Denys Gorbach
Dnipropetrovsk
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Articles by Denys Gorbach
Reactive Nationalism? Governance Through Identities in an Eastern Ukrainian City
Abstract The widespread resistance to the Russian invasion in 2022 seems to support the idea that the Ukrainian nationalist project became convincing to former ‘pro-Russian’ voters. This essay takes an ethnographically informed look at the way the identitarian cleavage works in an industrial city in eastern Ukraine. I argue that, prior to the invasion, it helped consolidate the power of the local elite but was of no great importance to the working class.
Justice for the Middle East Is Also About Climate
Denys Gorbach: We are one week into a new war that the US and Israel started against Iran. How can you analyse it from the point of view of the political economy of the region? Adam Hanieh: First, the US-Israeli attack on Iran is disastrous in terms of its human impact – primarily on Iran, but also on the peoples of the region more broadly.
Justice for the Middle East is also about climate
First published at Commons. Adam Hanieh is a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, widely known for his work analyzing the political economy of the Gulf monarchies from a Marxist perspective. His latest book, Crude Capitalism, offers a fresh take on the role of oil in the capitalist dynamics of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Free public transport in Ukraine
Simon: Please start by telling our readers who lives in Kryvyi Rih, what do they do, and where is it? Is it near the front line? Denys: Kryvyi Rih is a very large mining town, better called a city, with 600,000 inhabitants. At the peak it had nearly a million, and according to some conspiracy theories, the population actually reached a million, but the Dnepropetrovsk region authorities never wanted to acknowledge that, as that would require the creation of a separate region.
10 octobre 2025 | tiré du site entre les lignes entre les mots https://entreleslignesentrelesmots.wordpress.com/2025/10/16/a-gauche-en-europe-occidentale-il-y-a-une-volonte-de-dresser-un-mur-et-dignorer-ce-qui-se-passe-a-lest/#more-98851 Dans votre livre, vous soutenez que l’Ukraine post-soviétique, à travers son processus de privatisations, ne s’est pas pleinement intégrée à l’économie néolibérale et qu’« une apparence socialiste enveloppait les pratiques capitalistes ».
‘In the Western European left, there’s a desire to put up a wall and ignore what’s happening in the east’
First published in Spanish at Ctxt. Translation by Adam Novak from Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières. Denys Gorbach (Kryvyi Rih, 1984) is a sociologist. The research from his doctoral thesis at Sciences Po (Paris) is contained in the book The Making and Unmaking of Ukrainian Working Class (Berghahn, 2024), which recounts how economic changes altered the values of the working class in Ukraine, focusing on his city, Kryvyi Rih, in the south-east of the country.
What Does the Ukrainian Working Class Want?
As the U.S. and Russia discuss a possible ceasefire, what role do the Ukrainian people—especially the working class—have in shaping the outcome? Paul Jay speaks with Ukrainian political scientist Denys Gorbach about the war, class dynamics, and the neoliberal assault on workers’ rights during the conflict—a rare, progressive, class-conscious look at the war in Ukraine. ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers. Donate
An embarrassing war: what to do when Russia attacks Ukraine but you are left‑wing?
On February 24, the Russian army began its invasion of Ukraine. At the end of the third week of the invasion, thousands of civilian casualties were reported, and many hospitals and schools were destroyed by the bombing. A real humanitarian crisis is unfolding in the besieged cities, while the aggressor uses munitions prohibited by international conventions. How has the French-speaking left reacted to this tragedy?
We need a peoples' solidarity with Ukraine and against war, not the fake solidarity of governments
Shaun Matsheza and Nick Buxton of TNI spoke to two activists on the editorial board of the left Commons journal that explores and analyses Ukraine’s economy, politics, history and culture. Denys Gorbach is a social researcher currently doing his PhD in France on the politics of Ukrainian working class and Denis Pilash is a political scientist and activist involved in a social movement, Sotsialnyi Rukh.
Hillel Ticktin: I have not met any Marxist in the Soviet Union
How did you grow interested in Marxist politics? My father was on the Left. By coincidence, when he came from Poland in 1930, he came with a fellow passenger called Burlak. Burlak had been politically active in Estonia. He was a Marxist, almost certainly a member of the Communist party, and he left – obviously, Estonia at that time was in reaction, very right-wing. But he had been active in the previous period, during the civil war.
Russian-Germans and the surprising rise of the AfD
The right-populist AfD party is soon to take its first seats in the Bundestag. What was the role of Germany’s Russians in that unprecedented electoral success? On 24 September, Germans voted for a new Bundestag. Chancellor Angela Merkel clinched an historic fourth term, with her party, the centre-right CDU (Christian Democratic Union), and its sister party the CSU (Christian Social Union), topping the polls.
Why Moscow will never get a museum of migration
Russian museums tend to avoid the subject of migration at all costs. For curators, it seems the people and history embodied in migration processes are invisible. Three years ago Izvestiya trumpeted the news that Moscow was scrapping its “Museums for Migrants” project. “Gastarbeiters,” apparently, just didn’t want free visits to the capital’s museums. The article didn’t, of course, mention that the scheme had never got off the ground in the first place.
The man in black: interview with Russian anarchist Dmitry Buchenkov
For Russian investigators and judges, it doesn’t matter if you’ve taken part in protest actions or not. Public criticism of the state can serve as a pretext for imprisonment. Dmitry Buchenkov has spent one and a half years in a Moscow detention facility.
Scaling back on healthcare may start with Russia’s migrants. But it won’t end there
Russia has still not come to a final decision on its policy towards migration, despite having produced a raft of strategic government documents on the subject. During the 2000s the country experienced a “demographic dividend”, with a surplus in its working age population, along with fewer children and elderly people. However, since 2009 the supply of labour has been dropping every year relative to demand.
Second-hand Europe: Ukrainian immigrants in Poland
If you begin your visit to Poland from Warsaw Central Station, you may think you’ve found yourself in a western European metropolis, no different from Paris or London. Here, you can buy sushi rolls and a kale bioshake — a lunch fitting for the ride to Berlin on the hipster-filled Friday train. On the platforms, white-collar workers await their trains. When panic over air pollution gripped the city, they switched from SUVs to public transport.
Is the anti-corruption agenda all that it’s cracked up to be?
The fight against corruption is often sold as the pill to end all post-socialist ills. Activists and researchers in Poland, Russia and Ukraine give their views on why we need to challenge it. Recent years have seen a rise in anti-corruption protest movements across postsocialist states. These protest cycles in Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and Romania see citizens come together — whether on the square or in activist groups — to demand that public officials do not steal or abuse their positions.
A controversial law takes aim at Ukraine’s anti-corruption NGOs
New moves to make the work of Ukraine’s NGOs “transparent” only highlights how the fight against corruption is being undermined. On 27 March, President Petro Poroshenko signed into law a series of amendments to Ukraine’s Law on the Prevention of Corruption. These amendments, which compel members of Ukraine’s anti-corruption NGOs to release financial declarations, immediately elicited a response from segments of civil society and investigative journalist community.
Hatching discontent in Ukraine
The trip south from Kyiv to the villages of Cherkasy oblast takes several hours by bus over often bumpy roads, but I don’t mind — the idyllic countryside and expansive views of chernozem, the black soil that Ukraine is famous for, provides some respite from the concrete and hustle of the capital. Indeed, the country’s 30 million hectares of fertile and high-yielding soil is the reason why Ukraine is known as “the breadbasket of Europe”, and right now agriculture is booming.
Who will make Russia “great again”?
There has been quite a bit of whiplash in the way Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most promising opposition leader, has been regarded. One moment, he’s touted as Russia’s Vaclav Havel, who is about to ride in on a white horse and drain the putrid Kremlin swamp.
Listening to Russia’s female migrants
This article by Ekaterina Ivashchenko originally appeared in Russian at the Fergana.News information agency, a leading source of information on Central Asia. We are grateful for their permission to translate and republish it here. The first issue of Gul was published in St Petersburg in mid-December 2016. The newspaper, whose name translates as “flower”, isn’t just for women from central Asia — it’s produced by them, too.
Dreams of Europe: refugees and xenophobia in Russia and Ukraine
The refugee crisis has profoundly influenced the politics of the European Union at both the supranational level and the level of individual member states. Its repercussions have been strongly felt in the border countries of the south-east, such as Hungary or Greece, and in the west European “core”. For eastern Europe, the “crisis” is less relevant in terms of practical policy implications, but is important in the symbolic domain.
Undermined: how the state is selling out Ukraine's coal workers
Ukraine’s miners were once heroes of socialist labour. Today, after years of sector-wide neglect and corruption, there are new plans for further mine closures, leaving thousands of people without work. Since 2014, war has redrawn the map of Ukraine, removing many of its mining operations. Half of Ukraine’s 150 mines operational before 2014 are now in the territories of the so-called “Peoples’ Republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk, and some have been destroyed or flooded as a result of military action.
Where does the key to political change in the post-Soviet space lie?
Twenty five years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the post-Soviet world is caught in authoritarian stasis. How can grassroots movements find long-term success? This month marks the 25th anniversary of the failed August 1991 coup in the Soviet Union. This last-ditch attempt to save the USSR turned out to be its final nail in the coffin, its coup de grace.
Coup talk in Ukraine
The war in the east, the rise of paramilitaries and polarised public opinion are feeding fears of a violent seizure of power in Kyiv. Could Ukraine follow in Turkey’s footsteps? Once again, Ukrainians are discussing the possibility of a military coup in their country.
03 April 2016 | openDemocracy
Many assume that women, at the top, will act in the best interests of their gender. But don't the Margaret Thatchers and Theresa Mays act for their class?
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