Yuliya Yurchenko's is a Marxist account of recent Ukrainian history, arguing that Ukrainian labor has been exposed to the brutality of domestic and foreign capital in a process supported by international financial institutions and various governments. Unabashedly polemical, the book reads like a manifesto dedicated (as it is) “to the victims of capital.” The goal is to make sense of the recent armed conflict in Ukraine, and the verdict is stark: “Russia, the EU, and the USA, together with Ukraine's oligarchs are responsible for the fresh blood that has been shed in the name of markets and power” (22). Rooting her inquiry in Antonio Gramsci's notion of control, the author suggests that “the expansion of the empire of transnationalizing capital” (3) in Ukraine was secured through elite-manufactured “myths” that reference the elusive transition to market democracy, create artificial cleavages in Ukrainian society, and brand Russia as “the Other.” Empirically, the book mostly relies on an array of Ukrainian media sources, government reports, and select western scholarship.
Unorthodox from the perspective of positivist social science, the book succeeds in several respects. By rattling conventional interpretations of the Ukrainian crisis, it is thought-provoking and draws attention to class analysis and the power of myths as potentially fruitful lenses for examining post-communist Ukraine. The book's trenchant criticism of the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement as it has been applied by the EU in Ukraine merits attention. The investigation of the organizational history of the main foreign business lobby groups in Ukraine will be of interest to scholars of state-business relations in the region. The author's discussion of Ukrainian national identity—its evolution and its manipulation—is simply fascinating.
The book could have been more compelling on several fronts, too. The author's rhetorical edge is sharp but not always backed up by evidence. Proceeding from its ideological foundation, the account goes to great lengths to establish a moral equivalence between Russia and the west: “Russia's manipulation toolbox is not dissimilar to that of Ukraine's Western partners as both groups pursue their economic imperialist interests; yet the latter's selection contains a few pressure devices more sophisticated than those of the Russian, for example, delays in the IMF loan tranches … indeed, no military intervention is needed if the road to capital is open” (45). The book hardly furnishes sufficient evidence for such statements to be taken seriously. At the same time, the narrative too often triggers Karl Popper's (1963) critique of the twentieth-century extensions of Marxism as being essentially non-falsifiable.
A brief consideration of cases outside of Ukraine would have been illuminating. Ukraine's neighbors Belarus and Moldova, for example, have approached the “transition” quite differently from Kyiv. Are there any lessons to draw here for evaluating Ukraine's “neoliberal kleptocracy” (208) as the putative product of transnationalizing capital?
Methodology aside, there is a want of dialogue with scholars outside of the Marxist tradition (strictly speaking) in comparative political economy, which is regrettable as such accounts often resonate with the book's key themes, offering potential for deeper insights. Henry Hale's work on patronal politics (2014), for example, provides theoretical tools to understand the simulation of democracy by domestic elites in Ukraine. Juliet Johnson's (2016) volume points to the transnational central banking community as a route for the neoliberalization of the post-Soviet space. My own work on agent predation and stakeholder alliances in Ukraine and Russia (2015) offers a conceptual framework for understanding kleptocracies and the defensive mechanisms available to labor and small businesses. It may prove fruitful for these and other dialogues with fellow comparativists to occur in the future.
Overall, Yuliya Yurchenko has written an impressive book that readers interested in historical materialism and Ukraine will find indispensable.
