Hailed by the state as the ‘entrepreneurs of the future,’ students in Ukraine are an economically vulnerable class and, like many other social groups, have been consistently neglected by the state’s response to war and general crisis. Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that student activists have become a major force both critical of the state and key to self-organization in literally every social sphere, bridging the immediate needs of defending against Russia’s aggression and the prospects for social reforms in higher education to improve the quality of student life. However, self-organization cannot always be the only option for resolving a crisis, especially since the line between anti-state action and serving the needs of the neoliberal state can be easily blurred, as Emily Channell-Justice argues.
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“Destroy Russian Imperialism – Help the Army!” This call to action opens a recent post in the Telegram channel for Priama Diia, or Direct Action, an independent student union in Ukraine that has been active in waves since the turn of the new millennium. Urgently asking for donations for tourniquets for an anti-authoritarian soldier and her unit, the post also calls out the poor quality of tourniquets in circulation and their total absence in some pharmacies, noting that the goal of the call is “to help our army, protecting it with modern and high-quality tourniquets,” asking for help to buy 16 tourniquets to “save the lives of our defenders who are standing against the enemy at the front lines.” Before sharing the details of where to donate, the post includes the note, “Also, if you are a student and you need help fundraising for your loved ones, friends, or acquaintances who are now defending Ukraine, write to us! … We will happily spread the information and help gain support.”
For those with friends or colleagues in Ukraine, such a post is not a unique sight in the past nearly three years of full-scale war. Calls for crowdfunded support have consistently appeared as ordinary Ukrainians raise money for military personnel and emergency needs related to war. They have been part of the ‘self-organized response’ that took many international observers by surprise in 2022, and which has been essential to sustain Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion and attempts to destroy a sovereign state.
The Telegram post highlights the challenging position of anti-authoritarian and anti-state activists in Ukraine today. It contains a somewhat veiled criticism of the state: the problem of poor-quality tourniquets and their unavailability is a procurement issue, one that most likely should be resolved by state actors. Even as the full-scale invasion has continued over the past three years, student activists have been fighting against what they call anti-social reforms in higher education and to improve their quality of life as students. These internal issues are seen as deeply important to the fight for Ukraine’s existence – student activists are fighting for a Ukraine that they will want to live in when this war is over.
Yet the antipathy of the post is limited to one enemy, Russia, and its imperial ambitions. This balance of state criticism with a clear identification of the enemy is a common challenge for anti-authoritarian groups and those who fall on a leftist political spectrum. Leftists in Ukraine have been engaging with this challenge since February 2022, explaining their reasoning for supporting the Ukrainian Armed Forces – sometimes from the front lines – while also not withholding criticism of state actions.
Students, state criticism, and self-organization
The post in Priama Diia’s Telegram channel is not an illustration of a new practice. In 2014, in the wake of mass demonstrations that ousted then-president Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s military was mobilized to respond to Kremlin-backed separatist movements in eastern Ukraine. Many of those who had been active in the mass protests, known in Ukraine as Maidan or the Revolution of Dignity, volunteered to fight in the east, and civilians organized to source supplies for them and help raise funds to buy needed equipment.
In my book “Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine,” I explore how the Maidan protests were themselves self-organized, grounded in a criticism of the state, represented then by Yanukovych, which had become increasingly distanced from the needs and expectations of many citizens. Activists who identified themselves as being part of a broad, left spectrum were deeply engaged during Maidan, and they were particularly influential among student protesters due to their constant presence in the sphere of higher education activism. Activists associated with Priama Diia advocated for self-organization within the mass protests, and their practices were adopted by many other protest actors with a variety of political affiliations.
The basic premise of self-organization is that when something needs to be done, and when someone has the capacity to do that thing, they simply do it. They do not wait for someone else to do something for them; they find a way to meet their own needs. For leftist activists in Ukraine in 2013, this meant working outside of existing political institutions, such as parties, because these could only function within a system that activists had identified as disenfranchising. When the Maidan protests began in November of that year, many leftist activists saw an opening for a robust discussion of what the state should mean to citizens, though they ultimately chose to disassociate their participation in the protests from leftist rhetoric, colors, and group names in order to ensure their own safety.
For many leftist activists, self-organization was not only a mechanism for organizing, but also a way to criticize institutions that were not meeting people’s needs. During the Maidan protests, Priama Diia activists helped orient student protesters of all political affiliations toward major issues in higher education that they had been advocating for before the mass mobilizations began. The Student Assembly, for example, formed in late January 2014, when activists had occupied the Ukrainian House in Kyiv. It was a self-organized initiative that was woven into the fabric of the Maidan protests but that used action groups to pursue a variety of tasks, including those focused on criticisms of state actions. For instance, some action groups were focused on organizing boycotts of Russian products or film screenings for the occupants of the Ukrainians house; others asked volunteers to go to the courts to picket against the wrongful arrest of students and other protesters who were being detained.
Following the outbreak of mass violence in late February 2014, the Student Assembly ended when student activists occupied the Ministry of Education and Sciences. From there, students focused on putting pressure on state actors from within. Most student activists were concerned with who would become the next Minister of Education, a discussion that marginalized leftist activists who were generally critical of most of the options and of the lack of change within the structure of the Ministry itself. The occupation of the Ministry was an example of self-organization becoming distant from its roots in anti-state action and instead serving the needs of the state.
However, once the war began in 2014, leftist groups had to face new questions about their relationship with the state. The general lack of preparation in the Armed Forces meant that volunteers took on an outsized role, and some former Priama Diia members themselves volunteered. This prompted extensive debate: how can activists who position themselves on the left and criticize the state now volunteer to serve that state? For those who volunteered, the answer was literally about life and death. For instance, one former Priama Diia activists who volunteered as a combat medic understood that if he did not serve, more people would die, and he could not stand aside when he was capable of helping people.
“Dignified conditions for life”: wartime activism
Activist students again find themselves at the intersection of mobilizing to help defend the state and criticizing its absence. Recently, in Priama Diia’s Telegram channel, activists reflected on all that they had accomplished in 2024, including holding a free market in Kyiv, growing the number of activists involved in their campaigns and addressing discrimination and inequality in the organization, and participation in international summits on higher education activism. At the same time, the Priama Diia Telegram channel addresses real criticism toward the state. These posts were often focused on student-centered problems, such as the poor quality of dormitories (a problem Priama Diia activists have been fighting across Ukraine for more than a decade), but they also attended to topics of more general interest.
For instance, in mid-December last year, Priama Diia posted about the ‘winter support’ funding, in which the state provided citizens with one thousand hryvnia to offset the costs of heating and supplies due to power outages caused by Russian attacks on energy infrastructure, as well as to support citizens in a weakened economic situation. The Priama Diia post pointed out that students are an economically vulnerable class because of their reliance on stipends, often unable to rent higher-quality housing and therefore forced to live in the above-mentioned unsuitable dormitories. At the same time, the Ministry of Education’s rhetoric about students refers to them as ‘entrepreneurs of the future,’ relying on their ingenuity for the future well-being of Ukraine. The Priama Diia post calls out the insufficiency of this state response, noting that a one-time payment does not offset the larger burdens of being unable to afford one’s basic needs; the state’s priorities for reconstruction should be about helping young people find stable jobs with livable wages so that they are not pushed to move abroad. Self-organization is not a viable option to solve this crisis.
Priama Diia’s posts about their criticisms of state actions are interspersed with others reflecting the reality of living in wartime conditions. On December 20, activists posted about damage done to Kyiv National Linguistic University in the wake of a Russian bombing attack on the capital, which destroyed over 100 windows on the main campus. On December 6, they posted “Air raid sirens and protest,” as an air raid siren in Lviv disrupted a planned protest about reducing the cost of living in dormitories currently being repaired. The protest, the post said, would be canceled if the air raid alert was not over by the time it was scheduled to begin.
Priama Diia activists and other leftist groups continue to present criticisms of the state, despite the fact that they are also fighting on behalf of that state. They push back against global leftist positions that claim Ukraine is just a pawn in a bigger geopolitical game between NATO and Russia – they argue that theirs is a fight for self-determination. Student activists are continuing their struggle with state withdrawal and one-off attempts to ameliorate people’s day-to-day lives without committing to systemic change. The state’s disinterest in implementing more equitable social policies in the long term is largely due to pressure from the “empire of capital” on the one hand and from the expansionist designs of the post-Soviet empire on the other, which continue unabated with their hard and soft attacks on Ukraine’s sovereignty.