Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 16 – Russians who
have been accustomed since Soviet times to referring dismissively to Ukrainians
as their “young brothers” must now face up to the reality that the Ukrainians
are proving far more grown up and mature than themselves, according to Mikhail
Shishkin, a prominent Russian writer whose mother is a Ukrainian and whose
father is Russian.
In an article in the Swiss
newspaper, “Le Temps,” Shishkin argues that Russians and Ukrainians are truly “fraternal
peoples” who share not only much in common culturally and historically but who are
in many cases the product of ethnically mixed marriages like himself (inopressa.ru/article/14Mar2014/letemps/shishkin.html).
Despite that, “Russia has for a long
time treated Ukrainians and the Ukrainian language condescendingly,” he
continues. On the one hand, Russians are in some ways delighted with Ukrainians
for their vitality and other qualities. But on the other, they assume that
Ukrainians “must listen to the elder, learn from him, and try to be like him.”
But “over the last few months, which
have changed the course of history, Russians have seen that Ukrainians are not
like that at all. The ‘younger brother’ has turned out to be more mature than
the elder. Ukrainians have been able to say to a government of thieves, ‘get
out!’ but we haven’t been able to.” As a result, Russians are envious.
“The democratic revolution in
Ukraine began with a war against symbols: on the squares of the cities of the country
fell the monuments to Lenin. Butwith us in Russia and in the Russian-speaking
regions of Ukraine, [these] Lenins remained on the squares and in [our] heads,”
despite more than 20 years after the fall of communism.
“Each people is a hostage of its symbols,”
Shishkin continues. “In Russia, St.
Petersburg still is situated in Leningrad oblast, and [the country’s] super-modern
train carries you to the city of Derzhinsk, which bears the name of the chief
hangman of the country. The life of
people is defined by the symbols surrounding them.”
Moreover,
“whatever the ruling dictatorship has been – Orthodox, Communist and now again
Orthodox – the [Russian] regime has always used patriotism for the manipulation
of people,” the Russian writer says.
That hasn’t changed. Indeed, in the television propaganda of recent
weeks, it has become if anything even worse.
For
the regime, war, “hot” or “cold,” Shishkin argues, is a means of keeping itself
in power, and “for any dictatorship, enemies are manna from heaven” which
allows the empire to continue to survive, although defeats like the one in
Afghanistan “accelerated the death of the USSR.”
One
of his childhood friends died in Afghanistan, the writer says. People said that
he had died “defending the Motherland.”
That is what we told his mother, but we had no answer to her tearful question:
“What motherland? What motherland?”
Moscow
and many Russians do not appear to have learned the lesson of that war,
Shishkin suggests, and “today we are confronted with a repetition of the same
suicidal scenario.” Apparently, it is a law of life that “a dictatorship lives
by a lie” about “invented enemies” and “dies when it begins to believe in its
own lie.”
It
is painful to watch those who are waving the Russian tri-color and shouting “’Russia!’
with tears in their eyes,” he says. As so
often in history, they are being “used and betrayed.” Indeed, the path that
Russia is following just now “will lead them to a police state” and further
disaster.
“The
undeclared war with Ukraine,” Shishkin says, “is a good pretext [for the
regime] in Russia to finally suppress an independent civil society and set up a
harsh police regime. Militarism, a hunt
for internal enemies, a struggle with ‘traitors,’ and mass patriotic propaganda
have already become our reality,” he adds.
And
he concludes by referring to Aleksandr Galich’s observation after the Soviet
intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
At that time, the poet said: “Citizens. The Fatherland is in Danger!
[Precisely because] our tanks are on foreign land.” Tragically, Shishkin suggests, Moscow is
making the same mistake again.
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