“You don’t even exist!” Characters in Russian fiction are always insulting each other in this way. They call each other zeroes, nothings, nonentities. The hero of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground feels profoundly insulted when someone he hopes to annoy by standing in his way simply moves him aside like a piece of furniture. “I could even have forgiven blows,” the underground man explains, “but I absolutely could not forgive” his acting as if it was not a person in his way.
Of course, there is something paradoxical about telling someone he doesn’t exist, for whom is one telling it to?
It is a commonplace that Russians are intuitive existentialists. The title of Gogol’s novel Dead Souls refers to people who exist only on paper, while the well-known story about the “Potemkin villages” that Catherine the Great’s lover constructed to hoodwink her refers to empty façades concealing nothingness.
And so it is not surprising that, in his recent interview with Tucker Carlson and in his 2021 article “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” Vladimir Putin keeps assuring Ukrainians they don’t really exist. Ukrainians and Russians are not two neighboring peoples, he insists, but “one people—a single whole.” Russia and Ukraine “are parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space.” If some people do not agree, that is simply “the result of deliberate effort by those forces that have always sought to undermine our unity.” Always: Russian history is a struggle against those who from time immemorial have sought to “divide and rule” by pitting “the parts of a single people against one another.” This fraught view of a Russia always fighting for its very existence implies that any Russian regarding Ukrainians as a separate people is treasonous.
“To have a better understanding of the present and look into the future,” Putin explains, “we need to turn to history.” To justify his war, he offers a long and convoluted narrative about the Eastern Slavs going back to the ninth century. Most Americans find it hard to appreciate such an argument because they cannot imagine anyone not sharing their assumption that the state exists to ensure the welfare of its citizens. What else could it exist for? Russians, by contrast, typically reason that individuals come and go but Russia remains. Russia is more important, and more real, than all Russians living at any given moment. If Americans think only of themselves as individuals, Russians believe that American shallowness confers an enormous advantage on Russia because individualists are unlikely to make great sacrifices, let alone die, for their country—as Russians so readily do.
So how does Putin narrate Russian history to show that Ukrainians are really just Russians? When the Russian state was established by the Varangian (Viking) king Riurik, and when Prince Vladimir (Volodymyr to Ukrainians) chose to baptize his people into Eastern Christianity, the Eastern Slavs were one people whose capital was at Kiev. They called themselves the “Rus” and spoke a language that, as Putin reminds us, is traditionally called Old Russian. Of course, it might as well be called Old Ukrainian or Old Byelorussian, since it is equally the ancestor of all three, but of course Russia has come to be the dominant force in the region.
For Putin, this common linguistic origin demonstrates that, in spite of subsequent historical vicissitudes, the Eastern Slavs have always been and still are one people.
Like many Western European counterparts, the Grand Prince of Kiev had to share power with local princes who regarded him only as the first among equals. Such a vast territory, larger than any European kingdom, would have been hard to govern in any case, and by the twelfth century had begun to fragment into more than a dozen states, including Galicia–Volhynia in the West and Vladimir-Suzdal in the northeast. In the thirteenth century, Mongol invaders destroyed Kiev and further divided those under Mongol rule from those more Western people who remained outside it. In the northeast, Moscow emerged as the leading city by becoming the Mongols’ tax collector. As it gained power, it began the process usually called “the gathering of the Russian lands.”
The Eastern Slavs living under Mongol rule for two centuries developed differently from those Slavs who continued as a part of Europe. Muscovy experienced no high Middle Ages or Renaissance but instead adopted Mongol forms of authoritarianism. As Ukrainians tell the story, these developments created two distinct cultural identities; as Putin recounts it, they initiated the enslavement of Western Russians under the rule of various Western powers, especially Austria, Lithuania, and Poland.
In Russian-nationalist discourse, Poland represents not only a rival power but a treasonous one, a Slavic country that became Catholic and identified with the West. President Putin established the holiday of November 4, “Unity Day,” which celebrates the expulsion of Polish invaders in 1612 and the preservation of Russia’s distinct civilization from the ever-corrupting Western influence.
In 1596, when Poland dominated much of Ukraine, the Union of Brest created the Uniate Church, which, while maintaining the Slavonic rite, switched allegiance to Rome. Putin regards this union as just another Western plot to divide the Russian people.
The year 1654 is also crucial to Putin. Ukrainian Cossacks under Hetman (leader) Bogdan Khmelnitsky had revolted against Polish rule but could not contend with the Polish army. They turned to Orthodox Moscow for help. In 1654, at Pereyaslav, Khmelnitsky swore allegiance to the Russian tsar (this is what Russians emphasize) who agreed to allow Ukrainian Cossacks their autonomy (as the Ukrainians point out). For Ukrainian nationalists, Cossacks have acquired mythic status as heroic freebooters, symbols of adventure and anarchic liberty. That is how Gogol represents them in his novella Taras Bulba (1835) and Ilya Repin portrays them in his painting Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks (1880–91), which depicts a motley crew of warriors joyfully penning an obviously insulting letter to the Turkish Sultan.
Under Russian rule, Ukrainian autonomy repeatedly diminished. The Hetmanate was abolished in 1764, and serfdom was extended into Ukrainian lands. Putin is not in the habit of quoting Alexander Herzen’s famous comment that “the unfortunate country [Ukraine] could not withstand that fatal avalanche rolling from the north to the Black Sea and covering everything . . . with a uniform shroud of slavery.”
Nationalism, the dominant ideology of nineteenth-century Europe, inspired Ukrainians to establish a literature based on a distinct formal language. The first literary work in Ukrainian appeared in 1798, after which a great deal of folklore was collected. Ukraine’s greatest poet, Taras Shevchenko, born a serf, began to publish his poetry in 1840. He was arrested and banished to Siberia in 1847, and his complete works could not appear until 1907.
Russian policy was usually aimed at suppressing separate Ukrainian identity. An edict of 1863 declared that no Ukrainian language existed—it was merely a dialect of Russian—and banned books that were “religious and educational” along with “books generally intended for elementary reading by the people.” Ukrainian newspapers and schools were suppressed. In 1876, a decree confined Ukrainian-language publication to historical documents, and Ukrainian musical and theatrical performances were proscribed.
While vaguely acknowledging that the Russian government tried to suppress the Ukrainian national movement, Putin insists that we be “mindful of the historical context.” This “context,” as almost always, includes the danger of foreign intervention to divide the Russians. In this case, “these [Russian] decisions . . . were taken against the backdrop of . . . the leaders of the Polish national movement to exploit the ‘Ukrainian issue’ to their own advantage.” But how could the Poles have “exploited” the issue of Ukrainian identity if a sense of that identity did not actually exist? Putin never seems to appreciate that it is not for Russians but Ukrainians to decide whether they are a separate people.
Putin explicitly identifies the Soviet Union with the Russian Empire, which it largely paralleled territorially. By so doing, he can present Soviet expansionism as the historically justified recovery of ancient Russian lands. Nevertheless, Putin rejects the Soviet approach to nationalities, which he portrays not only as a historical mistake but also as a betrayal of Russia: “One fact is crystal clear: Russia was robbed.”
In Bolshevik theory, nationality would disappear as people came to identify instead by class. The working class has no homeland! All the same, Lenin and Stalin recognized that a transitional period would be necessary during which Bolsheviks could exploit nationalism to advance their power. “We would be very poor revolutionaries,” Lenin declared,
if . . . we did not know how to utilize every popular movement against each separate disaster caused by imperialism in order to sharpen and extend the crisis.
Accordingly, the ussr took the form of supposedly autonomous republics with the right to secede at any point—a right that was entirely empty, since all republics were “sovietized,” that is, governed by Communists chosen by and subservient to Moscow. National cultures were to be “national in form, socialist in content,” an accurate description if we understand that in Soviet thinking content is everything and form is nothing.
In Putin’s view, Bolshevik nationality policy
planted in the foundation of our statehood the most dangerous time bomb, which exploded the moment the safety mechanism provided by the leading role of the cpsu [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] was gone.
Instead of one Russian people, the Bolsheviks falsely “secured at the state level the provision of three separate Slavic peoples: Russian, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian.” Still worse, the Bolsheviks drew the boundaries of Ukraine to include “lands of historical Russia,” and in 1954 Khrushchev, “in gross violation of legal norms that were in force at the time,” transferred Crimea to Ukraine. Yet since Soviet law entirely rejected the notion of limiting the power of the cpsu, it isn’t clear how any decision it undertook could violate, let alone grossly violate, legal norms.
As Putin tells the story, it was the Ukrainian government that ignited the present conflict. They did so, he sometimes argues, at the behest of Nazis. At other times, he argues that Western powers, suffering from an entirely irrational “Russophobia,” called the shots in order to exploit Ukrainian national resources and, of course, weaken Russia.
Not everything Putin says is groundless. Since the Maidan revolution of 2014 did overthrow a democratically elected government, he has a point in calling it a “coup.” Putin can also cite various Ukrainian laws that discriminate against Russians or Russian speakers. For example, a 2021 law ensures the cultural integrity of “indigenous peoples,” which it defines as
an ethnic minority within the Ukrainian population that possesses a distinctive language and culture; has traditional social, cultural, or representative structures; considers itself native to Ukraine; and does not have its own state entity beyond Ukraine.
The last phrase excludes native Russian-speakers, who represent about a third of Ukraine’s population. Putin also makes a reasonable case that Crimea is not really Ukrainian since, according to the 1989 census, only 25.8 percent of its population was Ukrainian. And Ukraine has indeed dispensed with elections during wartime and brought all media under state control.
Henry Kissinger pointed out that Ukraine might serve “as a bridge between Russia and the West, rather than as an outpost of either side.” It is arguable that many in the West have sought to use Ukraine for their own ends, setting up a bulwark against Russia, one that is subservient to Western aims and working as a nato staging post.
But much of what Putin says is tendentious at best and designed to reinforce Ukraine’s status as just such an outpost. He complains that “local oligarchs . . . robbed the people of Ukraine and kept their stolen money in Western banks,” but that, after all, is precisely what Russian oligarchs have done to Russia.
Putin represents the 2014 Crimea referendum, conducted under Russian occupation and resulting in a 97 percent vote to join the Russian Federation, as entirely legitimate. By the same token, he describes the local populations of Donetsk and Lugansk as defending themselves from Ukrainian mass murder, without mentioning the many “little green men” (Russian soldiers in generic green uniforms to conceal their Russian origin) Putin sent to prosecute and control the 2014 war. “Russia has done everything to stop the fratricide,” he claims.
Putin, of course, omits the Russian bombing of civilian populations and infrastructure, the massacre at Bucha, and the abduction of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children, presumably to be brought up as Russians. Since Russian law prescribes that foreign children can be adopted only with the consent of their homeland, these Ukrainian children were granted Russian citizenship.
To appreciate Putin’s arguments, and his confidence that most Russians will agree with him, one must grasp that in Russian national mythology, Russia has never, absolutely never, fought an unjust war. On the contrary, it has always sacrificed its own interests for the sake of others.
As the eighteenth-century poet Gavriil Derzhavin wrote:
What an honor from generation to generation
For Russia, its glory indelible.
The universe saved by her,
From the new hordes.
Asked to define their own national character, very few Americans would think of their identity as warriors, as Russians typically do. In his 1898 book War in the History of the Russian World, Nikolai Sukhotin, the director of the Russian General Staff Academy, calculated that Russia had spent 353 of the past 525 years—two-thirds of its history—waging war. The Russian Orthodox Church has canonized warriors as saints simply for their military successes. Each war is really a part of one long war, every conflict is existential, and all enemies are now Nazis, which is why the excuse of “denazifying” Ukraine could seem plausible.
Putin’s most preposterous historical reconstruction, offered in the Carlson interview, concerns the origin of World War II. According to Putin, Poland was responsible for its own tragedy when the Germans invaded on September 1, 1939. That is because in 1938, when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia to annex the Sudetenland, Poland took the opportunity to seize a bit of Czech territory it claimed. As Putin tells the story, “in 1939, after Poland cooperated with Hitler—it did collaborate with Hitler, you know”—Hitler went on to demand that his Polish ally surrender the Danzig corridor separating East Prussia from the rest of Germany, and when Poland refused, the Germans invaded. In short, Poland precipitated its own destruction while the Soviet Union always behaved “honestly.”
This amazing account omits the real precipitating event, the Hitler–Stalin (Molotov–Ribbentrop) non-aggression pact of August 23, 1939. The treaty’s secret protocols, revealed at the Nuremberg trials but obvious enough from the start, gave the ussr the Baltic states and Finland, while dividing Poland. And so, on September 17, 1939, the ussr also invaded Poland, with the two partitioning powers stopping at a predetermined line and avoiding conflict with each other. For the next two years (that is, for about one third of the war), the ussr was a German ally. Although Poland had ignominiously gobbled up a piece of helpless Czechoslovakia, that had nothing to do with the German (and Soviet) invasion.
In much the same way, Putin omits the reason so many Ukrainians (and other Soviet ethnicities) joined an army under General Vlasov ready to fight alongside the Germans and, later, the victorious Western allies. Why, asked Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for the first time in Russian history, were there so many traitors? “Marx has eloquently described the poverty and suffering of the working class in England,” so why, Solzhenitsyn asks, did England produce no army of traitors, while “in our country [there were] millions?”
The reason is not far to seek: the Soviet war on the countryside from 1929–32, which was focused primarily on Ukraine. According to the authoritative history of this “war” (in which only one side was armed), Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine, more people died because of that Soviet policy than did in the entirety of World War I. Conquest begins his four-hundred-page study by observing that “in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.” The final stage of this war was an artificially created famine. All grain was removed, no food was allowed in, and the population was left to starve over the winter. People were prevented from fishing in the rivers or gathering bits of grain left in the fields. Idealistic young Bolsheviks enforced the famine. At the same time, Ukrainian cultural institutions and churches were suppressed.
Is it any wonder that people from families who survived the famine would have joined any anti-Soviet power that presented itself? “Who was more to blame [for that], those youths or the gray Fatherland?” Solzhenitsyn asked.
And is it any wonder that there have been, as Putin repeats, five waves of nato expansion? Poland pressed for admission, precisely because it (like other countries pleading to join nato) had just escaped Russian domination and foresaw the possibility—or inevitability?—of a future threat. There is a reason, after all, that while Germany has long avoided meeting its nato commitment to spend 2 percent of its gdp on defense, Poland has far exceeded it—and even exceeds the American percentage.
Putin claimed to Carlson that he would invade Poland only if Poland attacked Russia first. That was precisely the excuse the ussr gave for invading Finland on November 30, 1939: that Finland, a country of about three million, had invaded the ussr, with one hundred fifty million.
Russia has a history of expansion, under tsars, Soviets, and Putin. Ideology just provides an up-to-date excuse. Russian expansionism is conventionally dated to Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of Kazan in 1552. If we trace Russia’s (the ussr’s) boundaries in 1952, we can calculate that, on average, Russia added territory the size of Belgium every year for four hundred years—not including the Eastern European puppet states then under Soviet rule. Today the question remains why a massive state with a dizzying array of demographic, economic, and ethnic problems would try to expand its territory even further, especially into a well-defended nation such as Poland, but it is surely a possibility.
It is easy to miss the significance of a point Putin repeats in the Carlson interview: the world balance of power is changing rapidly. The United States and its allies are growing ever less powerful. In 1992, Putin explains, “the share of the G7 countries in the world economy amounted to 47 percent, whereas in 2022 it was down to, I think, a little over 30 percent.”
Calculated by purchasing-power parity, he points out, China is already a larger economy than the United States. Most significant, Putin boasts that “We are now ahead of everyone—the United States and other countries—in terms of the development of hypersonic strike systems, and we are improving them every day.”
Could this shift in the power balance explain Putin’s increasingly aggressive stance? Why would Putin incur bad publicity by killing the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, when Navalny was already in a remote Arctic prison camp? Perhaps because, after developing weapons capacity in secret, and watching the United States allow its military to be hollowed out, Russia is ready to act more aggressively than ever, alone or in concert with China and Iran.
But what has Putin to gain by that? If one considers only the well-being of a country’s citizens, the question is a fair one. But if one’s primary goal is national power, the question answers itself. The fact that few Americans understand this way of thinking makes Russian ambitions all the more frightening.
