Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 28 – Many Russians
believe and many in the West accept the notion that Ukrainians and Belarusians
are offshoots of the formation and growth of the Russian nation, a reflection
of a sometimes innocent confusion between nation building and state building but
often as now the result of Kremlin efforts to rewrite history to justify current
actions.
The conviction that Ukrainians and Belarusians
are byproducts of Russian nation building is based on the idea that Kievan Rus
was a Russian state and that the Russian nation can thus trace its origins to
the tenth century or even earlier and that this makes the Russian nation not
only older than but the seedbed out of which Ukrainians and Belarusians arose.
But that notion about Russian
ethno-genetic primacy is simply false and is recognized as such by the best Russian and Western historians. In the tenth century and for several
hundred years thereafter, as they write, there were no Russians or Ukrainians or Belarusians
as such. Instead, there were members of a large number of East Slavic tribes
who identified with localities or faiths.
None of them was a nation in the modern
sense. And for politicians or commentators to claim otherwise is to engage in the
worst kind of anachronistic thinking, of projecting the present onto the past
in order to change the future.
The reality is this: The three great
Eastern Slavic nations emerged at approximately the same time during the Mongol
conquest and can legitimately trace their distinct ethnic histories back to the
13th and 14th centuries.
Where they diverged both then and later was in their ability to
articulate and support a state.
For all of the intervening period,
there has been a Russian state. For only about half of it has there been a
Ukrainian one. And for only brief periods has there been a Belarusian
state. That gave the Russian nation
certain advantages – the state could impose a common language via schools and
the army – but it did not make the Russian nation older than the other two.
False claims about the primacy of the
Russian nation and the derivative nature of the Ukrainian and Belarusian ones
were reinforced for many by the fact that for much of the modern period, the
Russian state in one of its various permutations occupied both Ukraine and
Belarus and attempted with some success to impose the Russian language, the
Russian church, and other attributes of Russian culture.
But again, that says something about the
state not about the nation, despite the efforts of Putin and his acolytes to
blur this distinction.
Treating the state as the primary
actor in ethno-genetic history is no surprise in the Russian case. On the one
hand, the Russians for centuries have been a nation defined by the state rather
than a nation state in which the people as an ethnic community pre-existed the
state and defined its existence.
And on the other, this view reflects
the continuing impact of Friedrich Engels on post-Soviet thinking. Even more
than his partner Karl Marx, Engels argued that the peoples of the world are
divided between “historical” nations who have a state and will survive and “ahistorical”
ones who don’t and won’t.
Vladimir Putin’s suggestions over
the past five years that the Ukrainian state is not a real state and that the
Ukrainians are an offshoot of Russian ethno-genetic development, suggestions
that he is likely to extend to the Belarusians as well when he turns his
attention to Mensk, are products of this conception.
Tragically, instead of countering Putin’s
false claims in this as in other areas, many in the West have implicitly or in
some cases explicitly accepted them, thus intentionally or not providing
support for the Kremlin leader’s aggressive moves against Ukraine -- or at
least depriving those who are resisting those moves of a powerful means of
opposing them.
No comments:
Post a Comment