There is no way to know Russian President Vladimir Putin’s mind. But the bombing of a maternity hospital in the city of Mariupol, be it a strategic blunder or hyperbolized media narrative, has outraged almost every well-meaning individual. But, of course, here, one must not lose sight of old Greek wisdom that “in every war, the first casualty is the truth.”
The media worldwide is presenting this war (call it aggression or special military operation) in all sorts of manners, from pure pedestrian stuff to the profound geopolitical narrative. However, the extended duration and the kind of resistance being faced by Russians (if true) prompts me to add another dimension, “War of Memories”, about disputed heritage and contested victimhood.
If one carefully observes Putin’s politics since his first appointment as the Russian president, one senses a strong current of memory politics, a deep sense of loss of empire, and his motherland’s global power status. I wonder, Putin having grown up in the seventies, no longer appreciates the Bolshevik ideals. He idolizes more leaders like Brezhnev, whose state objectives were no longer Leninist “Increasing fusion of nationality into a New Soviet Man” but of Czarist Russia with consolidation and centralization of the Soviet State power burying once and for all the issue of autonomy of minorities.
Consequently, Putin considers the Bolsheviks’ treatment of Ukraine as separate from Russian and their generous bartering of Russian land to appease non-Russian (mainly Ukrainian) minorities as a historical blunder.
In today’s realpolitik, what needs to be seriously debated is this denial of Ukraine and separate Ukrainian identity irrespective of how closely the two have been interwoven through centuries.
For some, this is the manifest version of Neo-Con foreign policy of democratization and force-fitting nations into the New Economic Order. When the peaceful Euromaidan demonstrations refused to subside, government used high handed and cruel police tactics. Then suddenly, a large posse of well-built and well-armed dressed in black fascist groups descended and turned an event into a violent clash with armed police, and the state machinery collapsed. Readers may recall a similar sequence of events in the agitations in Kazakhstan, which was reigned in promptly, and an alleged regime change exercise failed.
The point here is the denazification objective of President Putin is not a figment of imagination, but a few other statements are. And that is adding a dimension of a Memory War, making the anticipated resistance harsher than expected.
On July 12, 2021, Putin published an essay titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”. In his paper he argued that independent Ukraine is a brainchild of Soviet-era and, to a large extent, created at the expense of Russian land. A more significant part was “true Ukrainian Sovereignty is possible only in partnership with the Russian state.”
It will be unwise to go into the causality of events in centuries-old relationships. Modern nations of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine claim “Kievan Rus,” the ninth-century kingdom of Ukraine’s predecessors, as their cultural ancestors.
The project of Ukrainian nationalism started in the late nineteenth century and picked up the pace at the end of the first World War along with other Slavic communities under the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires calling for nationalism. Having started as a Pan Slavic movement, it soon transformed into an ethno-Slavic project. Then under Russian nationalism, the third project developed the project of Ukraine as the ‘Little Russian’ identity both originating from the Middle Ages Kievan Rus’ and sharing common religion (Orthodox Christian) and language (Old Church Slavonic).
However, through aggressions, the area of Ukraine was constantly being divided and changed hands in the meantime. The Galician Ukrainians under the Austrian empire experienced “the emergence of modern democratic culture”. Despite Ethnic differences, there was limited accountability and semblance of the rule of law. So a Slavic complainant with a ragtag appearance got a hearing, and justice where due. There was a free job market for the craftsman. Working abroad was possible, and many Ukrainians could travel westwards and work in the industrializing west. It is interesting to note that the inward remittances in Galician Ukraine were $9 billion at their peak.
Even in the Second World War memories, a comparison of occupation in Ukrainian memory under German and Russian power far outweighed against the Russians. Experiences of Soviet authorities while withdrawing not acting as a native government but a conqueror who employs scorch earth policy so that the invading party finds area entirely unfit for habitation left deep antagonistic feeling.
The two years of German occupation were devoid of paranoia of being watched, being drafted into the army against their wishes and no looting while retreating.
Vladimir Lenin once said, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen”.
The Ukrainian Nationalist movements cleverly helped coalescence of these individual memories for strengthening a strong Ukrainian identity. Discrimination by Moscow’s elite and attempts at russification further augmented the “Otherness” of Russians and Russia. Memory adapts itself with time. Older and more general memories shed their specifics and get simplified and fuse into the prevailing broader narrative.
Ukrainian Elite used memories cleverly to make the newly formed nation a ploy in the Neo-Conservative game plan of global dominance. And the more painful historical irony has been to appropriate without appreciation the sizeable benefit in terms of social and industrial development during its 70 years as part of Socialist experiment. Just the two glaring examples are the energy infrastructure of fifteen nuclear reactors that helps the country export energy and many quality educational institutes where thousands of international students study.
Such memory politics may proliferate in the present unipolar world. A closer look at the 35 absentee countries during the UN General Assembly may give clues for future hot spots.
[Photo by kremlin.ru]
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.
The author is an Indian national and global citizen having professional experience in Marketing & Public Policy. He was a progressive student activist in campus days. Shrinivas stayed some time in Czechoslovakia, Africa, South East Asia. Five years’ stay in London made him look beyond the corporate world. Journalism for him began with Huffington Post and leading Indian titles.
