How much context is needed for solidarity?

A few days ago, one of my comrades sent me a relatively old text (https://t.me/stupidisthenewcool/1001) criticizing the statement by Russian anarchists on the war in Ukraine and the exclusion of Belarusian and Ukrainian comrades from public events in the “West”[1]. Most of the text is a perfectly adequate critique of the statement, but one thing struck me and made me sit down to write this text.

Namely, the argument that Russian anarchists are not putting enough effort into explaining the context of what is happening to Western comrades. For an Italian or German anarchist, it is difficult to understand the nuances of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because the statement does not take into account the problems of European leftists in their own regions. I hear this line of argument not for the first time (more often in English or German), and I would like to take a closer look at how we ended up in this situation.

In the first years of the full-scale invasion, there was a relative myth among Ukrainian and Belarusian anarchists about the rationality of Western comrades’ thinking. In such a situation, various groups made efforts to convey the factual situation on the ground, mainly while trying to raise money in parallel. Literally in the first weeks, many of those involved in organizing solidarity started hearing about NATO, which dragged Ukraine into this war, and that if it were not for the cunning European generals, Ukraine would be a peaceful land, free from suffering. Even then, we were told that we did not understand NATO and the horrors of European imperialism, and that we were too focused on Russia. Here, of course, one can note the paternalism of Western comrades, who saw Ukrainians as incapable of critically analyzing what was happening in Europe.

Contrary to such mythology, anarchist migrants from Ukraine and Belarus have long been participating in political life in various European countries. Part of the alter-globalist movement in Europe made considerable efforts to ensure that anarchists from Eastern Europe were present at global protests alongside others. The whole history of this interaction cannot fit into this text, and maybe one day the participants in these events will decide to write their own memoirs. Anarchists from Belarus and Ukraine took part in protests against NATO, UN climate conferences, G20 and G7-8 summits. Understanding the global functioning of the political and economic system was key to shaping strategies of political struggle, and international solidarity made it possible to continue working even in the most difficult situations (for example repression in Belarus). Partly because of this orientation toward the West, many Belarusian and Ukrainian anarchists came to understand Russian imperialism and the history of colonialism only after the events of 2022.

Why am I talking about it? To point that Eastern European anarchists partly understood and do understand the contexts of struggle in Western Europe and the United States. But our focus on Russia is determined by the regional specifics of the current political situation.

On the other hand, there is a very different situation with the relative lack of interest in what is happening on the periphery. Europeans were not particularly interested in Belarus or Ukraine. For all my time in political activism in Belarus, the number of visiting activists from the West was minimal.

In this context, we come to the fact that Western anarchists really do poorly understand the situation in the region of the post-Soviet empire. This could have been forgiven before 2022 (although even then there was already arrogant ignorance regarding political processes in Ukraine itself — see the stories about the fascist regime in Kyiv and support for far-right forces in the east of the country). But after 2022, ignorance turns into a conscious choice, and there is no excuse for it. A contemporary activist in the West has far more opportunities to learn about what is happening in one region or another than people from less stable economies. And in this situation we return to the previously mentioned text about Europeans lacking context. Today I do not believe that providing any amount of context will help Europeans understand what is happening in Ukraine. Many western activists have no interest in this understanding. Among other things, this is connected with the need for a radical rethinking of one’s own political theory, which few are ready for.

In the atmosphere of this chosen ignorance, activists from Ukraine, Belarus, and even Russia find themselves in a situation where not only are we denied solidarity, but there are also active attempts to prevent any interaction with the “dissenters.”

I absolutely disagree that at this stage it is our duty to chew over facts for Western activists so that they can understand all this in a softer context or somehow relate the situation to themselves. When I joined the anarchist movement, we all knew the slogan “think globally, act locally,” but unfortunately today the first part is becoming extremely difficult for people from the most privileged countries. And while Fortress Europe continues to close itself off more and more, we see that a significant part of the anarchist movement follows the logic of isolation from its own comrades in the hope of avoiding ideological difficulties in understanding the modern world.

A few years ago, one of my long-time comrades from Greece was outraged by my words that the modern West is a castle from which people dictate the rules of existence to the rest of the world, and that local anarchists, no matter how critically minded they are, also live in this castle and prefer not to leave it. Almost five years into the full-scale war in Ukraine, I suddenly noticed that additional signs now hang on the gates of this castle, urging people to stay away from the organized anarchist movement of Belarus and Ukraine, and it becomes clear to me that entering the halls of this castle was a privilege until the moment we began speaking about inconvenient things. And no matter how much context we include in our future texts, no one will let us into the castle of ideologically pure anarchism anymore.

1: Here and below, “the West” refers primarily to the countries of the old and new empires of Europe and North America.