Why Vladimir Putin has already lost this war (Yuval Noah Harari)

 Why Vladimir Putin has already lost this war

Russians and Ukrainians (The Economist)

 

Andrei Zorin, a professor of Russian at the University of Oxford, explains how national mythologies foment conflict

Russians see Ukrainians as brothers. But families sometimes break apart

Feb 22nd 2022 (The Economist)

Political leaders tend to believe that they take their own decisions. In fact, they are often dragged into action by the course of events, and enslaved by popular mythology that they themselves have promoted. With conflict looming between Russia and Ukraine, it is therefore important to understand the history of the two countries’ relationship. Fundamental differences exist between their historical mythologies, and between how they view themselves and each other.

In a televised address to the Russian nation on February 21st President Vladimir Putin all but declared war on the Ukrainian government in Kyiv. To the bewilderment of many observers, Mr Putin has recently become an amateur historian and started writing essays about Russia’s past. His address drew on the most important of those, published last summer, in which he insisted that Russians and Ukrainians are of the same Slavic nation. This revived thinking from before the revolution of 1917 which applied the term “Russian” indiscriminately to Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians. It defined them respectively as Velikorosy, Malorosy and Belorusy (Great, Little and White Russians). The Soviet regime got rid of those titles, but retained and enhanced the traditional notion of “brotherly” relations between the countries, with Russians playing the role of elder brothers.

Today, when Russia and Ukraine are on the brink of a major war, that idea of kinship may seem preposterous. Yet few conflicts are as deep and irreconcilable as family feuds. The omens are especially bad when one of the “brothers” believes in his natural right to be in charge of the whole family and the other is independent-minded and rebellious. Remember the Bible, where human history begins with a fratricide.

The family tensions between Russia and Ukraine are aggravated by a dispute over their heritage. Russia’s understanding of history idealises Kyiv as “the mother of all Russian cities”, and the source of Russia’s religion, culture, alphabet and a network of dynastic and military connections. The huge statue of the Kievan prince Vladimir, who baptised Old Rus, was erected in 2016 near the entrance to the Kremlin. If this claim on Kyiv’s past were to be renounced, not only would Russian history be shorter by at least a quarter of a millennium, but Russia would also, more importantly, be deprived of its European identity.

Russia’s historical narrative is to a large extent defined by miraculous transformations that turn even the most humiliating defeats into apocalyptic triumphs. The traditional stories of major Russian wars–be it against the Poles in the 17th century, the Swedes in the 18th, the French in the 19th or the Germans in the 20th–all follow the same pattern. After initial defeats that put the country on the brink of utter ruin, a strong leader mobilises the nation and imposes a devastating defeat on the enemy.

Mr Putin appears to be exploiting this tradition. Over the past 20 years his propaganda has attempted to convince Russians that the collapse of the Soviet Union was not their country’s liberation from communist dictatorship but “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. And that this was caused by dastardly Western intrigue. The implication is that this “catastrophe” should once again be turned into a glorious victory. That process supposedly started in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea. The reunification of the broken Slavic body, by bringing Belarus and Ukraine back under the protection of Great Russia, as the Kremlin imagines it, would crown Mr Putin’s triumph.

The Ukrainian identity could hardly be more different. It has been built in contradistinction to that of “Moscals”, as Ukrainians once called their northern neighbours. Whereas Russia’s historical narrative is built on the notion of a powerful autocrat, Ukrainian political imagination is shaped by the legacy of the Zaporozhskaya Sich. This Cossack military democracy navigated between three major powers–Russia, Poland and Turkey–for over 200 years and managed to sustain its own independence until the alliance with Moscow signed in 1654 by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnitsky, the elected leader of the Sich, gradually sucked Ukraine into Russia’s orbit.

For more than three centuries Ukrainians made spectacular careers in Muscovy, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, holding positions of ministers, church metropolitans, governors, generals and cult figures. Even today many leading Russian officials were born in Ukraine and carry distinctly Ukrainian surnames. The price of such successes was the suppression of the original Ukrainian national, cultural and linguistic specificity regarded in Russia as a sort of stubborn and eccentric superstition.

But nostalgia for that past independence was never fully extinguished. The ideal of the Zaporozhskaya Sich lingered on. It was present even in the hearts of communist apparatchiks, such as Leonid Kravchuk, the last leader of Soviet Ukraine and the man who took it into independence in 1991.

Russia’s leaders have never come to terms with the idea of Ukraine as a separate nation. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, they saw its drift towards the West as a betrayal of Russian-Ukrainian familial ties. And yet, however permanent such sentiments may seem, they have changed in the past.

Consider how Russian state and church propaganda accused the Poles of betraying the brotherhood of Slavic Orthodox nations following Polish uprisings in the 19th century. Russia accused the Poles of being seduced first by the Vatican and then by revolutionary France. At the same time, for liberal Russians critical of the authorities, Poland was the embodiment of the European world and thus a subject of adoration.

Today Poland is predominantly perceived in Russia as just another foreign country. Ukraine has replaced Poland in Russia’s consciousness and similarly divided Russian society. As with Poland in the 19th century, the jealous animosity that many Russians experience today towards their unfaithful “brothers” in Kyiv can be seen as the inchoate recognition of the Ukrainians as a separate nation.

History has unlimited resources to teach its lessons even to the most stubborn students. I am all but sure that the majority of Russians, and their leaders, will eventually learn to accept Ukrainian independence. Alas, that prediction will be of little comfort to those who have to bear the cost of their obstinacy today. ■

Andrei Zorin is a professor of Russian at the University of Oxford.