This article begins with an empirical puzzle: the case of a small factory in an industrial Ukrainian city appears to contradict everything we thought we knew about industrial paternalism and workers' contestatory attitudes in the country. Unlike the large companies in the same city, this factory enjoys social peace without having to guarantee it through a "social wage". How does management succeed in securing its legitimacy in the eyes of a typically demanding workforce? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the article demonstrates that the company's radical disembeddedness shifts it into a different register within the workers' moral economy, activating neoliberal subjectivity and extinguishing paternalistic expectations among the workforce.

This article begins with an empirical puzzle: the case of a small factory in an industrial Ukrainian city appears to contradict everything we thought we knew about industrial paternalism and workers’ contestatory attitudes in the country. Unlike the large companies in the same city, this factory enjoys social peace without having to guarantee it through a “social wage”. How does management succeed in securing its legitimacy in the eyes of a typically demanding workforce? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the article demonstrates that the company’s radical disembeddedness shifts it into a different register within the workers’ moral economy, activating neoliberal subjectivity and extinguishing paternalistic expectations among the workforce.

Overwhelming empathy with all the civilians and conscripts who have suffered from the ongoing violence in Ukraine, which began years before the Russian invasion of February 2022, must be complemented by analysis and explanation. What can anthropologists contribute? I have been disappointed by one-sided accounts endorsing the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky and the cause of the Ukrainian nation that have dominated in the Western mass media and anglophone academic work, including that of anthropologists. From an anthropological perspective, to invoke international law and sacralize political sovereignty is inadequate (Hann 2023; Malinowski 1944). Instead, we need to scrutinize the complex history of the Ukrainian nation, which is being consummated through the present violence. We need to recognize that Zelensky heads an Atlanticist, market-oriented, nationalist regime of dubious legitimacy. This critical stance does not mean deference to the Kremlin in the spirit of the “realist school” of international relations. It does mean recalling that as late as autumn 2021 President Vladimir Putin was putting forward proposals for a peaceful resolution of the crisis brought about by Western geopolitical and economic ambitions since the end of the Cold War. For the Russian political classes (not just for Putin and his oligarchical allies), when it came to NATO expansion Ukraine was a unique red line. However, too many interest groups in Washington as well as in Kyiv actually wanted the war that began in February 2022 (though this could not be declared publicly).

The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war seems to have prompted a return to anthropology's origins: the armchair. Claiming authority based on status and knowledge accumulated elsewhere and extrapolated to Ukraine, public scholars have proffered takes, op-eds, and geopolitical phantasies. Slow research in the full ethnographic mode, studying actors and subjectivities in fast shifting contexts, would have been preferable. In a context of war, complex and dynamic political phenomena easily become tokens in political debates that do not go much beyond statements of political identity.

Industrial workers in Ukraine have a complex political lifeworld because their political action aimed at bringing radical social change coexists with a demobilizing stance that condemns all political participation as corrupt. This contradictory attitude to politics defines the character of populist mass mobilizations that shook Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, as well as the electoral overhaul of 2019 and the popular response to the Russian invasion in 2022. Based on three years of fieldwork in the city of Kryvyi Rih, the book focuses on the moral economy that constitutes the working class and structures its relations with other social groups.

La (dé)formation de la classe ouvrière ukrainienne : la politique au quotidien et l’économie morale dans une ville post-socialiste L’énigme qui guide cette thèse porte sur la politisation des ouvriers en Ukraine : alors qu’ilsaspirent au niveau discursif à s’engager dans une action politique susceptible de provoquer unchangement social radical, ils associent dans leur vie quotidienne toute forme de participation àla vie politique à un acte de corruption, ce qui les démobilise. Pour expliquer cet apparentparadoxe, la thèse s’interroge sur le rapport des classes populaires ukrainiennes au politique.Cette exploration ethnographique du quotidien politique des ouvriers se concentre surl’économie morale qui forme cette classe sociale. La recherche est fondée sur un travail deterrain mené dans la ville de Kryvyi Rih entre 2018 et 2021. Celui-ci consiste en une séried’entretiens ethnographiques, d’observations participantes au sein d’une usine, d’analyse desarchives de la presse locale et d’une ethnographie numérique. L’analyse est multiscalaire :partant de la dynamique politique au niveau de la ville, elle descend au niveau de l’entreprisepuis des stratégies individuelles de survie économique et de distinction symbolique. La thèsemontre que la faiblesse de l’activité politique ouvrière, résultant de la crise socio-économiquepostsocialiste, est aggravée par les mécanismes paternalistes qui ont émergé pour atténuer leseffets de celle-ci. En même temps, la « démocratie oligarchique » des années 2000 a polarisé lavie politique selon un axe identitaire. Ces processus façonnent les modes de participationpolitique accessibles aux ouvriers : l’engagement politique se réduit à une vision antagoniste,qui clôt l’espace politique et favorise les projets autoritaires de lutte contre la corruption.

L’article interroge les configurations de pouvoir industrielles ( factory regimes ) à Kryvyi Rih, une ville minière et sidérurgique située à l’est de l’Ukraine. En s’appuyant sur un travail de terrain ethnographique, il retrace la reproduction de l’hégémonie industrielle au travers des transformations postsoviétiques (la privatisation et les mesures d’austérité). La comparaison de trois cas qui représentent des configurations hégémoniques différentes (des mines privatisées par des Ukrainiens, une aciérie achetée par une société étrangère et des carrières faisant partie d’une société ukrainienne intégrée verticalement) permet de repérer nombre de variations de ce processus, dues au degré d’autochtonie du nouveau propriétaire et à sa capacité répressive, au caractère des relations informelles dans le processus de travail et dans la scène syndicale, ainsi qu’à l’encastrement social du propriétaire à l’échelle de l’usine et au niveau urbain. L’article montre comment la construction et le maintien du bloc hégémonique entre le groupe dominant et des groupes subalternes à l’échelle de l’entreprise reposent sur une économie morale vernaculaire, dans laquelle sont encastrées les activités économiques de chaque entreprise. Le paternalisme industriel postsoviétique est le produit des attentes populaires, qui sont elles-mêmes dynamiques et susceptibles de changer sous l’influence des politiques des propriétaires légitimes.

This article examines hegemonic norms of political and moral economy in Ukraine today acting at the level of the workplace. My research is based on fieldwork I conducted in a large industrial city in the east of Ukraine from January to June 2019. Using the general Gramsci inspired theoretical framework and the insights of Hillel Ticktin, Simon Clarke and Michael Burawoy regarding Soviet and post-Soviet factory regimes, I analyse differences between the life-worlds of workers, relating them to the structurally different context in which they find themselves. All enterprises feature path-dependent informal bargaining and under investment as cornerstones of their factory regimes. However, they differ in the ways in which these traits combine in practice. These configurations, in turn, elicit different strategies and attitudes from the workers, each of them more typical at one enterprise than at others: an archaic manufactory attitude at a new window factory, exit in mines torn between owners, voice at the foreign-owned metalworking factory, and loyalty at a ‘native’ oligarchic holding. The general trend is not towards eliminating informality as a ‘post-Soviet residue’ but rather towards renegotiating it with different outcomes.

This article investigates factory regimes in Kryvyi Rih, a mining and metalworking city in eastern Ukraine. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it studies the reproduction of industrial hegemony in the context of major post-Soviet transformations (privatization and austerity measures). The comparison of three cases representing different hegemonic configurations (mines privatized by Ukrainian businessmen, a metalworking factory bought by a foreign company, and quarries acquired by a Ukrainian vertically integrated holding) sheds light on the variations of this process. This variability is due to the degree of the new owner's indigeneity and his repressive capacity; to the kind of informal relations regulating the labor process and the union scene; and to the social embeddedness of the owner on the scale of the factory and at the city level. The article shows how the construction and preservation of a hegemonic bloc between the dominant and the subaltern groups at the enterprise level rely on a vernacular moral economy in which the factory's economic activities are embedded. Post-Soviet industrial paternalism is the product of lay expectations that are, in their turn, dynamic and prone to change under the influence of the policies of legitimate owners.

In order to explore factors conditioning the political quietude ofUkrainian labor, this article analyzes ethnographic data collected at two large enterprises: the Kyiv Metro and the privatized electricity supplier Kyivenergo. Focusing on a recent labor conflict, I unpack various contexts condensed in it. I analyze the hegemonic configuration developed in the early 1990s, at the workplace andat the macro level, and follow its later erosion. This configuration has been based on labor hoarding, distribution of nonwage resources, and patronage networks, featuring the foreman as the nodal figure. On the macro scale, it relied on the mediation by unions, supported by resources accumulated during the Soviet era and the economic boom of the 2000s. The depletion of these resources has spelled theongoing crisis of this configuration.

In order to explore factors conditioning the political quietude of Ukrainian labor, this article analyzes ethnographic data collected at two large enterprises: the Kyiv Metro and the privatized electricity supplier Kyivenergo. Focusing on a recent labor conflict, I unpack various contexts condensed in it. I analyze the hegemonic configuration developed in the early 1990s, at the workplace and at the macro level, and follow its later erosion. This configuration has been based on labor hoarding, distribution of nonwage resources, and patronage networks, featuring the foreman as the nodal figure. On the macro scale, it relied on the mediation by unions, supported by resources accumulated during the Soviet era and the economic boom of the 2000s. The depletion of these resources has spelled the ongoing crisis of this configuration.