Introduction to Ukraine's clan wars

Part 1: the Soviet-era emergence of the clans. Why Ukraine had no Putin. Rough scheme of post-soviet clan wars.

I recently went on the wonderful podcast the Farm, where I talked at length about the shadow wars between rival oligarchic groups in post-soviet Ukraine. It’s a quite complicated but absolutely crucial topic, and I think there’s value in laying out the general historical contours in written form. With an understanding of the whole, the stakes involved and so on, later posts will be able to go into more detail on particular events and personalities.

Why Ukraine had no Putin

Today we’re going to have a look at how post-soviet Ukraine became so characterized by a sort of Hobbesian struggle between competing regional elites. To understand the basics, some comparison with Ukraine’s two slavic sisters is necessary.

Soviet Ukraine was, in many ways, blessed. Eastern Ukrainian regions like Donetsk, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia were one of the greatest centers of Soviet heavy industry, particularly the most technologically advanced military technologies.

But this would also become a curse. Why? Because it meant that the ostensible capital, Kiev (a note for readers: I use the Russian spelling for cities whose residents mainly speak Russian, and the Ukrainian spelling for cities such as Lviv, which mainly speak Russian), was dwarfed both politically and economically by other cities.

Compare that to Russia or Belarus. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Belarus, by the hands of president Lukashenko, was the first of the three to successfully tame the newly emergent business class in the early 90s. There’s only one significant city in the country, and it’s the capital, Minsk.

Russia, of course, has plenty of economically and politically powerful regions, and it took over a decade of the regions ‘taking as much power as you can’, as Yeltsin famously encouraged, and a whole separatist civil war in Chechnya for Putin to centralize power. But there were never any cities in Russia whose political or economic power rivalled or exceeded that of Moscow/St Petersburg.

A tale of two cities

In Ukraine, meanwhile, 70% of GDP was concentrated outside the capital, most of all in the eastern cities of Dnepropetrovsk and Donetsk. There were other eastern centres of industrial power as well - Kharkov and Zaporizhzhia in particular, though all the eastern provinces boasted factories with Soviet-wide importance.

The western regions were and are dirt-poor, destroying basically all their industry in the early 90s. Their economic survival has always depended on labor migration to the EU and Russia, as well as budget subventions from the richer east.

Here was the problem - Ukraine had cities which were used to competing for domination on the scale of the entire Soviet union. But now they were hemmed in by the confines of a relatively small Ukraine.

My friend had a teacher in the Odessa region who would never stop reminiscing about the Soviet Union - ‘Once we had a country THIS BIG [she would raise her hands wide], now its just this big [with her hands close together].’ Another of her theses was that ‘the only thing the Anglo-Saxons have ever invented is the rubbish bag’. I wish I knew her, though I am told that I shouldn’t wish for such an honor.

Both cities were economic giants. Dnepropetrovsk was where the Soviet Union’s intercontinental ballistic missiles were produced in the monumental Yuzhmash factory, founded in 1944 (note the date, as former president and head of the factory Kuchma wrote in his memoirs). Donetsk was one of the Soviet Union’s greatest sources for coal and iron, as well as the center for a range of other crucial industries.

But politically, they were also heavyweights. The Donetsk elite began playing on the Soviet-wide stage already in the 30s. Its first leader was Aleksandr Zasyadko, a Donetsk miner who impressed Stalin himself, soon becoming People’s Commissar of the coal industry. Future leader of the Union, Nikita Khruschev, was also raised and matured in the Donetsk clan system.

And besides that, Donetsk and the broader Donbass region was hugely politically important for the Soviet Union. So many dramas, battles and heroes of the civil war took place here. It was from here that many of the most important political intrigues and purges of the late 20s and 30s emanated. It was here that so many of the great victories of breakneck 1930s industrialization were achieved.

It was in many ways the quintessence of Soviet proletarian modernity. Decades later, for this reason it would be hated by Ukrainian nationalists, whose ideal was liberal capitalism and peasant individualism, rather than the Plan and proletarian, supranational collectivism. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.

Dnepropetrovsk would form its own powerful clan in the 60s, with its leader - Leonid Brezhnev. Vladimir Scherbitsky, powerful leader of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from 1972 to 1989, was a close ally of Brezhnev’s and another representative of the Dnepropetrovsk clan.

From left to right: Brezhnev, Aleksandr Ryabenko, and Scherbytsky. Ryabenko, born in Odessa, spent much of his life in Dnepropetrovsk, as well as Donetsk.

Back then, the military secrets produced in Dnepropetrovsk meant that it was a secret city - the movement of its million residents was severely restricted. This perhaps lent a certain secrecy and ambition to its political elite. In any case, these pragmatic, cunning engineers soon made their way to the top of the Soviet power structure. At the Soviet Union’s - and Russia’s - historical peak in the 1970s, it was led by the Dnepropetrovsk elite.

By the end of the Soviet Union, more than half of Ukraine’s top government-party officials were from the Dnepropetrovsk region. Ukraine as a whole, but particularly our two cities, were called the Soviet Union’s ‘cadre reserve’. The stage was set for the ensuing decades of vicious power struggle.

The Rocket represents a technology of ultimate terror, capable of annihilation and devoid of moral compass.

Ukraine’s first president was Leonid Kravchuk, head of Ukraine’s Communist Party at the time. He had little noteworthy achievements aside from tepid support for cultural nationalists and overseeing the collapse of Ukraine’s Soviet riches. Kravchuk came from a poor western Ukrainian peasant family, and there are even rumors that his parents were active in the collaborationist nationalist movement in the 40s. I’ve written here about the cold war-era infiltration of Soviet Ukraine by western-sponsored nationalist agents.

But the second president was far more important - Leonid Kuchma, the classic representative of the Dnepropetrovsk clan. He was head of Dnepropetrovsk’s most important factory - the Yuzhmash rocket factory.

I intend to write about Kuchma and his fascinating memoirs in more detail in the future. Many speculate that Kuchma was trying to replicate Putin/Lukashenko’s centralization of power and taming of the oligarch class. It’s possible, and he certainly cultivated such an idea in his memoirs.

But there are two reasons why that wasn’t the case. First, he himself was a representative of a warring clan, and was already leading the emerging Dnepropetrovsk business elite against the Donetsk elite in the struggle for power in the capital in the early 90s.

Second, even if he had wanted to centralize power, he and his clan weren’t powerful enough to do so, relative to the Donetsk elite. And as we will see in later installments, the Dnepropetrovsk clan has always suffered from one defect the Donetsk elite have less of a problem with - internal disagreements and feuding.

A scheme

In the sequels to this series, we will try to flesh out the following rough scheme of events:

1991-1993: Donetsk elite maintain influence through president Kravchuk, Dnepropetrovsk elite weakened

1994-1997: Dnepropetrovsk elite strengthened as Kuchma becomes president

1997-2004: Due to competition within the Dnepropetrovsk clan and Kuchma’s desire for centralization, the Donetsk clan gains favor in the capital. It becomes the most economically powerful region of Ukraine, led by Ukraine’s richest man - Rinat Akhmetov

2004-2010: The Dnepropetrovsk clan, notably rising oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, allies with pro-western and nationalist forces in the 2004 Orange Revolution, preventing Kuchma’s desired successor Viktor Yanukovych, Donetsk native, from coming to power. Instead, the pro-western nationalist Viktor Yushchenko takes power, who I wrote about here and here.

2010-2013: The Yushchenko years saw economic chaos amidst western-encouraged neoliberalization. Furthermore, the Dnepropetrovsk clan descended into fratricidal (and sororicidal?) struggle, as Yuliiya Tymoshenko, the Dnepropetrovsk ‘Gas Queen’, began mauling her erstwhile ally Yushchenko. In 2010, Yanukovych became president, solidifying the positions of the Donetsk clan.

2013-4: As so often happens in Ukrainian history, the president, though a representative of one regional clan, grew excessively large ambitions. He tried to create a new oligarchic clan centered around his family. None of the other clans were going to take it, and he was removed in the 2013-4 euromaidan.

2014-2019: A complicated period for Ukraine’s clan wars. At first, the Dnepropetrovsk clan grew in power, with Kolomoisky becoming the governor of the region, and the Donetsk clan seemingly routed, with much of Donetsk and its factories separated from Ukraine by a frontline. But the richest man in Ukraine was still Donetsk’s Akhmetov, though he no longer lived in the city.

Meanwhile, the two clans were under pressure from two directions - president Petro Poroshenko, an oligarch trying to centralize power for himself, and pro-western ‘sorosites’, the western-funded NGOs, journalists and anti-corruption organs that were principally opposed to Ukraine’s oligarchy as a whole - because it was an obstacle to their sponsors, transnational western capital. By 2016-19, all oligarchs, even and especially Kolomoisky, came out with scandalous (by Sorosite standards) statements in favor of ending the war in the east and returning to economic normality by means of a compromise with Russia.

2019-present: Zelensky takes power, at first an obvious puppet of the Dnepropetrovsk clan. In his first year or so in office, he is clearly on the side of his old sponsors, Kolomoisky. But then a range of events, as well as his own ambitions, lead him to put his old boss in jail in 2023, and attempt to centralize power in a way that no previous Ukrainian president had ever dreamt of doing. Though the west has its worries, it is all too happy to see the troublesome oligarchs disappear.