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Mandi: Can you telI us about your political background?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n This interview has been minimally edited for clarity<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Straight from the middle of the Global Sumud Flotilla, Mandi Coelho interviews Andriy Movchan, a Ukrainian left organizer, also sailing in the Flotilla, who organizes with the european network for solidarity with Ukraine, and who is a political dissident facing persecution by the right-wing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":75970,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"litci_post_political_author":"Mandi Coelho","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935,2,3710],"tags":[6672,5451,4004],"class_list":["post-75969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ukraine","category-featured","category-palestine","tag-flotilla","tag-interview","tag-ukraine"],"yoast_head":"\n
Andriy<\/strong>: So let\u2019s start from my experience in Ukraine. My political biography begins 20 years ago or even more, but I started on the opposite side, [on the side of] radical nationalism. You may ask why? How did I appear there? There are some objective circumstances for that. It is not like a wish or something, because I\u2019m from Kyiv, from the capital. And in Kyiv, like in most of big cities in Ukraine, and especially in south and in the east, the linguistic situation was very difficult due to centuries of Russification, centuries of the erasure of our language by the Russian empire and then by Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet authorities. We had only one major boost to our culture. Only during a first decade after the revolution in the twenties, when Lenin\u2019s progressive national policy really promoted oppressed cultures and oppressed languages. But later it was over. And this is why when in the late 80s, during my childhood, I knew like 0 Ukrainian speakers in my environment. It\u2019s a definite consequence of a deliberate policy of the state. And even when Ukraine got its independence, the linguistic situation didn\u2019t really get better because the Ukrainian language became the only official one. But in everyday life it still was oppressed. It still was seen as something associated with peasants, of people with low culture. And it was totally, totally discriminated against. When I was 18, I decided to switch into Ukrainian and speak Ukrainian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But unfortunately in our case, you buy political identities in packages. So usually there were two packages. One package, if you don\u2019t like linguistic discrimination, if you want to promote Ukrainian language in Ukrainian culture, you buy it in a package with anti communism, with radical nationalism, with some xenophobic stuff and other quite ugly things. And if you are interested in socialism, for example, you buy it in a package with Stalinism, authoritarianism, like apology of Russian imperialism and discrimination of the Ukrainian language. So these were both quite stupid positions. And when I already was in the nationalist movement, I started to see the absurdity of these positions. I started like doubting all these dogmas of nationalism and reading a lot of stuff. Curiosity helps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mandi: I wanted to ask you that. What changed in the past that you are not a right wing nationalist anymore?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Andriy:<\/strong> Curiosity. Curiosity is the key, always the key. When you come to something with the idea that you know everything, it is not good, better to approach everything with curiosity and always have certain doubt, even in the most like dogmatic things of your life. Really. It\u2019s a good mental and intellectual exercise. So I started reading different philosophy, different literature, classic literature. And what really helped me is cinema. At that time, very fast and very cheap Internet appeared in Ukraine with lots of pirate content which I couldn\u2019t watch on TV. Yeah, it was the 00s. So I found many, many movies by classic Italian, French and American, other directors from the 60s and 70s, from the epoch of maybe the highest peak of the socialist struggle in the world. And at that time, socialism, it was like mainstream. It had such certain hegemony. And even if you make an apolitical art, it gets political. So I broke up with nationalism and started searching for something else, for alternatives. And actually there are many other young people who broke up with nationalism and started searching for something, something on the left. And actually, indeed in Ukraine, many, many leftists are former nationalists. It is not our fault, this is because of objective circumstances. As Marxists we should understand this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mandi: And nowadays you identify as a Marxist. How would you describe your ideology now?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Andriy:<\/strong> In general, I identify myself as a socialist in general without being very particular, without very dogmatic things. So back in Ukraine I started to search for alternatives, but there were few of them. For example, there was antifa movement, which was deeply subcultural and not really serious. On the other hand, there were some Marxist circles who were like, studying only theory, but without any actions. And there was Communist Party, absolutely Stalinist, conservative. And this is why we decided to create something new. And we launched a student union based on anarcho-syndicalist principles. And it was a very cool experience. The student union is called Direct Action and it still exists. There is a new generation of students fighting for educational social rights against fascism. And they are my heroes now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mandi: I remember that in the end of last year, there was some attack by right-wingers and I recorded a video and we sent solidarity from our organizations to them. I remember talking about the students from the Direct Action Union.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Andriy:<\/strong> We highly appreciate your solidarity. It is very important to our comrades who fight in extremely difficult circumstances. Extremely difficult. And you know, circumstances at that time were way easier. But year by year they were getting worse because we started facing some persecution. And it was not by the government, it was by the far right. Yeah, because unfortunately, the far right subculture, violent subculture in Ukraine is quite strong. This is no reason to destroy and occupy our country. But this is what we have on this historical stage of the development of the historical process. And we faced like some troubles with the far right, you know, for them I was not only one of the leaders of these left wing students, I was a traitor of their movement. This is why they paid special attention to my person. And eventually in 2014, I was forced to leave the country because it was getting more and more dangerous. This is how I came to Spain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My ex girlfriend, who is our comrade, who is a socialist and feminist too, she studied at the time in Europe and she organized the plan of my evacuation, let\u2019s say. And I still highly appreciate this, what she did for me. And it is very important to mention that she is my superhero, because now she is in the front line. She\u2019s a soldier of the armed forces of Ukraine. After getting a wonderful education, PhD in the university of Milan, she went back to Ukraine. She taught in the best universities of the country. And now she joined like two years ago, she joined the ranks of the resistance. And there are many, many comrades of us, my friends from the same student union who like former members of the student union, members of trade unions, members of Marxist organizations, now they are part of the resistance too, and they need our solidarity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Coming back to my Spanish experience, you know, during eight years between 2014 and 2022, I was like harshly criticizing everything about our government, everything about Ukraine. That was my political dedication, political agenda, that was a radical criticism of everything regarding Ukraine. And I wanted to make people know in the world that some horrible things take place in our country. And I thought that is my duty as a communist. And because Lenin always, for example, said that the communists should criticize his own government and his own chauvinism. And when, and definitely for many people in Europe, in Latin America, in Russia, for Russian left, I became kind of a hero, or at least very cool person who is totally against Ukrainian fascism, etc. So everything that perfectly fits in the view of the world. But when the full scale invasion came, I was shocked because I expected the same behavior from my Russian comrades. I expected the same, something similar, at least some solidarity from people in Europe, like from leftist circles. But unfortunately we didn\u2019t get that solidarity that we expected. Many found a lot of excuses that are really well known to not show this support. And this is what brought me to the movement of solidarity. I discovered that indeed the world knows very, very little things about Ukraine, about Eastern Europe, even comparing to Palestine, you know, with all my sympathy to the Palestinian people, but their situation was in the focus of all progressive intellectuals and all progressive movements all over the world during decades. And it is not something new. While in the case of Ukraine, I see a lot of ignorance, a lot of like, incredible, really incredible ignorance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mandi: Ignorance mixed with some orientalism and ideology and also Russification. I have studied language and I have studied Russian language, which made me study a little bit of the Eastern Europe and things we know from Ukraine or when we talk about Ukraine, we talk from the Russian perspective. So I think all of these mixed things make people don\u2019t really get to know Ukraine.<\/strong>
Andriy:<\/strong> Yeah. And especially for the left, for whom Soviet Union is very, let’s say romanticized, extremely romanticized and exoticized. They don’t want to know the reality, all the contradictions, not only good things that we had, indeed we had many good progressive things in the Soviet Union, but we also had terrible things such as brutal collectivization, with almost 4 million of dead people in Ukraine, Russification, bullying of our culture. So we have to see this through dialectics and through contradictions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mandi: So, Andriy, you have been fighting for the oppressed nations for mostly all your life. But tell me, why are you here in the Flotilla?<\/strong>
Andriy<\/strong>: Oh, when, let’s say, okay, when the genocide in Gaza started to unfold in our circles of the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine, we decided that we have to support both causes because they are connected and it is based on the same values and the same principles. And also, otherwise, if we are not with Palestine, it will not be understandable for the rest of the world and for the rest of the left. So it was an obvious decision for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mandi: When you say us, it’s the Ukrainian community?<\/strong>
Andriy<\/strong>: I mean, the leftists in this network. Which represents European leftist organizations that solidarize with Ukraine. Not the [general] community. And since then, we started to promote the connection of these causes, both in pro Palestinian rallies and in pro Ukrainian rallies. And we, so indeed, we have some even success in influencing Ukrainians, at least in Europe and in Ukraine too. It is difficult because unfortunately, Israeli propaganda is very strong in our country and it manipulates so much our traumatized society, which makes super, super uneasy, to convince people about such obvious things as the righteousness of the Palestinian struggle. But we are trying to do our best. And when the first Flotilla went to Gaza, I decided that, no, I had to be here. I had to be here. I had to be there with the flotilla. And I decided that it needs some Ukrainian representation too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And it is necessary for so many reasons. First of all, to show to our society and our communities across the world that we stand with other oppressed nations to have this, a clear and powerful message to our own citizens, a part of demonstrating the solidarity with Palestine. And also I wanted to show with this gesture that Ukrainians don’t stand aside to let the world know that there are also Ukrainians who show this solidarity, there are Ukrainians who are not Zionists, because there are indeed politicians who support Israel. But. Ukraine is not just them, and we want to change these things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mandi: What are the points of contact that you see between the Palestinian cause and the Ukraine cause?<\/strong>
Andriy<\/strong>: You know, the most obvious ones are even recognized by our own government. Our own government officially has the line, at least in the United nations, that everybody should stick to international law, even if they don’t criticize, for example, Trump’s aggressions against Venezuela or Iran, for many reasons. Yeah. But in the case of Palestine, our Ministry of Foreign. Affairs has a Clear line of condemnation of occupation and illegal annexations by Israel in order to stick the international law. Because international law, while it can be criticized from many points of view, and indeed it is designed by those who have a stake in the status quo, by those powerful forces that [like how things are]. But on the other hand, [international law, in theory is supposed to] help the weak countries, weak nations who don’t have strong armies, don’t have nuclear weapon, who don’t have powerful monopolies. In theory, it protects us. So I think this is the most obvious point of contact. Both nations suffer occupation and violation of international law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Moreover, the actions of Israel and Russia are very similar in many cases. For example, there are many wars around the world. But only two states are carrying out direct annexations of foreign territories. These are Russia and Israel. There are many parts of other countries occupied by some other forces. But direct annexation like territorial grab, it’s only Israel’s and Russia’s style. Moreover, both of them [justify their aggression with] references to primordialist ancient history. In the case of Russia they refer to thousand year old Russian statehood. They talk about Kiev as the mother or the cradle of Russian and Orthodox Christian civilization. In case of Israel they refer to biblical tradition even even more ancient, like three, 2,000 years ago, which has nothing to do with our reality nowadays. The world has changed so many times since then that it is like unbelievable to refer to those, like myths or legends. But people who have power and who are ideologically obsessed with territorial grabs, they do this. And this is like another parallel because I think that in many senses both aggressions by Israel and by Russia are based on ideological obsession. For example, how modern imperialism usually acts like the United States or China, they act through some, through economic forces and maybe military force, but not to conquer directly some territory, but to install maybe a puppet government or friendly government. While annexation of territories like historically theirs is the style of Israel and Russia. And this marks clearly ideological obsession. And I think this, you know, this part is largely ignored by the left. If I think like almost everybody recognizes this, let’s say nationalist ideological reasons motivations of Israel. But for many people it’s difficult to see the same in Russia. I think this requires more reflection and more attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mandi: What are the challenges for fighting for the oppressed nations nowadays?<\/strong>
Andriy<\/strong>: There are many challenges, but I think the most the major challenges are indifference and ignorance. If we overcome indifference and ignorance, then many forces that seem to be powerful will fall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mandi: Good. Two more questions. First, in Brazil, the left parties are influenced by Stalinist ideas, and they talk about the Ukrainian resistance as something bad and related to the far right and related to Nazis and related to NATO and so on. What would you say to a person who is interested in communism and socialism, and has this kind of ideas? What do people need to know about the Ukrainian resistance?<\/strong>
Andriy:<\/strong> I think people have to be materialists. First of all. If we apply not dogmas, but materialist analysis, we must understand that on the current stage of development of Eastern Europe in general, you don’t see any hegemonic forces on the left. No, it is impossible. But does it mean that our countries should be conquered, occupied or erased from the map? Resistance is what it is and as it can be at this stage. And in many cases, actually the anti-imperialist resistance was led not by the most progressive forces. Even if we take Palestine, which I think is a clear example, or during the second World War in Poland, anti-Nazi resistance was led by nationalists. And there are so many cases of this. If it comes to national liberation, definitely the most motivated elements are nationalist or religious fundamentalists. They are most motivated factions who take arms and go to fight. So we have to understand this material reality and analyze the world from this perspective, not from the perspective of our dogmas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mandi: And the last question, a curiosity. Do you identify with the ideas of Leon Trotsky? What do you think about overcoming Stalinism?<\/strong>
Andriy<\/strong>: I do not identify myself as a Trotskist, but Trotsky definitely influenced my vision of the world and vision of socialism. Even in my teenage years I read with curiosity Trotsky’s works. Even in Barcelona I have a collection of Trotsky’s work regarding the Ukrainian question, which are highly recommended. We published it [in Ukraine]. So indeed it’s a huge revolutionary heritage. Moreover, he was originally from Ukraine. He was originally from the central Ukraine. So I encourage people to familiarize themselves with his work. And definitely Trotsky’s organizations are our closest allies in social and anti imperialist struggle, who through these tools understand the world better than many other tendencies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n