The objection came in under a retelling of Part 11, posted by an international network that organises solidarity with Ukraine. Three numbered points, polite and confident. The first held up the other two: the integration of Ukraine and Russia before 2014 was the shared legacy of the Soviet Union, and calling it colonialism reads the present back into a history that was something else.
The commenter had found the right place to push. Part 11 argued for reading Ukraine as Ireland in 1916, a nation pulling away from the state that had governed it and taking arms from wherever arms could be had. That analogy carries weight only if Ukraine stood to Russia roughly as Ireland stood to Britain. Remove the subordination and Serbia walks back in, then neutrality, and then the robbers’ peace starts to look like realism.
Another commenter in the same thread had already pointed to the first document. In April 1917, in Petrograd, Lenin wrote a preface to Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism explaining that the pamphlet had been written with the tsarist censor in mind, and that to show how the capitalists screened their annexations he had been forced to use Japan as his example. Then the instruction: ‘The careful reader will easily substitute Russia for Japan, and Finland, Poland, Courland, the Ukraine, Khiva, Bokhara, Estonia or other regions peopled by non-Great Russians, for Korea.’ Japan had annexed Korea in 1910. Khiva and Bokhara were protectorates in Central Asia. Lenin put Ukraine on the same list, in the same grammatical slot, and left the arithmetic to readers the censor was presumed not to have, which by 1930 included most of the people who had studied the pamphlet in party schools.
So the man in whose name the Serbia analogy is defended had no trouble with the word. The trouble comes after October, and it is real. The revolution made Ukraine a Soviet republic with its own party, its own government and, from 1945, its own seat at the United Nations. The 1920s brought Ukrainisation, a deliberate push of the language into the schools and the press and, more slowly, into the party apparatus. Anyone who says the Soviet Union began as something other than the tsarist empire under a new flag is right, and Lenin’s last political fight proves it: in his notes of December 1922 on the question of nationalities, he turned on Stalin’s plan to fold the republics into the Russian federation, on an apparatus ‘we took over from tsarism and slightly anointed with Soviet oil’, and on the Great Russian chauvinism he found in the people carrying it out, several of whom were not Russian at all: ‘people of other nationalities who have become Russified over-do this Russian frame of mind.’
What happened next is recorded in the party’s own theoretical journal. In 1928 Bil’shovyk Ukrainy published, across two issues, an article by the Kharkiv economist Mykhailo Volobuiev on the problem of the Ukrainian economy. He argued that Moscow’s fiscal and planning policies were returning Ukraine to the colonial status it had held under the tsars, that central control fused with Russian chauvinism was distorting the republic’s development, and that Ukraine should control its own budget and its own economy. He was made to recant within the year and his name became a charge sheet, ‘Volobuievism’. The colonial diagnosis of Soviet Ukraine came from inside the party, in its own journal, and the reply came from the police, who arrested Volobuiev in December 1933 and kept him for the best part of a decade.
By then the argument had stopped being made aloud. Mykola Khvylovy, the communist writer who had told Ukrainian culture to turn its face away from Moscow, shot himself in May 1933. Mykola Skrypnyk, the Old Bolshevik who had run Ukrainisation, shot himself in July. The famine was emptying the countryside in the same months. Writing six years later, Trotsky named Pavel Postyshev, Stalin’s emissary to Kharkiv, as the real organiser of Skrypnyk’s death, and said that nowhere had purge and repression taken so savage and so massive a form as in Ukraine.
Trotsky’s answer, in April 1939, was the most uncomfortable slogan the Fourth International has ever carried: ‘A united, free and independent workers’ and peasants’ Soviet Ukraine.’ He still regarded the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state, to be defended against imperialism, and he called for Ukraine to leave it. Unification with the Ukrainians under Polish rule, he wrote, ‘presupposes freeing the so-called Soviet Ukraine from the Stalinist boot.’ In July he answered the sectarians who said independence would weaken the Union by turning the charge round: it was the bureaucracy’s strangling of the nation that drove Ukrainians towards the imperialists. If Trotsky could argue for separation from a state he was still defending, ‘shared Soviet legacy’ cannot settle anything about 2014, when the state in Moscow had long since shed the content he was defending.
The Russian share of the republic’s population rose from 9.2 per cent in the census of 1926, 2.7 million people out of 29 million, to 22 per cent in 1989, 11.4 million out of 51.7 million. They came overwhelmingly from European Russia, Orthodox and Slavic, very few from the Muslim republics or Siberia, and they were over-represented where power sat. Postyshev arrived in 1933 with a large contingent of Russian cadres to replace the purged, and Khrushchev brought another in 1938. In 1958 Russians were 28.2 per cent of the members and candidates of the Communist Party of Ukraine; twenty years later they were 27.3 per cent, in a republic where the 1979 census counted 21.1 per cent. A kind of settler colonialism, then, or more exactly a migration the centre steered and then rewarded with the jobs that ran things.
The obvious move is to call it colonisation outright and stop there. It overreaches. The borders moved underneath the census, with western Ukraine taken in 1939 and Crimea transferred in 1954, so the two figures do not count the same territory. Nationality on a Soviet census form was never a fixed quantity either, and Russified Ukrainians were counted as Russians in large numbers. Above all, Ukrainians were not shut out of the centre. Khrushchev made his career in the Ukrainian party and Brezhnev came up through Dnipropetrovsk, and the republic supplied ministers, marshals and plant directors to the whole Union. Moscow did not people Ukraine the way Britain peopled Australia.
The comparison that holds is nearer home. Ireland under the Act of Union of 1801 was formally part of the United Kingdom, sending its MPs to Westminster and its sons into the army and the imperial service, and the Duke of Wellington was born in Dublin. Formal integration, and a share of the imperial spoils for one layer of the population, sat alongside an economy arranged around the needs of another country and a famine during which food went on leaving Irish ports. Junior partnership and subordination are compatible, and the Marxist tradition has a word for the combination, semi-colonial, which fits Soviet Ukraine better than either ‘colony’ or ‘shared legacy’ and fits the relationship the Kremlin is now trying to restore by force.
I saw the economic end of this from inside a manufacturing company in Kyiv, about twenty years ago. The plant sold in three directions. At home it sold on ordinary commercial terms. Russia took the volume, below full cost and above marginal cost, cheap and frankly poor goods that neither Ukrainian nor European buyers would have accepted, and the plant could not refuse the business because machines built for the scale of the Soviet economy ran at volume or not at all. Europe was the hope. Make to a European standard, sell at a price that covered the full cost of production, and the company might slowly dig itself out of its dependence on customers in the former Soviet Union who were, put plainly, being subsidised by it, which is a strange position for a supposed beneficiary of shared legacy to be in fifteen years after the legacy was wound up.
The left’s usual reading of the trade figures is the textbook semi-colony, raw materials out and finished goods in. The imbalance is real and the composition is wrong. In 2013, the last full year before the war, Ukraine exported goods worth $15.1 billion to Russia and imported $23.2 billion; with Belarus the gap was nearly two to one, $2.0 billion out and $3.6 billion in. Seven years later, after the trade had been reoriented towards the European Union and China, the 2020 IMF figures, as Visual Capitalist charted them, still showed Ukraine buying from Belarus a little over twice what it sold there, and from Russia about 1.7 times as much. But in the breakdown for the year before, the exports to Russia were Ukraine’s most advanced, the machinery, equipment, aircraft and vessels that its sales to the European Union lacked. The largest single import, by a distance, was natural gas, worth $11.5 billion in 2013. The dependence ran through a machine-building industry with one customer, working on energy priced by that customer’s state, which used the price as a political instrument in the gas disputes of 2006 and 2009.
Much of the Russian trade ran through networks of patronage and corruption, and those networks made a class with a stake in keeping them. The groups known as the Donetsk clan built the Party of Regions out of the state resources they controlled in the east and put Yanukovych at its head, and Dmytro Firtash, among the richest of their allies, made much of his fortune as Gazprom’s partner in RosUkrEnergo, the company given exclusive rights as Ukraine’s gas trader in 2006, in which Gazprom held half and Firtash, through Centragas, held 45 per cent. Call it a comprador bourgeoisie, or, for the late Soviet years before there was a bourgeoisie to speak of, a comprador elite. At election time it offered a choice between bourgeois politicians loyal on the whole to Ukrainian capital and bourgeois politicians loyal on the whole to Russian capital. The turn towards Europe was the only route out of the old trading pattern and out of Ukraine’s poverty, and it ran against the material interests of that layer and of the Russian oligarchy at once, which is why Yanukovych’s suspension of the Association Agreement in November 2013, under Russian threats over trade, was a choice made on that layer’s behalf. The commenter’s second point has the direction of travel backwards. Maidan and its aftermath broke the political hold of the fraction of Ukrainian capital most tied to Moscow, and the assault on workers’ rights came later, from wartime legislation, as Part 3 recorded.
Donetsk shows how old the arrangement is. The same comment thread gave the city a Belgian founding. It began in 1869 as Yuzovka, the works town of John Hughes, an ironmaster from Merthyr Tydfil in Cymru, who shipped in his equipment in eight ships and brought about a hundred workers from home. Belgian and French capital followed him into the basin: by 1914 thirty-one Belgian companies were operating in the Donbas, and foreign capital held some 70 per cent of its coal mining. The Donbas was designed from outside from the start, by foreign capital and then by the Soviet plan, and peopled by migrant labour, and Putin’s 2021 essay on the ‘historical unity’ of Russians and Ukrainians is a bid to put the design back under a single owner, with the eighteen mineral deposits Moscow has marked out in the occupied south, recorded in Part 9, standing in for the old contracts.
The worker in a Donbas machine plant in 2013 had a wage that depended on the Russian order book. Independence from Moscow, for that worker, carried the risk of losing the only customer the plant had ever had, and the eastern working class knew it, and much of it voted for the Party of Regions, and some of it took up arms on the other side, and a great deal of it is now under occupation or scattered across the country or in the ground. Trotsky’s slogan assumed that the workers of an oppressed nation would find their interest in independence. The Soviet division of labour handed a section of them a material interest running the other way, and on that ground the commenter stands on firmer footing than anything this series has yet answered, because an answer would have to say what an independent Ukraine owes the workers whose skills were built for a market that Europe was never going to replace within a working life, and nothing in this series has yet said what that is.
The whole series is collected at With Washington and Moscow.