Article and Interview Spotlights on Ukraine (Sept 2023)
Here are a few articles and a video interview over which I found myself lingering and returning to this week. I’ve highlighted a few key passages from each in the hope that you will be drawn in and motivated to read the entire essay or watch and listen to the video interview in its entirety. A common thread in the essays and the interview is the need to interrogate discourses and narratives about Russian Imperialism in order to better understand the present realities in both Russia and Ukraine—and especially with a view to Russia’s imperial/colonial attitude toward Ukrainians.
“The Ghost of Lawlessness” by Volodymyr Yermolenko (Ukrainian philosopher, Future of Ukraine Fellow). Yermolenko begins by highlighting that when the Russian military occupied Ukrainian southern territories in February-March 2022, one of the first things they did was to fly red Soviet flags over each city’s central buildings. As Yermolenko explains, it is important to note that “the first symbols the Russians turned to embody their occupation were not Russian but Soviet. As if they were trying to refer not to the actual reality of the Russian imperial state but to the ephemeral reality of the non-existent country, the Soviet Union. This fact has at least three important dimensions. The first one relates to time; the second one to law, and the third one to Europe.”
With respect to time, the red flags symbolize a Soviet past that does not exist in Ukraine (except perhaps for small pockets of elderly citizens). With no vision of the future, the Russian regime can only turn to “political simulacrum,” denying what happened in actual Soviet history under Stalin in order to present a fantasy. As Yermolenko explains,
The Russian invasion of Ukraine shows signs that in the current Russian imagination, the past has replaced the future. Hopes, expectations or fears that we have about the future have been replaced by past hopes, expectations or fears. The future was replaced by this surreal future-in-the-past, where all our emotions having the relation with the future and its unpredictability, are replaced with emotions from the days long gone.
The Russian political imagination creates a human being whose key hope is that no real future comes, that it will only be a repetition of the past – a senseless and absurd repetition, replacing reality with a surreal image. For example, that of a red flag.
“Going Native: Russian Studies in the West” by Tomasz Kamusella. Kamusella’s essay challenges us to re-think and critically interrogate the narratives we have been taught about “great Russian culture and literature”—narratives that have been inflected in a Russian neo-imperial key. For example, he writes:
The classical canon of Russian belles lettres is popularly lauded for its supposedly universal reflection on the human condition. Yet, this canon’s scope and the literature’s selection of characters are extremely narrow, and even bigoted. Despite the fact that tsarist Russia was an extremely polyethnic and multi-confessional empire, classical Russian literature focuses exclusively on the Russophone and Orthodox subset of the Russian nobility. This class translated to a mere quarter of all the empire’s nobles, or just half a million people in purely numerical terms. From a statistical point of view, the social milieu of Russian literature covered 0.3 percent of the empire’s population, which counted 166 million in 1914.
During the Soviet period, the situation did not improve markedly. Communist propagandists retained most classical Russian literature in the form of a high-quality benchmark for Soviet writers, while compulsory elementary school acted to propagate this canon throughout the Soviet empire. In line with the official policy of socialist realism in the arts and humanities, Soviet literature’s subject was to be peasants “in an unbreakable class union” with workers from across the Soviet Union. Somehow, the peasants and workers in question turned out to be almost exclusively ethnic Russians (Русские Russkie), who sang the praises of the Bolshevik revolution and the leading role of the country’s communist party. If an ethnic non-Russian had a colonial-like walk-on in a novel or poem, he almost certainly spoke in Russian.
By 1938, imperial Russia had been supposedly exorcised of its tsarist sins of imperialism and “Great Russian chauvinism.” Then socialist Russian was imposed on all the Soviet population as the universal language of interethnic communication for the entire world’s coming communist future. Subsequently, all Soviet citizens were required to speak and write in Russian. Furthermore, those of ethnically non-Russian extraction were to be firmly led toward this monolingual communism by their respective ethnic groups’ writers. These ethnically non-Russian Soviet authors had to abandon their native languages in favour of the communist language of Russian for composing their literary works. Should they unwisely choose to produce a novel or poetry in their native language, the censors would not allow it to be published before its Russian translation came off the press first.
“Europe After the Death of Peace” by Vasyl Cherepanyn. As Cherepanyn explains, in light of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, Europe needs to revisit and revise some of its defining narratives, which include its discourse on genocide, decolonization, and anti-fascism. Here’s an except:
Europe faces a crisis, the outcomes of which will define the rest of the 21st century. Now is therefore exactly the right time for Europe to revisit and revise its own basic narratives, stories that Europeans have been telling for decades, deceiving both themselves and others. This historical moment has been famously dubbed a Zeitenwende (epochal shift), but a more precise term, picked up from Europe’s cultural history, would be what Aristotle called peripeteia, a peripety – a dramatic reversal of circumstances, a drastic change from one state of things to its opposite. Russia’s war against Ukraine and the West is indeed characterized by an Oedipal logic, and the task of Europe in these times of emergency is primarily to unlearn to unsee, in order to learn to see – to subject the narratives central to its history to profound revision and change, since they are decisive for Europe’s future.
The first is the discourse on genocide. This fundamental principle of post-Nazi Europe, whose political integration was based on the idea of a common responsibility for the Holocaust, was brutally challenged by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Apart from the filtration camps, mass deportations, kidnappings and omnipresent torture chambers, around 1600 cultural sites have been damaged or destroyed in Ukraine by the Russian military since 24 February 2022. Russia is deliberately targeting the country’s cultural infrastructure as part of its attacks on civilian facilities.
“Ukraine is Facing a Genocide” by Jason Stanley (American philosopher, Yale University). This is a Youtube video interview with Jason Stanley who recently traveled to Ukraine to lecture about fascism, colonialism, and imperialism at the Kyiv School of Economics. Stanley talks about his experience, Ukrainian history, democracy, and identity, as well as Russian imperialism, fascism, and its genocidal violence against Ukraine.