Staying with Failure: Soviet Nostalgia and Social Reproduction in Donbas

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

Abstract

Since 2014, Ukraine has been framed as a nation in transition—shedding its failed Soviet past, embodied by Homo sovieticus, to embrace a European future. This perpetual political economy of ‘becoming’ has justified neoliberal de-communizing reforms in social policy and the public sphere, further eroded since ’90s Shock Therapy.

Excluded from ‘becoming fully human’ are those whose sovietness is not easily shed—the working-class ‘losers’ of deindustrialization, such as the once-prosperous Donbas, marked by separatism, Russian annexation, destined for colonial resource extraction. Labeled vatniki by European-aspiring Ukrainians and Russians—a proto-racializing term evoking Soviet proletarian identity—its residents are cast as apolitical surplus of a failed Soviet project, manipulated by Putin’s propaganda. Yet their continued presence disrupts Ukraine’s narratives of ‘decolonization’ as ‘de-communization,’ exposing post-Soviet transition as depletion.

My paper examines how, unlike Ukraine, the Russian state has instrumentalized the trauma of the ’90s post-Soviet crisis. Under Putin, neoliberal reforms have been framed as hetero-nationalist citizenship inclusion via financialization and, since 2022 invasion, extended to Donbas. Using Maternity Capital (Материнский Капитал)—a pronatalist, debt-based benefit—I ask: (1) how the Russian state, seeking legitimacy among Donbas’s dispossessed, leverages Soviet nostalgia to implement financialized ‘social citizenship’; and (2) how Donbas residents mobilize ‘Soviet values’ and Russia’s promises of protection of ‘mother and child’ to make social reproduction claims. I consider the policy implications of merging finance and social policy to fill the void of Soviet social citizenship and whether its proto-Soviet rhetoric—exposing post-Soviet transition’s failure—can be repurposed for alternative social transformation.

Author

• Olena Lyubchenko, York U (Canada)