Class, values, and revolutions in the Russia-Ukraine war

Abstract

Chris Hann's essay serves as a valuable intervention against the tendency to normalize primordial ethnonationalism following the full-scale Russian invasion. It is not immune to the common pitfalls and omissions in the writings of many authors whose point of criticism is aimed primarily at the role of Western elites in the conflict within and around Ukraine. But surely, Hann's core argument contains essential truths. Many social scientists have contributed to the construction of a theoretically shallow, methodologically nationalist, and culturally essentializing narrative. It is a telling fact that someone engaging the discussion has to begin with some basic facts of Ukrainian national identity formation, such as its diversity, or has to remind that the interests of the Western ruling classes in the war do not necessarily coincide with the interests of the Ukrainian subaltern classes, or that those are also likely to diverge from the interests and ideologies of their own comprador middle classes calling themselves “civil society.”