“Whichever way this war ends,” thought Volodymyr Ishchenko on 24 February 2022, “I will no longer have a homeland.” In the preface to his new book, Towards The Abyss, the iconoclastic sociologist outlines his Soviet-Ukrainian identity as distinct from Ukraine’s Russian-speakers or the population of its south-eastern regions. Instead of ethnicity, these people were shaped by the forces of social revolution, class and modernisation. Looking back at the post-Soviet decades, Ishchenko argues that the political fragmentation of Soviet Ukrainians and the fragility of the “Eastern” (misleadingly called “pro-Russian”) camp in Ukrainian politics, as opposed to the politically stronger “Western” (“pro-European”) camp, is an underestimated cause of the ongoing war.
