Maidan

In connection with the NATO summit scheduled for the end of this year, Putin’s government has intensified its disinformation campaign against its former imperial possession because it cannot come to terms with the reality of Ukrainian independence. Accordingly, it disseminates old imperial-era preconceptions about Ukraine and Ukrainian-Russian relations to help those in NATO and the EU who oppose Ukrainian membership in their organizations. Some of them think that Russia through its CIS/SES can maintain stability within what was Soviet-ruled territory and seem to imagine that Putin’s resource-based autocracy can make the region stable in an age when resource-based autocracies everywhere else in the world are chronically unstable. Others use spurious Russian historical claims and logic in their attempts to convince others that Ukraine “belongs to Russia.”

Vladimir Putin did not seize the opportunity offered by the collapse of the USSR to make his mark in history as Russia’s Ataturk. Instead, he and his entourage (siloviki), who inherited an intact soviet military-industrial complex, see Russia as a neo-imperial global power – not as a post -imperial state. The Russian dominated CIS/SES (Single Economic Space), accordingly, cannot be compared with other post-imperial associations like the British Commonwealth or the Nordic Union – let alone the EU. Putin, Europeans should remember, considers the collapse of the Soviet Union as the great tragedy of the 20th century – not the Holocaust, Europe’s two great wars, Hitlerism, or Stalinism. While Germany’s post-Nazi government, which does not regard itself as the heir of Nazi Germany, nevertheless, accepts the burden of Nazi guilt and pays millions in compensation to all its surviving victims, Russia’s post-Soviet government, which does regard itself as successor to the USSR, does not recognize the existence of soviet or Stalinist crimes against humanity, and pays no compensation to anybody.

The siloviki see Ukraine as part of a Russian dominated Eurasian CIS/SES. Some of them who think that power and control still depend on armies and bureaucracies physically occupying territory outside the home country, would like Ukraine reintegrated into Russia. Others have learned that external power today does not lie in the ability to physically occupy foreign territory and they now formulate policies. These siloviki think in terms of “integration from below” and now dictate policy. They maintain Russian hegemony in former Soviet territories via the control of interest rates, loan conditions, telecommunications, industrial plant, and energy supplies. By paying lip-service to Ukrainian political independence they direct Ukraine’s wealth north, without spending anything on its administration, policing or services. To justify their continued domination of Ukraine, the siloviki and pro-Russian advocates abroad do not only use the old spurious tsarist/soviet historical justifications of empire briefly noted in part 1 of this article.

Another element in Russia’s disinformation campaign in the EU involves the notion that Ukraine’s Russians, which the naive conflate with Russian-speakers, are somehow “oppressed.” People like Luzhkov and Zatulin and their acolytes, assume Ukraine was “always Russian” or that Russians and Russian are “native” to it. As such, they present Russian domination as the product of “historical forces” which Ukrainian national leaders must accept and not change. Russian settlement in Ukraine and continued Russian domination of the country’s public sphere, however, is a product of chosen policies, which like all policies, can be reversed.

While pockets of Russian immigrants obviously lived in the Ukraine from at least the seventeenth century, mass migration did not begin until the late nineteenth century. Migration policies in the Soviet period, moreover, directed Russians into and Ukrainians out of Ukraine until the 1970s. The ensuing “ethnic dilution,” combined with deportations and millions of unnatural Ukrainian deaths between 1917 and 1947, created large Russian-speaking urban enclaves in the country’s four easternmost provinces that did not previously exist. Media policies, meanwhile, created a centralized production/distribution infrastructure that disseminated massive amounts of cheap Russian-language products which allowed urban Russians to live work and satisfy their cultural/spiritual needs without having to use or learn Ukrainian. Since Ukrainian-language products were fewer and restricted to select Ukrainian subjects/themes, Non-Russian rural migrants little choice but to acculturate and/or assimilate into Russian-speaking culture if they sought to better themselves. There was no mass assimilation of urban Russians into Ukrainian-speaking culture – which most regarded as quaint ethnography unsuitable for modern urban life. Second and third generation urban Russian immigrants and assimilated migrants spoke in Russian, lived in a Russian public-sphere and were Moscow- oriented culturally . Educational policies from the 1930s not only made Russian a compulsory subject, but introduced it as the language of instruction in most urban schools.

After 1991 most of the urban population accepted the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state. But the “old-regime” leaders who still dominated the bureaucracy did not dismantle the institutional infrastructure underlying public Russian language–use and thus kept Ukraine within the Russian-language communications sphere. Given the paucity of Ukrainian-language publications and audio-visual products, people had little reason to change their Russian language-use or intellectual/cultural orientation. All too many still associate Ukrainian only with folklore.

Russian rhetoric about Ukraine emanating from the Luzhkovs and Zatulins does not mention that because Russian and/or Russophile controlled production/distribution chains flood Ukrainian markets with cheap modern Russian-language mass-market products, Ukrainian-language mass-market products still today either do not exist at all, or they are difficult to obtain. Since this institutional infrastructure severely limits Ukrainians’ ability to “freely choose” to use Ukrainian publicly, it keeps the public-sphere Russian. Because in schools English is only an optional foreign language, and even then, subject to teacher availability, the market for English-language audio-visual producers in Ukraine is too small for them to be able to compete with Russian-language producers. So English- language books remain very expensive, libraries cannot buy them, and students continue to use Russian-language books to study and research non-Ukrainian related subject matter since there are few or no Ukrainian-language books on such subjects. All of which reinforces the average person’s dependency on the Russian- language communications sphere and their isolation from the rest of the world – which speaks English. Individuals learn English, but English-language knowledge remains limited as the average person has neither the time, the money or the inclination to learn a third language. Thanks to its leaders Ukraine did not follow in the wake of Mongolia and Poland where governments introduced compulsory English in primary schools in the 1990s and where it is now the de facto second language.

Thus, far from being the product of abstract “historical forces,” Russian domination of Ukraine and its public communications sphere is the product of political events – which involved conscious decisions to subordinate Ukraine to Russia. Pro-Russian authors ignore this and direct their readers away from the real issues: in a country where, as of 2006 there were still no Ukrainian-language glossy-fashion/womens’/teen magazines, and Ukrainian-language papers/magazines were rare even in Kyiv’s kiosks, where popular culture and business is all in Russian, is it Russians who are “oppressed?” If Russians are “oppressed” how, in Donetsk province, where 38% of the population are Russian speaking Russians, can there be approximately 1000 Russian-language newspapers and magazines and one Ukrainian language newspaper? How could it happen in 2005 that provincial Party of Regions politicians in Donetsk province stopped the subsidy of 43 000 hryvnia they had provided until then to schools and libraries for the Ukrainian paper, and voted a 800 000 hryvnia subsidy to those institutions to buy the three major Russian newspapers? How can Russians be “oppressed” in a country where, although they are not more than 20% of the population, the media, as of 2000, was still overwhelmingly Russian? Only 10% of Ukraine’s annual published book titles, 12% of its magazines, 18% of its TV programs and 35% of its newspapers were in Ukrainian. These figures would be even lower if totals included Russian-language products and programming imported/broadcast from Russia. Foreign non-Russian corporations in Ukraine, finally, function in Russian.

Since post-Orange national government has not reversed this situation Europeans should ask themselves just how exactly are Russians in Ukraine “oppressed?” Is there another country in Europe whose official language is as invisible in business and popular culture as is Ukrainian in Ukraine? From this perspective, the perspective Russia’s siloviki prefer Europeans ignore, it might be added, Ukraine’s politically pro-Russian Russians can only be compared to the French in Algeria, the Germans in pre-war Bohemia and Poland, or the English in Ireland 100 years ago. Does appeasing such people bring stability?

A third element in Putin’s disinformation campaign involves the claim that Ukraine is situated within an imagined space between Japan and Ireland defined as an east-west land continuum that Russia should dominate. However, there is no particular reason to see the territory between Paris and Port Arthur as a land continuum. It should rather be seem in terms of north-south river networks, since rivers were the only means of fast cheap communication/transportation before the late nineteenth century. Because they were on two different unconnected river networks Ukraine and Russia developed independently of each other until Muscovy politically incorporated Cossack-Ukraine in the late eighteenth century. Afterwards, Russia could not economically integrate its Ukrainian lands until it began building paved roads and railways in the later nineteenth-century, while massive Russian immigration to Ukraine began only in the 1930s. Accordingly, there is no particular reason to see Ukrainian lands on the southern river-network defined by the Dnipro, Dnister, and Donets rivers, as the “southern part of Russia” or the “western part of Asia.” They are better understood as the eastern part of Europe.
A fourth element in Russia’s campaign against Ukrainian efforts to join NATO and the EU centers on obfuscating the historical differences between Russia and its empire—which reinforces the view that Ukraine is or should be “ part of Russia.” Russian neo-eurasianists are perhaps the most outspoken advocates for the restoration of Russian rule in what was its empire. Seemingly oblivious to the fact that every other modern country that had an empire and lost it is still “alive”, a leading proponent of this modern obscurantism, Alexander Dugin, claims that if Russia repudiates what it controlled before 1991 the result will be civil war and the “...utter destruction of the Russian nation....” Formulated in the early 1920s Eurasianism claims that the territorial unity of the old tsarist empire has to be maintained and dominated by a hybrid Russian-speaking nation composed of all the peoples of the empire who supposedly have more in common than differences with each other -- otherwise they will all suffer “Romano-Germanic oppression.” Because Eurasian and Bolshevik goals coincided some Eurasianists cooperated with the Soviets during the twenties until they were arrested by Stalin. The movement was dead by 1932. Resurrected by Russian rightist fringe groups at the end of the century, today they have sympathizers within Ukraine and the Russian government.

This conflation of Russia with its empire, finally, is reflected in the work of scholars who still use the term “All Russian” ” -- which implicitly encompasses Ukraine and Ukrainians as “Little Russians” and makes it difficult to imagine Ukraine as something separate and distinct from Russia. Using “All Russian” in reference to a multi-national imperial cultural system obscures the differences between the imperial and the national within that system, and implicitly assumes that the imperial culture created by Russians and non-Russians was an exclusively Russian national culture. What this term obscures, is that educated Ukrainians in the empire were “assimilated” only to imperial (state) practices and institutions, which bore few “national” Russian characteristics. People like Gogol (Hohol), thus, were not assimilated to the as yet weakly developed Great Russian nation. In other words, if Ukrainians were becoming “Russians” before 1917 it was not in the “national” sense but the “imperial”-- which left room for a Ukrainian sub-loyalty and identity. The big difference between Ukrainians and Russians is that whereas the former began developing a distinct non-imperial national identity in the nineteenth century, like all other Europeans, Russians did not. Russians still confuse their particular national identity with the old imperial/soviet supra-national identity and Putin’s propaganda wants to maintain and spread this confusion in the EU.

Russia might someday become a democratic country with a strong state, rule of law, and no hegemonic ambitions. A country where primary-school children do not have to learn to strip and assemble AK-47 rifles, and which does not support revanchist anti-democratic groups in its former possessions . Perhaps someday business with Russian companies will be as politically neutral as business with any other companies and perhaps someday its historians will “de-imperialize” Russia’s history and trace its beginnings to the Volga-Oka basin – and not to a region located in a territory that became an imperial province only in the 1780s. Perhaps someday Russian leaders will pay world rates for its Crimean naval bases just as they expect Ukraine to pay world prices for its gas. Russian leaders might someday realize that Russia, like other countries that lost empires, will become prosperous and democratic only if it refrains from trying to rebuild that empire with former imperial-era collaborators.
But today, when its leaders want neighbours like Belarus, use private companies and religion as instruments of foreign policy, make avowed extremist - nationalists government ministers, and regenerate rather than revise imperial-era historiography, it is difficult to imagine Ukraine’s integration with Russia as a benign two-way process. Even if the men who want to keep Russia a global neo-imperial power someday leave the Kremlin, it would still be difficult to see Russia as one among equals in the CIS/SES.
By supporting Ukraine’s bid to enter the EU and NATO EU leaders are working in their own interests. If a democratic national Ukraine enters the global economy as an EU member it will pose no threat to Russia and it and the EU will both have stable borders. If Ukraine ends-up participating in the global economy via the CIS as a Party of Regions dominated Russian satellite, the EU will end-up with instability on its eastern border and Russia will have instability on its western border. There is no third alternative and those who reiterate Russian rationalizations for control over its old imperial possessions to explain why Ukraine should not be in the EU only guarantee continued instability. Is that worth Russian oil and gas that can, in any case, be obtained elsewhere – as well as be replaced by alternative sources of energy?

Stephen Velychenko
University of Toronto.