Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 28 – Yesterday, Kyiv took another big step on the road to the
West by signing an association agreement with the European Union, and Moscow not
unexpectedly responded by saying it would do everything it can to punish
Ukraine for making that civilizational choice and force it to reconsider.
Part of Moscow’s effort in that
regard is to suggest that Kyiv’s decision is the product of outside influence
rather than a reflection of genuine Ukrainian aspirations, that it is something
that doesn’t reflect the long-term national interests of Ukraine, and that
despite all that it has happened, Ukraine will return to the Russian world.
But such arguments, however much
they may be believed in Russia or accepted by some in the West, are simply
propaganda and ignore the reality that Ukraine made a European choice already
800 years ago at a time when Russia made a Eurasian one and that the current
conflict between Kyiv and Moscow is the latest working out of those two very
different choices.
Aleksey Shiropayev,
a Russian regionalist, has made this argument in a series of articles and
speeches over the past six months, most recently at a conference at Moscow’s
Sakharov Center earlier this month (youtube.com/watch?v=1907E5YjJ
Russians are “always prepared to recognize
in words that Ukrainians are a people,” he sys but they insist on adding that
it is a “fraternal” one, a formulat which conceals their “firm conviction that “Russians
and Ukrainians are ONE people, which is called to live in one state with a
capital in Moscow.”
Indeed, Shiropayev continues, “the
majority of Russians” are dismissive of the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian
identity and suggest they are nothing more than the product of Lithuanian and
Polish conspiracies against Russia. What Russians do not accept is that their
own choices and not those of anyone else lie behind Ukrainians as a separate
and distinct nation.
“Already in th 13th
century, two opposed historial vectors which defined the future formation of
the Ukrainian and Russian peoples were marked one. The firt vector was a
struggle with the Horde in alliance with Europe; the second, a struggle with
Europe in alliance with the Horde.”
These vectors were personified by
Daniil Galitsky and Aleksandr Nevsky, Shiropayev says. Daniil Galitsky chose the former course, “a
natural and logical one at the cultural-historical level,” and Aleksandr Nevsky
chose the latter, “a most profound perversion with far-reaching consequences.”
That
choice is at the origin of all subsequent relations between Ukrainians and
Russians. As a reflection of this “civilizational” choice, it can even be
called “people-forming,” for just as Daniil Galitsky made a different choice
than Aleksandr Nevsky, so too Ukrainians have chosen law, freedom and property
rather than their opposites as Russians have.
“If
Ukrainian self-consciousness has historically drawn it to Europe, traditional
Russian self-consciousness conceived Europe to a greater or lesser degree with
hostility, distrust and envy, the opposite site of which” is expressed in
Russian messianism and Russian dismissals of “’the rotting West.’”
For Russians, but not for Ukrainians, “Europe is ‘a
paradise lost,’ from which they were taken away” by the horde. And it is “precisely this conflict between an
initial European nature and a history and culture imposed by Asianism [which]
has defined the Russian psychological type, with all its complexes and phobias.”
“All Russian neuroses, from
drunkenness to Bolshevism – come from there,” Shiropayev argues. “Having lost
Europe, Russians wanted not simply to forget it;” they wanted to defeat it. And
this “psychological and mental perversion is called Russian patriotism.”
Despite
Moscow’s efforts to pull Ukraine away from Europe and into its own Asiatic
orbit, Ukraine “thanks to Lithuania and Poland has preserved in itself an
attachment to Europe,” Shiropayev says. Indeed, it has “preserved itself as Rus
in the genuine sense of this term,” in the sense it existed before Moscow and
Nevsky made their choice.
Russia
and Russians in contrast “degenerated into Muscovy, having lost their
immemorial civilizational identity.” Had that not happened, Russians “would not
live in Europe and would not have behind them the GULAG” and all the rest of
this Asiatic background. “And the
history of Europe itself would be different.”
“In
the final analysis,” the Russian regionalist says “the cultural-historical
beginnings of Russians and Ukrainians are completely different even
contradictory.” The two peoples began as close brothers but the former turned
away from Europe and has continued to try to force the latter to do the same.
Russians,
Shiropayev insists, “are dangerous” because they carry within themselves a
destructive quality that at an instinctive level “all who live to the West” of
Russia -- the Ukrainians, the Balts and now the Belarusians—understand and are
repelled by. “On the other hand,” the Chinese are not, and Russia is turning in
their direction.
“It
is time,” is concludes, for Russians “to recognize that Ukraine’s acquisition
of independence is legitimate. It is an act of historical justice” Russians
should not just come to terms with but welcome. Ukraine is “really another
country, a real abroad,” and accepting that is “a key to [Russian]
self-consciousness, self-criticism, and self-liberation.”
Indeed, this
acceptance is “a precondition for the birth of a new Russian mentality without
imperial and anti-Western stereotypes. If this will happen, all [of Russia’s]
vision of history and the world will be changed. Ukraine as it were holds up a
mirror before Russians. It is necessary
to look honestly and dispassionately” at what it shows.
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