Russia’s Long Disdain for Ukrainian Nationhood
By Yaroslav Trofimov, April 28, 2022, WSJ
As a young poet in the Soviet Union, Joseph Brodsky was
persecuted by the authorities before escaping to the U.S. in
1972 and going on to win the Nobel Prize in literature. In
Soviet-era Kyiv, Ukrainian intellectuals used to trade coveted
samizdat reprints of Brodsky’s poems, reciting them at
clandestine gatherings.
But the affection wasn’t mutual. At a reading in 1992,
less than a year into Ukraine’s existence as an independent
nation, Brodsky offered a new poem titled “To the Independence
of Ukraine.” “Farewell khokhols,” he intoned, using a racial
slur for Ukrainians. “We’ve lived together, now enough. Wish
I could spit into the Dnipro river, perhaps it would now flow
backwards.” Brodsky went on to predict that when the ungrateful
Ukrainians were wheezing on their deathbeds, they would surely
revert to reciting the verse of the classic Russian poet
Aleksandr Pushkin, rather than the “lies” of their own
national poet, Taras Shevchenko.
The idea that Ukrainians aren’t a real people and that
Ukrainian nationhood is an artificial construct has long been
mainstream in Russian culture, literature and politics—including
among liberal luminaries like Brodsky, who died in 1996. Putin’s
views on Ukraine, which he expounded in an essay last year that
was read to Russian soldiers preparing for the invasion, are no
outlier. They follow a lengthy tradition that helps to explain
the continuing support for the war among Russia’s citizens.
This blind spot dates to the beginnings of the modern Ukrainian
quest for sovereignty more than a century ago. “The Russian
democrat ends where the Ukrainian question begins,” said
Ukrainian writer and playwright Volodymyr Vynnychenko, who
served as prime minister of the short-lived Ukrainian National
Republic in 1917-18. It has become one of the best-known phrases
in Ukrainian politics.
In Russia’s historical narrative and literary tradition,
Ukrainians have often been depicted as dimwitted but good-natured
peasants who speak with a funny accent, and whose quest for an
independent future can only be the product of foreign intrigues.
Mikhail Bulgakov, born in Kyiv to parents who had moved from
Russia, mocked the Ukrainian language in his novels, with one
character arguing that Ukrainians can’t have a word for whale
because, unlike Russia, Ukraine doesn’t have oceans. Natives of
Ukraine who achieved undisputed artistic or scientific success,
from the painter Kazimir Malevich to the father of the Soviet
space program, Sergei Korolyov, have been appropriated as Russian.
“Many of those in Russia who pretend to be an intellectual
elite have a condescending attitude to Ukrainians, and this
includes many of those in the opposition who are supporting
Ukraine now,” said Russian politician Ilya Ponomarev, the only
Russian lawmaker to vote against the annexation of Ukraine’s
Crimea peninsula in 2014. “They look at the Ukrainians as a
little brother, a brother who still needs to grow up.”
Every Russian, Ponomarev added, instinctively feels the
heritage of the ancient Russian state when dismissing Ukraine
as a recent invention. It’s a view that Mr. Ponomarev himself
says he had to reassess after emigrating to Ukraine, where he
learned that historical figures viewed by Russians as the
founders of their nation were in fact ruling from Kyiv
centuries before Moscow came into existence. One example is
Prince Vladimir the Great, the 10th-century ruler who brought
Christianity to the realm then known as the Kyivan Rus. Both
Putin and Ukrainian President Zelensky are named after him.
The tradition of Russian hostility to Ukrainian aspirations
comes in two strands. One simply denies the existence of
Ukrainians as a people distinct from Russians. That was the
line adopted by the Russian Empire for much of the 19th c,
when it banned books in Ukrainian and the very term Ukraine,
calling the region “Little Russia” instead. Another strand
holds that while Ukrainians do in fact have their own identity
and speak their own language, at least half the territory of
present-day Ukraine really belongs to Russia and was unfairly
pried away by the Soviet Union’s founder Vladimir Lenin.
That was the view of the Russian novelist & former political
prisoner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, another Nobel laureate, who
was exiled by the Soviets in 1974 and returned to Russia in
1994. He initially expressed understanding of Ukrainian suffering.
“We should prove the greatness of our nation not by the sheer
size of our territory and the number of peoples in our care,
but by the greatness of our actions,” he wrote in his 1968
classic, “The Gulag Archipelago,” describing encounters with
Ukrainian political prisoners.
But after Ukraine’s independence turned from a distant and
unlikely prospect to reality, Solzhenitsyn adopted a different
tone, one that Putin replicated in his essay last year. In a
2006 interview with Moskovskiye Novosti newspaper, Solzhenitsyn
argued that southern and eastern Ukraine, the Crimea and Donbas
have never belonged to historical Ukraine, and that the country
was being dragged into NATO against the will of the inhabitants
of these areas. “Under all these conditions, Russia can under
no circumstances dare to betray the multimillion Russian
population of Ukraine, renounce our unity with them,” he said.
Putin paid a visit to Solzhenitsyn in his country home in 2007,
a year before the novelist’s death, and gave him one of Russia’s
highest prizes. Some of the Kremlin’s policies, Putin said at
the time, were inspired by the writer.
In 2014, Putin seized Crimea after Ukrainian protesters ousted
Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Yanukovych, who had reversed
the country’s longstanding policy toward integration with the
European Union and sought a customs union with Russia. Putin
also promoted the concept of Novorossiya, “New Russia,” for
the regions of southern and eastern Ukraine that he said
rightfully belong to Moscow.
The annexation of Crimea was almost universally applauded
in Russia. Even the imprisoned Russian opposition leader
Alexei Navalny, who is now protesting vociferously against
Putin’s war on Ukraine, said at the time that Crimea should
remain part of Russia. “Crimea is not a sausage sandwich to
be given back,” he told a radio interview.
Until the invasion began on Feb. 24, Kremlin statements
challenged Ukraine’s right to govern what Putin described as
historic Russian lands in so-called Novorossiya but grudgingly
acknowledged the existence of a Ukrainian state. According to
Russian propaganda, the problem was a Western-installed clique
that supposedly seized power in 2014, and whose removal would
be welcomed by ordinary Ukrainians yearning to resume their
brotherly kinship with Russia.
Once the fierce Ukrainian resistance showed that hardly any
Ukrainians greeted Russian soldiers as liberators, the tone
shifted. Now Russian state media and official discourse argue
that Ukraine and its culture must be simply wiped out—an idea
that explains the killing spree in towns like Bucha during the
Russian occupation.
A commentary published by Russia’s RIA state news agency on
April 3 under the title “What Russia Must Do to Ukraine” argued
that ordinary Ukrainians must be made to “atone for the guilt”
of hostility to Moscow, the name Ukraine should be abolished
once again and the country split into several pieces. Ukrainian
elites should be physically liquidated and the remaining population re-educated and “de-Ukrainized.”
Russia’s former president and current deputy national security
chief, Dmitry Medvedev, outlined a similar vision for the future
of Ukraine days later, writing that after the Russian victory,
the Ukrainian state will disappear just like the Nazi Third Reich.
As for the Ukrainians’ deep sense of their own separate nationhood,
Medvedev explained, “It’s a great fake fed by anti-Russian venom
and an all-encompassing lie about their own identity. It never
existed in history and doesn’t exist today.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-long-disdain-for-ukrainian-nationhood-11651165024
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