Russia’s Lengthy Disdain for Ukrainian Nationhood

https://techy-job.com/russias-lengthy-disdain-for-ukrainian-nationhood/ 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-long-disdain-for-ukrainian-nationhood-11651165024

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/russian-contempt-for-ukraine-paved-the-way-for-putins-disastrous-invasion/

Russia’s Lengthy Disdain for Ukrainian Nationhood
April 29, 2022 by techyjob_apcwh6

As a younger poet within the Soviet Union, Joseph Brodsky was persecuted by the authorities earlier than escaping to the U.S. in 1972 and happening to win the Nobel Prize in literature. In Soviet-era Kyiv, Ukrainian intellectuals used to commerce coveted samizdat reprints of Brodsky’s poems, reciting them at clandestine gatherings.

However the affection wasn’t mutual. At a studying in 1992, lower than a 12 months into Ukraine’s existence as an impartial nation, Brodsky supplied a brand new poem titled “To the Independence of Ukraine.” “Farewell khokhols,” he intoned, utilizing a racial slur for Ukrainians. “We’ve lived collectively, now sufficient. Want I might spit into the Dnipro river, maybe it will now circulate backwards.” Brodsky went on to foretell that when the ungrateful Ukrainians have been wheezing on their deathbeds, they’d absolutely revert to reciting the verse of the traditional Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin, relatively than the “lies” of their very own nationwide poet, Taras Shevchenko.

“President Vladimir Putin’s views on Ukraine aren’t any outlier.”

The concept that Ukrainians aren’t an actual individuals and that Ukrainian nationhood is a synthetic assemble has lengthy been mainstream in Russian tradition, literature and politics—together with amongst liberal luminaries like Brodsky, who died in 1996. President Vladimir Putin’s views on Ukraine, which he expounded in an essay final 12 months that was learn to Russian troopers getting ready for the invasion, aren’t any outlier. They observe a prolonged custom that helps to clarify the persevering with assist for the warfare amongst Russia’s residents.

This blind spot dates to the beginnings of the trendy Ukrainian quest for sovereignty greater than a century in the past. “The Russian democrat ends the place the Ukrainian query begins,” mentioned Ukrainian author and playwright Volodymyr Vynnychenko, who served as prime minister of the short-lived Ukrainian Nationwide Republic in 1917-18. It has change into one of many best-known phrases in Ukrainian politics.

In Russia’s historic narrative and literary custom, Ukrainians have usually been depicted as dimwitted however good-natured peasants who communicate with a humorous accent, and whose quest for an impartial future can solely be the product of overseas intrigues. Mikhail Bulgakov, born in Kyiv to oldsters who had moved from Russia, mocked the Ukrainian language in his novels, with one character arguing that Ukrainians can’t have a phrase for whale as a result of, not like Russia, Ukraine doesn’t have oceans. Natives of Ukraine who achieved undisputed inventive or scientific success, from the painter Kazimir Malevich to the daddy of the Soviet area program, Sergei Korolyov, have been appropriated as Russian.

“A lot of these in Russia who faux to be an mental elite have a condescending perspective to Ukrainians, and this contains a lot of these within the opposition who’re supporting Ukraine now,” mentioned Russian politician Ilya Ponomarev, the one Russian lawmaker to vote towards the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014. “They have a look at the Ukrainians as a bit brother, a brother who nonetheless must develop up.”

Each Russian, Mr. Ponomarev added, instinctively feels the heritage of the traditional Russian state when dismissing Ukraine as a current invention. It’s a view that Mr. Ponomarev himself says he needed to reassess after emigrating to Ukraine, the place he discovered that historic figures seen by Russians because the founders of their nation have been in actual fact ruling from Kyiv centuries earlier than Moscow got here into existence. One instance is Prince Vladimir the Nice, the Tenth-century ruler who introduced Christianity to the realm then referred to as the Kyivan Rus. Each Mr. Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are named after him.

The custom of Russian hostility to Ukrainian aspirations is available in two strands. One merely denies the existence of Ukrainians as a individuals distinct from Russians. That was the road adopted by the Russian Empire for a lot of the nineteenth century, when it banned books in Ukrainian and the very time period Ukraine, calling the area “Little Russia” as an alternative. One other strand holds that whereas Ukrainians do in actual fact have their very own identification and communicate their very own language, no less than half the territory of present-day Ukraine actually belongs to Russia and was unfairly pried away by the Soviet Union’s founder Vladimir Lenin.

That was the view of the Russian novelist and former political prisoner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one other Nobel laureate, who was exiled by the Soviets in 1974 and returned to Russia in 1994. He initially expressed understanding of Ukrainian struggling. “We should always show the greatness of our nation not by the sheer measurement of our territory and the variety of peoples in our care, however by the greatness of our actions,” he wrote in his 1968 traditional, “The Gulag Archipelago,” describing encounters with Ukrainian political prisoners.

However after Ukraine’s independence turned from a distant and unlikely prospect to actuality, Solzhenitsyn adopted a distinct tone, one which Mr. Putin replicated in his essay final 12 months. In a 2006 interview with Moskovskiye Novosti newspaper, Solzhenitsyn argued that southern and japanese Ukraine, the Crimea and Donbas have by no means belonged to historic Ukraine, and that the nation was being dragged into NATO towards the desire of the inhabitants of those areas. “Below all these situations, Russia can certainly not dare to betray the multimillion Russian inhabitants of Ukraine, resign our unity with them,” he mentioned.

Mr. Putin paid a go to to Solzhenitsyn in his nation house in 2007, a 12 months earlier than the novelist’s demise, and gave him one in every of Russia’s highest prizes. A few of the Kremlin’s insurance policies, Mr. Putin mentioned on the time, have been impressed by the author.

In 2014, Mr. Putin seized Crimea after Ukrainian protesters ousted Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, who had reversed the nation’s longstanding coverage towards integration with the European Union and sought a customs union with Russia. Mr. Putin additionally promoted the idea of Novorossiya, “New Russia,” for the areas of southern and japanese Ukraine that he mentioned rightfully belong to Moscow.

The annexation of Crimea was nearly universally applauded in Russia. Even the imprisoned Russian opposition chief Alexei Navalny, who’s now protesting vociferously towards Mr. Putin’s warfare on Ukraine, mentioned on the time that Crimea ought to stay a part of Russia. “Crimea is just not a sausage sandwich to be given again,” he advised a radio interview.

Till the invasion started on Feb. 24, Kremlin statements challenged Ukraine’s proper to control what Mr. Putin described as historic Russian lands in so-called Novorossiya however grudgingly acknowledged the existence of a Ukrainian state. In accordance with Russian propaganda, the issue was a Western-installed clique that supposedly seized energy in 2014, and whose removing could be welcomed by odd Ukrainians craving to renew their brotherly kinship with Russia.

“Now Russian state media and official discourse argue that Ukraine and its tradition have to be merely worn out.”

As soon as the fierce Ukrainian resistance confirmed that hardly any Ukrainians greeted Russian troopers as liberators, the tone shifted. Now Russian state media and official discourse argue that Ukraine and its tradition have to be merely worn out—an concept that explains the killing spree in cities like Bucha through the Russian occupation.

A commentary printed by Russia’s RIA state information company on April 3 below the title “What Russia Should Do to Ukraine” argued that odd Ukrainians have to be made to “atone for the guilt” of hostility to Moscow, the identify Ukraine must be abolished as soon as once more and the nation break up into a number of items. Ukrainian elites must be bodily liquidated and the remaining inhabitants re-educated and “de-Ukrainized.”

Russia’s former president and present deputy nationwide safety chief, Dmitry Medvedev, outlined an analogous imaginative and prescient for the way forward for Ukraine days later, writing that after the Russian victory, the Ukrainian state will disappear similar to the Nazi Third Reich. As for the Ukrainians’ deep sense of their very own separate nationhood, Mr. Medvedev defined, “It’s an ideal pretend fed by anti-Russian venom and an all-encompassing lie about their very own identification. It by no means existed in historical past and doesn’t exist in the present day.”

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com