USSR was Not the Russian State Kremlin is Promoting, Ukrainian Historian Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 14 – Many people following the Kremlin’s line now conflate the concepts of Soviet and Russian when it comes to Soviet times, Sergiy Pasichnik says; but such an approach is “not only historically inaccurate but also fundamentally distorts the very nature of the Soviet project.”

            The Ukrainian historian at Kyiv’s Academy of Strategic Research says that before 1991, “millions of people of widely diverse nationalities … perceived themselves first and foremost as ‘Soviet people,” an identity that was “not ethnic in nature but rather imperial and civilizational” ( region.expert/supra-ethnic/).

            This is a critical distinction and reflects the fact that “the USSR was not a Russian nation-state in the European sense of the term,” but rather “a vast supra-ethnic project that sought to forge a new collective identity.” That means that “the creators of Soviet culture cannot be automatically classified as ‘Russian.’”

            All too often, people in the West “oversimplify this picture out of inertia and view the USSR merely as ‘historical Russia,’” but within the post-Soviet Russian Federation, Pasichnik continues, “this conflation has long since evolved into a deliberate state policy” with “everything Soviet being reinterpreted as exclusively ‘Russian.’”

            This represents “the symbolic appropriation of a vast shared heritage,” he argues, suggesting that “it is critical to distinguish between ethnic and imperial cultures. An ethnic culture belongs to a specific people,” while “an imperial one unites a multitude of peoples within the framework of a shared political and cultural system.”

            Individuals “may well belong at one and the same time to both of these levels of identity;” but the problem in the Russian Federation now is that the post-Soviet regime “failed to try to create a new, fully realized supra-ethnic model,” something that could have happened but didn’t.

            Had the country’s leaders take a different course, “the Muscovite component would have been merely onde element among many, alongside the Siberian, Uralic, Far Eastern, Pomor, Tatar, Caucasian and other distinct regional-cultural worlds,” with the Russian language remaining “the lingua franca” for all but without seeking to trying to culturally absorb them.

But, the Ukrainian historian says, “Moscow chose a different path. Instead of forging a new civic identity, a gradual restoration of an archaic imperial model began—characterized by a cult of the center, ‘spiritual bonds,’ the sacralization of the state, and the concept of ‘ the Russian World.’"

“As a result, the federation is increasingly perceived not as a union of diverse peoples, but rather as an instrument of assimilation under the dominance of a single political and cultural group. This is precisely why the modern Russian project has reached a dead end.”

Moscow is trying “to maintain an imperial scale while structuring itself around a narrow, ethnocentric model. Yet vast territories cannot be effectively held together solely by means of ethnic nationalism—particularly in Eurasia, a region historically based on the complex coexistence of cultures, languages, and civilizations.”

“In all likelihood, any future integration project could only emerge in the form of a broad confederal system,” Pasichnik says. This would not be a new empire, but rather a space for cooperation among diverse regions and peoples, wherein no single identity lays claim to absolute dominance.”

Russia has a chance to do this until the rise of Putin; but his “reliance on revanchism, militarism, and the myth of ‘the Russian world’ has destroyed that chance” and means that “instead of becoming a potential hub for European integration, Russia has “transformed itself into a source of division and conflict.”