The movement in Ukraine that brought down the former president, Viktor Yanukovich, at the weekend has not fitted into some stereotypes used by people in western Europe, including socialists and left wingers. Having spent the last few days in Kyiv, I offer the following answers to questions that friends in western Europe frequently ask.

 Ukraine 1. Yanukovich’s end is a beginning

This is the first part of an article on Ukraine.

Question : Has there been a right-wing coup ?

Gabriel : No, there has not. The new government will include some nasty right-wing people. How nasty they can get, only time will tell. But it’s difficult to imagine that they could take repressive measures more monstrous than those Yanukovich and co. used in the last few months (sniper fire into crowds, other types of murder, torture of activists, unbridled use of paid thugs, and so on).

In any case, the government’s potentially dangerous right-wing colouring is one thing ; the character of the movement that paved the way for it is another. Two important points, to my mind, are (1) this was a mass movement embracing wide swathes of the population ; and (2) the strength of right-wing populism, and the presence of fascists, is due mainly to the crisis of the left – which is an international problem, not a Ukrainian one.

The occupation at Maidan (= Maidan Nezalezhnosti, = Independence Square) mushroomed into a mass movement not so much in response to Yanukovich’s failure to sign an association agreement with the European Commission as in response to police brutality.

Oleksandr Turchinov, speaker of parliament and acting president, said on Monday 24 February that “the priority is to return to the path of European integration, the struggle for which Maidan was started”. That’s rewriting history – already ! Yanukovich’s failure to sign the agreement with Brussels brought on to Maidan only about 400 students. What enraged much of Kyiv was the brutality with which those 400 were attacked by the Berkut riot police late on 30 November last year. The next day, Maidan (also the venue for mass demonstrations during the so-called “Orange revolution” of 2004) was filled with tens of thousands of people. A middle-aged, middle-class acquaintance, whose own children are at university, said to me this week : “If they [Yanukovich and co.] hadn’t attacked those kids, the whole thing would never have got going. It was their own stupid fault.”

The make-up and motivation of the crowd on Maidan was complicated. I wasn’t there so I can only relay impressions from friends and comrades. Almost everyone I talked to seemed to agree that a gigantic proportion of Kyiv’s population (the young and the old, the rich, the middle-class and the workers) was there at one time or another ; that motivations varied widely, but removal of Yanukovich became an all-embracing theme, especially after 16 January when he tried to push through laws to limit drastically the right to protest ; and that putting an end to corruption in politics – which means different things to different people – was an issue. Various kinds of patriotism and nationalism, including the most reactionary, were there in abundance ; social issues seemed not to be at the forefront. Among analyses published by Ukrainian leftists in English, this interview with a member of the Autonomous Workers Union considers Maidan’s politics in the most detail [1].

The crowd was independent of its “leaders”, and that was crucial in Yanukovich’s final days.

• On bloody Thursday, 20 February, snipers opened fire on Maidan and, unbelievably – despite dozens of deaths – the crowd stayed firm. (A well-off acquaintance of mine, who had never been on a demonstration in his life before November, said : “Many people in Kyiv, me included, who couldn’t spend all our time on the square, would go there whenever Maidan was under attack. That happened on Thursday.”)

• On Friday 21 February, the three opposition leaders – Vitalii Klitschko (boxer turned leader of the Udar (= Punch) party), Arseny Yatseniuk (neo-liberal economist, of former prime minister Yulia Timoshenko’s Batkyvshchina party) and Oleh Tiahnybok (leader of the right wing populist Svoboda party) – negotiated a compromise with Yanukovich : presidential elections in December and return of the 2004 constitution (i.e. less power for the president and more for parliament). The talks also involved European foreign ministers, including Pavel Sikorski of Poland who was caught on camera warning Klitschko : “If you don’t support this, you’ll have martial law, the army, you’ll all be dead.”

• Klitschko went to the square to ask the crowd to endorse the deal. An activist from the self-defence force grabbed the microphone and said no. If Yanukovich did not leave by the morning, the crowd should go and get him. The crowd roared its approval – and at that point Yanukovich lost his nerve. By Saturday morning 22 February he had abandoned the presidential administration and his obscene dacha at Mezhigorye. By Sunday 23 February Aleksandr Efremov, leader of the Party of Regions (Yanukovich’s party) in parliament, was declaring him a “traitor”. Among Yanukovich’s piles of riches were found documents showing that he had considered an “anti-terrorist operation” using 2500 troops, which could have multiplied the number of victims many times over.

What did for Yanukovich was the crowd’s refusal to move.

Q. Was this a revolution, then ?

G. I heard different views on this from Ukrainian friends and comrades. Of course, it depends what is meant by “revolution”. To my mind a revolution involves a collapse or radical overhaul, not just of government but of state structures – the bureaucratic apparatus, armed forces, and the rest. In Ukraine, these structures are holding together, but only just. A decisive element in Yanukovich’s downfall was the declarations at various times last week by various police, army and security services chiefs that they would not move against the protesters. On Friday-Saturday 21-22 February, parliament played fast and loose with the constitution : it effectively usurped the president’s powers, deciding e.g. to free Yulia Timoshenko from jail and to call new elections. Structures were strained, but not destroyed.

Another element in revolution is surely a successful challenge to state power, by a mass movement, outside the usual political processes. This certainly happened – although the state’s armed forces surrendered after the cowardly murders on the square, rather than being defeated in battle.

On the other hand, the Marxist understanding of revolution assumes change not only to the political system, but to the social and economic order. That, clearly, has not happened.

So I suppose my answer is more “no” than “yes”. But the important thing is to understand the substance, not to try fitting it to pre-conceived definitions.

Q. What part have right wing populists and fascists played ?

G. The right wing and fascists are, numerically, a small minority in a broad popular movement. But they can not be ignored. And for Ukraine’s left wing, their threatening presence is a problem that will not go away.

The populist right wing party Svoboda (= Freedom) – which is aggressively nationalist, homophobic, and received about 10.5% of the vote in the parliamentary elections of 2012 – was prominent on Maidan. So was the Right Sector, an alliance of nationalists, including the most prominent organisation, Trizub (= Trident, the group of Dmitry Yarosh, Right Sector’s leader), racists such as Belyi Molot (= White Hammer), UNA-UNSO (Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian National Self Defence) and other extreme right and fascist groups.

Right Sector took shape on Maidan as a fighting force, and formed branches in western Ukraine. As soon as its leaders started talking about turning it into a political party, tension grew been them and Svoboda’s leaders, since they could appeal to the same voters. Some Ukrainian comrades describe all these groups as “Nazis”, and I don’t think that’s an adequate term of analysis ; it obscures significant differences between them. [2]

The Right Sector, and/or gangs associated with them, have assaulted and threatened leftists and trades unionists in the Maidan crowd. A tent put up by the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine, the main independent union federation, was attacked by a gang carrying knives. Such violence is the contination of a series of attacks on left-wing gatherings in Ukraine that has run parallel with Svoboda’s growth over the past couple of years.

This highlights another issue – that although hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of leftists (including socialists, anarchists and others, and trade union activists) participated in Maidan, attempts to do so in a high-profile or organised way mostly failed. Some socialists were heavily involved in initiatives such as medical support, and in anti-Yanukovich student strikes. But attempts to form a Left Sector, and to form an anarchist fighting group on the square, were both abandoned due to threats from the right.

For those active in the workers’ movement and left wing groups in Ukraine, this is an urgent practical problem. Rather than trying to gauge the strength of fascist or right-wing organisations according to prejudices about Ukrainian nationalism, let’s focus on concrete incidents, and make sure that we support our friends and comrades. My practical proposal would be that attacks are systematically monitored, so that our discussions can be informed by good information.

Note : apart from attacks on anti-Yanukovich leftists, there have also been widespread attacks on members of, and property of, the Communist Party of Ukraine. But this post-Stalinist organisation was on the other side of the barricades. It notoriously voted in favour of the anti-protest laws of 16 January, the introduction of which produced a big upsurge in the movement. It has long supported Yanukovich in parliament on a range of issues, and on Monday announced that it was moving into opposition together with the Party of Regions. [3]

Q : The fascists and extreme nationalists are not the only ones organising self-defence groups, are they ?

G. Certainly not. The Right Sector was substantially outnumbered by the Maidan self-defence units that owed allegiance to the “Civic Council of Maidan”, formed as the would-be voice of the demonstrations by human rights activists, NGOs and aspiring politicians (real, current politicians were not welcome). The Maidan self-defence units and Right Sector fought side by side against the riot police. While the state forces had most of the armed force, but not a monopoly. Of an estimated 82 killed last week, 10 were policemen. In the middle of last week there were about 250 policemen in hospital with gunshot wounds, in addition to 350 protesters.

In the days after Yanukovich’s downfall, the police largely disappeared from the streets of Kyiv and other cities. An agreement was reached in Kyiv that police and Maidan self-defence groups would patrol jointly. Self-defence groups sprang up across the country, most armed with sticks, baseball bats and ski masks, some with firearms. Some are coordinated by Maidan or the Right Sector ; some organised by local residents in response to fears of the breakdown of law and order ; some are little more than self-appointed gangs of young men, playing by their own rules.

It is not clear how this will play out. One friend told me that a newly-formed neighbourhood defence group in the huge housing estate in which he lives, on the edge of Kyiv, is disciplined and expertly coordinated with internet-based technology. At the height of the conflict it erected a block on the main road to Kyiv to obstruct pro-Yanukovich forces ; over the weekend, it patrolled police-free streets. My friend described a reasonable level of community coherence. But I heard and read reports of other armed groups apparently not underpinned by such collectivity.

On Monday 24 February, a small picket – of about 20 people, mostly radical leftists – was held outside the Russian embassy, to support the 6 May prisoners who were that day sentenced to terms of between two-and-a-half and four years for their part in anti-Putin demonstrations in Moscow. [4] It was interesting to see the response from Maidan.

A self-defence unit of about ten men stayed throughout. Their representative addressed the pickets, and said they wanted to protect the embassy from provocation. My leftist friends thought such a danger – that, in response to Russian government support for Yanukovich, Ukrainian protesters might use the picket as a pretext to attack the embassy – was real, and that the self-defence units’ reasoning was logical. Half-way through the hour-long picket, a less friendly-looking group –Svoboda supporters, apparently – arrived. The self-defence group talked to them, and they remained passive onlookers. I wondered what was going on in their minds : one of their perceived enemies, the left, was up against another, Russia.

Q. And how might things evolve politically, from here ?

G. The opposition is putting together a government that will head a weak state at a time of mounting economic crisis. It’s hard to see how the political forces in the opposition will be able to work together. Even within the largest party, Batkyvshchina, there are deep differences : Yatseniuk, proposed on Wednesday 26 February as prime minister, has bought into the neo-liberal agenda that implies opening up Ukraine’s economy to a heavy pounding (“making it competitive internationally”). Timoshenko’s modus operandi, by contrast, is to cut deals with Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs (politically powerful businessmen) ; she is one of them, having accumulated a huge fortune in the gas sector in the 1990s.

Even if neo-liberal dogmatists and oligarchical interest groups can reach compromises, they still have to deal with Ukraine’s working-class people. The impact of the 2008-09 economic crisis, in terms of unemployment and inflation, has been partly cushioned by public sector wages and pensions, that have risen in line with inflation, and relatively cheap municipal services (housing, gas, electricity, etc) and welfare, that no Ukrainian government – neither Yanukovich and his allies (2004-05, 2006-07 and since 2010) nor Timoshenko and co (2005 and 2007-10) – have dared to cut. Udar and Svoboda, Batkyvshchina’s likely partners in government, have both won votes by railing against cuts, as well as against corruption in government.

Squaring this circle won’t be easy for the new government, my leftist friends in Kyiv said. Tensions could also open up between Svoboda and the extreme nationalists of the Right Sector. My own view is that Ukrainian governments can not for ever put off turning the screws on people’s living standards. Battles over this could open up spaces for working-class action and left activity, and not only for the right

Some leftists see a serious danger that right wing and fascist groups may merge with state structures. They fear that the radical right street fighters, who are today operating joint patrols with police, could tomorrow get uniforms and (legal) weapons. Proposed government appointments seem to justify such fears. On Wednesday 26 February, it was reported that Andrei Parubi, who headed the Maidan self-defence force, would take over Ukraine’s Council of National Defence, and that Yarosh of Right Sector would be one of his two deputies.

Parliament has appointed Arsen Avakov, former governor of Kharkiv, as internal affairs minister ; Valentin Nalivaichenko of Udar to head the SBU security service ; and Oleg Makhnitsky of Svoboda as general prosecutor. “Who’s he going to prosecute ?” asked a socialist friend.

Q. Some people in the western left focus on the right wing and fascists ; others seem to ignore them completely. Why ?

A. This is more about the western left, and the stereotypes it is so often satisfied with, than about what is going on in Ukraine.

People who see the world in terms of a geopolitical battle between the USA and NATO on one side, and Russia, among others, on the other side, look at Ukraine as a chess piece in this conflict. To them, what is most important is not the development of social and labour movements – in Ukraine, Russia or anywhere else – but which side Ukraine takes in this battle (the west vs Russia). They can not get their heads round the idea of middle class or working class Ukrainians seeing positives in Europe, as opposed to Russia. The answer, they are convinced, must be that Maidan can not be a mass movement in which right wing populists and fascists have gained influence, and therefore it must be a movement inspired by the right, supported materially and ideologically by the USA.

Here is an especially crude version of this view [5] : (“In an attempt to pry Ukraine out of the Russian sphere of influence, the US-EU-NATO alliance has, not for the first time, allied itself with fascists”, etc.) Some of these presumptions were reflected, too, in Seumas Milne’s article in the Guardian [6].

On the other side are social democratic supporters of the European ideal, whatever that means to them. They believe that their job is to help bring Ukraine into the European capitalist fold. This meant turning a blind eye to, or playing down, the right wing and fascists’ violence, and emphasising that Maidan is pro-European and therefore inherently progressive. Variants of such views are effectively challenged by Volodymyr Ishchenko of the journal Spil’ne [7].

There is a great deal of history running through these arguments. I was depressed to see, on Maidan, flags and symbols of the wartime Ukrainian Resistance Army (UPA), some of whose leaders collaborated with the Nazis, and some of whose detachments participated in ethnic cleansing against Jews, Poles and Russians. That symbolism sticks in my gullet ; perhaps it’s my Jewish family background. (I felt even sicker in 2010, when the former Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, pinned a medal on the grandson of UPA leader Stepan Bandera, saying, in effect, “screw any discussion of history among Ukrainians, let’s appeal to the crudest nationalist sentiments”.)

Socialists need to get a historical handle on Ukrainian nationalism. But in order to do so, in my view, we need first to filter out the heavy legacy of Soviet ideology, which still corrodes the 21st century labour movement. That ideology cast the tyrannical Stalinist dictatorship, which in 1932-33 presided over a famine that killed millions of Ukrainians, as “socialist”, and all Ukrainian nationalists – whether or not they had any connection with UPA or sympathy for its wartime dealings with the Nazis – as “fascists”. All this is behind some of the stereotypes.

When Yanukovich said he was overthrown by a “fascist coup”, he might even have believed it. In terms of analysis, surely we can do better.

 Ukraine 2. A political earthquake for Europe and Russia

This is the second part of an article on Ukraine.

Q. Where did the impetus for Yanukovich’s removal come from ? And what else was the Maidan movement demanding, exactly ?

G. Yanukovich was always a corrupt bully. Even so, it was remarkable to see how, over the last couple of months, his awful capacity for cruelty helped to tie together the political threads that led to his removal. Each police attempt to clear Maidan brought thousands of extra people into the square, and intensified the level of resistance, and violence, by demonstrators : on 11 December (when a police attempt to clear the square sparked a counterattack), on 19 January (when Yanukovich’s anti-protest laws reignited Maidan), and again on 18 February.

In Maidan’s politics, democracy – the right to demonstrate without fear of brutal police assault, the right to free speech, and so on – was important. wantedBeyond this, the target perhaps most often identified by protesters was “corruption”. It’s worth thinking about its meaning in post-Soviet states. When their economies began to be merged with world capitalist markets, after the Soviet system collapsed in 1990-91, the transition was far from smooth or comprehensive. Some of them – Ukraine’s neighbour Belarus is the obvious example – have retained many Soviet economic methods (state ownership of most industry ; state direction of investment ; heavy regulation of markets, prices, cross-border capital transfers, etc). In Ukraine and Russia, most of these methods are no longer used : most but not all industry has been privatised ; many but not all prices have been deregulated.

But there are other Soviet-era survivals, particularly in the relationship between the state and the capitalist class. Who owns what, and how business is regulated, is often decided privately between politicians, capitalist owners and managers. Western capitalists who try to do business in Russia and Ukraine go crazy about this : they are used to relatively open competition. Apart from corruption in the strict sense of the word (e.g. bribes collected by state officials from firms, or individuals, in exchange for decisions made) there is also a mass of opaque relationships between state officials and businesses. These may or may not be law-abiding (the laws are often left deliberately complex, so that a transaction cost can be created e.g. for delivering court judgements one way or the other) – but they certainly don’t meet the “standards” for competition developed in American and European markets, especially during the age of neo-liberalism.

Ukrainian rage against “corruption”, as far as I can tell, is not only from working-class and middle-class families who have to bribe traffic cops, doctors, university admission boards, and the rest, but also from small, and even large, businesses who are shut out of this disposition of power and money by state officials and their favoured capitalists. It’s a cry for “normal” capitalism ; capitalism that plays by “normal” rules and works “properly”. For upper- and middle-class Ukrainians, Europe is the place where these normal rules apply.

But Europe means something to working-class Ukrainians too. Before the 2008 crisis there were 3 million or more migrant Ukrainians working in the European Union, many illegally. Much of this migration was temporary ; it probably dipped post-crisis, but picked up again. [8] These people are surely not influenced by lying promises from Brussels ; they may not even have heard them. They just know that, even in precarious work, wages in Europe are much higher than at home. For many young Ukrainians, Europe’s comparatively tolerant culture and social liberalism surely strikes a welcome contrast to Russia’s increasingly stifling conservatism.

I have heard western leftists argue that Ukrainian workers need to beware of Europe because EU labour regulations compare poorly with the letter of Ukraine’s labour law. Maybe true, but surely irrelevant. Ukraine’s labour law is rarely enforced to workers’ advantage, because workers’ organisation is not widespread enough or strong enough to enforce it. Whether Ukraine ends up imposing legal frameworks from the Eurasian customs union (Russia-Belarus-Kazakhstan), or the EU, or neither, it will be the level of organisation that matters most. In the meantime, for young Ukrainian workers “Europe” means “higher wages”.

On Monday 24 February in Kyiv, completely by chance, I came across about 2000 medical students from one of Ukraine’s most prestigious universities on a spontaneous demo. They were demanding the dismissal of their rector, who had threatened to discipline students who joined the Maidan medical corps. Chatting to some of them, it seemed to me that they look at the world much as do their counterparts right across Europe (or in Russia for that matter). I was struck by how their transnational outlook contrasts with the nationalist symbols on Maidan – legacies of the process of national self determination that Ukraine didn’t complete in the 19th or 20th centuries, and that in the 21st seem like an echo of the past. Just impressions, but I’m sharing them. …

Q. Where does the workers’ movement fit into all this ?

G. Ukraine’s biggest concentration of industrial workers, mostly Russian speaking, is in the east. That’s where most of Ukraine’s iron ore, and steel (its no. 1 export), is produced ; chemicals and machine-building are also significant. Eastern Ukraine, which sits on gigantic coal reserves, was developed as one of the Soviet Union’s biggest centres of heavy industry, and there are strong social, industrial and cultural legacies.

I don’t have sufficient information to say how workers in the east are reacting to events in Kyiv. Sections of the local elite are hostile to the new government (see below), but even this is not uniform. The west vs east dichotomy is an oversimplification. I have seen reports of pro-Maidan actions in the east, including big demonstrations in Kharkiv, and a blockade of the main Dnipropetrovsk-Kyiv railway on Thursday 20 February to stop a trainload of troops being moved to Kyiv.

I have not seen reports of the miners’, steel workers’ or factory workers’ reactions. But that may say more about the low level of collective activity in these industries than about their support or opposition to Maidan.

It would be stupid, though, to equate the Ukrainian working class with factory-based trade union organisation. For a start, with few exceptions, the workforce in eastern Ukraine is aging ; young people don’t work in the factories, and, increasingly, don’t live in eastern Ukraine at all. (A recent UN report on the world’s cities showed that, in the top ten of fastest-shrinking cities, Dnipropetrovsk is no. 1, Donbass is no. 3 and Zaporizhzhya is no. 4. That’s partly low birth rates and high mortality, but also a great deal of migration. [9]) For another thing, other economic sectors – services including IT, food and consumer goods production, and so on – have expanded in post-Soviet times while heavy industry and mining has contracted. At a trade union activists’ conference in Kyiv in November, most reports at a session on rank-and-file organising were from these sectors [10].

There were myriad ways in which working people were involved in Maidan, but far fewer examples of collective participation. If the sort of popular mobilisation we have seen in recent months continues, it will surely be important for activists to find points through which the Maidan and the workers’ movement can strengthen each other.

Q. What might happen to workers’ social and economic conditions under the new government ? And in which way is the Ukrainian economy developing ?

G. This is a big “x” factor, to my mind. Ukrainians’ living standards are low, but the state budget – via a comparatively decent pension system, public sector workers’ wages and a range of benefits and relatively cheap services – helped it to rise before the 2008-09 economic crisis, and has prevented it from going too much lower since then. So in 2002, according to the World Bank’s definition, 47% of Ukrainians were below the poverty line ; that number fell to 12.3% in 2007 and has rebounded to about 16% in 2009-10. [11]

All this spending has aggravated the state’s serious financial problems. The political crisis of recent months has made things worse. Now there is too little foreign currency in the kitty (governments generally regard enough cash to buy three months’ worth of imports is the minimum ; after spending a couple of billion trying to slow down the fall of the hryvna this month, Ukraine’s national bank has $17.8 billion left). Politicians have already come up with some eye-watering figures (e.g. $35 billion) of what they want to borrow ; financial analysts are talking about $20 billion, which is still a fair bit. Whether Ukraine borrows from the USA and Poland and/or the EU, and/or the IMF, the lenders will demand huge cuts. Battles over public spending and other social issues are bound to break out, sooner or later.

Q. What about the Ukrainian economy ? What is the longer-term background to the crisis ?

G. In the mid 1990s, Ukraine was thrown into a slump even deeper than Russia’s. Large swathes of Soviet-era industry closed, unable to compete in world markets. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, parts of the industrial base that could compete were bought up by oligarchs via privatisation, and consolidated into the business empires that dominate today. The largest is Rinat Akhmetov’s SKM group, which started with steel-making and machine-building plants, and has expanded into metals mining, the power sector and telecoms. Alongside these empires, a great deal of the transport and construction sectors, as well as municipal services, education, health and welfare, all remained in the state sector.

Successive governments in Ukraine have been politically weak, both in the face of oligarchical influence, and with respect to potential working-class discontent – even though labour unrest has not been really widespread since the mid 1990s. So, on one hand, the oligarchs dodge tax. On the other, the cost of public sector wages, plus pensions and other social benefits, is comparatively high per dollar of tax collected. (A World Bank report complained that “successive governments hiked public sector wages and pensions”, and that in 2009 public spending was 47% of GDP, including pensions (18%) and public sector wages (12%). [12])

So Ukraine’s state finances have been kept afloat with a wish and a prayer. Up to 2008, the international boom in commodity prices meant that exports of steel, ferrous metal alloys and chemical fertilisers – and, in some years, wheat and other agricultural produce – helped a great deal. There has been a good chunk of foreign currency in the bank and that has helped the Ukrainian hryvna to be reasonably stable.

After the 2008-09 crisis, Ukraine qualified for one of the biggest rescue packages. Both the IMF and the European banks, some of whom had invested heavily in Ukraine from the mid 2000s, were desperate to ensure that both the state finances and the banking system emerged unscathed. An IMF loan programme was arranged for Ukraine, with typical neo-liberal conditions attached : the public sector wage bill had to be cut ; the pensions system had to be reformed ; and gas, water and electricity tariffs must rise above cost-recovery levels. Both Timoshenko up to 2010 and Yanukovich since then have artfully avoided keeping the promises the government made to the IMF at that time.

A long-running side show features Russian gas imports. Ukraine’s Soviet-era industry and municipal infrastructure is heavily dependent on these ; successive post-Soviet governments have spent far more time haggling with oligarchs over who will skim margins from the resale of gas than worrying about reducing Ukraine’s dependence on Russia for energy. For its part, Russia has sometimes offered price reductions in return for political concessions by Kyiv – although that often cuts across the aims of Gazprom, Russia’s big state-owned gas company, which (surprise surprise, there’s that “normal” capitalism again) sees selling gas as a way of making profit. In 2009, Gazprom sharply increased its prices (there were high oil and gas prices everywhere then) and Ukraine’s gas company has struggled to pay a gas bill that runs at $7-14 billion a year. It ended last year with a $3.3 billion back debt, of which it paid $1.6 billion last week.

The bottom line is that, with the Yanukovich meltdown, Ukraine’s state finances will be reorganised under the close attention of the international financial institutions. How much pain are they prepared to inflict on working people ? Look at Greece.

Q. What about this tug-of-war between the western powers on one side and Russia on the other ? Is the EU competing with Russia for economic hegemony over Ukraine ?

G. In some respects. Competition in the economic sense has been heightened by both sides’ broader political and strategic aims. The deal offered by Russian president Vladimir Putin, and accepted by Yanukovich as an alternative to the EU association agreement was incredibly costly to Russia : $15 billion in loans, lower gas prices and a bundle of measures to boost Ukrainian imports to Russia. (The loans were to have come directly from Russia’s “fund for national well-being”, and I doubt that struggling Russian families, who could probably use $15 billion worth of support themselves, were amused.)

As for the EU, after bringing in Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, and Croatia in 2013, politicians from the rich, dominant countries have drawn a line. Neither Turkey nor Ukraine – both large countries with big reserves of cheap labour, and heaps of political and cultural problems attached – will have any chance of joining the EU in the foreseeable future. (How many Tory MPs, under challenge from UKIP, would ever support that ?!)

Ukrainian workers are well aware of this : access to EU labour markets via migration (whether legal or not) is not going to widen. For them, an EU “integration process” short of membership is pretty meaningless. For Ukrainian politicians, less so. Throughout the post-Soviet period, successive governments in Kyiv have proved adept at manoeuvring for concessions from Europe on one side, and Russia on the other, and playing one off against the other. The room for such manœuvre was closed down by Putin’s “either/or” stance, and the resulting difficulty was one of the secondary causes of Yanukovich’s demise.

Q. Russian colonialism, to which Ukraine has historically been subjected, plays a real part here, doesn’t it ?

G. Of course. Ukraine was Russia’s oldest colony, and, just as northern Ireland is full of the descendants of (largely Scottish) protestant immigrants of the 19th century, so eastern Ukraine is full of Russian-speaking descendants of waves of immigrant workers who settled there during the industrialisation of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – in the first place, the industrial workers I mentioned above.

On the day Yanukovich disappeared (on Saturday 22 February), local politicians from Ukraine’s Russian-speaking regions gathered in Kharkiv. Claims were made that Maidan was anti-Russian ; calls for regional autonomy and even separation were made. By Wednesday 26 February, in Crimea, which has long had political autonomy and where the proportion of Russian speakers is among the highest, pro- and anti-Maidan demonstrators clashed. Russian nationalist politicians made incendiary speeches.

Some gloomy Ukrainians point to Russian support for separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which helped to trigger the brief Russo-Georgian war of 2008. They say that, under Putin, Russia’s great-power ambitions have become so pronounced that Moscow will use any and every lever of control, even at great cost to itself. The Financial Times (Monday 24 February) suggested that Putin would “revert to type, plunging Russia’s neighbour into a bitter and destructive war”. I think this says more about its leader-writers’ two-dimensional view of the world than any serious assessment of what near-term possibilities.

I accept that, under capitalism, politics and ideology sometimes take over, and drive governments to do things that bring no economic advantage and in the short term do great harm. And for that reason, I would not rule out stronger Russian support for separatism in eastern Ukraine, or even, in extremis, civil war. But I don’t think these are the the most likely prospects right now.

There are huge risks for the Russian state. Not only would inciting conflict in Ukraine lead to a further deterioration of relations with the western powers, particularly Germany, but, above all, it could rebound in the form of social discontent in Russia. The many millions of Russians with family and friends in Ukraine would hardly take kindly to conflict that would be perceived as unnecessary. Moreover, however vaguely opposition to dictatorship and corruption has been articulated on Maidan, Putin has no way of knowing whether such demands might catch on in Russia itself.

Look at recent history. In 2004, the Ukrainian “Orange revolution”, triggered by Yanukovich’s victory in a falsified election, scared the hell out of Putin and co. They didn’t like the infatuation of Viktor Yushchenko, the “Orange” leader, with NATO. (Nor did the vast majority of Ukrainians, so NATO membership was surely never going to happen). But the Kremlin’s greatest fear, and rightly so, was that large-scale political discontent in Ukraine might help spark Russian social movements. In January 2005 came the largest wave of working-class protests during Putin’s first two terms (2000-08), sparked by attempts to cut and reorganise welfare benefits.

Fast forward to 2011, and the falsification of Russian election results sparked the biggest wave of protests Putin ever faced. I believe that has made Russian government wary of setting off chains of unpredictable consequences in Ukraine. And don’t forget that if Putin had wanted to raise the violent stakes in Ukraine, he had the perfect chance to do so last week, when Yanukovich (after all, the democratically elected president), was indeed threatened (after all, unconstitutionally and with violence) by Maidan. If any Russian support was offered behind the scenes, it was ineffective, as we all saw.

Surely nothing is more destructive of working-class solidarity and collective action than all kinds of nationalism, separatism and threats of civil war. But to gauge the real dangers correctly, we need to strip out the distortions and exaggerations by most mainstream media, and sections of the left too, who depict the relationships between Russia, Europe and the USA in geopolitical terms. This approach downplays the obvious fact that, since the break-up of the Soviet Union, Russia has been integrated into the world capitalist economy not as a great power or anything resembling one, but in an economically subordinate role – that of a supplier of oil, gas, metals and other raw materials to manufacturing economies elsewhere.

The share of oil and gas in Russia’s export earnings (now about 70%), its GDP (about a quarter), and its budget (about a third) tells a story of economic dependence on stronger nations. Throughout the Putin era (i.e. from 2000), all Russia’s efforts to revive its manufacturing sector, and start up high-tech industries, have met with little or no success. There just is no basis for Russia to develop as a 21st century great power. Whatever vicious military games Putin plays in the Caucasus, in central Asia Russia has been eclipsed by China as the main economic power, and is increasingly giving up ground politically.

Q. To conclude, what might all this mean for the left, and for labour and social movements, internationally ?

G. For working people – in the widest sense that I’ve suggested above, embracing the industrial workers of eastern Ukraine but also the working and middle classes of Kyiv who have been on the square, the students, and Ukrainian migrants working in the EU – this is powerful confirmation of the strength of collective action. The leaders sought a compromise with the old regime ; the crowd said no ; and so Yanukovich was destroyed.

Collective action isn’t a panacea on its own. It doesn’t follow the logic we socialists might think it should. It has ugly aspects, in particular the participation of extreme nationalists and fascists, and I wouldn’t downplay those. But Maidan has ripped politics out of the narrow confines of government, parliament and apparatus ; it has put it in the streets.

Most importantly, though, this political earthquake will reverberate not only through Russia, but through Europe too. GL.

■ Saturday 1 March, 2.30 pm, The May Day Rooms, 88 Fleet Street, London, talk on the “revolution” in Ukraine by Gabriel Levy.

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