Conflict in Ukraine ‘War of Soviet and Russian Imperial Succession,’ Plokhii Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 26 – Empires rarely die overnight as many imagined happened with the Moscow empire in 1991. Instead, their decay and ultimate demise can take decades or even centuries, Serhii Plokhii says. And consequently what is going on in Ukraine now is part of “a war about Soviet and Russian imperial succession.”

            “It is a continuation of the disintegration of the disintegration of the Russian Federation that had started during World War I, was arrested by the Bolsheviks and then continued in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union,” the director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute says (ukrainian-studies.ca/2022/09/26/interview-with-serhii-plokhy-russias-war-against-ukraine-empires-dont-die-overnight/).

            “The fact that Putin is back on the international scene with ideas that come from the Russian Empire, from imperial Russian thinkers, is just one more indication that long-range history is at play here,” Plokhii says – and one more indication that what is happening in Ukraine is not something isolated from imperial decay but very much part of it.

“As the result of this war,” he continues, “there will be less and less incentive for anyone in Russia, but also in Ukraine, to subscribe to Putin’s imperial ideology of Russia and Ukraine being one of the same people and one of the same nation. So this war really puts an end to that sort of rhetoric” and will “hopefully” lead to the formation of post-imperial nations.”

            And what this means is that the current war is yet “another bloody step on the long, long road of the disintegration of the Russian Empire.” At the very least, it points to “the eventual end of that process. We know that empires collapse and that imperial nations reinvent themselves as nation states.”

            But “we also know from history that, unfortunately, this takes time and is very often accompanied by bloody wars.”