The Making & Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class: Everyday Politics and Moral Economy in a Post‐Soviet City by DenysGorbach. Dislocations, Vol. 36. New York: Berghahn Books, 2024. 346 pp. $135.00. ISBN 978‐1‐80539‐298‐9

Denys Gorbach has written a very substantial work that describes in great detail the challenges and politics of a struggling post-socialist industrial Ukrainian city. His book will be of interest to anyone who cares about the political economy of Ukraine, or of the working class in the post-Soviet region more broadly. The work is centered in Kryvyi Rih (incidentally, the city where Voldoymyr Zelenskyi was born), which Gorbach describes as a “working-class post-Soviet provincial city” that “represents the country’s industrial backwater” (pp. 3, 9). Gorbach is a native himself; he once lived there as a self-described anarchist activist, and he returned to conduct eight months of fieldwork in 2018–19, including two months employed as a manual worker at a small-scale factory. While Gorbach states that the book’s central question as “How does the Ukrainian working class relate to politics?,” his definition of politics includes class consciousness, “everyday politics,” and notions of moral economy (p. 4). Yet this question is embedded in analysis that takes place on different levels. One level focuses on the post-Soviet industrial city, with a chapter on the “archeology of power” examining domination reflected in urban infrastructure, such as public transport, heating, and housing. From there, Gorbach weaves together detailed accounts of four enterprises based in three different industries, all transforming, in dissimilar ways, from Soviet paternalism to the “decomposing” of industrial paternalism. He finds that, despite their roughly similar profiles and location in the same city, different patterns of labor conflict emerge among the workforce of these enterprises, a puzzle he explains by describing their diverse factory regimes. This in itself is valuable, but the book then adds detailed reflections from a number of informants, revealing the complicated nature of working-class identity and consciousness in post-socialist Ukraine. Gorbach’s informants are avid followers of news, well aware of class distinctions and the experience of conflicts at work. Yet, he finds that regardless of the level of their militancy, they all share deep suspicions of organized politics as such, “criticizing trade unions, parties, and all other institutions as corrupt and serving the interests of the elite” (p. 2). Such class identities are complicated further in compelling ways by informants discussing—before Russia’s full-scale invasion, but after 2014—their “pro-Ukrainian” or “Eastern Slavic” identities, a divide that at the time takes on a moral dimension as opposed to a purely ethnic one. The argument, though, is centrally focused on how this set of political and anti-political views can be termed populist, an outlook he describes as comprising the virtuous people in opposition to a morally compromised elite. In recent years the word populism had almost always been preceded by the words “right-wing,” typically avoiding the question of whether any other variety is possible. While not confronting this question directly, Gorbach makes clear the ambiguities inherent in the orientation of his working-class informants. These Ukrainian workers are deeply suspicious of institutionalized politics, yet they are profoundly aware of power relations and have an equally strong sense of the unjust nature of economic arrangements. This “everyday politics” is shaped by their sense of moral economy, itself a complex combination of legacies from the Soviet past and the consequences of Ukraine’s position in the semi-periphery of global capitalism. Yet with a worldview that confronts “morals” against “politics,” the result to date has been one of “demobilized discontent,” one open to a savior figure who might upend the status quo, rather than one of collective mobilization from below (p. 293). Gorbach includes an epilogue written after Russia’s full-scale invasion of 2022. Not surprisingly, the Eastern Slavic orientation has largely been shunted aside, and workers have indeed been mobilized, both for warfighting and also for confronting a growing labor shortage. He ponders further whether workers might use that experience to defend their interests in a postwar environment. While he remains doubtful, the question is pertinent, since the Ukrainian government has tightened restrictions placed on labor in wartime, and this process is likely to continue once the fighting ends and the painful process of rebuilding Ukraine’s crippled economy begins. The book’s insights are both novel and nuanced and cannot be fully explored in a short review. While Gorbach’s account is especially compelling in that it is centered in Ukraine, there really is no comparable work of this depth for any of the post-Soviet states, all of which continue to struggle with the politics of deindustrialization.