Ukrainians’ Embittered Reaction to the Russian Opposition, Explained
It is not always obvious to casual observers why many Ukrainians don’t want to talk with the Russians who are in opposition to Putin and claim to support Ukraine or see them receiving publicity in the Western media and appearing at cultural events alongside Ukrainians.
There are two root causes for this.
On the one hand, there is emotional, irrational reaction. After all, Ukraine is being attacked by the Russian army, and the Russian army swore to serve the Russian people. Thus, the military represents the people. Moreover, the army executes orders of Putin who, being the ruler of Russia, represents the will of the Russian people.
Even if some say they never voted for him or authorized him to represent them in any way, he assumed this title, and they have to deal with it. In short, one should not be surprised that many perceive the entire Russian people as the aggressor, even if in reality some Russians don’t support the war.
But, on the other hand, there is also rational critique applicable to many a Russian dissident, especially to those most famous. And this critique can be boiled down to three major points.
1. Russocentric view of “common history”
Kyivan Rus’ as the “ancient Russian state”, Kyiv as the “mother of Russian cities”, and the Russian Empire and the USSR as “one big common motherland” of Russians and Ukrainians (as well as other nations) are clichés hardwired in the Soviet and post-Soviet psyche that are difficult to eradicate and that are uncritically, and often unconsciously, communicated by most Russians regardless of their declared political views.
The thing with Kyivan Rus’ partly has linguistic roots since in Russian, the same word (русский/russkiy) is used for Ruthenian, that is related to ancient Rus’ (Ruthenia in Latin) as well as for Russian as in the Russian language or the Russian people, while the word российский/rossiyskiy refers to Russia as a country with its many ethnicities.
It is different in Ukrainian and, for example, in Polish, where руський/ruskyi/ruski means Ruthenian and was also used as a synonym for Ukrainian as recently as the early 20th century, while російський/rosiyskyi/rosyjski is used for both the Russian language and the Russian people. Originally, Russia was known as Muscovy/Moscovia and its people as the Muscovites, and only later did it start promulgating its imperialistic narratives and dictating them to other peoples.
That is one of the reasons why I believe it would be advantageous for both the Russian opposition and everyone else, as part of deimperialization, to consider reverting to the use of Muscovy/Moscovia instead of “Russia” and Muscovite instead of “Russian”.
From the Ukrainian perspective, there was no shift of the Ruthenian “center of power” from Kyiv to Moscow. After Kyivan Rus’ had ceased to exist, a new proto-state formed on its northeastern outskirts, around the young city of Moscow. It would later transform into Russia and its people form the basis for the Russian nation.
Meanwhile, the historical processes that were happening outside of this initial sphere of Moscow’s direct influence for the next few centuries — the rise and fall of the Kingdom of Galicia-Volhynia, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth — made even more apparent the cultural and linguistic differences that already existed before — after all, there was a reason why there were many different tribes with different names in Kyivan Rus’.
And when Muscovy captured the lands that are today known as Ukraine and Belarus, it was by no means the “reunification of the Russian state”, but colonization pure and simple. In the same way, although de jure Ukraine was one of the republics of the Soviet Union with the right to secede, de facto it remained a colony and was treated by Moscow as such.
This Russocentric view also leads to generalizations like ignoring the fact that some Ukrainian lands were not part of the Russian Empire — and of the USSR before 1939 — and thus have much less of “common history” with the Russians.
In this respect, most Russian dissidents also fail to understand why the Ukrainians reject the Soviet “Great Patriotic War” narrative. For many Ukrainians, the war started not in 1941, when the Third Reich attacked the USSR, but in 1939, when the Soviet troops invaded their lands as part of Stalin’s pact with Hitler. Consequently, the dynamics of WWII were much more complex for Ukraine than for Russia.
Finally, the view of Russian as the “common language” is also a result of the Russocentric view. Even if most Ukrainians can understand Russian, it does not mean all of them can speak it, and not all those who can speak it will want to speak it today.
Thus, if some Russians want to communicate with Ukrainians, they should detach from the Russocentric perspective. And especially if they fled from Putinism to the West, it’s about time to stop clinging to the narratives entrenched in their homeland. Lastly, they should be prepared to hold a dialogue in a neutral language like English. For some, it may be better to remain silent for a while and focus on self-education.
2. Imperialist mindset
As an extension of the previous point, many Russians fail to realize how their attitude to both other nations of the former USSR and various minorities living in the Russian Federation is influenced by imperialist thinking.
Russian conquest of territories in the Caucasus, Siberia or Central Asia is presented in school and books as an act of heroism, as a great feat of Russian rulers and warlords. At the same time, they tell the minorities how wonderful it is to live in the multinational Mother Russia, failing to mention that they were turned into minorities even in their “autonomous” republics as a result of Russian genocidal policies. (See some statistics here.)
The Russian opposition talks about changing the regime, often leaving out the need to deimperialize. They simply can’t imagine their dear Great Russia being not so great anymore. If they have political ambitions, they dream of inheriting all the power Putin now has — maybe giving up Crimea and other Ukrainian territories and then reluctantly, grudgingly, Transnistria, South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
But revisiting the whole imperialist policy of the centuries? Questioning Russia’s possession of Königsberg, Karelia, Petsamo, the Kuril Islands, Chechnya, Ingushetia, Tatarstan, Dagestan, North Ossetia, and many other lands? Moreover, questioning the superpower status itself? This requires thorough mindset rehash, but this is highly desirable under present conditions.
3. Attempts to separate culture from politics
A good example of this is Mikhail Shishkin’s essay “Don’t Blame Dostoyevsky” for The Atlantic where he argues that Russian culture has nothing to do with the war and on the contrary, is its casualty, and that “the road to the Bucha massacre leads not through Russian literature, but through its suppression”.
But let’s not forget that culture, by definition, encompasses all products of human activity — intellectual and otherwise. “Russian culture” as a whole cannot be separated from the general course of Russian history. Of course, there is “lower” culture of folk masses, and “higher” culture of intellectual elites, and there were dissident authors whose works were banned by various regimes. But general cultural trends reflect social customs, values and sentiments, and works of intellectual elites more often than not resonate with attitudes of political elites. And most importantly, culture is often used by regimes as an internal and external propaganda tool.
When Ukrainians demolish monuments to Alexander Pushkin, it’s not so much about his personality or his literary works as about him being used as an imperialist symbol. With few exceptions (I can think of six pre-1917 monuments and two post-1991 ones), most of those monuments were erected during the Soviet era, more as a way to mark the territory than anything else. There were dozens of them — only a few Ukrainian authors were similarly honored — even if he barely had anything to do with Ukraine.
On the other hand, there are cases like Mikhail Bulgakov — there are currently debates around his museum in Kyiv — whose works occasionally demonstrate anti-Ukrainian sentiments, or Joseph Brodsky, one of the most undeserving Nobel Prize in Literature winners, who wrote an overtly xenophobic poem after Ukraine had regained its independence in 1991, worthy of a brainwashed useful idiot rather than someone considered a great poet. Both Bulgakov and Brodsky are mentioned in Shishkin’s essay as “victims” of culture suppression.
As for Dostoyevsky, being the most famous Russian author in the West, he also became a symbol — and that is obviously why Shishkin has chosen him for the title of his essay. Even if the Soviets preferred Pushkin, and despite his politically-motivated clash with the regime of his time, Dostoyevsky’s writing is soaked in the Russian spirit in its worst, that is imperialist, manifestation. Recognizing the value and influence of his oeuvre, it is also important to realize this “darker” side.
No less important is to realize that everyone in the West knows Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, or Maxim Gorky not because of the sheer value of their works — although some of them were indeed great — but thanks to their motherland’s cultural expansion that transcended the empire’s physical borders. All things Russian were — and still are — in vogue, while the cultures and histories of the colonized nations remained overlooked, ignored, oppressed, sidelined.
Perhaps, it’s time to change the situation?
I can’t recommend my favorite Ukrainian authors to people from other countries simply because they were never translated into English or sometimes into any language at all, even if I believe some of their works are on a par with global classics. And even many translations have been forgotten, never reprinted, and are hard to find.
Why is that? Because the empire never promoted them, and the world never cared to pay attention, craving for all things Russian and not the culture of the empire’s colonies. And when there was a vogue for Soviet dissidents and refugees from Bolshevism, everyone wanted to read Russian dissidents and Russian refugees.
Conclusion
What could be the best approach in this situation for the Western media and event organizers?
I’m sure there are Russians who realize the problems described above and who are more open-minded and ready for self-analysis, self-reflection, and reviewing their deeply ingrained beliefs.
But the critique set forth in this article is definitely applicable to those who get the most attention, be it Alexei Navalny, Garry Kasparov, Mikhail Shishkin, or Boris Akunin. And there’s a serious problem of giving the microphone to those who already scream the loudest.
I also mentioned in a previous article that the Russian opposition lacks truly profound, active inner dialogue where they could discuss and clarify various issues and reflect on why they are unwanted by the Ukrainians. How about allowing them time for such a dialogue instead of listening to their premature opinions that don’t really contribute anything new or valuable?
Besides, the world needs at least several years to get a wider context of Ukrainian culture and history, if only because, again, a lot still remains untranslated and unknown. Sorry, but Wikipedia and news articles are far from enough. Before expecting a truly productive dialogue between Ukrainians and Russians, it makes sense to first focus attention on leveling the field.