Post-Soviet Vicious Circle: The Crisis of Hegemony and the Crisis of Revolution

• In Event: Left Perspectives on State- and Post-Socialism II: Ghosts of Revolution: Post-Soviet Resentment and the Rise of the Right

Abstract

This paper examines the persistent failure of contemporary revolutions to achieve transformative change, focusing on the post-Soviet region as a critical site for examining the global crises of hegemony and revolution. Drawing on Gramsci's concept of a crisis of hegemony, we argue that the degeneration of communist hegemony following the Soviet social revolution left a fragmented sociopolitical landscape unable to resolve its crisis of leadership and cohesion. Over the past three decades, more than a dozen revolutions and suppressed uprisings have taken place in the region. While some have succeeded in overthrowing regimes, they have consistently failed to establish cohesive, transformative political projects, instead deepening the crisis of hegemony they were responding to.

To explain this phenomenon, we introduce the concept of "deficient revolutions," which occupy a space between social or political revolutions and mere regime changes or coups. Deficient revolutions combine revolutionary form with counterhegemonic weakness. Ukraine's Euromaidan -- the longest, most massive, and most violent deficient revolution in the post-Soviet region -- serves as a focal case for understanding how they escalate polarization and asymmetrically empower political actors who do not represent the interests of subaltern classes.

By analyzing post-Soviet transformations through the lens of hegemonic crisis, this paper offers an alternative to dominant frameworks such as democratization, patronalism, and postcolonialism. Locating the post-Soviet condition within the broader global context of neoliberalism and the erosion of revolutionary politics, we propose a deprovincialized understanding of these revolutions as mechanisms that intensify the global crisis of (counter)hegemony.

Author

• Volodymyr Ishchenko, Freie U Berlin (Germany)