Could Russian-Ukrainian relations have followed a different scenario?
Review by Serhey Bohdan

ANALYTICS  04 July 2022 - 16:42

Last week Russia and Ukraine exchanged prisoners of war. Ukrainian servicemen of the Azov regiment were also released. They were declared "Nazis" by the Russian side and threatened to be put on trial. But it is unlikely that even the Kremlin's proclaimed goal of "denazification" was taken seriously. Radical Ukrainian nationalism does exist, but despite some negative events associated with it, the situation with the "Bandera people" is very ambiguous. And no one has done more for the rise of this phenomenon than the Kremlin with its policies.

Derussification and de-Sovietization

They wanted to eradicate the Russian language and all ties with Russia from Ukraine, turning it into an "anti-Russia," Russian politicians tell us. But what is the reality? Over the past few months, I have had to deal with hundreds of Ukrainian refugees in Western Europe - of different ages, social backgrounds, and places of residence. Few spoke Ukrainian. Even when asked to speak Ukrainian, people smiled and often went back to Russian. Of course, most fled from eastern Ukraine, but that is what makes up the majority of all of Ukraine. Their political views are probably not pro-Russian, but the relationship between language, cultural and historical sympathies, on the one hand, and political sentiments, on the other, is generally debatable. It is possible to change attitudes quickly, but cultural affiliation, like the language of actual communication, is much more difficult.

Once a society has undergone modernization, i.e. the population has been educated, the industry has been built and a modern culture created, it is very difficult to remake its cultural superstructure. Was it possible to replace English with Irish in Ireland? And in India, did they replace English with its own Hindi? Have African countries introduced local languages instead of English and French? The only exception was Rwanda, which started to force out the French. The French language was replaced not with local but with English - nothing personal, just business.

As long as there are economic ties, it is almost impossible to force out the language of any other country with a more or less diverse culture (which is why the Albanians speak Italian en masse). When economic ties change, that is when the possibility of cultural and linguistic reorientation arises.

The current Russian intervention in Ukraine is tearing Kyiv's economic ties with Moscow and the post-Soviet space, breaking the industry and infrastructure oriented to ties with the Russian Federation and the former Soviet countries. The Russian language will begin to go away. And in many areas hardly in favor of Ukrainian. With globalization, all science, business, media, and culture will be reoriented towards the West or its ersatz versions (like Poland). It is the Rwandan model. Earlier something similar happened to the Baltics, as well as to Georgia (some Georgians can communicate only in Turkish). Ties with Russia in the economy were severed and the Russian language disappeared. Now, in exactly the same way, Ukraine - a huge part of the "Russian world" - is leaving it.

Putin like an anecdotic legendary hero

War, by the way, was not inevitable. The Kremlin had plenty of opportunities to resolve the issue in a simpler, cheaper, and unarmed way, right up to the point of launching an invasion. Had it been done without arrogance, there would have been people to work with in Ukraine. Back in the 2000s, even the former leader of the paramilitary organization UNA-UNSO and the current head of the radical "Brotherhood" Dmitry Korchinsky was at war with George Soros and not with "Russkies". He used to go to the "Muscovites" to speak and "solve problems" - even to the "United Russia". In the last ten years, however, things have been different.

We can say that the current Ukrainian crisis has shown that both the Kremlin and the West have become disconnected from reality and live in parallel worlds. The Russian leadership in principle has no serious expertise in post-Soviet countries (there are very few serious scientific studies on this region in Russia). Ersatz expertise is supplied either by charlatans or outright lobbyists. The collective West has a different problem - it has the expertise, but often listens to multiple echoes of its own voice instead - most of the so-called "independent media" and NGOs in the post-Soviet space were created by Western or quasi-Western structures and depend on them.

Let's talk about the West another time. Now it is about the invasion of a brotherly country by Russia when the problem even on the eve of the war had a political solution. But, apparently, there was no one to explain it and develop an appropriate policy. Even on the eve of the war, the balance of power in Ukrainian society was ambiguous, and it was necessary to find simply sane organized political forces focused on the search for constructive relations with Russia. But who could do this from the Russian side, where the relevant direction was increasingly controlled by madmen eager to tell Ukrainians that they do not exist, and then to redraw identities and borders.

Meanwhile, according to Ukrainian polls conducted in October-November 2018, the impact of Euromaidan-2013 on the mood of Ukrainians can by no means be called unambiguous. Some 23% said they began to identify more strongly with Ukraine, while more than 25% said the identification got weaker. Only 38% expressed intention to join NATO, while 40% were against it. Some 53% were in favor of official status for the Russian language, at least at the regional level. Only 28% were in favor of the so-called "decommunization" of street names, while 63% were against it. Yes, there were phenomena like "Azov" and many others, but they partly existed as a consequence of Russian intervention. But how many percent did Azov's political wing get in the 2019 elections? About two, missing the parliament.

In a country with minimal elections, the pluralism of public sentiment meant that Russia could count on a political solution to issues by working with Ukrainian politicians. The latter would have been helped at least by a cessation of Russian support for the dead-end "Novorossiysk" projects. But it seems that even now the Kremlin has not understood that it is difficult to create a political project and identity from scratch and that it has no resources for "Donbass", "Novorossiya", "DPR", "LPR" etc. Yes, the Kremlin and its court historians have heard (but not understood) that the early Soviet regime built national projects and quasi-states for many ethnic groups. But, first, this was not done voluntarily, but on the basis of a careful study of the real ethnic picture. Secondly, surprisingly enough, Russia had the appropriate intellectual resources at the time. Third, we are talking about the pre-modern era, when it was still possible to reshape society.

The Kremlin's reliance on military force is no less striking. In fact, once upon a time, the Kremlin understood that the world would not end with the first Maidan in 2004 and pro-Western Yushchenko's accession to power in Kyiv. Indeed, Yanukovich, the Kremlin's favorite, won the next election. But during the second Maidan 2013, the Russian leadership decided not to continue the political struggle, but to get into a fight, and then to send people like FSB colonel Strelkov (a lover of historical reconstruction, delirious about the Tsarist times) to Donbass, so that they, together with their ideological twins from volunteer battalions like Azov (who have the same reconstruction only in the spirit of the Third Reich), started a fratricidal war. It is clear why exactly them because normal Ukrainians and Russians would not shoot at each other, but the historical re-enactors would. Another thing is surprising: Putin's decision to embark on dead-end Donbass projects and take away Crimea, removing from Ukrainian politics the regions that were holding back unpleasant trends for Russia. Maybe the Kremlin did this for fear of losing bases for the Black Sea Fleet, which could have been kicked out of Crimea by the new Ukrainian government? Yes, the bases remained, but the navy is hardly capable of doing anything other than defending itself from now on.

Why is there a need for "brainwashing"?

Of course, the current situation would never have developed if it had not been for a number of actions by the Ukrainian side. Actions that were dictated not by the logic of the interests of the country, but by the logic of an ideology that is mainly nationalistic, even when it runs counter to reality and the seemingly common goal of building an independent, viable country.

Ukrainian nationalism is not a unique phenomenon. Nationalisms in Eastern European countries tend to turn to the past, filled with tales of great achievements lost as a result of the degradation of subsequent generations under the influence of all kinds of alien elements. As a consequence, in post-Soviet countries, the problem is proclaimed to be the real people with their "mutilated mentality". The inferiority of mentality is deduced, for example, from "wrong voting" - a striking level of contempt for compatriots, which is difficult to imagine in any Western European country. But it happens all the time in the former Soviet Union. Famous Ukrainian writers like Yury Andrukhovich or Vasil Shklyar in the early 2010s, long before the Maidan and Russian intervention, openly proposed separating the Donbass and Crimea from Ukraine! And all because they were the ones who elected the "pro-Russian" Yanukovich.

I remember speaking at length in the summer of 2014 with a fairly well-known pro-Western Ukrainian political analyst, who commented on the shelling of settlements in the Donetsk region by saying, "There is nothing to feel sorry for them, they knew what they chose when they voted. Had they listened to the nationalists and supporters of the Euro-Atlantic choice, they would have been drinking Bavarian beer."

But should we be surprised that people do not listen to deeply paternalistic suggestions to throw away all their life experiences connected with the USSR or the Russian Federation and simply follow some ideological sermons? And is it even necessary to "re-educate" adults? And is it possible to "re-educate" them?

And that is exactly what the supporters of Ukrainian nationalism decided to do. And no one was ashamed of it. Already after the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine, Oleg Skripka, the famous Ukrainian cultural figure, and leader of the folk-rock band "Vopli Vidoplyasova," said: "If people do not speak Ukrainian, they have every right to seek work elsewhere. People who cannot learn Ukrainian have a low IQ and are diagnosed with mental retardation. It is necessary to separate them because they are socially dangerous, it is necessary to create a ghetto for them."

However, the majority of the post-Soviet intelligentsia and its successors (not only in Ukraine) are convinced that any Soviet legacy should not just be gradually eliminated, but rapidly eradicated. Otherwise, they say, there will be no way forward. Anti-Sovietism and anti-communism are absolute values for them. Anti-Sovietism allows these "nationalists" to build an alliance with "liberals" of similar quality throughout the post-Soviet space, resulting in more and more splits in society. Which, in fact, creates the basis for intervention from external forces - Moscow, the West, and anyone else.

And meanwhile, from the point of view of building a "beautiful Ukraine of the future" there was no need to beat "sovietism" out of the fellow countrymen. After all, the successful state projects were not made by such "brainwashing". Have the Germans and Japanese, who were building their new states after their defeat in WWII, changed much? Judging by how many hard-core Nazis remained in key positions in Germany even in the 1970s, and how marginal were the themes of the Holocaust, there are serious doubts about it. Today's descendants of "those" Germans and Japanese are different, but "those" generations built new countries from the ruins of war. The whole point is to organize the work so that individual views simply could not interfere with achieving the result.

There are plenty of examples of stable "mentalities" or identities that did not interfere with development. Successes in the political and socio-economic development of a nation are not the result of culture. Recall that the same Soviet mentality or identity is a set of cultural and historical ideas, not ideological beliefs. Success depends on creating the conditions for productive work for as many people as possible. In their free time, they can think, listen, and read anything they want.

A cultural majority (as well as a minority) is not equal to a political majority. For all the Soviet nostalgia, where are the active political movements, any more or less visible parties that would fight for the restoration of the USSR? Theoretically, they are possible, but in practice, they are not. That is, looking at the available evidence, we can say that some kind of "Soviet factor" to mobilize the masses in reality simply does not exist. You can think about it as much as you like, and attribute various shortcomings to it, but there is no evidence of its existence, especially over the past 20 years. And all the talk about it is just an attempt by anti-Soviet activists to attribute everything to "Soviet times". Any failures of development, corruption, etc.

But this struggle with everything Soviet often has devastating consequences for society. Aggressive de-Sovietization reactivates many attachments that may have existed only on a sentimental level. Putin's "anti-Soviet" campaigns by liberal and nationalist forces in Ukraine helped him ignite the civil war in eastern Ukraine. Because on his own, with his obvious affiliation with the perestroika liberal current, he could hardly have persuaded the masses nostalgic for the USSR to join the Donbass adventure.

In short, it is unlikely that Putin could have successfully "meddled" in Ukraine if it had not been driven to division. It was brought to it in an active way, not by coincidence. The fact that this partly happened using the rhetoric of "nationalism" and "liberalism" should not mislead us - in fact, the radical nationalist organizations themselves remained marginal forces in Ukraine until very recently, keeping afloat not only through participation in the squabbles of larger political forces and oligarchs but also through the very war that Putin started in 2014. However, one drop of poison infects the whole tun of wine.

Caliber.Az