Putin’s War in Ukraine Product of Three Core Myths of Russian Culture, Zorin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 29 – Three core myths of Russian culture, a belief that there can be a sudden and great transformation, that a real leader is someone who can change defeat into victory, and that this course of events is impossible if the body of the people is divided, lie behind Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, Andrey Zorin says.

            The Russian historian at Oxford says that these myths are especially strong when they resonate with one another as they are doing now and that they are especially prone to generate violent conflict when they come into contact with a nation, like the Ukrainian, which has fundamentally different myths (meduza.io/feature/2022/03/30/ustarevshie-predstavleniya-stanovyatsya-ne-teoreticheskim-zabluzhdeniem-a-obosnovaniem-massovogo-ubiystva-lyudey).

            “For Russian culture,” Zorin continues, “a constant sense of mortal danger and threats is characteristic,” dangers and threats which then can be overcome by “a real tsar” who faced with defeat can transform it more or less instantly into victory, often by reuniting parts of the community that have fallen away.

            He argues that “official Russian ideology and propaganda has won the battle for the interpretation of the events of 1989-1991” and that those events are no longer viewed as the liberation of Russia from neo-Stalinism but as “a defeat inflicted by the West in the Cold War” and even more a defeat caused by “the worst of all possible means, deception.”

            An unspoken basis for this view is the notion that Russia and the West had “some kind of contract” according to which Russia would give up its empire and in exchange would suddenly become part of the West and live as well as people in the West do. “We kept our part of the bargain, but the West didn’t.”

            Just as the perestroika generation of leaders were people who grew up and were formed in the 1960s and believed in the West, the current Putin generation consists of people who were formed in the Brezhnev era, “a time when the revolutionary ideology of communist universalism finally was driven out by the idea of Russian national-imperial messianism.”

            When the dreams of the people of the 1960s failed after 1991, this generation was prepared not only to reject those dreams but to see what happened as the result of outside actors rather than domestic circumstances, to blame the West for betrayal and consequently to seek revenge, Zorin argues.

            This mythological vision has deeper roots than any ideology. Ideology may play to or be based on them but such visions inform how a nation views itself and what ideas it will accept or not, the historian continues. Now, all three core elements of Russian mythology have come together in Ukraine.

            And that sets the stage for an existential conflict because Ukrainian national myths are fundamentally different. At their basis is “not the figure of ‘the real tsar,’ but rather Cossack military democracy” – and that notion is not only different from the Russian but in direct contradiction with it.