Putin’s Vision of Russian National Identity is the Problem

 The Yale-based historian Timothy Snyder has called people’s attention to a document prepared by the Russian ministry of information prepared before the invasion. Apparently, it was to be read over the airwaves as the invasion of Ukraine proceeded apace as Ukrainians saw Russian soldiers, recognized their brothers and joined the march on Kyiv to celebrate the deposing of the Jewish President Zelenskyy in an anti-Nazi reverie. According to Snyder similar documents were prepared, but were quickly trashed as it became clear that the happy ending they imagined was delayed but this one is survived. I don’t feel comfortable enough reading Russian to go through in detail, but according to Snyder it is a dark document envisioning that following the Ukraine’s speedy capitulation would lead complete destruction of distinct Ukrainian and Belarusian identities the emergence of single Slavic state triumphing over the decadent west. 

This is scary stuff: an unapologetic celebration of genocide in the terms laid out by Rafael Lemkin, who first defined the term. Many already have died in the Putin’s effort to create that reality, and Ukraine’s cultural heritage has also been hit. One of the early casualties of the war was a museum of the work of a Ukrainian folk artist, Maria Prymachenko, where 25 of her paintings were destroyed. There are also legitimate concerns that Russians will seek to destroy the State archives where records relating to Soviet rule in Ukraine, including the Holodomor, are found, and that is just the start of the horrors we can imagine. Still without suggesting all is going to be okay, it is important to remember that the underlying idea of Putin’s plans are completely unrealistic. Yes, it is possible to imagine that under other circumstances a single Russian national identity that truly united Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians might have been forged, just as we should not assume that Belarusian and Ukrainian identities, as we know them, were inevitable. At this point rendering over 150 years of thought, cultural, and political activities moot as a result of Brutal actions in the twentieth-first centuries is absurd, This would have been true even if the cakewalk Putin imagined the Ukraine campaign would be had come to pass. 

The ostensible unity Putin sells this war on is grounded in a dream grounded in essentialist thinking about identity that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny in even the most culturally homogenous cultures. The history of Russian imperial culture, however, is closely related to the multiplicity of cultures encountered in the Russian state-building project. As Putin himself acknowledged just recently in a speech, in which he claimed to be a number of different nationalities, save conspicuously Ukrainian. Yet, the notion that Ukraine and Ukrainians all be absorbed in ways these other peoples have not been is a pipe-dream. At best, a client Ukrainian state will emerge, not direct rule from Moscow, and ordinary Ukrainians willingness to challenge Russian occupation in towns hardly bodes well for anyone thinking being appointed client president of Ukraine will be anything more than a gigantic headache.

To be sure, Putin’s essentialism is pretty common in the post-Soviet world, especially on those who grew up in the Soviet Union. Indeed, the intensity of the language issue in Ukraine, which Putin draws on to make claims about the discrimination faced by Russian speakers in Ukraine, derives largely from a belief than all Ukrainians must be Ukrainians in the exact same way, by speaking Ukrainian, loving Ukrainian literature etc. rather than participating in Ukraine’s political life from their personal perspectives. Admittedly. the way the Ukrainian language was at best siloed and and at worse actively discouraged in the Soviet Union makes language a touchy subject. Everyone wants to encourage Ukrainian, but language laws that emphasize Ukrainian as sole legal language as a way to get people to adopt Ukrainian is a mild version of Putin’s misunderstanding of modern political identities. Fortunately, the various versions of the language laws that have been in place since 1992 have been honored in the breech in ways that have rarely caused real harm. Pragmatism on the ground has invariably prevailed. Furthermore to a certain extent the laws have been made conceptually tolerable because even Russian-speakers in Ukraine share the same essentialism and agree that Ukrainian should be the language of state.

The real sadness is that Ukrainian pragmatism has been threatened by Putin’s Russian nationalist idealism. As Roman Szporluk pointed out over 30 years ago, despite the Azeri-Armenian conflict, and the crazed Georgian nationalism of Zviad Gamsakhurdia that had yet to come to pass, the most dangerous nationalism emerging as the Soviet Union collapsed was Russian nationalism. Linked to Russian dominance in the Soviet Union, the boundaries of Russian identity were far less defined than those of the various smaller nationalities. Russians Empire and their special position in the Soviet Union they had to decide what model of nation could opt to accept their new position as Russians in a Russian state, in which case the Commonwealth of Independent States might well have blossomed into a large community of independent but friendly nations. More ominously they could become exercised about their ostensibly lost empire and build a politics around protecting the rights of Russians in other territories. Many Russians may well have preferred the first alternative, but for reasons that may have little to do with concern for Russians abroad or the loss of Empire they chose Putin, and once having chosen Putin, he made the choice for them. As this war drags on becoming a disaster that Putin may not be able to live down, Russians will get a do-over. If indeed anger at Putin brings about the end of his rule, perhaps this time, Russians will be more comfortable with the possibilities opened up by taking a more narrow view of Russian identity.

The Donbas Republics Were Always Going to Go to the Loser

 The situation in Donbas is fluid. No one knows what Putin will decide to do. Reports are that military is still gathering on the borders, and the joint maneuvers with Belarus have been extended. That said, there is reason to think that US alarmist rhetoric boxed Putin in. If he doesn’t move farther into Ukraine, we will have to wonder if he ever really planned to move on Ukraine in the first place, but hoped to shake down Ukraine and the west to the point where he could force Ukraine to implement the Minsk 2 agreement according to Russian wishes, permanently crippling Ukraine. By raising the warnings of an invasion to fever pitch the US forced Putin to acknowledge that he can’t credibly do more than threaten an invasion of Ukraine, and recognizing the Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic was a way to save face, something that according to the exceedingly well connected and judicious Russia expert Mark Galeotti many in the Russian political class had been urging.

    We will know in the coming days and weeks if this truly was an off ramp for Putin. It would ring true with the Putin analysts like Galeotti are accustomed to, one who is pragmatic and a rational actor if viewed on his own terms. Seen in that light, both the staged meeting of his security council and the looney speech he gave later justifying his actions are best understood as the grudging and angry recognition that the US and just as importantly Ukraine’s Zelenskiy had out-foxed him. The fact that Ze, a former comedian, has managed to hold Ukraine together must be especially irksome to a man like Putin, who thinks of statesmen as anointed great men.

    To add insult to injury Putin now finds himself in charge of cleaning up the mess he made in Donbas eight years ago. He didn’t want that. Forcing Ukraine to keep Donbas was a way to weaken Ukraine, and that was why Putin hoped to get the west to go along with his plans to force Ukraine to accept Minsk 2 on his terms, formally creating a pocket veto on Ukraine’s efforts to move towards the west. But even without Minsk being implemented the Donbas was a drain on Ukraine. The limited but moderate intensity warfare with no resolution cost money and lives. Ukraine was also paying the pensions of people who were not living in territory controlled by Ukraine, an expense that was necessary for Ukrainian dignity, but of little good for its economy. Even implementing the Minsk agreement according to Ukrainian terms would have been costly and time consuming. Rebuilding the state and institutions systematically destroyed by the combination of Russian military operatives and organized crime gangs that ran the city would have been difficult, and the investment necessary to revive the Donbas’s mining-based economy in Donbas cost effective would have been huge. Modernization would not lead to employment for most miners — just look at the situation in West Virginia, Southeastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania and Eastern Kentucky. In times other businesses would develop, but with huge social costs. 

    Ever since the insurgencies of Spring 2014 the dirty secret of the conflict has been that whoever ends up with Donbas will be the loser of the war. Today, Putin took that honor and was forced to pretend that this was a good thing. Putin will now have to fix it; although whether he can do that is another question. Of course, Putin can break more. He can use the claims of the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics to the whole administrative regions to justify pushing Ukrainian forces out there. He can move to create the so-called land bridge to Crimea that has been talked about since 2014, but that should not be confused with victory. That will be a drain on the Russian economy and cost lives that many Russians will resent, Ukrainians won’t like it much either but they will be fighting for their country and that will make a big difference.