Source: PostPravda.info 18.11.2024.
URL: https://postpravda.info/en/stories/freedom-of-speech-en/war-against-ukrainian-identity/
URL: https://postpravda.info/en/stories/freedom-of-speech-en/war-against-ukrainian-identity/
Can a national identity be false? The question may seem absurd. After all, if people perceive themselves as one nation, then that is how it is, and no one has the right to judge whether this is correct or not. But what if a national identity is built on the denial of another identity? Moreover, what if this denial has become the basis for mass support of a war against another people?
If the war against Ukraine were supported only by morally degraded or poorly educated people, this could be explained by propaganda and manipulation. But the war is supported by respectable Christians, by members of the intelligentsia, by scholars. More than that, they trust Putin more than their own relatives, colleagues, or fellow believers who live in Ukraine.
Why Russians Do Not Believe Even Their Loved Ones in Ukraine
In the spring of 2022, many stories circulated in online media about Russians refusing to believe their relatives in Ukraine when those relatives said they were being bombed at that very moment. For example, a daughter calls her mother in Russia from Kharkiv to say that residential neighborhoods are being shelled, that explosions are very close – and in response she hears: “Don’t make things up!”, “No one is bombing you!”, “Our troops will come soon and liberate you – no one will even touch you with a finger!”
Today, such stories are no longer circulating, because Ukrainians have stopped trying to persuade Russians – it is pointless. I can confirm this from my own experience.
In 2011, I was one of the organizers of an interfaith dialogue in the Siberian city of Tomsk. Representatives of different religions shared their spiritual experiences, sought to understand one another’s positions, and tried to find a common ethical foundation in order to overcome xenophobia. In 2015, I went to the Donbas, collected testimonies about the lives of Christians under conditions of war, and wanted to share these accounts with my fellow townspeople. However, participants in the interfaith dialogue said they were “outside politics” and refused to listen to me.
After the full-scale invasion in 2022, it was no longer possible to hide one’s position behind the mask of apolitical neutrality. Some supported Ukraine, but they were forced either to leave Russia or to retreat into internal exile. As a result, only those remained in the interfaith dialogue who believe that there are Nazis in Ukraine and that Putin must therefore carry out its so-called “denazification.”
I suggested that they speak with their fellow believers in Ukraine and learn from eyewitnesses what is really happening. My proposal was categorically rejected. This was strange.
Even if a person is completely brainwashed by propaganda, they still remain a witness to everyday life in their own country. For example, if I were to meet a resident of North Korea, I would not listen to their communist propaganda, but I would try to learn from them – as a witness – about everyday life in their country. If Russian Christians, Vaishnavas, or Muslims believe that all their fellow believers in Ukraine are brainwashed by Nazi propaganda, why do they not at least ask how this supposed “Nazism” manifests itself in everyday life? What is most depressing is the complete lack of such interest, along with the unshakable conviction that they know better than Ukrainians themselves how life in Ukraine actually is.
From this it follows that they believe Kremlin propaganda because they themselves want to believe it, and therefore fear communicating with those who might call that belief into question. In other words, they want their worldview – based on an imperial identity – to be confirmed by facts, and so they deliberately seek out fake stories about Ukraine in order to believe in them. This means that their Russian imperial identity outweighs their religious identity. And this imperial identity is built on the denial of Ukrainian identity.
A similar phenomenon can be observed in the scientific and academic community, where, seemingly, erudition and a critical attitude toward information are cultivated, and therefore this behavior can no longer be explained by the effectiveness of propaganda alone. How many people in this environment support Ukraine? After the full-scale invasion, several of my colleagues from Russia contacted me with words of moral support. Among them was one world-renowned scholar who, through me, reached out to Ukrainian colleagues to apologize for his country. But this was an isolated case: the majority either remain silent or openly support the criminal war.
I asked Anatoly Akhutin, a well-known Russian philosopher who emigrated to Ukraine, whether his colleagues from Russia had contacted him to apologize or to express moral support to Ukrainian colleagues. He replied that, of course, he has friends in Russia who support Ukraine, but that among philosophers and intellectuals no one had reached out to him. On the contrary, many had stopped communicating with him altogether.
To my question of whether the issue really lies in Russian identity, Anatoly Akhutin replied:
“I think the issue is not simply ‘Russian identity,’ but the fact that this ‘identity’ is imperial. I am not talking about political imperialism (of which there is more than enough), nor even ideological imperialism (Moscow as the Third Rome, and so on), but about something much deeper – on an irrational, subconscious level.
Note that the word ‘Russian’ is an adjective, and what kind of ‘substance’ stands behind it is unclear – it can be whatever we like. This imperialism feeds on a messianic idea (stolen from Byzantium), on the self-awareness of a ‘God-bearing people’ (stolen from the Jews), and on reliance on a great history that was stolen – or, in fact, alas, gifted – from Ukraine itself, which makes Ukraine all the more hateful.
Thus, the denial of an independent Ukrainian identity also grows out of a fear of hanging in a historical void – as some kind of bastard offspring of the Horde – of suddenly finding oneself without Roman heritage, without succession to Byzantine Orthodoxy, without one’s own history: an empty adjective without a noun.”
In support of Anatoly Akhutin’s idea, I can cite a story that was told to me at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Before the full-scale war, a Polish Vietnamologist from Warsaw, Leszek Sobolewski, visited the institute. In a conversation with the then head of the department – now the director of the Institute – Viktor Kiktenko, the Polish scholar asked for his patronymic so that he could address him politely. The Ukrainian colleague replied that the form of address “Pan Viktor” was perfectly polite and even sounded better, as it was less formal and more personal.
Later, Pan Leszek recounted this story to his Russian colleague, also a Vietnamologist, Ilya Usov, who reacted with extreme indignation. He was outraged that in Ukraine people use the forms of address “pan” and “pani,” and immediately began to argue that a supposedly Russian-speaking population had risen up in Donbas and that there were no Russian troops there. Pan Leszek was taken aback by this reaction. What business is it of a Russian scholar how his Ukrainian colleagues address one another? And why was he outraged specifically by Ukrainians, rather than by Poles, who use the same forms of polite address?
It should be emphasized that this was the reaction of a scholar who, by virtue of his specialization, ought to understand questions of national identity and contemporary politics. I believe that in the forms of address “pan” and “pani,” the Russian scholar perceived a demonstration of Ukrainian identity as independent of Russian identity – and it was precisely this that provoked his outrage. In other words, the issue here is not propaganda, but a worldview in which Ukrainian identity itself is perceived as a hostile, anti-Russian ideology.
A Worldview Based on the Denial of Ukrainian Identity
Imperialism in the Soviet Union was instilled from the school bench. In school lessons, we were taught that Russian history begins with Kyivan Rus. Its development was supposedly interrupted by the Tatar-Mongol invasion, after which Kyiv somehow ended up outside Russia’s borders, but Bohdan Khmelnytsky later “reunited” Ukraine with Russia, after which their histories allegedly became inseparable. Ukrainian school education eventually freed itself from this false imperial interpretation of history, and imperial sentiments largely disappeared in Ukraine. In Russian schools, however, this narrative is still taught in essentially the same form today.
As a result, most Russians by default accept the pseudoscientific premise of a “triune Russian people” – Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians – as the collective heir to Kyivan Rus, and therefore do not perceive Ukraine as a separate country with its own culture and history. In reality, there was no single people either in ancient times or today. On the territory of Kyivan Rus lived many different peoples, including Slavic tribes that migrated in different waves and were, in essence, distinct peoples.
The concept of the “triune Russian people” is a false construct of imperial ideology that supplants historical consciousness. Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church has invoked this concept to justify claims to Ukraine as part of his church’s canonical territory. Putin, however, has gone further. He adopted this idea from Russian nationalists in a more radical form, according to which neither the Ukrainian people nor the Ukrainian language exist at all, and Ukraine is merely a borderland of Russia.
According to this worldview, the West has always sought to destroy Russia and, to that end, imposed upon the Russian population of Ukraine the idea that they are Ukrainians rather than Russians. Ukrainian identity, in this interpretation, was invented by Russia’s enemies: it is portrayed as an Austro-Hungarian project in which an artificial language was allegedly created on the basis of rural Ukrainian dialects and borrowings from Polish.
Following Russian nationalist thought, Putin perceives Ukrainian identity as a hostile ideology akin to Nazism, from which Ukrainian society must be “liberated” – that is, subjected to “denazification.” In practice, this means the destruction of the Ukrainian language and of Ukrainian cultural and historical consciousness. Consequently, in the occupied territories of Ukraine, all those who in any way manifest Ukrainian identity are subjected to repression.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the formation of new civic nations began in both Ukraine and Russia. In Ukraine, this process advanced at an accelerating pace, and external aggression only hastened it. Because Ukrainian self-identification manifests itself in diverse forms, this process has been accompanied by intense public debate, including mutual accusations that are often unjust. Nevertheless, a shared basis for mutual understanding has already emerged: the Ukrainian civic nation consists of all those who take responsibility for Ukrainian culture and language. In other words, regardless of ethnic or religious affiliation, a person is Ukrainian if they consider themselves Ukrainian and assume responsibility for Ukraine.
In Russia, by contrast, the process of forming a civic nation was impeded by imperial consciousness. When the security services came to power under Putin, this imperial consciousness mutated into a new form – necro-imperialism. To justify their claims to Ukraine, Russian necro-imperialists portray Ukrainian identity as a Nazi ideology. Yet for such an absurd assertion to be believed at all, one must first transform one’s own identity into an ideology.
It is precisely this ideological transformation of identity in mass Russian consciousness that led to the abortion of a Russian civic nation. Today, nothing unites Russian society except violence and imperial ideology. In other words, in place of a national identity, a void has emerged – one filled by ideology. This void only intensifies fear of Ukrainian identity, especially against the backdrop of the rapid formation of a Ukrainian civic nation. For this reason, many Russians refuse to believe even their closest relatives in Ukraine.
Is There a Way Out?
We can now answer the question posed at the beginning. A national identity can be false when identification is based on allegiance to a political regime or to power itself, and when it depends on the denial of another people’s identity. Such a false identity condemns societies to endless wars: the end of one war merely marks the beginning of preparations for the next.
As long as Russians do not abandon this false identity, they will be unable to believe their loved ones in Ukraine and will continue to support the war. Consequently, it is not enough merely to defeat Russia militarily; it is also necessary to support the formation of new identities among the peoples of Russia – identities that are not bound to imperial ideology.
