The 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.
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.
Satyam Nagwekar
2 years ago
Can the articles be better proofread, please? Typos make for a bad reading experience.
George Wells
2 years ago
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?
Last edited 2 years ago by Andrew Fisher
James B
2 years ago
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.
The 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.