Putin is Conducting an Ethnic Russian War in Ukraine, Not a Soviet or Civic Russian One as Some Suggest, Shusharin Argues

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 19 – Like Stalin before him, Putin has only “one objective: power,” and he is conducting his war in Ukraine on the basis, realizing as the Soviet dictator did before him that “the manipulation of stereotypes and cliches regarding Russian identity is the simplest and most reliable method of governance,” Dmitry Shusharin says.

            The Russian historian and commentator says that neither Putin nor Stalin “actually ‘dumbed down’ or ‘brainwashed’ the Russian people. To the contrary, these rulers merely capitalized on what fell effortlessly into their hands: the self-perceptions of Russians and their concept of their proper places in the world” (kasparovru.com/material.php?id=69E4BCE91BF24).

            From Stalin’s toast to the Russian people at the end of World War II to Putin’s statements in the lead up to and since the beginning of the latter’s expanded war in Ukraine, Shusharin says, there has been no real change “as long as the fundamental core of Russian identity remains intact.”

            That identity holds that Russia is fated to be a great power and to impose its will on others. If they fail to do so, the commentator says, “the Russians would not only cease to be ‘Russian’ in their own eyes, but in fact cease to ‘exist at all’ and thus forfeit their place in both the world and history.”

            This perception of the independent agency of other countries as an inherent threat to their own, of course, arises “from a fundamental lack of such subjectivity” within the Russian nation itself. Unless that changes, Russia will engage in “endless wars waged solely for the purpose of destroying the subjectivity and agency of others.”