History repeats? The danger of historical justifications in matters of state and nation.
The invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces at the end of last month has spawned an industry of think pieces. Comparisons to historic events, times, people, and peoples have been a useful, if not fraught means of attempting to explain something which to most people under 40 seems unexplainable. The End of History, the oft scoffed at thesis of Francis Fukuyama, has well and truly been put to bed. This conflict marks the return of war on the European continent, modern military vs modern military, great power politics, defensive alliances, and nuclear deterrents. Join these familiar concepts from history with those experienced in developing states when foreign powers stick their hands where they shouldn’t be: drone combat, digital misinformation, cybersecurity, and economic sanctions, or economic warfare depending on the viewpoint.
Two periods in particular have been popular throwbacks in our current situation. Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and the resulting world war that it produced, and the Cold War competition between the previous iteration of the Russian state, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Neither comparison really matches the reality of Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, yet neither is completely bereft of important similarities.
In many ways, this conflict’s creation of millions of petty historians has been apt considering that many believe that Vladimir Putin has been dabbling in the subject himself. Much of the conflict seems to stem from Putin’s erroneous view of the history of states, peoples, and nations. In his announcement before the invasion on February 24th, he made clear his belief that Ukraine was not a real state, that it was indelibly tied to the history of Russia, and that any attempt to legitimize a separate people in Ukraine from the people in Russia would be nothing more than pure creation or fantasy.
The fantasy of nationalism is laced throughout the conflict. Putin’s early miscalculations seems to indicate that he believes what he said about Ukraine and Ukrainians. The early misstep of accidentally publishing a glowing op-ed in one of Russia’s state controlled newspapers laying out the ways in which Putin has solved the Ukrainian problem once and for all belied a belief in the Kremlin that the Ukrainians would not actually fight for their independence because they themselves did not believe it to be true. Obviously this is not the way in which the conflict has played out considering we are nearing a month since it’s inception and Ukraine still controls its own capital as well as most major cities.
Putin’s conception of nationalism pretends that there must be historic justifications for territorial claims. But nationalism really is little more than construction from a set of environmental factors. The whole idea that particular nations can trace their history back hundreds or thousands of years is difficult to ever actually prove. It is the primary conceit of nationalism: that the nation has roots which provide not only a narrative story, but a sense of shared continuity. Personification of the nation means that territories once lost to a state that claims to represent a nation should therefore be returned to their ‘rightful’ owner. When we think of the nation as being a person, we blind ourselves to the messy reality of statecraft. There is a through-line between the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, to today’s Russian Federation, all three were widely multi-national states led almost exclusively by Russian speakers. But there is no reality in which the Russian nation is necessarily owed lands which they once held by the Russian Empire. That state does not exist anymore and Putin’s attempt to resurrect it is the dangerous end of revanchist nationalism.
Ukrainians national history is complicated, like most national histories. Russia and Ukraine share a history, both are like peoples speaking similar Slavic languages. Ethnically both nations have mixed back and forth substantially, probably more alike than otherwise. Ukraine traces its modern conception back to the Cossacks, an East Slavic cohort, who lived in present central Ukraine and fought to release themselves from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In doing so, they asked their neighbor, the Tsar of the Muscovite Rus to act as suzerain. Essentially they traded independence from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for military protection from the rapidly growing Muscovite state which would soon come to be the Russian Tsardom. Eventually, Russian Tsarina Catherine the Great would abolish the independent status of Ukraine within the empire and remove all autonomy from the former Cossack state. This would hold until the Russian Civil War in 1917 in which Ukraine would break free and declare itself an independent republic. However, this only lasted for three short years before the new Soviet government in Moscow would forcibly take Ukraine back under the control of Russian hands. The Soviets did recognize Ukraine as a constituent republic thus giving back some level of control to the people living in the lands north of the Black Sea.
The Ukrainian SSR managed to play a major role in the dissolution of the Soviet state. First came the meltdown of the Chernobyl Nuclear plant 1986, an incident which the Soviets in Moscow attempted to cover up and led to even greater distrust among members of the Ukrainian Soviet. In late August, the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine (essentially the executive of the constituent state) declared independence and put a referendum to the people who voted overwhelmingly to remain independent. The new Republic of Ukraine was nearly immediately recognized and the rest of the Soviet Union would shortly thereafter collapse entirely.
From a revanchist personalistic national framework, the annexation of Ukraine back into the Russian state seems deeply justified. This is a territory and people who have lived under the rule of Russians for the better part of the last 400 years. Putin clearly fantasizes about the Russia that has been lost, the Russia that no longer exists. He’s spoken in the past about the great tragedy of the fall of the Soviet Union. He’s also talked at length about the failures of the Soviet state. From these two competing visions it becomes clear that for Putin, the ideology of the state does not matter, only projecting power and placing Russia atop the world stage matters. He longs for his state to have the same power and sway it had during the Cold War, he longs to be known as the state that fought off Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler. Strength for Russia and Russia alone is most important. It is a politics we struggle to recognize after thirty years of American hegemony.
But if we take a realists’ perspective on nationalism then we can see why Ukraine has proven to be a far more worthy adversary to Russian aggression. To claim nationhood, one need not simply look to historical power for one’s people. For Ukraine in many ways their conception of nationhood springs from repression from successive Russian states. First the Russian Empire, then the Soviet Union, and now the Russian Federation have all used power to force Ukrainians into positions of subservience. This shared history is what drives Ukrainians to fight to the last breath against a foe who looks like them, speaks like them, and culturally behaves like them. There are no hard and fast rules for what makes a nation. Nations are creations of the people who they are made up of. It is a collective decision making process, not a forgone conclusion of history.
When Vladimir Putin says the Ukrainian state doesn’t exist because the Ukrainian people don’t exist, he is attempting to warp the history of Ukrainian subservience to successive Russian states into an assimilation program. But as much as he wishes Ukrainians did not see themselves as such and instead adopted the moniker of Russian, it is not of Putin’s ability to change those people’s minds. His invasion will not help him in his desire to integrate two similar neighbor nations, instead this conflict will further drive a wedge between the two people, hammering out clear differences between invader and invaded, between aggressor and defender.
The history written of this conflict will surely look different than the experiences coming out of it in the present. How this conflict reshapes geo-politics and the post-cold war alignment are impossible to predict. It probably won’t have the same effects as the 1939 invasion of Czechoslovakia, nor will it result in complete isolation between two distinct ideological blocs like the Cold War. But there are lessons to be learned from past conflicts in Europe and its long peace that was probably far more unstable then we had been led to believe.
However the conflict shakes out, and the long lasting ramifications that it will surely have, one thing I’m confident in declaring is that Ukrainian nationhood is now a firm reality, regardless of what Vladimir Putin has decided to believe.
