Vladimir Putin is smart and, before invading Ukraine militarily, he published an essay on the Kremlin website in which he claimed that the neighboring country had never owned its own identity: it would come from Russia — whose president would now seek to devalue the Ukrainians and then subjugate them with many deaths and destruction.
The maneuver is denounced in a podcast on the American network NPR (in English), with historically consistent information, by one of the largest academic authorities on Ukraine. Serhii Plokhii is 65 years old and is a professor at Harvard. Author of “The Last Empire” (2015), he argues that local identity predates Russian and integrates an ethnic and religious framework of enviable complexity.
The conflict that started in February, he says, is functioning for Ukrainians as a war of independence, from which a new level of identity is reached. The country, extensive and with just under 45 million inhabitants, rediscovers its former individuality, definitively dissociated from the empire commanded by Tsarina Catherine II and, above all, no longer referring to the extinct Soviet Union.
All this contrasts with Putin’s position expressed in the text of July last year, for whom Ukraine does not have a history of its own. In a second moment, the politician also says that the neighbor should turn more towards Russia, not towards the European Union or the USA. Which leads Plokhii to claim that, without history or legitimacy, Kiev has no right to exist.
There is a clear analogy with George Orwell’s “1984”, for whom control of the past is also control of the present.
And Plokhii returns to the question of identity: “Ukrainians are not only fighting for the independence of their state. They are also fighting for the survival of their identity, as Russia in the past tried to annihilate Ukraine to subject it to its cultural influence.”
This perception is not always clear. For centuries Russia and Ukraine worked together. Even today families are divided on both sides of the border. But Ukrainians have always cultivated the roots of their sense of autonomy and independence, says the Harvard professor.
Let’s look at some history. During the High Middle Ages, Ukrainian watersheds attracted the Vikings, also called Rus, from Scandinavia – where the word Russia comes from. Other ethnicities arrived, one of them the Slavs. In the 13th century the region fell under the control of the Mongols, who destroyed the trading posts of the State of the Rus. It is in the struggle against the Mongols, says the Harvard historian, that Ukrainian identity begins to form. The Eurasian steppe outlined its current political outline.
Plokhii insists that modern Ukraine was born with the arrival of a new character in Eastern European demography. It was the Cossacks, not the Vikings or the Rus. There is a difference between the Ukrainian and Russian Cossacks: the former were able to create a state of their own, around the 17th century, which is initially independent and then associated with Russia, until the end of the 18th century.
The word Cossack comes from Turkish and means free men. They were excellent horsemen, aggressive and responsible for the extermination of tens of thousands of Jews from Ukraine in the 17th century. In terms of cultural identity, this group stimulated literature and the teaching of science. They still had their own army and bureaucratic institutions, later incorporated into the Russian Empire.
The important thing is the identity differential that the Rus and Cossacks gave to the peoples who today consider themselves Ukrainians. They know they have less to do with Russian identity. They claim a difference that they now make through war.
One of the topics that the NPR podcast doesn’t explore in depth is the weight Ukraine still carries from its Soviet past. When created, in 1922, the USSR exercised the leveling between the republics that integrated it. Ukraine became a backyard in which Russia exercised its high technology – nuclear and above all war. The Ukrainians deserved a trust and complicity that did not exist, for example, in relation to the Baltic republics or Chechnya.
The fact is that the Ukrainians were glued to Russia by communism. And that is why Vladimir Putin unfairly feels entitled to treat Ukraine as a periphery inextricably attached to Moscow. Which, ultimately, Professor Plokhii insists is not true.
