EPILOGUE

March 18, 2014, was a day of triumph for Vladimir Putin, the sixty-one-year-old president of Russia, who was then serving his third term in that office.

In his speech, Vladimir Putin hailed the annexation of the Crimea — an act undertaken in violation of the sovereignty of Ukraine, which Russo-Ukrainian treaties guaranteed and the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 ensured — as a triumph of historical justice. Much of Putin’s argument was historical and cultural in nature. He referred to the disintegration of the Soviet Union as an expropriation of Russia, repeatedly called the Crimea a Russian land and Sevastopol a Russian city, and attacked the Ukrainian authorities for neglecting the interests of the people of the Crimea and, most recently, seeking to violate their linguistic and cultural rights. He claimed that the Crimea had as much right to secede from Ukraine as Ukraine had to secede from the Soviet Union.

History has been used and abused more than once in the Ukraine Crisis, informing and inspiring its participants but also justifying violations of international law, human rights, and the right to life itself. The Russo-Ukrainian conflict, while arising unexpectedly and taking many of those involved by surprise, has deep historical roots and is replete with historical references and allusions.

The Ukraine Crisis reminded the world of the Russian annexation of the Crimea in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the creation in southern Ukraine of the short-lived imperial province of New Russia. This memory of Russian imperial expansion into the area was brought to the fore not by outside observers trying to portray current Russian behavior as imperial but by ideologues of the Russian hybrid war in Ukraine, who came up with the New Russia project. They sought to develop their historical ideology on the foundations of imperial conquest and Russian dominance in lands originally inhabited by the Crimean and Noghay Tatars and Zaporozhian Cossacks. This pertains especially to the trope of Sevastopol as a city of Russian glory — a historical myth rooted in the 1853–1856 Crimean War (a disaster for the Russian Empire) that attributes the heroism of the multiethnic imperial army defending the city to Russians alone.

The formation of the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics,” along with the attempts to proclaim Odesa and Kharkiv republics — building blocks of a future New Russia — also had its roots in historical memory. It went back to Bolshevik attempts to maintain control over Ukraine’s east and south soon after the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany (March 1918), which assigned those regions to Ukraine. At that time the Bolsheviks were creating puppet states, including the Crimean and Donetsk–Kryvyi Rih Soviet republics, which were allegedly independent of Moscow and not covered by the treaty.

While allusions to the Russian imperial and revolutionary past became part of the historical discourse justifying the Russian aggression against Ukraine, its historical motivation is more recent. The rapid and unexpected disintegration of the Soviet Union, recalled by President Vladimir Putin in his speech on the annexation of the Crimea, provides the most immediate historical background to the crisis. The current Russian government keeps claiming that Ukraine is an artificial formation whose eastern territories were allegedly a gift to the country from the Bolsheviks, as was the Crimea after World War II. According to this narrative, the only genuine and thus historically legitimate polity is the empire — first the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. The Russian government actively combats and suppresses any historical traditions and memories that undermine the legitimacy of the empire, such as commemoration of the 1932–1933 Great Ukrainian Famine or the Soviet government’s 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars; such was the case with the ban on public commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of the Crimean Tatar deportation imposed by the Russian authorities in the Crimea in May 2014.

Russia today seems to be following in the footsteps of some of its imperial predecessors who continued to harbor nostalgia for their empires long after they were lost. The collapse of the Soviet Union left Russian elites bitter about their loss of imperial and superpower status, nourishing illusions that what had happened was an accident brought about by the ill will of the West or by politicians like Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin foolishly bickering for power. Such a view of the end of the Soviet Union makes it hard to resist the temptation to rewrite history.

The Russo-Ukrainian conflict also brought to the fore another important issue with historical roots and ramifications: the unfinished process of building the modern Russian and Ukrainian nations. The Russian annexation of the Crimea and the propaganda intended to justify Russian aggression in the Donbas have proceeded under the slogan of defending the rights of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in general. The equation of the Russian language not only with Russian culture but also with Russian nationality has been an important aspect of the worldview of many Russian volunteers who have come to Donbas. One problem with that interpretation of Russianness is that while ethnic Russians indeed make up a majority of the population in the Crimea and large minorities in parts of the Donbas, most of the population of the projected New Russia consists of ethnic Ukrainians. While Russian and separatist propaganda has had an appeal for many ethnic Ukrainians, most have refused to identify themselves with Russia or with Russian ethnicity even as they continue to use the Russian language. That was one of the main reasons for the failure of the New Russia project, which came as a complete surprise to its authors.

The view of Ukrainians as constituents of the Russian nation goes back to the founding myth of modern Russia as a nation conceived and born in Kyiv, the “mother of Russian [rather than Rus’] cities.” The Synopsis of 1674, the first printed “textbook” of Russian history, compiled by Kyivan monks seeking the protection of the Muscovite tsars, first formulated and widely disseminated this myth in Russia. Throughout most of the imperial period, Ukrainians were regarded as Little Russians — a vision that allowed for the existence of Ukrainian folk culture and spoken vernacular but not a high culture or a modern literature. Recognition of Ukrainians as a distinct nation in cultural but not political terms in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1917 challenged that vision.

Since the fall of the USSR, the Russian nation-building project has switched its focus to the idea of forming a single Russian nation not divided into branches and unifying the Eastern Slavs on the basis of the Russian language and culture. Ukraine has become the first testing ground for this model outside the Russian Federation.

The new model of Russian identity, which stresses the indivisibility of the Russian nation, closely associated with the Russian language and culture, poses a fundamental challenge to the Ukrainian nation-building project. From its beginnings in the nineteenth century, that project placed the Ukrainian language and culture at its center, but from the outset it also allowed for the use of other languages and cultures, as attested, for example, by the Russian-language writings of Taras Shevchenko, whom many regard as the spiritual founder of the Ukrainian nation. Bilingualism and multiculturalism have become a norm in post-Soviet Ukraine, extending membership in the Ukrainian nation to people of various ethnic and religious backgrounds. This has had a direct impact on the course of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Contrary to the Kremlin’s expectations, Russian aggression failed to mobilize the support of ethnic Russians outside the areas directly controlled by the Russian army — the Crimea and those parts of the Donbas seized by Russian mercenaries and Russia-backed insurgents.

According to data provided by the respected Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, with Russians constituting 17 percent of the Ukrainian population, only 5 percent of those polled considered themselves exclusively Russian: the rest identified as both Russian and Ukrainian. Even those who considered themselves exclusively Russian often opposed Russian interference in Ukrainian affairs, refusing to associate themselves with Putin’s regime. “Ukraine is my Homeland. Russian is my native language. And I would like to be saved by Pushkin. And delivered from sorrow and unrest, also by Pushkin. Pushkin, not Putin,” wrote one of Kyiv’s ethnic Russians in her Facebook account. The ideology of the “Russian World,” which combines Russian nationalism with Russian Orthodoxy and which Moscow and Russian-backed insurgents have promoted as an alternative to the pro-European choice of the Maidan protesters, has helped strengthen the Ukrainian-Jewish pro-European alliance developing in Ukraine since 1991. “I have said for a long time that an alliance between Ukrainians and Jews is a pledge of our common future,” posted a pro-Maidan activist on his Facebook account.

History has left Ukraine united in one state but divided along numerous regional lines that echo the cultural and political boundaries of the past. The line between the parklands of central Ukraine and the southern steppes became a porous border between the predominantly agricultural areas to the north and the urban centers of the mineral-rich steppes to the south. The frontier of Western and Eastern Christianity, after reaching the Dnieper in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, retreated to Galicia and now recalls the border between the Habsburg and Russian empires of the pre–World War I era. Within the former Habsburg possessions, Galicia differs from the largely Hungarian-ruled Transcarpathia and the former Moldavian province of Bukovyna. Within the former Russian Empire, Volhynia, which was under Polish rule during the interwar period, is different from Podolia, which stayed under Soviet rule for most of the twentieth century. There is also a difference between the formerly Polish-ruled lands on the Right Bank of the Dnieper and those of the former Cossack Hetmanate on its Left Bank, as well as between the Cossack lands and those colonized largely through the centralized efforts of the Russian Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The borders of those lands also serve as a line between Ukrainians who are more comfortable speaking Ukrainian and those who prefer Russian in everyday speech.

In reality, Ukrainian regionalism is even more complex than the account of it just presented. There are differences between the old Cossack lands of the former Hetmanate and Sloboda Ukraine, while the southern Ukrainian province of Mykolaiv differs greatly in ethnic composition, language use, and voting behavior from the Crimea, which was attached to Ukraine only in 1954. But despite all these differences, Ukraine’s regions stick together because the borders indicated above, which were quite distinct in the past, would be almost impossible to reestablish today. Nowadays one sees a patchwork of linguistic, cultural, economic, and political transition zones that link different regions to one another and keep the country together. In practice, there is no easily identifiable cultural boundary dividing the Crimea from the neighboring regions of southern Ukraine or the Donbas from the other eastern regions. None of the historical regions has shown a strong desire to leave Ukraine; nor have elites managed to mobilize citizens in support of secession. True, such mobilization has taken place in the Crimea and the Donbas, but only as a consequence of Russian annexation or intervention.

A symbol farewell to the Soviet past — the demolition of remaining monuments to Lenin, more than five hundred altogether, in a few weeks — accompanied the Revolution of Dignity. Among the anti-Kyiv insurgents in the Donbas, there were many defenders of the old Soviet values. But Russian mercenaries and volunteers brought to the region an overarching idea of a different kind. Like the best known of the Russian commanders, Igor Girkin, they came to the Donbas to defend the values of the “Russian World” against the West. In that context, they saw Ukraine as a battleground between corrupt Western values, including democracy, individual freedoms, human rights, and, especially, the rights of sexual minorities on the one hand and traditional Russian values on the other. By that logic, Western propaganda had simply addled the Ukrainians’ minds. It was up to the Russians to show them the light.

This interpretation of the conflict has deep roots in the Russian culture and intellectual tradition. While one can hardly imagine modern Russian history without Russian participation in European culture, it is also true that for centuries Russia was cut off from the West or engaged in confrontation with the countries of central and western Europe. Which set of historical experiences best defines Russia’s love-hate relationship with the West? In the enduring Russian intellectual debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles, which began in the early nineteenth century and pitted the view of Russia as part of Europe against that of Russia as a distinct civilization with a world mission, the descendants of the Slavophiles and anti-Westerners now have the upper hand.

As for Ukraine, its claim to independence has always had a European orientation, which is one consequence of Ukraine’s experience as a country located on the East-West divide between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, central European and Eurasian empires, and the political and social practices they brought with them. This location on the border of several cultural spaces helped make Ukraine a contact zone in which Ukrainians of different persuasions could learn to coexist. It also helped create regional divisions, which participants in the current conflict have exploited. Ukraine has always been known, and lately it has been much praised, for the cultural hybridity of its society, but how much hybridity a nation can bear and still remain united in the face of a “hybrid war” is one of the important questions now being decided in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

The pro-European revolution in Ukraine, which broke out a quarter century after the end of the Cold War, took a page from the Cold War fascination with the European West shared by the dissidents of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other countries of the region, in some cases turning that fascination into a new national religion. The Revolution of Dignity and the war brought about a geopolitical reorientation of Ukrainian society. The proportion of those with positive attitudes toward Russia decreased from 80 percent in January 2014 to under 50 percent in September of the same year. In November 2014, 64 percent of those polled supported Ukraine’s accession to the European Union (that figure had stood at 39 percent in November 2013). In April 2014, only a third of Ukrainians had wanted their country to join NATO; in November 2014, more than half supported that course. There can be little doubt that the experience of war not only united most Ukrainians but also turned the country’s sympathies westward.

Historically, the shock of war, the humiliation of defeat, and the open wound of lost territories have served as potent instruments for building national solidarity and forging a strong national identity. The partitions of Poland in the second half of the eighteenth century wiped the Polish state off the map of Europe but served as a starting point for the formation of modern Polish nationalism, while the Napoleonic invasion of Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century gave rise to pan-German ideas and promoted the development of modern German nationalism. Memories of defeat and lost territory have fired the national imaginations of French and Poles, Serbs and Czechs. Invaded, humiliated, and war-torn Ukraine seems to be following that general pattern.

The Russian annexation of the Crimea, the hybrid war in the Donbas, and attempts to destabilize the rest of the country created a new and dangerous situation not only in Ukraine but also in Europe as a whole. For the first time since the end of World War II, a major European power made war on a weaker neighbor and annexed part of the territory of a sovereign state. The Russian invasion breached not only the Russo-Ukrainian treaty of 1997 but also the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, which had offered Ukraine security assurances in exchange for giving up its nuclear weapons and acceding to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty as a nonnuclear state. The unprovoked Russian aggression against Ukraine threatened the foundations of international order — a threat to which the European Union and most of the world were not prepared to respond but one that demands appropriate counteraction. Whatever the outcome of the current Ukraine Crisis, on its resolution depends not only the future of Ukraine but also that of relations between Europe’s east and west — Russia and the European Union — and thus the future of Europe as a whole.