So rivetted am I by the Russian invasion of Ukraine that I actually dreamed I was there, helping someone who was rescuing displaced cats. It may yet prove to be the third great crisis of our lifetimes, along with the pandemic and the even more destructive ecological meltdown. I knew little about the region, except that it had been invaded and fought over innumerable times – so often that historian Timothy Snyder titled his book on it “Bloodlands”. So here are a few things I found.
Putin’s fateful, appalling and ill-conceived invasion is just one of a very, very long series.
In the year 370 it
was the Huns.
In 882 it was the
Varangians (no, I’m not sure where they came from, either).
In 1240, the Mongols
sacked Kyiv; many fled to other countries. Five years later, the papal envoy Giovanni
da Pian del Carpine reported:
"They
destroyed cities and castles and killed men and Kyiv, which is the greatest
Russian city they besieged; and when they had besieged it a long while they
took it and killed the people of the city. So when we went through that country
we found countless human skulls and bones from the dead scattered over the
field. Indeed it had been a very great and populous city and now is reduced
almost to nothing. In fact there are hardly two hundred houses there now and
the people are held in the strictest servitude."[
In the 1470s a
then-powerful Lithuanian/Polish combination did it again. At that time, ‘Rus’
to the east barely registered on the map.
In 1793 Catherine
the Great invaded Ukraine, just one of several Russian autocrats who would
exert dominance over an area that at one time formed the very heart of Russia,
at other times opted for fierce independence, and at others still were as nasty
to their neighbours as anyone. The tsarist ambition for a Greater Russia in
some ways was merely continued by the Communists after 1917. This new-ish
national sensibility was forged in contradistinction from the ‘West’, upon
whose cultural coat-tails Russia had long and ambivalently dangled. The West helped
stoke Russian antipathy and fear by themselves invading occasionally: Napoleon
in 1812, others a century later in the aftermath of World War I, when Russia
endured a gruelling civil war. Canadian scholar Orest Subtelny wrote:
In 1919 total chaos
engulfed Ukraine. Indeed, in the modern history of Europe no country
experienced such complete anarchy, bitter civil strife, and total collapse of
authority as did Ukraine at this time. Six different armies-– those of the
Ukrainians, the Bolsheviks, the Whites, the Entente [French], the Poles and the
anarchists – operated on its territory. Kyiv changed hands five times in less
than a year. Cities and regions were cut off from each other by the numerous
fronts. Communications with the outside world broke down almost completely. The
starving cities emptied as people moved into the countryside in their search
for food. [Quotations courtesy Wikipedia]
One of the worst was
in 1941, when the Nazis rumbled through, levelling cities and shipping tens of
thousands off to the gas-ovens. The Soviet response and backwash over Ukraine
was almost as vicious; and it wasn’t long before Stalin’s policy of compulsory collectivisation
starved millions more Ukrainians to death.
So one can imagine a
cold-blooded Putin saying: “Why is everyone getting so excited? This has
happened before!” One can see him choosing to model his attitude on a
particular moment of Russian historical pride – Peter the Great, perhaps –
spiced with KGB-trained Cold War paranoia, centuries-old resentment of
perceived inferiority to the West, and fears of yet another encroachment, this
time by NATO. He seems motivated, in short, by a monumental myth – and as
Roland Barthes argued a long time ago, such myths are the greatest motivators
of all. Napoleon had his myth, too; so did the British Empire, as Caroline
Elkins shows in her magisterial new book, Legacy
of Violence. Such myths serve to deny, justify, legalise or cover up acts
of terrible violence inflicted on subject peoples. Putin’s propaganda is
nothing new; every empire, every power structure, has one.
This is not in any
way to justify the present invasion, which will deliver good to no one much except
the arms manufacturers. Not even to Russia. And of course the situation today,
due to the presence of thousands of nuclear warheads, looks more dangerous than
any of those previous occasions.
What seems most
mysterious to us now, perhaps, is why so many within Russia (and some outside) seem
to swallow that myth and propaganda, even publicly support it.
I found myself going
back to a book I’d read maybe 30 years ago, by the Nobel Prize-winning Polish
poet Czeslav Milosz. Poland has been through much the same turbulent history as
neighbouring Ukraine, the same spasms of national and linguistic pride and
independence, the same kind of incorporation into that one-time ‘Greater
Russia’ that Putin seems set on reinstating. In his book The Captive Mind, first published in 1953, Milosz explores in
detail how complex is that ‘submission’ to the autocratic state. Not a simple
belief in the propaganda, not a simple sense of numbed victimhood, not even a
simple survival strategy for potential dissenters; but something of all of
these, varying from individual to individual. Milosz is concerned mostly with
intellectuals and writers, especially from Poland, who had to find ways of
accommodating themselves to Stalin’s hyper-surveillance. (To understand just
how intense that surveillance was, read Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, or Orlando Figes’ grimly
absorbing study of everyday lives under Stalin, The Whisperers. There are moments I feel a little in sympathy with
Putin’s sneering at ‘the decadence of the West’, but however messy and
hypocritical democracy can get, the Stalin-style alternative is just
unacceptably terrifying.)
What strikes me
about Milosz’s book, even after 70 years, is how often it’s eerily prescient of
today’s situation, unsettlingly parallel. Here are just some of the passages I picked out. A key component of the syndrome is Russia’s suspicious
disdain for the West – far from new to Putin & Co. Despite the West’s
technological superiority,
[The] Eastern intellectual asks, what goes on in the heads
of the Western masses? Aren’t their souls asleep ... isn’t Christianity dying
out in the West, and aren’t its people bereft of all faith? ... Don’t they fill
that void with chauvinism, detective stories, and artistically worthless
movies? ... One has but to read
Tolstoi’s What is Art? to get a
picture of the scorn for Western sophistication that is so typical of the Russians.
[The Russian] must break that habit of imitation which was inevitable as long
as French, English or Belgian capital, investing in the mines, railroads and
factories [add, today, oil and gas] of the ‘Eastern Marches’, pushed its books,
films and styles upon them. ... “
According to Stalin’s version of Marxism, the West is
doomed: “The bourgeoisie rules through demagoguery, which in practice means
that prominent positions are filled by irresponsible people who commit follies
in moments of indecision.” [Trump? Johnson?] Hence, the average Russian is
subjected to propaganda that “tries by every means to prove that Nazism and
Americanism are identical in that they are products of the same economic conditions...”
Putin seems to have bought this line entirely, relying on outdated philosophers
who punt a Russian version of America’s “Manifest Destiny”, but a faith
avowedly founded on pure reason and historical inevitability.
“The philosophy of History emanating from Moscow is not just
an abstract theory; it is a material force that uses guns, tanks, planes, and
all the machines of war and oppression. All the crushing might of an armed
state is hurled against any man who refuses to accept the New [Stalinist, or
Putinist] Faith. ... What is happening in Russia and the countries dependent upon
her bespeaks a kind of insanity, but it is not impossible that Russia will
manage to impose her insanity upon the whole world ...”
Milosz writes of the 1950s, but it is uncannily being
reproduced today. Under such pressures of history, surveillance, external
curbing of dissenting voices, internal self-censorship and guilt, little wonder
that many find ways to ‘go along’, quietly harbouring any doubts while publicly
writing odes to the Leader. It is not just a matter of lying to save one’s skin
or position.
“Finding oneself in
the midst of an historical cyclone, one must behave as prudently as possible
... All [one’s] intellectual and emotional capacities are put to the test. ...What
can be said openly is often much less interesting than the emotional magic of
defending one’s private sanctuary. For most people the necessity of living in
constant tension and watchfulness is a torture, but many intellectuals accept
this necessity with masochistic pleasure. [And] even the enclosing fence
affords the solace of reverie.”
This gives just a flavour of the subtlety and complexity
with which Milosz unpacks the mentalities of people, especially poets and
intellectuals, who find themselves caught up in the periodic whirlwinds of the
“bloodlands.” It makes the courage of Pussy Riot and Navalny all the more
remarkable – but look what’s happened to them. I suppose if there is any hope
arising from this tortuous history, it’s that although these cities have been
flattened time and again, time and again they’ve also been rebuilt. May the
present-day sites of horror – the suddenly-household names of Kyiv, Bucha,
Kharkiv, Mariupol – be similarly restored.
As for Milosz the poet, he refuses to give in to despair.
“The war years taught me that a man should not take a pen in
his hands merely to communicate to others his own despair and defeat. This is
too cheap a commodity; it takes too little effort to produce it for a man to
pride himself on having done so. Whoever saw, as many did, a whole city reduced
to rubble – kilometres of streets on which there remained no trace of life, not
even a cat, not even a homeless dog – emerged with a rather ironic attitude
towards descriptions of the hell of the big city by contemporary poets,
descriptions of the hell in their own souls. A real “wasteland” is much more
terrible than any imaginary one. ... Today the only poetry worthy of the name
is eschatological [pertaining to the ‘end times’], that is, poetry which
rejects the present inhuman world in the name of a great change.”
One has to wonder if we're not in similar eschatological times, history repeating itself, to be sure - but with contemporary variations.
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