Towards the Abyss

In Towards the Abyss, social scientist Volodymyr Ishchenko tracks a decade of war and upheaval in Ukraine. Ishchenko has been among the most significant left-wing commentators on Ukraine since 2014 when pro-EU protestors toppled the government in Kiev, pro-Russian separatists seized parts of the Donbas and Putin annexed Crimea. His analysis gives a deeper understanding of the country's political dynamics. NATO occupies a peculiar place in this history and Ishchenko sifts Ukrainians' attitudes towards it.Ishchenko's parents worked as Soviet scientists and engineers in Kiev on cybernetics and cosmonautics. No outside power has offered Ukraine a future that compares to this lost world of Soviet modernity. He argues that the conflict being fought in Ukraine with tanks, artillery and rockets is the same conflict that police batons have suppressed in Belarus and Russia itself. The intensification of the post-Soviet crisis - the incapacity of an oligarchic ruling class in the territories of the former USSR to develop sustained political, moral and intellectual leadership - is the root cause for the escalating violence.

Volodymyr Ishchenko was born in Hoshcha in western Ukraine in 1982. He grew up in Kiev, taught sociology at Kiev universities and was active in the Ukrainian new left. He is now a researcher at the Freie Universität in Berlin. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Al Jazeera, Jacobin and New Left Review.