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The President is stuck between past and present. Credit: Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
All infants are conspiracy theorists. They think that the whole world revolves around them, and that if they are denied something it’s because bad forces in the world have it in for them. This is, essentially, the theory of Melanie Klein, the pioneering child psychoanalyst. According to Klein, in the early stages of infancy we can only think about the world in terms of objects, and can only think about those objects in relation to themselves. The complex, nuanced lives of others are reduced to primitive binaries: the mother, for instance, is reduced to a “good breast” that feeds the mewling child and a “bad breast” that denies the child its satisfaction. The infant cannot perceive that its mother is a subject in her own right.
I kept thinking about this idea last week, as I was trying to make sense of Vladimir Putin’s paranoid new essay, “On the Historical Unity of the Russian and Ukrainian Peoples,” which the Russian President published on the Kremlin’s website (so, essentially, self-published). Putin fancies himself as something of a historian, and the gist of the 5000-word ramble — so poorly-composed it’s unlikely to be entirely ghost-written — is that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people”, cruelly separated by scheming foreign powers who want to turn Ukraine into the “anti-Russia”. Kiev, known as “the mother of Russian cities”, has been split from Moscow over the centuries by dark forces: the Tatar Mongols, the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, Austro-Hungary, the Nazis, and now “the West”, who turn the “mother” into a weapon against Moscow.
It’s rare for Putin to publish something so long, and historians, Kremlinologists and cultural critics have all been working out what it can tell us about the Russian President’s ideology and geopolitical intent. The BBC Russian service pulled together comments from eminent Russian and Ukrainian scholars, who accused the President of “school boy errors”. Putin claims, for example, that Russians and Ukrainians are all descendants of a single medieval kingdom from Finland to Kiev that was unified by one language, one Orthodox Christian faith and one royal family. The early Kiev Kings supposedly adopted Christianity and then moved to Moscow. In Putin’s simplistic vision the identity is stable, the lineage unbroken. In fact, Medieval Rus was multilingual, has always been multi-confessional, and the descendants of Kiev kings ruled over areas outside of Moscow.
The Russian President also dismisses Ukrainian efforts (and huge sacrifices) for statehood over the centuries. The mother could not possibly be an autonomous subject. Putin claims the first Ukrainian republic of 1917 was just a German “construct.” Stalin’s enforced famine of Ukrainian peasants and slaughter of Ukrainian intelligentsia, he says, had nothing to do with the Generalissimo’s fears about Ukrainian nationalism undermining the Soviet project. Indeed, independent Ukraine, “is entirely the brainchild of the Soviet era, and was to a large extent created at the expense of historical Russian lands.” Putin’s take utterly ignores the Soviet rationale for formalising a Ukrainian Soviet republic completely controlled from Moscow. It was a way to control nationalist energies.
Sergey Radchenko, Professor of Cold War History and International Relations at Johns Hopkins University dismissed the essay as “deranged” — but frightening all the same. Rather than a serious scholarly account, its aim is to give a rationale for continued aggression. After all, if Ukraine and Russia are “one”, then invasion and other forms of colonial subjugation are just an internal matter. Putin often invokes “history” when he needs propaganda cover to send in the tanks. To justify his annexation of Crimea and invasion of East Ukraine, Putin argued in 2014 that “Russians and Ukrainians are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus is our common source and we cannot live without each other.” Since then, there’s been something disturbed about the way Kremlin propaganda has conceptualised Ukraine: either deifying it as “the mother” or castigating it as a whore who has sold itself to the West. There’s the good breast and the bad breast, and nothing in between. This latest essay, too, circles around metaphors of family relations, identity and possession; that’s why it’s so tempting to read it through the framework of psychoanalysis.
Because Ukraine isn’t just another political issue for Putin: it cuts to the quick of how he, and many of his compatriots, make sense of Russia’s sense of self. One of the tragedies of post-Soviet Russia is that its rulers have never surrendered their vision of the nation as an Empire, intrinsically destined to be a Great Power, a force around which the world revolves. And historically this identity has always been formulated via Ukraine. In the 16th century the tsars of Muscovy grandly declared their kingdom to be the “third Rome”: the inheritor of the divine mission of Rome and then Constantinople; the next city destined to unite politics and Christianity and establish God’s Empire on earth. But this claim was always based on Muscovy’s connections to Kyiv: it was the Kings of Kyiv who brought Christianity to the region, and married into the Byzantine royal family. As descendants of the Kyivan kings, Moscow’s rulers now claimed to be the epiphany of that lineage. Russia can’t quite live up to serious Empire billing if it doesn’t control cities like Odessa, Kharkov and Kyiv, the jewels of the old Russian Empire.
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SubscribeThe problem is not just Putin – the ruling elites of post-Soviet Russia have never accepted Ukraine’s right to be an independent, sovereign state. This was true even in the Yeltsin era, although they were less able to work mischief then (my late father wrote an article about this for International Affairs back in 1993). Not all parts of the former USSR attract the same degree of revanchism from the Kremlin – they are more reconciled to the loss of Central Asia, whose rulers in any case tend to have good relations with Moscow. Ukraine is different, for all the reasons Pomerantsev outlines above. It is the key site for the creation of Russia’s religious identity – St Vladimir’s conversion to Orthodoxy – and of the creation of the Russian state, something of crucial importance to Putin who has made statehood – gosudarstvennost’ – the centre of the official historical narrative. As Pomerantsev says, the line connecting post-Mongol Muscovy to the Princes of Kiev is a very tortuous and largely imaginary one, but the emotional attachment remains.
Modern Ukraine of course has its own historical myths, some of which are just as bogus as those peddled in Moscow: there is little or no acknowledgement that within its current borders it is indeed largely a Soviet creation, that some of the twentieth-century nationalists the Ukrainian government now celebrates were virulent anti-semites, or that the origins of modern Ukrainian identity are entangled in the legacies of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the 17th-century Cossack Hetmanate, Habsburg Galicia (where Ukrainian/Ruthenian nationalism was encouraged) and Romanov Russia. The best account of these complexities is Timothy Snyder’s The Reconstruction of Nations. Putin is not wrong to describe the Ukrainian State of 1918 as in part a German puppet creation. A significant proportion of independent Ukraine’s population – in Crimea, the Don basin and along the Black Sea coast – did not identify as Ukrainian, which is not to say they necessarily identified as Russian either. They identified as Soviet, and the disintegration of that identity has left a lot of painful ambiguities behind it.
Putin has sought to exploit these ambiguities in a peculiarly cynical and destructive way, but as Pomerantsev says, it seems to have backfired. The violence he triggered in Eastern Ukraine has alienated most Russian-speaking Ukrainians from his regime. Imperial nostalgia is certainly a part of this (and I’m not sure we British have a right to feel superior about that – we also have a somewhat exaggerated sense of our place in the world). I think a further complexity is that Russia, in some ways like Britain, is not a nation-state. It is a rump empire, which even in its reduced form has large numbers of non-Russian minorities, many of them Muslim: Tatars, Bashkirs, Yakuts, Ossetians, Chechens, Jews… Any new form of Russian identity has to include all of these, and therefore cannot be a purely national one. Putin has shown a willingness to flirt with ethnic Russian nationalism, which is also an important part of Alexei Navalny’s appeal. We should be very worried indeed if those tendencies grow stronger, so I am not certain Pomerantsev’s prescription of abandoning an imperial for a national identity is necessarily the right one.
Interesting
On my first trip to the Soviet Union in 1987, I went to a white water rafting competition in the Kavkaz near a village called Mezmai in the Western Caucasuses. I was a little confused as there were many blue and yellow flags fluttering in the wind. That was the first time I saw a Ukrainian flag flying beside Soviet, Russian and Kazak flags, among others. Kievan Rus has always been the spiritual and intellectual home of modern day Russia; the problem isn’t Putin: the problem is the west that fails to see Russia as what it is in its own right a mature sophisticated state; like the Nazis who always considered Russia full of unsophisticated ignorant Slavs. The MSM of all persuasions in the UK/US and Western Europe are extremely bigoted. There would never have been any conflict between Russia and Ukraine had the US/West/Obama not got involved in business that was none of their business.
So, beyond touristic impressions and outward flag unity, what do Ukranians want? I don’t know, for starters. You seem to suggest they are merely pawns incapable of deciding for themselves? Unhelpful meddling there is aplenty from all sides, but surely Ukranians can think too, in a more fragmented public picture than you hint at – e.g. some pro-and anti- Russia? And ambivalence. If something like Putin’s essay was written and went viral in Kiev you may have a point – and you may even personally agree with it? But it wasn’t, and it has a curious Ein Volk aspect. Try Frontline Ukraine by R Sakwa instead. A good read.
That is largely rubbish and rewriting history. Firstly in 1991 presidents Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine and Stanislav Shushkevich of Belarus met to agree the dissolution of the USSR. Then in 1997 the Russian Federation and Ukraine signed The Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership, which included the recognition of existing borders.
Can the articles be better proofread, please? Typos make for a bad reading experience.
Russia is a great nation with legitimate interests and was a geographically natural ally of Britain against Napoleon and Hitler.
It is hubris for the American Empire to make an enemy of it, particularly now when the West is weakening.
An accomodation with Russia based on mutual respect and shared interests is a no-brainer.
Russia was no ally of Britain against Hitler. By default we ended up fighting the same enemy but until the German invasion the Soviet Union was a steadfast ally of Nazi Germany supplying the materials to enable the Nazis to wage war against Britain, including the oil used to fuel German bombers in their attacks on Britain and the materials used to make the bombs they dropped. Also the Soviet Union instructed the British communist party to oppose and undermine the British war effort.
If 2 burglars break in to your house and fall out between themselves and start fighting it does not make one of them your friend
Would Russia have been such a close and temporary ally of the UK if Hitler had stuck to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact? Stalin had slaughtered most of his colleagues on a paranoiaic whim by this point. So, for the UK, ‘united against a common foe’ did not forcibly mean ‘friend’ – whether or not we like(d) Russia(ns).
Well it was an ally only after the Nazis broke their Pact with the Soviets, having among other things together destroyed Poland and the Baltic States, both committing huge atrocities! If it hadn’t been for the Nazis, the West would very likely have come into conflict with the Soviets at some stage. Given the appalling record of Leninism, and indeed the existing Chinese state, it is a shame that Bolshevism wasn’t strangled in its grave.
What exactly has the ‘American Empire’ done to compare?
An excellent piece. Congratulations. The difficulty faced by modern-day Ukraine is that it is, to all intents and purposes, a Banana Republic. The population has voted, overwhelmingly, to become part of Europe. The government, in answer to this mandate, continues to foster corruption and indifference. Meanwhile Europe has cast the country aside by signing up to Nordstream-2. This leaves the arch schemer in a comfortable position, psychological weaknesses aside, to swallow up more chunks of his perceived ex-Empire. The sad part is that the Ukrainians, who have far more to lose than Russia, will fight and further bloodshed will result.
To be fair, Nordstream 2 is entirely promoted by the German government, not the EU.