Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 24 – The central
Russian narrative on the emergence of the three modern nations of Russians,
Ukrainians and Belarusians, a narrative on which Vladimir Putin relies, is that
there was a single Russian nation a millennium ago and that Ukrainians and
Belarusians were byproducts of Russian ethnogenesis, the result of outside
interference.
That narrative has been shown to be
false by numerous historians and ethnographers: a millennium ago, there was no
separate Russian nation, and neither it nor its Ukrainian or Belarusian
counterpart emerged under several centuries later, arising out of various east
Slavic tribes.
What Russian writers can point to is
the fact that those whom they call Russians had an articulated state for almost
all of that period while Ukrainians had a state for only about half of it and
Belarusians for only a tiny fraction of that millennium, yet another Russian
confusion of ethnic and state development that Moscow has long promoted.
Ukrainian historians have long
challenged the Moscow version of reality, and Belarusian writers are doing the
same, casting doubt on the Russian version of reality and provoking anger among
some Russians who recognize that Moscow stands to lose far more if it loses
this debate about events of centuries ago than it might seem at first glance.
In an article in “Russkaya planeta” yesterday,
Yury Glushakov says that “ever more frequently” Belarusian scholars and popular
writers are “casting doubt” on “the common history of the Belarusian, Russian
and Ukrainian peoples,” projecting the existence of the first further and
further into the past and downplaying the role of the state in ethnogenesis (rusplt.ru/world/belorusskie-protiv-drevnerusskih-11469.html).
On the one hand, the Russian writer
says, the appearance of such books reflects commercial calculations: people are
more likely to buy books which debunk older ideas or promise to “reveal” new
ones. But on the other, he insists, it
is an ideological challenge to Russia because it insists that the commonalities
of the three Slavic nations are “no more than a myth … thought up in the
Russian Empire and then strengthened, modernized, and used in the Soviet Union.”
There is a range of views within
this new Belarusian trend, Glushkov says. Some Belarusian “national romantics”
say that Belarusians have existed since Kievan times. Others insist that the
Belarusians were never Slavs at all but instead “Balts who accepted under
certain historical circumstances a Slavic language and by blood have little in
common with the Slavs.”
These various Belarusian views have been
around for some time, the Russian writer says. The “founding fathers” of them,
Vsevolod Ignatovsky and Vatslav Lastovsky, were exposed by Stalin as “’bourgeois
nationalists’” in the 1930s. But these “academic” ideas are not what is really
at stake, he continues.
Many Belarusian “national romantics”
believe that they can provide support for “the sovereignty of contemporary
Belarus” by pointing to the emergence of a Belarusian nation earlier than or at
least apart from “the medieval ancient Russian nationality.” And they see
Kievan Rus as the forefather of Ukraine not of Russia.
Glushkov discusses
and then dismisses Belarusian commentaries on Slavic ethnogenesis, with the core
of his argument being that the Russians had a state while the Belarusians did
not and therefore the Russians became a nation much earlier and would have
absorbed those who call themselves Belarusians had it not been for outside
actors like Lithuania and Poland.
And for all the details that he
offers, Glushkov shows himself to be but the latest example of the longstanding
Russian confusion between nation building and state building and of those in
Moscow, Putin among them, who fear that if the other Slavs do have states, they
will become separate nations, and that this process must be stopped before it
goes any further.
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