How do I want this book to be read? My answer may sound surprising and perhaps like wishful thinking. I would like this book, with its rolling analysis of the beginning of the armed conflict in Ukraine, to be read first and foremost because it records reactions to globally relevant processes.
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First, the late Soviet and post-Soviet leadership became seen as nothing more than a corrupt, self-serving elite. The atomized masses responded with frequent but poorly organized and amorphous protests that, when successful, only reproduced and intensified the underlying crisis. Unlike social revolutions, the maidans did not bring radical transformations in favour of the popular classes; they typically only increased social inequality. The maidan revolutions did not even build a stronger state but only destabilized the existing one, allowing domestic and transnational elite rivals to seize the opportunity to advance their interests and agendas. The post-Soviet elite responded only with more coercion, which eventually escalated into war. This set the stage for the flourishing not of developmental national ideologies but of regressive neo-tribalist identities. There was no strong force from below to counteract this dynamic. The processes of the escalating crisis of hegemony are universal, but their manifestations in the post-Soviet space are of a rather unique magnitude.
—Volodymyr Ishchenko, Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War, (London: Verso, 2024), xiv, xxviii-xxix.
When I first read Ishchenko’s suggestion studying post-Soviet Ukraine provides useful insight into globally relevant processes I didn’t feel I understood what he meant, however the more I read Ishchenko’s work the more I get the feeling that as with John Dunlop’s writing on the late Yeltsin and early Putin years what is being described very much does provide a guide into processes currently shaping the West.