of the elites, produces a minimal level of political legitimacy that is just enough to prevent full-­scale social disintegration but which remains chronically unstable.

Normalized Emergency The concept of moral economy, central in this book, is a historical concept: it refers to a set of political norms, attitudes and expectations that is specific for each given socio-­economic conjuncture (Thompson [1991] 1993). The moral economy of the late Soviet period was structured by symbolic hierarchies that prioritized the working class, meaning its interests chimed with a larger understanding of social progress. The overturning of this moral order in the early 1990s was never succeeded by a new one, which could have been explicitly formulated by the ruling class and accepted by the subaltern populations. What followed instead was the situation of normalized emergency, known in the literature as ‘chronic disaster’ (Shevchenko 2009) or ‘permanent transition’ (Kideckel 2008). The lack of a clear language that would describe and explain the new situation led to a gap between official discourses and norms of everyday life. Official discourse upheld traditional expectations of embeddedness and just rewards to workers, but actual norms and habits arose spontaneously in response to the situation of chronic austerity. This gap gave shape to a local variety of neoliberalism, which is constantly straddling between formal norms and the informally acknowledged reality principle. This gap is also responsible for the characteristic subtractive, rather than additive, workings of post-­Soviet patron–client relations: the patron’s generosity is built on his willingness to slow down, exceptionally, the inexorable march towards a fully neoliberal reality. On the workers’ part, this translates into a lack of appreciation for paternalist schemes, in which they are included (unlike some other categories), while at the same time they must fear their cancellation. This dependency activates the culture of ‘getting by’: making do on limited resources, demonstrating personal resourcefulness and the ability to ‘hustle’ (krutitsia). The respectability that can be gained in this way, through procuring scarce resources in adverse market conditions, partially alleviates the ten-

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sion between the inertia of working-­class pride, still present in the official discourse, and a very real state of affairs that dictates class shame. Despite their apparent animosity to free-­market dogmas, mechanisms of paternalist protection do not supplant but rather facilitate neoliberal governance. The introduction of such embedded mechanisms in some highly visible areas happens at the cost of ruthless disembedding taking place in other, adjacent sectors. This is true for nationwide social standards such as pensions or minimum wage, for urban infrastructure systems in Kryvyi Rih, but also for the impasse of the workplace politics of the local industrial giants: attempts at introducing lean management boil down to leaving intact informal flexibility mechanisms belonging to the Soviet legacy and adding to them the formal flexibility of the ‘just-­in-­time’ model. Across the post-­ Soviet space, this model allows the new private owners of enterprises to benefit from the legacies of informal taut planning, to exert social control through the discretionary distribution of monetary and in-­ kind remuneration, and to legitimize themselves as local patriarchs representing the labour collective, which, in turn, ends up standing for the whole local community. In a wider sense, widely advertised but poorly financed welfare policies spawn a further demand for patron–client politics.

Morals Against Politics An ambiguous attitude to the state encapsulates Ukrainian workers’ complex attitude to the political sphere. The state is both the primary addressee of popular claims and the illegitimate intruder on individual resourcefulness. This contradiction is masked by interpreting violations of both normative frameworks as ‘politics’. More often than not, workers reject all politics, which in their eyes is a synonym for the unending postsocialist crisis. In a worldview that keeps using the Soviet period as the yardstick to evaluate the state of affairs even thirty years later, the pre-­existing default Soviet system of social relations is distorted by politicians. The political domain of competing party programmes and ideologies is, according to this view, smoke and mirrors. Politics obscure the harmonious domain of self-­evident ­truths – ­such as, for example, fair redistribution to each according to his labour. The intrusion of politics in the form of competitive elections, parties and ideologies in workers’ lives coincided with the dramatic fall in standards of living and a crisis of

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the naturalized system of values and hierarchies that used to underpin and explain the socio-­economic order. As politics is associated with social decay and workers’ downward mobility, the politicization of discourses amounts to a closure, not an opening up, of the public sphere. The latter is usurped by an illegitimate elite that tries to justify its domination with the help of ideologies, which are perceived as insincere ploys concocted to trick simple people. Such an appraisal stems from a context where the imposition of extremely politicized discourse from above does not open any avenues for actual political involvement of the subaltern population. Politics, then, remains a show on the TV screen, which can be entertaining but does not deserve serious immersion. The post-­political politicization of Ukrainian workers is mediated by imagined communities that grant virtual belonging without a need for or a possibility of practical interaction and activity. Thus, a miner may be an active follower of online discussions between opinion leaders based in Kyiv and other cities but explicitly reject all personal political participation in Kryvyi Rih. Having no experience of political participation in any meaningful way, the workers conceptualize it as a classed activity. Instead, they concentrate on their family life, the private sphere being the only domain remaining under their control. Frustrated political agency breeds contradictory attitudes: demobilizing scepticism coexists with vaguely formulated radical and messianic expectations. Since collective action is impossible, the agenda is dominated by hopes for a saviour figure: a singular personality with exceptional innate qualities who will be able to rein in the corrupt elite and introduce a fair social order. These hopes are informed by a particular combination of technocratic centrism and, at the same time, moralism. The anti-­political ideal of technocratic common sense, realized in the policies of city mayors as well as in the privatism of individual households, opposes the routinized crisis in the public sphere, associated with incessant ideological struggles. On a deeper level, this same persuasion that there is just one right decision and that it is not up to political debates corresponds to the cult of moral authenticity counterpoised to ideological polemics. In this framework, moral convictions and personal traits, deeply ingrained on an individual level, matter more than superficial political slogans and colours. This leads to the personalist politics of anti-­ corruption, which does not believe in a systemic change promised

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by political ideologies but puts all hope on the arrival of ‘new faces’, deemed more realistic. Such politics, translated into the language of morality, does not leave space for negotiation and compromise. All deliberation with the immoral enemy can only lead to further moral decay, hence the perception of political struggle as a confrontation between good and evil. This Schmittian outlook rejects the process of political agonism and constructs political interactions in terms of antagonistic clashes between pre-­existing agendas articulated with moral virtues and vices. Political struggle is understood in the sense of mechanically assembling all the people already possessing the right views and marginalizing those whose views are objectionable. This approach, further, allows the interpretation of all sociopolitical conflict in civilizational and/or identitarian terms. The moralistic political language is hence ossified in two mutually opposed national populist projects: the ‘East Slavic’ and the ‘ethnic Ukrainian’. The horizontal appeal of nationalism, directed against ethnically or linguistically marked outsiders, articulates in both cases with the vertical appeal of pure populism, directed against the corrupt elite. The dissonance between formally egalitarian settings (i.e. lack of a visible repressive state and equal possibilities to elect and be elected etc.) and strict limitations imposed in practice by different habitus opens the door to conspiracy theorizing, whereby the political elite is constructed as a cohesive entity, covertly and consciously keeping the subalterns in their place. The proneness to conspiracy theories is also reinforced by the scepticism about all political discourses: if all ideologies are just a ploy designed to exploit the dominated, then inner convictions of an honest/decent person are the only source of genuine knowledge. Finally, the context of permanent crisis pushes my informants to put high value on state capacity. An efficient coercive state machinery is deemed indispensable in the struggle against the corrupt elite feeding off the weak state. Hence the popularity of the ideologically diverse governments of Belarus, China, Singapore or Pinochet’s Chile. What matters is not the political programme of a given government but the concentration of political power and the will to use it for the benefit of the powerless. Seeing ideologies and political debates as illusions that cover up the domination of the corrupt elite, my interlocutors reject them in favour of pragmatic governance. In other words, the political ideal of post-­Soviet workers amounts to protecting society from politics. This may be thought of as neoliberalism from below.

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Further Theoretical Avenues In the remaining pages, I will move from my conclusions above to a set of remarks on the neo-­Gramscian literature on post-­Fordism, hegemony and vassalage. Vassalage is an anthropological concept that can be put into dialogue with the Gramscian concept of hegemony as coercion and consent, linking it to the literature on patron– client relationships. This particular aspect of the social imaginary of the postsocialist modernity speaks to two contradictory claims: asymmetric social obligations that regulate the public sphere, but also unlimited personal autonomy that reigns supreme in the private domain. What can be made of Ukrainian workers’ moral economy in the context of this literature? In a sense, this concept can be understood as a concretization of Charles Taylor’s social imaginary in the context of post-postsocialist modernity: ‘the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’ (Taylor 2004: 23).

Reclaimed Vassalage, Cherished Autonomy The emergence of countless suzerainties, based on an enterprise, a town or region, or even on a collective farm, was a well-­documented consequence of the fragmentation and disintegration of Soviet economic and political circuits in the 1990s. These autonomous entities domesticated the market economy by marrying it with imperatives of social protection and productivist hierarchies, which accorded fewer resources to those whose contribution to the collective good was less visible. Economic redistribution within them is not equitable, and political power is very concentrated. However, these relations, informed by the principle of reciprocity, are legitimate in the eyes of people who ‘fight to remain vassals because they see “wage slavery” as the only alternative’ (Dunn 2004: 153). Reciprocity is the decisive component that distinguishes vassalage from slavery and makes it attractive for subalterns seeking to protect their ­livelihoods – ­be they Polish workers studied by Elisabeth Dunn, the Indian ‘caste of thieves’ (Piliavsky 2021) or Ukrainian workers. When the ties of mutual obligation are perceived to be broken, the condemning discourse of slavery takes over, and the patron–client relationship loses its legitimacy.

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However, the demand for such dependency remains even after a particular patron turns out to be inefficient or untrustworthy. Hence, the failure of the AMKR management opened up political opportunities for trade unions to be brokers and potentially patrons in their own right. Their competition is codified in the language of resistance against the illegitimate elite, but it does not lead to the creation of genuine collective action of the working class. Instead of becoming focal points of class formation, trade unions reinforce the logic of paternalism and atomized individual survival strategies. Rather than promoting a radical rupture with paternalist practices, unions declare the desire to preserve the obligations that ultimately reinforce the power of dominant groups. This taste for paternalist obligations may have several explanations. Economic hardships and moral dispositions would be the most typical ones, but there is also another logic to it. Such obligations may be the only way in which disenfranchised workers can still influence those who govern them. One possible way out of the perceived powerlessness for the subaltern is to mobilize their vertical patronage connections for political participation by proxy. The state here becomes an object of unarticulated claims, the very formulation of which is delegated to a competent paternalist khoziain. Formed in the fragmented but still state-­owned economy of the 1990s, this normativity helped legitimize the privatization and neoliberalization that took place afterwards. The new owners only had to follow a pre-­existing script for embedded patrons in order to obtain a basic level of legitimacy in the eyes of the population dependent on the given enterprise. The paternalist posture does not prevent factory owners and city mayors from adopting disembedding policies, as long as they are gradual and justified by conjunctural factors outside of the patron’s control. The weak legitimacy of this subtractive paternalism is sufficient thanks to the gap that divides the formally proclaimed maximalist agenda of social protection and the informally acknowledged limitations of the available options. The neoliberal reforms have thus found their legitimation in an anti-­neoliberal normativity of pre-­existent social rights. The other way in which post-­Soviet workers construct their political selves is by pursuing a project of personal autonomy from the oppressing and corrupt world of politics. This perspective divides the world into two domains: the commonweal (commonwealth in its original sense), governed by a paternalist social contract, and the anti-­ commons, the private domain of unrestricted individual activity. The former domain conflates public property and privately owned assets

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of large size that were created by the state and are still understood to be common goods regulated by the paternalist moral economy. The domain of the anti-­commons is also heterogeneous: it comprises the private property that is symbolically distinct from the commonweal (e.g. factories and businesses created after the end of the Soviet Union) and personal property created and managed by individuals for their own use (housing, garages, informal activities and exchange networks etc.). Any incursion of the state regulation in this sphere is deemed illegitimate. This non-­intrusion pact between the state and autonomous subaltern individuals helps legitimize completely disembedded domination; for example, at the Screenwind factory, the owner does not need to justify his social position with paternalist measures as long as his employees perceive him as a fellow neoliberal subject acting within the confines of the private domain. This autonomism is another way in which lay moral economic norms help domesticate the permanent crisis of the post-­Soviet society. The values of self-­sufficiency, stamina and ingenuity, initially collectivist, are re-­oriented in the direction of privatist ­individualism – ­which, in turn, facilitates neoliberal austerity and depoliticization. However, this domestication does not mean justification. Asserting their pro-­active and self-­sufficient personalities, post-­Soviet citizens are not so much becoming neoliberal subjects as criticizing the failure of the state to fulfil its obligations. They replace the state in areas from which it has withdrawn, but this replacement has not been normalized in the lay moral economy. The proverb that springs up systematically in such contexts – ‘you have to hustle if you want to live’ – carries the directly readable imperative of having an individual proactive attitude, but there is an ironic undertone to it that contains a judgement against the new social context that imposes this imperative. The normative horizon of efficient redistributionist institutions managing the social life remains in place despite the ubiquitous ad hoc fixes of private autonomism.

Weak Hegemony: Demobilized Discontent This analysis of the everyday politics and the moral economy of the postsocialist working class can be interpreted in Gramscian terms as a study of the production and maintenance of hegemony, the power configuration relying simultaneously and indivisibly on coercion and consent (Anderson 1976). The approach popular in today’s Gramscian literature consists of the ‘persistent equation of hegemony with a generic notion of consent conceived in terms of a subjectivist

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assent to power, which is projected from the individual level to that of social classes and groups’ (Thomas 2020). Contrary to this school of ‘hegemony lite’ (Crehan 2016), I go beyond the discursive analysis to also uncover material factors framing the consent and add to it the component of coercion. Continuing the conjunctural approach of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham school, the current conjuncture structuring the worldview of Ukrainian labour can be defined and analysed on its own terms – ‘adding, adding, adding the different levels of determination’ (Grossberg 1986: 58). This strategy allowed Hall to conceptualize authoritarian populism, a regime based on consent as much as on coercion (Hall 1983). This framework has been productively used to analyse alliances struck between the governing elite and the domestic bourgeoisie underpinning political regimes: Lula in Brazil (Boito 2019), Modi’s India (Heller 2020) and Orbán’s Hungary (Rogers 2020; Scheiring 2021; Szombati 2018). The same approach could shed additional light on the struggles and alliances within the Ukrainian political and economic ruling bloc. From my position of a researcher more focused on the subaltern classes, Hall’s concept offers a conceptualization of a regime that strives to ‘hegemonize a field of disorganized popular discontent while further demobilizing popular sectors’ (Colpani 2021: 14). My fieldwork in Kryvyi Rih demonstrates exactly this kind of weak hegemony relying on the demobilized popular discontent. Contrary to the examples of efficient authoritarian populism in the cases cited above, my research focuses on a case where the ruling elite continually fails to come up with a convincing hegemonic project that is centred around an efficient accumulation strategy and effectively consolidates the ruling class and co-­opts subordinate classes. Constructing their political selves, Kryvyi Rih workers do not find ‘a concrete, national-­popular program of action which asserts a general interest in the pursuit of objectives that explicitly or implicitly advance the long-­term interests of the hegemonic class (fraction) and which also privileges particular “economic-­corporate” interests compatible with this program’ (Jessop 1983: 100). The lack of such a shared programme compromises both the relative autonomy of the state (hence the phenomenon of oligarchy) and its substantive unity, preventing the formation of a hegemonic bloc. The absence of such a bloc becomes, in turn, a structuring factor that defines the character of weak hegemonic politics on the national level. There certainly is a moral economy, consisting of claims about the general will or common interest, which I explored in this book.

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However, these claims are only shared to a certain extent by the elites, and mostly on the local level. Partly, they are articulated in an antagonistic language of ethnolinguistic identities, without a clearly established symbolic domination of one identitarian order over the other. To the extent that one can find a historical bloc in Ukraine – ‘a mutually supportive relation among the economic base, juridico-­ political organizations, and the moral and intellectual field’ (Jessop 2016: 74) – it exists locally, upholding various embedded ‘suzerainties’, but not on the national scale. The framework of the Gramsci-­inspired cultural-­political economy is often used to analyse successful hegemonic projects. However, scholars also study cases of incomplete hegemonic rule. They are conceptualized as passive revolution: palpable progressive social transformations conducted under the leadership of the ruling class (hence revolution) but ­p assive – ­t hat is, ‘without the extensive involvement of subaltern classes as classes, but by means of molecular absorption of their leading elements into an already established hegemonic project’ (Thomas 2006: 73). This situation of domination without genuine hegemony can develop into ominous political forms of Caesarism or Bonapartism (Antonini 2021). Such regimes emerge as an attempt to fill the gap between the masses and the weak ruling class with an agent presented as a compromise, and to accomplish national tasks by reaching over the heads of the impassive institutions. These morbid regimes come to life in the situation of hegemonic (organic) crisis, famously described by Gramsci as an interregnum, when ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’ (Gramsci 1992: 275). The collapse of political representation between the rulers and the ruled opens the way to unconventional political styles, movements, narratives and regimes, which are often grouped under a single label (e.g. populism) despite their heterogeneous nature. Historically, these sustained periods of non-­hegemony can last as long as hegemonic periods and should be analysed in their own right rather than as simple transitions. The concept developed by Gramsci to make sense of the situation in interwar Europe conceptualizes the current hegemonic crisis, known under the names of post-­democracy, technocracy and populism. Both situations can be interpreted as a vacuum that arises when the old hegemonic equilibrium is shattered but no new hegemonic project replaces it. The loss of public support for the power bloc and its internal ideological divisions prevent the possibility of low-­ tension depoliticized policy changes, spelling social stagnation that is

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sometimes interrupted by pathological political outbursts. Left populism, economic nationalism, and austerity neoliberalism are the three hegemonic projects competing in the post-­2008 interregnum on the global scale. As for Ukraine, the history of its organic crisis may be counted from the very beginning of its national independence. This chronic inability to find a stable power configuration based on a convincing hegemonic project is not a unique situation. Many if not all the post-­Soviet countries have been facing the same permanent crisis, oscillating between two deficient solutions that only reproduce and intensify the crisis. On the one hand, large-­scale mass protest mobilizations occurring regularly in countries like Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia or Moldova show revolutionary aspirations but only vaguely articulated claims and loose organization structures. When these movements gain the upper hand, they fail to establish stable institutions of political representation. On the other hand, attempts to consolidate power in Bonapartist regimes, prominent in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan or Azerbaijan, are not successful in this enterprise either (Ishchenko and Zhuravlev 2021). The inability of national elites to claim moral leadership is manifest in the growing distance between the subaltern classes and the institutions of representative democracy. The distrust and contempt that Kryvyi Rih workers demonstrate towards politics; their systematic preference for anti-­system political options, leaning towards authoritarian anti-­corruption; their flight from the public sphere into the private ­domain – ­all this indicates a deep crisis of hegemony that has yet to be overcome.

Variegated Moral Economy – Uneven and Combined Besides the Gramscian framework, there is one more theoretical perspective that can be productively used in further academic research of the politicization of the post-­Soviet working ­class – ­namely, the framework of uneven and combined development (UCD). Its roots lie in the comparative analysis of the socio-­economic backwardness of late imperial Russia, made by Leon Trotsky ([1906] 2015). He showed that, contrary to the logic of uniform linear progress, dominant at the time, this backwardness had paradoxically allowed for more radical politics than was possible in more advanced Western Europe. Rediscovered by academics a century later, this perspective has inspired a growing literature on uneven and combined development.

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Arguing for a holistic approach against the methodological nationalism of mainstream frameworks and the West-­centrism of the world-­systems theory, the UCD school operates with the concepts of ‘the whip of external necessity’, pushing a society towards transformations, and ‘the privilege of backwardness’, allowing laggards to overtake the leaders of the development race (Anievas and Nişancıoğlu 2015). Using this framework to interrogate the ethnographic case of a Croatian factory, Ognjen Kojanic (2020) shows, for example, that technical modernization is not a linear process; it depends on the composition of the workforce, on the scale of production, on the enterprise’s position in global capitalism. And some factors (e.g. peripheral location and cheapness of labour) may render non-­modernized production more viable. The UCD approach rejects the state-­centrism of the institutionalist ‘varieties of capitalism’ school, further developing an approach to the international political economy that postulates the existence of a single but variegated global capitalism (Peck and Theodore 2007). This multi-­scalar perspective does not take the priority of the national level as granted: global hegemonic structures may provide an ‘exoskeleton’ to a state that exists without a national hegemony (Morozov 2021). This discussion concerns directly my case of a weak macro-­level hegemony in Ukraine, sustained or replaced by more powerful configurations on other levels. A closer engagement with the UCD framework and with the field of the international can further develop the analysis presented in this book. What can be said at this point, without new research? Ukraine is a remarkably unstable element of variegated, uneven and combined global capitalism. It underwent a structural crisis and reshaping after the collapse of the Soviet politico-­economic system in 1991. After a decade of economic freefall and social chaos, this polity found a new niche in the global political economy, riding the wave of a commodity boom. The new Ukraine joined the ranks of peripheral extractivist capitalist economies, whose sociopolitical stability is sustained by the redistribution of rent extraction rent. Anti-­neoliberal tendencies of its formal economy on the national scale coexist with a ‘neoliberalism from below’, the lay moral economy of merit and distinction (Gago 2017). Residual protectionist attitudes of the national elite may have prevented even worse social outcomes of the market-­oriented transformations, but they failed to bring about sustained economic growth relying on inner resources; instead, this developmental state without development produced a particular kind of ruling class, an oligarchy straddling the economic, political and social domains. The

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stability of this configuration is undermined by its geopolitical position: stuck between two blocs, Ukraine became a hostage of their growing mutual hostility. Initially specializing in the export of metals, the Ukrainian economy has been gradually shifting towards a focus on agricultural and purely extractive exports. These processes have shaped the politics of Kryvyi Rih, whose local paternalist regime of domination embeds the extraction and material production, which feeds into global flows, notably contributing to the growth of China. During the years of the 2000s boom, China was an important consumer of local metallurgical produce, but since then it has developed its own metalworking industry that now competes with the obsolete Ukrainian producers and prefers to consume Ukrainian raw materials. The whip of external necessity, generated by the Soviet collapse, prompted the local society to transform and find a way to fit into the global economy, but this adaptation proved to be a temporary fix. In 2019, Kryvyi Rih workers still benefited from the privilege of backwardness, which makes their jobs more protected than in the Western countries. However, this privilege did not serve to create new, advanced social forms. Instead, the factors that generate ­it – ­paternalist moral economy, weakness of the state, material resources inherited from the Soviet system, and the global market ­conjuncture – ­are not sustainable in the long term. The peculiar identitarian patchwork of Kryvyi Rih is a local articulation of Ukraine’s peripheral position, its political and military connections with the US, economic dependence on the EU, and the structural threat posed by the Russian empire. These international factors encounter local structures of class and distinction, in a region that is culturally close to Russia but that suffers disproportionately from the conflict with that country. The lens of moral economy, focused on subaltern agency and lay attitudes, helps us better understand large-­scale processes defining the specific place that Ukraine occupies in global capitalism at a time when both the post-­Fordist economy and the liberal international order are in deep crisis. The competition of ethnolinguistic identities takes place in the background of shared normative beliefs in the end of ideologies, the democratic sovereignty, and an efficient state apparatus. In the historical moment when the liberal order unwinds on the global scale, these premises, on which it was based, survive, finding their local expression in an agenda that is very different from the previous ‘end of history’ configuration. The ideals of value-­free expertise legitimated by the democratic mandate and supported by

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well-­oiled state institutions transform and reconfigure to produce the agenda of authoritarian anti-­corruption (penal populism) and anti-­ political, technocratic governance. In this sense, the kaleidoscope of moral regimes of production and domination observed in Kryvyi Rih is not an exotic aberration but rather a local manifestation of the global turmoil in which the formerly hegemonic ideological, political and economic structures find themselves worldwide.

Epilogue Ukraine after 2022

_ The research on which this book is based was conducted before the Russian invasion of 2022. Neither I nor most of my interlocutors back then could imagine an overt military attack by Russia outside of the Donbas. This failure of ­imagination – ­to the extent that it was ­one – ­was common. The new realities merit new analyses based on new fieldwork. What can be said in the meantime? Based on the currently available information, what has changed? And what remains true? How should we read this book about the pre-2022 Ukraine today?

Politics and Identities One of the central topics of my analysis has been the depoliticized nature of Ukrainian post-­Soviet society in general, and specifically of its working class. At the same time, we have seen compelling stories about the impressive level of social mobilization in the wake of the invasion. Instead of passively accepting whatever ‘the politicians’ prepared for them and minding their private affairs at a safe distance from ‘politics’, my interlocutors and people with similar social profiles have demonstrated a surprising will to fight, taking a clear side in the conflict and thereby ruining Putin’s plans for a Blitzkrieg. How can this be explained? Does it mean that Ukrainian society has been highly political and civic-­minded all along, with civil society structures penetrating its very depths?

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I argue that this impressive mobilization can be best understood precisely through the lens of depoliticization. The wave of activism, courage and self-­sacrifice demonstrated by the working class hardly relied on any pre-­existing organizational structures of the lionized post-­Maidan civil society. Rather than a manifestation of cherished political convictions and organizational loyalties, it can be interpreted as a reaction to the sudden disruption of the everyday life of private citizens. When the hostile world of politics takes the shape of missiles and bombs aiming to destroy your quotidian routine, remaining immobile is not an option. Taking an active stand against it, protecting one’s private lifeworld, is a visceral reaction that does not require any political positioning. This perspective probably also explains the persisting indifference of the Russian population to the war: largely sharing the general anti-­political attitude, the demobilized Russian working class has no reason to revolt against events that do not overturn their daily lives so violently and on such a grand scale as has happened in Ukraine. How durable are the effects of this visceral mobilization? Will it subside leaving no trace when the active phase of the conflict is over, as some people suggest already, looking at relatively safe regions that have reconstructed a pre-­war routine? Or will it finally lead to the creation of a national project shared by the majority of the population, putting an end to the endless post-­Soviet hegemonic crisis? The latter option is quite possible, although not guaranteed. What seems to be certain is that the balance between the two identitarian narratives, which regulated Ukrainian politics for decades, is not going to re-­emerge. The ‘East Slavic’ discourse is not accepted in the public sphere the way it used to be before the 24 February 2022, and the ‘East Slavs’ themselves have become much less numerous, falling to the shock of the invasion. Ukraine’s Russophone population has taken the hardest hit of this war, both in terms of material destruction and of shattered worldviews: the so-­called ‘pro-­Russian’ public in Ukraine, misled by those who claimed to represent it, was the one least morally prepared for the Russian ‘special military operation’. The ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ discourse has certainly been reinforced, but it does not remain the same, either. For one thing, it has become paradoxically less ethnicized: vicious essentializing slurs against ‘all Russians’ are routinely expressed by people with Russian surnames, often in Russian language, targeting Russian generals and politicians with sometimes Ukrainian surnames. In other words, the essentialist understanding of ‘nationality’ as ethnicity, dating back to the 1920s and dominant until recently, has taken on a different, more inclusive

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shape, even if the ethnic core remains important. The 2022 invasion has cemented the Ukrainian nation by moving the principle of the ‘us vs. them’ fault ­line – ­from now on, it corresponds to the Russo-­ Ukrainian state border. An example of this merger of the two previously diametrically opposed narratives can be found in Kryvyi Rih, where the local strongman Oleksandr Vilkul uses Soviet cultural tropes to justify his refusal to collaborate with the Russians and has built close alliances with his erstwhile enemies from the nationalist camp. Such national unity is not necessarily politically progressive (do we still believe in linear progress that brings us democracy and freedom?), but it is a markedly different situation from the weak hegemony of ‘pluralism by default’. That said, it does not invalidate all the debates. For example, if the ‘ethnic Russians’ are today considered Ukrainians for all practical purposes as long as they are loyal to the Ukrainian nation state, the question of the usage of Russian language still stands: should it be completely banned from the public sphere as a colonial relic, or will it be rehabilitated as the language of many Ukrainian army members and of the majority of victims of the Russian aggression? What about the largest Ukrainian Orthodox Church, subordinated to the pro-­war Moscow Patriarchy? Or the popular cult of Stepan Bandera and other radical nationalist politicians from the 1940s, who became simple symbols of patriotism for the bulk of contemporary well-­meaning Ukrainians? Most importantly, what should the socio-­economic face of the Ukrainian nation look ­like – w ­ hat is the place of the working classes in it? These pre-­existing discussions accompany new ones, borne out of the ‘eventful’ character of this new nationalism. Just as the nationalism of post-­Euromaidan Ukraine was anchored to the loyalty to this particular event, the post-­2022 nationalism distributes the ability to make symbolic claims to citizenship proportionally to the degree of participation in the war. It is not uncommon to hear refugees living in safe Western countries expressing self-­doubt about their belonging to the new national body, often reinforced by voices from inside the country. All that can be said at this point is that these flexible and dynamic hierarchies are highly contingent on the outcomes of the war.

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Getting By in War Time The post-­Soviet culture of ‘getting by’, cutting corners and seeking ‘hidden productivity reserves’, inasmuch as it is geographically specific, grew out of two great societal dislocations: the revolution of 1917, with the subsequent quest to trick material circumstances, ensure economic development and win over the capitalist camp; and the fall of the USSR, with the subsequent attempts to preserve a degree of economic stability and social cohesion while integrating into the capitalist camp. The dislocation caused by the ongoing war further reinforces the culture of resourcefulness and informality in all ­domains – ­from the army itself, which has to improvise with available equipment and use it in unforeseen ways, to households, which, in order to survive, have to navigate a myriad of new problems using their social connections and creativity. This is also true for the labour process and workplace politics. The military draft and the massive emigration have reinforced the perennial problem of Ukrainian ­capitalism – ­labour shortage. Answers to it are predictable: labour hoarding and entrenched industrial paternalism combined with underinvestment. All the major enterprises of Kryvyi Rih, put under enormous strain by the war, have avoided redundancies as much as possible and found ad-­hoc solutions. To give one example, in late May 2023, AMKR was working at only 25–30 per cent of its capacity while maintaining its workforce of 22,000, of which only 11,000 were employed full time. The rest, being idle, received two thirds of their normal wage. The management rotated jobs, trying to distribute evenly the burden of idleness. Rather than shedding labour, the CEO was worrying whether the workers drafted into the army (3,000) would be willing to return to the factory later on. The traditional pattern of a non-­Taylorized labour process, ‘negative autonomy’, political atomization and informal leverage of workers over the management which attracts them with paternalist tools, does not seem to be anywhere close to ending.

Peripheral War Economy On a larger scale, the war has intensified structural changes to the Ukrainian economy. The role of heavy industry in the South and the East, already compromised by post-­Soviet decades of underinvestment, is further diminishing. The total destruction of some industrial capacities, such as the two huge steel mills in Mariupol, does not

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only erase these factories from the scene but produces a negative multiplier effect across the whole sector: for example, AMKR and Metinvest in Kryvyi Rih have lost their main domestic consumer, even if they themselves have not been physically hit. In addition, Russian warships have blocked Ukrainian seaports, which has drastically reduced the exporting capacities of Ukrainian industry since the start of the invasion. After the 29 per cent contraction of the economy in 2022, in 2023 the World Bank estimated the cost of reconstruction at more than twice the size of Ukraine’s whole pre-­invasion economy. Even if industrial paternalism still remains on the stage, the industry itself is becoming less relevant for the ­country – ­at least the legacy Soviet industry in the South and the East. The same is likely true for agriculture, suffering from direct occupation, constant fighting in adjacent areas, landmines, the sea blockade, but also the desertification induced by climate change and the catastrophic effects of the destruction of the Kakhovka dam. Taken together, this amounts to the shifting of the country’s economic gravity centre westwards. Regions that have been relatively marginal in the Soviet and post-­Soviet economy may gain comparative advantage from the war but also from climate change and from economic integration with the EU. The latter factor is responsible for the emergence of a string of greenfield industrial enterprises, without Soviet legacies, in Western Ukraine. Situated close to the border, these small factories are extensions of EU-­centred production chains. If such a restructuring is indeed taking place, Russophone workers of Eastern and Southern Ukraine are set to lose their jobs and welfare to identifiable winners, the population of Western regions. This can be offset by a countertendency: the militarization of the economy, which will necessarily make use of all the existing industrial assets. Developing a war economy, which is likely whatever the outcome of the war, is a way not only to preserve Ukraine’s industrial potential and to attenuate economic dependence on Western countries but also ensure the co-­optation of local workers into a new hegemonic bloc. This co-­optation can be further facilitated by measures that can be reasonably expected in the course of any postwar recovery: curtailing the role of markets, introducing planning and progressive taxation. Finally, whatever happens within the Ukrainian economy, as a whole it is now more firmly than ever inscribed into the periphery of what Russian propaganda calls ‘the collective West’. This confusing term mixes up several structures and processes. Militarily, Ukraine is most heavily dependent on the US. However, economic ties between the two countries have never been very close, and this

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is not likely to change. Instead, Ukraine is deepening its economic dependence on the EU. Besides presenting ample economic opportunities, the EU has a privileged place in the Ukrainian political imaginary. Membership in the EU is seen here as the ultimate success of every imaginable national development strategy. This gives the EU ample political powers over a country militarily tied to the US: something we saw in Turkey for decades before Erdoğan’s turn. Finally, millions of Ukrainian refugees currently living in EU countries will further reinforce these tendencies, contributing to the gradual reorientation of Ukrainian everyday culture from Russia to the EU.

What about the Workers? This book’s chief theme is the politics of the working class. What has the war done to it? On the one hand, trade unions are among the key institutions supporting the war effort. They have actively supported military resistance to the invasion and coordinated humanitarian aid and other initiatives falling under the category of ‘Ukrainian wartime self-­organization’. Hence, formally it is indeed the working class, represented by its most active members, that is in the vanguard of politics. However, in practice the two kinds of unions do it following different logics. Legacy unions follow the template of a ‘HR department’ of the powers that be. At this time, it may not be the enterprise administration but the state and/or local authorities that asks them to help, and unions like PMGU deploy all their organizational potential: making sure that nobody avoids the military draft, procuring and distributing equipment and other necessary supplies to ‘their’ drafted workers on the frontline, directing humanitarian aid to their families, supporting workers remaining at the enterprise, facilitating evacuation and/or setting up welcoming facilities for evacuees. These functions are difficult to overestimate, but they can hardly be considered a manifestation of workers’ agency. Similarly, independent unions follow the template of self-­help organizations. They possess fewer resources but invest more empathy. They do not police the military draft but function as mutual aid societies, finding necessary resources and directing them towards union members and their families. This does resemble the early history of the labour movement, but so far these processes are not accompanied by subjective politicization or empowerment.

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Thus far, no new forms of class self-­organization have emerged during the war. This is reasonable given the context: not only are all the resources of potential working-­class activists directed at survival and at the war effort, but martial law directly forbids all oppositional activity. In the meantime, the government pushes ahead with anti-­ worker legislation, going as far as introducing zero-­hour contracts. Three bills passed in parliament in 2022 have restricted the rights of workers and unions more than all previous legislation on industrial relations. This campaign is not about to stop: pro-­presidential lawmakers plan to pass a ‘simplified’ Labour Code, following the examples of Putin’s Russia and Saakashvili’s Georgia. Apart from angry declarations, there was no response from trade unions. Facing their own powerlessness reproduced yet again, workers console themselves with a recurrent trope: currently we have another enemy to beat, but soon our boys will come back victorious from the frontline; they will be angry and armed, and then they will teach the corrupt elite a lesson for daring to challenge workers’ rights. Theoretically, powerful labour emerging out of war is not unheard of: after the First World War, it managed to create the Soviet state; after the Second World War, it built welfare capitalism in Europe and the US. However, there is nothing automatic about this process. Currently, the narrative about ‘the boys’ taking revenge has much more in common with other populist tropes putting all hopes on a powerful saviour that will protect the people and punish the elite evildoers. Like all such tropes, it is an empty signifier: the same form (soldiers that will bring justice) is equally often filled with left-­wing (punishing exploitation), right-­wing (punishing diversity) or liberal (punishing corruption) content. The war that used to be of only limited importance to a large part of the population before 2022 has become what Maoist doctrine calls the ‘people’s war’. It relies on the army, consisting first and foremost of the working class, and on the mobilized civilian population. However, a people is not equivalent to a class. ­Populism – ­that is, the politics of ‘the people’ – is antithetic to class politics. It is yet too early to say whether the Ukrainian working class will be finally reassembled as a collective political subject and on which premises.

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Index AMKR, 1, 2, 82, 84, 94, 114, 139–50, 166, 177–79, 184, 185, 218, 229, 230, 237, 245, 259–63, 272, 291, 302, 303 atomization, 9, 15, 29, 64, 99, 112, 121, 134, 144, 169, 178, 183, 184, 200, 201, 210, 212, 224, 241, 276, 285, 291, 302 automation, 127, 131, 159, 160, 170 autonomy, 15, 25, 30, 41, 65, 76, 77, 80, 84, 104, 112, 120, 121, 125, 126, 131, 147, 149, 159, 170–77, 198, 199, 203, 208, 210–12, 226, 284, 285, 290–93, 302 biudzhetniki, 42, 57, 62, 78, 216, 239 blat, 19, 29, 30, 32 Bobchenko, Yuriy, 140, 141 Bonapartism, 29, 35, 294, 295 Bourdieu, Pierre, 8, 20, 23, 181, 197, 214, 240 Breman, Jan, 24, 219 Burawoy, Michael, 8, 30, 123, 167 bydlo, 194, 205 Canovan, Margaret, 20, 21 chastnik, 114, 166, 167 commodity markets, 8, 51, 53, 55, 60, 63, 64, 78, 86, 148, 149, 163, 278, 282, 283, 296 conspiracy theories, 205, 259, 289 clans, 39, 42, 43, 45, 47, 48, 89 clientelism, 15, 19, 27–29, 31, 32, 34, 35, 39, 43, 45, 47, 48, 53, 56, 58–60, 62, 64, 76, 81, 85, 96, 110–13, 121, 124, 137, 143–7, 153–56, 161, 172, 173, 175–78, 185, 211, 234, 238, 241, 263, 265–67, 276, 278, 279, 284, 286, 287, 290, 291

corruption and anti-corruption, 2, 3, 15, 20, 29, 32, 44, 48–50, 56, 62, 65–66, 130, 145, 147, 158, 166, 167, 172, 185, 188, 195, 219, 229, 238, 241, 247, 254–57, 260–68, 270, 272–75, 277, 280, 285, 288, 289, 291, 295, 298, 305 decency, 244, 255–57, 266, 268, 274, 289 decommunization, 60, 229, 233, 254 dependent survival, 46, 176 depoliticization, 6, 24, 25, 102, 112, 145, 156, 191, 252, 254, 264, 283, 292, 294, 299–300 distinction, 5, 72, 181, 183, 186, 188, 189, 191, 192, 195–98, 205, 206, 212–14, 217, 219, 220, 223, 224, 226, 240, 241, 274, 276, 277, 285, 296, 297 Dnipropetrovsk (Dnipro), 39, 43, 47, 48, 81, 114, 162, 233 Donbas political economy of, 39, 40, 43, 48, 49, 72, 73, 153, 177 the war in, 58, 128, 196, 229, 231, 242, 245, 282, 299 Donetsk. See Donbas ‘Eastern Slavs’, 50, 56, 64, 155, 215, 224, 226–28, 230, 231, 233, 235, 236, 237, 240, 246, 247, 259, 268, 277, 282, 283, 285, 289, 300 embeddedness (dis-), 6, 7, 13, 15, 26, 27, 30–33, 35, 40, 42, 43, 45, 48, 73, 77, 78, 83, 86, 90, 91, 93, 96, 98, 99, 105, 107, 109–12, 122, 127, 128, 136, 137, 139, 140, 149, 151, 152, 154, 156, 160–62, 167, 169, 172–77, 211, 213, 256, 264, 272, 274–76, 283, 284, 286, 287, 291, 292, 294

330   |   Index

entrepreneurial self, 171, 173–75, 177, 200, 211, 212, 284 ‘ethnic Ukrainians’, 50, 178, 225–27, 231, 235, 237, 240, 241, 246, 259, 268, 279, 282, 285, 289, 300 Euromaidan, 2, 57–59, 62, 64, 197, 220, 227, 228, 232, 240, 265, 282 Europe, the normative image of, 3, 9, 29, 37, 39, 62, 173, 179, 205, 219, 220, 225, 232, 235–39, 265, 266, 268 everyday politics, 4, 13, 25–27, 32–34, 88, 181, 282, 292 Evraz, 128, 129, 154 factory regime, 6, 30, 126, 127, 130, 131, 134, 137, 140, 141, 147–49, 151, 154, 161, 163, 172–75, 178, 199, 284 Fordism (neo-), 35, 117, 151, 154, 158, 160, 161, 167, 171, 173–75, 177, 178, 284 garage, 103, 161, 162, 208–10, 292 getting by. See smekalka GOKs InGOK, 151, 154 SevGOK, 151–54, 158 TsGOK, 151, 152, 273 YuGOK, 82, 141, 151, 154–59, 178, 218, 228 Gramsci, Antonio, 21, 22, 117, 215, 234, 279, 290, 292, 294, 295 Gurov, Vadim, 79, 139 Hall, Stuart, 293 hegemony, 21, 22, 43–45, 51, 56–58, 60, 62–64, 67, 78, 82, 83, 85, 87, 96, 112, 113, 117, 118, 125, 138, 167, 184, 227, 231, 234, 235, 240, 249, 274, 279, 290, 292–96, 298, 300, 301, 303 IMF, 3, 41, 45, 46, 53, 55, 59, 260 individualism, 124, 173, 178, 181, 183, 189–91, 197, 198, 211–13, 258, 276, 277, 285, 292

ingenuity. See smekalka inflation (hyper-), 40, 41, 45, 47, 51, 75, 77, 91, 105, 110, 122, 123, 131, 147, 210 informality, 24, 28–35, 37, 39, 42, 43, 47, 48, 53, 62, 63, 76, 77, 82–85, 93, 96, 99, 112, 114, 119–21, 123, 125, 127, 130, 131, 133–35, 138, 142, 146, 148, 151, 157, 159–61, 163, 166, 167, 169, 171–73, 176, 178, 183, 199, 207–11, 213, 218, 253, 265, 269, 276, 284, 286, 287, 291, 292, 302 Kalb, Don, 24, 25 Karamanits, Fedor, 128, 217 khoziain, 35, 65, 77, 136, 152, 154, 266, 283, 291 Kolomoyskyi, Ihor. See Privat komunalka. See utility tariffs Kravchuk, Leonid, 36, 37, 39, 41 krutitsia (vertetsia, ‘to hustle’, ‘to spin’), 76, 171, 199, 208, 210, 286, 292 Kryvorizhstal. See AMKR Kuchma, Leonid, 41, 43, 44, 46–49, 63, 128, 261 kulturnost, 194 kum, 247, 256, 279 KZRK, 1–2, 127, 128, 130, 131–33, 135, 137, 146, 187, 188, 200, 216–19, 229, 231, 244, 273 Laclau, Ernesto, 13, 21, 22, 34, 225 Ledeneva, Alena, 29, 30 LGBT, 223, 224, 239 lgotniki, 90–93, 95, 96, 113, 114, 157 Liubonenko, Yuriy, 75, 77, 80, 81, 91, 92, 106, 226 living wage, 51, 66, 134, 140 Lüdtke, Alf, 25 Maryniuk, Natalia, 141, 146 marshrutka, 92, 93, 95, 96, 111, 114 Marx, Karl, 8, 9, 23, 35, 43, 138, 189, 196 mentalitet, 195, 204 Metinvest, 2, 79, 81, 82, 84, 95, 114,

Index   |   331

128, 141, 151, 152, 154–56, 158–60, 164, 175, 177–79, 303 metrotram, 90–92, 114 minimum wage, 51, 59, 66, 109, 287 mobilization economy, 82, 86, 87, 107, 112, 176 moral economy, 3, 5–8, 13, 26–29, 31–35, 71, 73, 84, 86, 92, 93, 96, 97, 99, 104, 110, 122, 125, 154, 161, 166, 174, 175, 177, 211, 216, 256, 273–75, 278, 281, 283, 284, 286, 290, 292, 293, 295–97 moralism, 13, 26, 104, 107, 198, 211, 238, 248–50, 252, 254–58, 260, 274, 275, 288, 289 Morris, Jeremy, 32, 210 Mouffe, Chantal, 13, 21, 22, 243 Mudde, Cas, 20, 224, 225 natural gas, 47, 53, 55, 57, 59, 105, 96, 100, 108–10, 155 neoliberal subject, 15, 170, 171, 174, 203, 208, 211, 292 neoliberalism, 6, 13, 32, 35, 41, 42, 45, 49, 51, 56, 65, 98, 109, 112, 149, 150, 158, 170, 211, 212, 234, 235, 238, 252, 263, 275, 283, 286, 287, 289, 291, 292, 295, 296 normalized emergency, 75, 76, 86, 108, 286 Novak, Serhiy, 135, 136, 217 NPGU. See trade unions, independent oligarchs, 2, 3, 10, 28, 46–53, 55, 56, 58, 59, 62–64, 79, 123, 129, 139, 144, 145, 151, 155, 224, 261, 265, 268, 273, 280, 282–84, 293, 296 Opposition Bloc, 82, 83, 155 Orange revolution, 2, 49, 53, 56, 59, 79, 81, 128, 134, 147, 197 organic crisis, 22, 57, 60, 279, 294, 295 Parry, Jonathan, 219, 265 Party of Regions (PR), 48, 50, 53, 79, 80, 102, 140, 247, 268, 282, 283 passionarity, 269, 270

paternalism, 15, 29–32, 34, 35, 45, 49, 63, 70, 73, 83, 84, 88, 93, 96, 98, 99, 104, 110–12, 118, 120, 121, 123, 125, 126–28, 132, 133, 135–37, 139, 141, 144–46, 148, 149, 151–55, 157, 158, 160, 161, 167, 172, 174–77, 211, 217, 218, 224, 227, 241, 260, 264, 266, 272–75, 277, 278, 283, 284, 286, 287, 291, 292, 297, 302, 303 patrimonialism, 28, 29, 32, 35, 49, 59, 64, 112, 271, 275, 278, 282 patronage. See clientelism patron-client relations. See clientelism Pavlov, Kostiantyn, 84, 95, 103, 230 peripherality, 63, 69, 215, 219, 235, 236, 240, 281, 296, 297, 302, 303 plan-fulfillment pact, 30, 119, 125, 138 PMGU. See trade unions, legacy Polanyi, Karl, 27, 32 populism as style, 20, 225 as thin ideology. See Mudde, Cas postfoundationalist theory of. See Laclau, Ernesto Poroshenko, Petro, 58, 60, 204, 218, 223, 233, 247, 263, 267–70, 272 pre-emptive scepticism, 270 Privat, 47, 48, 128, 141, 154, 268, 280 privatism, 25, 253, 274, 276, 277, 288 privatization of housing, 97, 98, 111 of industrial enterprises, 41, 44, 46, 47, 49, 50, 78, 79, 82, 85, 98, 114, 123, 127, 128, 138–40, 144, 145, 147, 148, 161, 166, 278, 283, 284, 291 of public infrastructure, 91, 109 profit rate (profitability), 43, 52, 63, 70, 121, 124, 128, 130, 138, 147–49, 153, 157, 159–61, 163, 173, 217, 218, 282 property regimes, 88, 96, 103, 104, 111, 112, 174, 284 putiovki, vacation vouchers, 120, 132, 133, 140, 143, 147, 150, 185, 228

332   |   Index

‘red directors’, 41, 42, 44, 45, 48, 65, 211, 217 reiderstvo, 44, 48, 152 retirement age, 134, 137, 150, 196, 201, 203, 206, 262, 263 Scott, James, 26, 31, 32, 34, 178, 234 Screenwind, 10, 161–74, 177, 179, 188, 207, 208, 266, 270, 292 serfdom. See slavery Servant of the People, the (political party), 84, 280 Shevchyk, Dmytro, 84, 273 smekalka, 210, 212, 286, 292, 302 Skeggs, Beverley, 197–99 slavery, 129, 137, 196, 197, 213, 258, 261, 290 state capacity, 77, 260, 289 strikes in 1992–1994, 1, 73–75, 185 in 2017–2019, 1–2, 11, 128, 146, 147, 184, 188–90 in 2020, 11, 135–37, 196, 203, 216, 217, 231, 232, 244, 245, 258, 273 subsumption of labour, 138, 149 subtractive clientelism, 113, 177, 286 Sukha Balka, 1, 2, 82, 128, 129, 134, 146, 164, 178, 186–89, 218 surplus value, 130, 134, 149, 284 Svoboda party, 56, 179, 228 Szelényi, Iván, 28, 35 Taylorism, 30, 119–21, 124, 125, 127, 131, 148, 151, 160, 169, 173–77, 284, 302 technocracy, 41, 42, 49, 50, 64, 67, 75, 79, 85, 86, 106, 156, 175, 226, 227, 251, 253, 256, 260, 262–64, 266, 271, 275, 278, 283, 288, 294, 298 Thompson, E.P., 8, 19, 23, 24, 26, 27, 33, 34, 183, 257

trade wars with Russia, 55, 57, 282 trade unions legacy, 30, 79, 123–26, 132, 133, 136, 140–43, 146–49, 153, 156, 157, 165, 176, 187, 188, 213, 228, 238, 304 independent, 12, 124, 125, 128, 137, 141, 142, 153, 154, 161, 184, 185–88, 203, 206, 250, 254, 304 ‘two Ukraines’, 37, 49 Tymoshenko, Yuliya, 47, 48, 50, 52, 134, 154 uneven and combined development, 5, 240, 295, 296 utility tariffs, 59, 65, 71, 76, 80, 105–7, 109, 110, 114, 283 variegated capitalism, 4, 15, 295, 296 vassalage, 290 vatnik, 224, 233, 242, 246, 279 Vilkul Oleksandr, 79–82, 100, 102, 141, 152, 155, 178, 227, 229, 230, 233, 234, 301 Yuriy, 80–82, 84, 92, 95, 103, 108–11, 114, 128, 136, 141, 229–31, 233, 271–73, 279 vykonkom, 83, 84, 90, 91, 93, 94, 98, 102 vyshyvatnik. See vatnik Weber, Max, 28, 29, 35, 63, 256 workplace safety, 124, 129–31, 158, 164 Yanukovych, Viktor, 48–51, 53, 55–58, 61, 81, 141, 247 Yaroslavskyi, Oleksandr, 129, 218 Zelenskyi, Volodymyr, 3, 60, 84, 136, 155, 204, 245–47, 258, 267–73, 275, 279, 280, 282 ZhKH. See utility tariffs

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