The Class-Conscious Workers of Kryvyi Rih

After meeting with the Kyiv chapter of Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement) on Saturday, November 10, 2024, I took an overnight train to Krvyi Rih for a meeting with that city’s chapter of Sotsialnyi Rukh on Sunday, November 11. Traveling with me to help with translation and other things was Dionysii Vynohradiv, an activist in Pryama Diya (Direct Action), the leftwing student union, as well as Sotsialny Rukh. We were hosted by Snizhana Oleksun, a school teacher recently elected as the new head of Sotsialnyi Rukh at their national conference in October. She provided rooms and fed us. After the overnight train ride we took an early morning nap, ate a meal, and headed for downtown Kryvyi Rih for a meeting with the local Sotsialnyi Rukh chapter in their storefront meeting space.

Kryvyi Rih is a city of about 600,000 that is the longest in Europe, 60 miles long by about 12 miles wide, because it traces a long vein of iron ore deposits around which mines and related metallurgical industries have grown up since the 1880s. We met in the central district of the old city where they told me their storefront is in the neighborhood where the first workers revolts in the Russian Empire took place in the late 19th century.

I gave the same basic presentation as the day before in Kyiv (see Dispatches from Ukraine #15). In the discussion that followed, instead of discussing the problems with extending solidarity to Ukraine from parts of the U.S. and international left and the danger Trump’s recent election posed for Ukraine and the world as the Kyiv group had done, the Kryvyi Rih group wanted me to understand their anger at the oligarchs, the neoliberal government, and the general command of the military of the Armed Forces of Ukraine as well as at the slow and limited military support from Biden  The group was a mix of Sotsialnyi Rukh members from the miner’s, teachers, and veterans unions, along with some high school students.

This group was the most class-conscious group of workers I have ever met. They said too many Western visitors only go to Kyiv and Lviv to meet with the middle-class NGO and government people. They thanked me for coming to hear from the “proletarians of Kryvyi Rih” as they described themselves.

Angry Veterans

The veterans were the most emphatic in conveying their points to me. In the informal talk after the meeting, the veterans gave me their business cards and one gave me a velcro military patch off his jacket. One of them told me he had begun his military service in the Spetsnaz (special forces) of the Soviet Army’s Berlin brigade in East Germany during the Cold War before continuing in the Armed Forces of Ukraine after independence and fighting the Russians after they first invaded in 2014. Another veteran told me he was a native of Donetsk who had fought the Russian after they invaded his home region in 2014.

The veterans made a number of points they wanted people in the U.S. to know:

• The U.S. no right to propose a ceasefire line that cedes Ukrainian land and people to Russia.
• They are angry at Biden for tolerating corruption and inept military commanders in Ukraine while pulling his punches on military support by delaying the supply of advanced weapons and providing what military supplies he did provide in insufficient quantities and slower timelines than the realities of the war required.
• Americans should understand that too much of the aid is being used by corrupt elites in Ukraine to enrich themselves, such as building showy public assets with resources that should be going into the war effort.
• The Minsk Accords of 2014 and 2015 did not uphold Ukrainian sovereignty. The Russians constantly violated them. They should not be a model for a peace agreement.
• The U.S. and other Western allies do not appreciate the tension between the rank-and-file soldiers and the government, the military command, and the oligarchs, and the degree of elite corruption. There is widespread working class resentment that the burden of the war is falling on the working class while the professional middle class and the wealthy avoid military service. That is why the draft mobilization is resented and sometimes resisted in working class communities.
• They are angry at the neoliberal austerity policies of the Verkhovna Rada (Supreme Council, the national parliament) and President Zelensky that has cut social guarantees, including a freeze on inadequate old age pensions and the failure to provide veterans with the full benefits they are entitled to by law.
• They said U.S. military aid should bypass the central government and general command and go straight to the military units on the frontlines. They hoped Trump might do that. I replied that they had better not count on that.

The veterans as well as the miners and teachers in the meeting emphasized that it was the self-organization of rank-and-file soldiers in battle and the mutual aid organized by citizen volunteers that were most effective in fending off the Russian invaders and stepping in where the state had failed to meet the needs of soldiers, displaced persons, and civilians generally. They said it was these soldier and citizen self-organized initiatives that had defeated the Russian attack on Kyiv and halted and then pushed back Russian territorial gains on the eastern and southern fronts. The grassroots organization and initiatives were more productive than the military command and the central government.

They said general staff and many mid-level commanders of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were stuck in the old top-down Soviet army conventions and failed to listen to and respect the knowledge and experience of frontline fighting units. They said this tension between the soldiers and the commanders had been a problem since the Russians first invaded in 2014. They said this was a problem with the previous top commander, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, and continues with his replacement, General Oleksandr Syrskyi. They said it was a big reason why the Ukrainian army has 200,000 deserters.

As this part of the discussion concluded, they wanted Americans to know that if the U.S. pushes, and the Ukrainian government accepts, a peace deal that cedes Ukrainian land and people to Russia, there will be a civil war in Ukraine. They said soldiers would take matters into their own hands against the government, the military commanders, and the oligarchs. I asked them if they meant like the Armed Forces Movement in Portugal in 1974. They said they were thinking of Makhno.

The Makhno Model

Nestor Makhno was the leader of the anarchist-communist Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine during the Russian revolution and Ukrainian War of Independence from 1917 to 1921. These insurgent Ukrainian militias, who became known as the Makhnovshchina (Makhno movement), fought against the counter-revolutionary White Army of the Tsarist aristocracy and landowning class and their foreign interventionist allies, including expeditionary armies from Germany, Austro-Hungary, and France. After allying with the Bolsheviks’ Red Army to defeat the White Army and the foreign armies, the Makhnovshchina fought the Moscow-based Red Army because the Bolsheviks turned against the Makhnovshchina, who fought to protect their communities from forced requisitions of food produced by the peasants under the Bolsheviks’ “war communism” policy and to stop what they viewed as the recolonization of Ukraine by Russia.

The Makhnovshchina were one of several peasant-based armies that were known as the Green Armies, or simply the Greens, throughout the Russian Empire during the Russian revolution and civil war. Most of the Green Armies were associated with the Socialist Revolutionary Party, the ideological heirs of the Narodniks of the 19th century who advocated an agrarian socialism in which peasantry, the most populace of the laboring classes, would lead a revolution for a democratic socialist Russian republic that served the interests of the peasantry’s small farmers and self-governing communities as well as the emerging industrial working class in the cities. That program opposed the Bolsheviks’ program of turning self-employed peasant farmers into proletarians working on industrial-scale state farms and of centralized state administration of local communities.

The Makhnovshchina in Ukraine were the most left-wing of the Green Armies with an anarchist communist program of creating a stateless and classless society based on a federation of free soviets (councils) that administered local communities. The Makhnovists implemented their program in the areas they liberated, seizing land from the large landlords, collectivizing land ownership, and distributing plots to farmers under the control of self-governing communities with elected soviets. The land was distributed among peasants families according to their needs, so larger families were alloted larger plots to farm. The Makhnovists also collectivized mines and factories under the administration of the workers’ elected soviets. These Mahknovists considered the Red Army to be imperialist Russians seeking to re-colonize Ukraine, which had declared its independence early in the revolution in March 1917. They considered the Red Army to be a counter-revolutionary betrayal of the revolution’s democratic promises, especially due to the brutal repression by the Cheka secret police of revolutionaries like the Makhovist anarchist communists and the Socialist Revolutionaries for disagreeing with the Bolsheviks. [1]

Fighting Russian Tanks, Western Banks, and Ukrainian Oligarchs

When they invoked Nestor Makhno, who I knew had fought both Russian and Western expeditionary armies in Ukraine for independence and a democratic socialism, I said it reminded me of what I had heard members of Sotsialnyi Rukh say many times: that they have a two-front struggle against Russian tanks and Western banks. Yurii Somoilov, the head of the Ukraine’s independent miners union, responded to my comment by saying they are fighting on a third front as well against Ukrainian oligarchs.

Yurii said he would show me the next day the balcony from which Nestor Makhno gave speeches in Kryvyi Rih, which was an urban stronghold of the Makhnovshchina. Unfortunately, a Russian ballistic missile hit an apartment building near that balcony the next morning a little after 10:00 am. The missile strike killed four, a mother and three children, and injured 14 others. [2] I heard the explosion, which came within just five minutes of the air raid sirens going off. I was about 10 miles away at Snizhana Oleksun’s house, which is a 30-minute drive away traveling slowly through Kryvyi Rih’s village-like “private sector” of narrow washboard dirt roads between walled family compounds often with chickens and cows and always dogs. The missile hit in the urbanized area of mostly Soviet-era public housing. The Makhno balcony was close by the missile strike and cordoned off by first responders for rescue operations.

So Yurii took me the next day on a tour of the mines and slag heaps, including open pit mines with polluted water. He wanted to show the environmental destruction that the mines and metallurgical plants have done. He believes the environmental destruction was not necessary but the fault of Soviet and now private exploiters who put profits ahead of the environment. The red landscape of the slag heaps looks like a Martian landscape. Yurii quipped, “Ukrainains miners beat Elon Musk to Mars.” Yurii described their fight against the use of radon-emitting house stones quaried from the mines. He said two environmental activists in Kryvyi Rih had been murdered by real estate oligarchs’ gangsters for demanding the houses be tested for radon.

Liberation Square

Liberation Square in downtown Kryvyi Rih.

After the meeting in the Sotsialnyi Rukh storefront, I was taken on a tour of Liberation Square in the center of downtown Kryvyi Rih. They pointed out the apartment building across the street where President Volydomyr Zelensky had grown up. Several of them had known Zelensky when he was a youngster. A couple of the veterans described him as a nerd growing up who they had made fun of back then. 

They explained the displays on Ukrainian history on the outside of a small museum in the park although the inside was closed for the night. They also shows me a statute of Taras Shevchenko, the freed serf, painter, poet, and writer in the mid 19th century who was a tribune for the appreciation of the Ukrainian language and culture and for the revolutionary democratic movement against the Russian Empire and for an independent Ukraine. Of interest to Americans is Shevchenko’s friendship with the African-American Shakesperian actor, Ira Aldridge, who had to practice his craft in Europe due to the racism of the U.S. They became good friends over discussions of art and music and their shared experiences of oppression in the age of slavery in the U.S. and serfdom in the Russian Empire. [3] Shevchenko is honored in statutes all over Ukraine and around the world in the Ukrainian diaspora, from Liberation Square to my hometown in Syracuse, New York.

With a captured Russian tank. On the left is Yurii Somoilov, head of the Independent Miners Union, and on the right is Snizhana Oleksun, head of Sotsialnyi Rukh. To Snizhana’s right is Maryna Mykhaliova, a teacher and member of the national council of Sotsialnyi Rukh.

Underground Schools in Basement Bomb Shelters

High school class in a basement bomb shelter in Kyrvyi Rih.

On my second day in Kryvyi Rih, after hearing the explosion of the Russian ballistic missile in downtown Kryvyi Rih, Snizhana Oleksun put me on the phone with her son who operates an anti-aircraft weapon in the Kharkiv region of northwest Ukraine. I expressed my support and best wishes. He thanked me for being in Kryvyi Rih in solidarity with his family and friends.

We then headed back toward downtown to visit a class in the school where Snizhana teaches. The students were high schoolers. The upper two stories of the school are now empty. They meet every day in the basement bomb shelter of their school due to the threat of Russian missiles and drones. Heating ducts hang from the ceiling and a building column obstructs the view to the front of the classroom. But those inconveniences are necessary to endure. A Russian ballistic missile hit a high school in central Kryvhi Rih three weeks ago, killing four and injuring seven. As I write this on February 11, another school and residential and business buildings were struck again today in Kryvyi Rih as well as a kindergarten and two schools in Kyiv. [4]

Dionysii at the chalkboard spelling out an English word.

The students in the class practiced their English by asking me questions. Despite the war hardships, they asked me questions you would expect American teenagers to ask. They asked me a lot about American pop culture — movies, music, celebrities. They knew a lot more about it than I did. Some also asked for my opinion on current events with respect to Ukraine, including about what to expect from the recently elected Donald Trump and some quite sophsticated question about international relations.

Environmental Concerns

A student speaking by candlelight in a video produced by high school students about life in Ukraine without electric power.

After the class with the high schoolers, we went back to the Sotsialnyi Rukh storefront for more classes, this time English classes for Ukrainians. The classes are part of the services to the community that Sotsialnyi Rukh provides. On this day they had English classes for 6 year olds in the early afternoon and later in the day for 15 years olds. To finish their class, the 15-year-olds asked me questions in English. They asked a lot of pop culture questions like the other students had earlier in the day and again I wasn’t much help, except for the students who wanted to know what I thought about various NBA teams and players. On that I did have opinions to share. Then they showed me an 8-minute video that some of them had made. It was in English to appeal to westerners. It was about the months-long power outage they had suffered the previous summer when the temperatures got over 100ºF and they couldn’t run fans. The video, produced under the direction of Maryna Mykhaliova, a high school teacher and Soltsialnyi Rukh council member, showed how the students worked by candlelight to make the film about their struggles with water and sewage problems without electricity to power water and sewage treatment plants.

The first slide of Maryna Mykhaliova’s power point presentation on environmental destruction caused by the war in Ukraine.

After the video, Maryna showed me her own power point presentation on “Environmental Sustainability” in Ukraine. It covered the environmental problems generated by the war. She had recently presented it in an online presentation for Sotsialnyi Rukh members across Ukraine. The power blackouts were due to Russian bombardment of power plants, hydropower dams, and the power grid. Bombing civilian infrastructure is a war crime under international law. The black outs came when temperatures reached as high as 104ºF in July, causing widespread food spoilage as well as water and sewage problems. The environmental consequences after the Russians blew up the Khakhovka Dam on the Dnieper River were devastating, causing flooding downstream, destruction of agricultural land, and the loss of water and hydropower in the region. The war is bad for the climate, with 43 million tons of carbon dioxide released in Ukraine since the war started. Air quality has been worsened by the bombardments and resulting urban and forest fires. Kryvyi Rih already had an air pollution problem largely due to the massive ArcelorMittal metalurgical works, which has been burning coal unregulated since it was established in 1934 and gives the Kyrvyi Rih sky its red glow. Forests are being destroyed by the war due to bombs and fires; 500,000 hectares in the Izium forest of Kharkiv oblast alone. Millions of hectares of land, both forests and agricultural fields, are covered with bomb craters and land mines. Demining and restoring the fields and forests will be an enormous undertaking. Wildlife is suffering a huge toll due the war. 600 animal species and 750 plant species have become endangered in Ukraine because of the war. 50,000 dolphins have been killed due to military shipping noice, water pollution, and ocean mines in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.

Maryna concluded her power point presentation with a call to make ecocide a war crime. Making ecocide a war crime has been proposed since the incredibly widespread environmental devastation the U.S. caused in the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 1970s with massive bombing and the defoliation of 5 million acres of forest with Agent Orange. But it is still not a war crime under international law. President Zelensky and Ukraine’s Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources have been campaigning in the international community to make ecocide a war crime and punishable by the International Criminal Court.

An Ecosocialist Ukraine?

he Sotsialnyi Rukh members I met in Kryvyi Rih were as militant about the environmental protection as working-class empowerment and defeating the Russian invaders. They describe themselves as ecosocialists in their organizational documents. [6] They seem confident that the majority of Ukrainians are fed-up with the corruption of the oligarchs and the hollowing out of social services by the neoliberal state, are ready to revolt against the neoliberal oligarchy, and would support restructuring Ukraine around a more social, ecological, and democratic system. They believe their Social Movement (Sotsialnyi Rukh) can grow into a mass-based political party that will help bring about that kind of progressive future for Ukraine. From what I observed, Sotsialnyi Rukh is doing the kind of political education, organizing, and coalition building needed to succeed. They set a great example for the American left to learn from.

Notes

[1] Wikipedia has good short histories of the Narodniks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narodniks), the Socialist Revolutionary Party (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Revolutionary_Party), Nestor Makhno (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestor_Makhno), the Makhnovshina (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makhnovshchina), and the Green Armies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_armies).

[2] Novaya Gazeta Europe, “Four killed and 14 injured in Russian missile strike on Kryvyi Rih,” November 12, 2024, https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2024/11/12/four-killed-and-14-injured-in-russian-missile-strike-on-kryvyi-rih-en-news; Ivana Kottasová and Svitlana Vlasova, “Ukrainian mother and three children killed in a Russian strike on Zelensky’s hometown,” CNN, November 14, 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/14/europe/ukrainian-mother-killed-russian-strike-zelensky-hometown-intl/index.html.

[3] On Taras Shevchenko, the Wikipedia entry is a good historical summary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taras_Shevchenko). On the friendship of Shevchenko and Aldridge, see Bohdan Nahaylo, “Shevchenko and Aldridge: Black and White Artistic Brothers in Arms Against Slavery,” Kyiv Post, March 9, 2024, https://www.kyivpost.com/post/29242.

[4] “Russian Missile Strikes Kill 4 In Ukraine’s Kryviy Rih,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, January 17, 2025, https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-missile-strikes-ukraine-kryviy-rih-casualties/33279386.html; Tetyana Oliynyk, “Russian Forces Strike Kryvyi Rih,” Ukrainska Pravda, February 11, 2025, https://www.msn.com/en-us/war-and-conflicts/military/russian-forces-strike-kryvyi-rih-causing-damage/ar-AA1yQNTi; Liliana Oleniak, “Russia strikes Kyiv region with drones: Kindergarten and schools damaged,” RBC-Ukraine, February 11, 2025, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russia-strikes-kyiv-region-with-drones-kindergarten-and-schools-damaged/ar-AA1yO4OX.

[5] Renéo Lukic and Sophie Marineau, “‘Ecocide’ is being used as a weapon of war in Ukraine. It should be one of the crimes tried in the International Criminal Court,” The Conversation, October 7, 2024, https://theconversation.com/ecocide-is-being-used-as-a-weapon-of-war-in-ukraine-it-should-be-one-of-the-crimes-tried-in-the-international-criminal-court-240267.

[6] Sotsialnyi Rukh, “The Path to Victory and the Tasks of the Ukrainian Left,” Resolution adopted by the Sotsialnyi Rukh conference, October 4-6, 2024, https://rev.org.ua/resolution-the-path-to-victory-and-the-tasks-of-the-ukrainian-left/.