Putin’s War in Ukraine Not Unimportantly about Imposing Moscow’s Understanding of ‘People’ on Others, Gubin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 28 – “In Russia, words taken from the European lexicon often have a completely different meaning,” Dmitry Gubin says, something that needs to be recognized by both Russians and others. This is especially true of words like “people” and “nation,” that is in German Volk and Nation.

            A people in the West is “above all about a group’s horizontal ties – social, neighborhood, professional, political, cultural and so on when people without being pressured from the outside began to act as a single organism,” the Berlin-based writer says. In that context, “government is simply a structure” hired to do what the people want (graniru.org/opinion/m.286481.html).

            In Russia, in contrast, “the people is not about horizontal ties. It is a community of language and history, and very often, a unity of race.” That explains the suspicious “and in fact idiotic” Russian tendency to say things like unlike in Russia, “in Europe the white man will not no longer remain.”

            “For ‘a people,’ in the Russian understanding what is important is the color of skin and the slant of eyes. For Russians in the metropolitan center, people like Rishi Sunak or Sadik Khan aren’t Englishmen. For Russians, these politicians instead are clear examples of the erosion and corrosion of the English people.”

             According to Gubin, “from this perspective, Putin’s war in Ukraine is a war conducted so that all peoples of Europe will exist exclusively in the Russian sense” and not in the sense such groups have in other countries. Russians have convinced themselves that they are defending Europe from falling into an abyss. In fact, it is Russia that is headed that way.

 This difference in perspective on what a people is has far-reaching consequences. Russians aren’t behaving toward the war in Ukraine the way Americans did toward the war in Vietnam. Instead, “Russians are behaving the same way as they did during the pandemic,” disturbed only about its consequences for themselves and without empathy for Ukraine.

             “The absence of horizontal ties within one’s own country deprives individuals of both empathy and solidarity toward everything outside that country, Gubin argues. It means that for Russians, the world is divided as it was in the Middle Ages into “ours” which resembles us by race, language and history and “others” who differ on those measures.

             Once that is recognized, the commentator continues, it is clear that it is “time to stop deifying the Russians. They “are simply a state-occupied, fragmented, disenfranchised, poorly educated and poorly self-aware population which can sometimes be sympathized with but in no case should be indulged.”

             And for Russians who have moved abroad, it is time to insist that they stop trying to clutch to the idea of their uniqueness and rather ask them to master and assimilate to the world around them. That is, they must undergo Europeanization, Americanization, Englishization, Frenchization and Germanization depending on where they live.

             That means they must cultivate the horizontal ties they don’t have at home and make them rather than some racialist state definition the definition of who and what they are. If they do, they might at some point be able to make a contribution to saving their own homeland from the abyss Putin is now driving it toward.