REPOSSESSION: Notes on Restoration and Redemption in Ukraine's Western Borderland

Abstract

This essay is an ethnographic account of the use of post‐Soviet military ruins in western Ukraine. I describe an encounter with the founder of a commune for persons released from prison, victims of human trafficking, and asylum seekers established in a former nuclear base in Ukraine's western borderland. The commune is an unusual restoration project that is carried out in the interstices of the postsocialist state and of the changing European border regime. As such, it is a compelling site for rethinking dispossession and the possibility of redemption some 15 years after the USSR ceased to exist. The protagonist of this account redeems ruins left behind by the collapse of an empire he was glad to see go, and reproduces precisely that which has been lost in the process of the unmaking of Soviet life, that is the all‐embracing domain of collective work and life.

Introduction: Towards a Political Understanding of New Ruins

“…Not only are the architectural artefacts Chaubin visited physically peripheral, on the margins of cities that were themselves on the margins of the USSR, but they are in a sense remote culturally, given the disappearance of the political administrations that constructed them, and given these administrations' own effacement of the traces of the city's previous histories, traumas and populations. The role of the periphery is shared in much of the literature on the role of ruins within the post‐Soviet nations, including for example Szmagalska‐Follis's (: 333) description of the occupation by a commune of ex‐military ruins in Ukraine on the Polish border; here she finds in Ukraine's rural landscape, as Hatherley (this issue) does in its capital city, evidence of a country forged, ‘framed and informed by the dialectic of grand ideologies and their disintegration’. As noted in Pusca's (: 242) work on the afterlife of ironworks in provincial Romania and the Czech Republic, many of the less visible ruins of this era lie outside large cities and are potentially lost to cultural analysis, ‘easily disregarded as nonrepresentative of the general experience of the postcommunist transition’.…”

Representations of disability in print news media in postsocialist Ukraine

“…These relationship-focused articulations of personhood -which often are embedded in the narratives of interviewees with disabilities but not necessarily elaborated on by journalists -define self-making as an inherently social endeavor. They show that neoliberal logics are not the only ideologies governing social relations and manifestations of personhood in postsocialist societies (Matza 2009;Szmagalska-Follis 2008).…”

The empire strikes back: War without war and occupation without occupation in the Russian sphere of influence

“…By reinvoking the rights of secession and ethnic self‐determination, and the right that ostensibly accrued to Soviet republics under Soviet law, Putin implicitly claims to be reinstating the durable institutional frame for national cadres, intelligentsias, languages, and cultures that collapsed along with the Soviet state, while, at the same time, restoring Russian primacy in the region. In doing so, he articulates a national vision to an otherwise disoriented post‐Soviet population, one that for many reasons is often nostalgic for the Soviet past (Klumbytė ; Oushakine ; Ries ; Szmagalska‐Follis ).…”