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.
