Once
More on Russia and Ukraine
December
23, 2021
Many years ago I,
your humble author, earned a PhD in Russian history. I lived in Moscow for the
1975-76 academic year with my late wife and our son, who turned two while we were
there. I have written and spoken publicly about the relationship between Russia
and Ukraine before, but it seems that tensions between Russia and Ukraine are
increasing in recent times. It is clear to me that very few Americans know
anything at all about Russian history and how Ukraine fits into that history.
Our leaders either don’t know that history either or, more likely, have had it
explained to them but chosen to ignore it or just don’t understand its
significance. My purpose here is not to defend Vladimir Putin. He is an
authoritarian ruler who fits perfectly into Russian history. He doesn’t need me
to defend him, and my purpose here is to explain not to judge. I write here
because the history of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine really does
matter if we are to understand Russia and Putin well enough to avoid going to
war over Ukraine. I’ll start with more recent events in the Russia-Ukraine
relationship before looking briefly at the more distant nature of that
relationship.
Because it had
been part of the Russian Empire since the late eighteenth century, Ukraine
became one of the republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics when
that entity was created in 1922.[1]
Communist bureaucrats in Moscow set the boundaries of that soviet republic.
Doing so could not have been easy. Especially in the eastern part of what
became the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic there are no clear demographic
lines between Ukrainians and Russians. Those two cultural identities overlap.
There are significant parts of Ukraine where many of the people are Russians
not Ukrainians. Yet those soviet bureaucrats did establish a boundary between
the Ukrainian republic and the Russian one. When they did they assigned the
Crimean peninsula to the Russian republic not the Ukrainian one though Crimea
is geographically contiguous with Ukraine not with Russia. For reasons no one
really understands, in 1954 Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred the
Crimea from the Russian republic to the Ukrainian one.
The Soviet Union
ceased to exist on December 25, 1991, and had been falling apart for several
years before that. Each of the fifteen constituent republics of the USSR became
independent, sovereign states, something many of them, including Ukraine, had
never been before. The world community quickly recognized these new nations. So
did the new sovereign state of Russia. The Crimea became part of the sovereign
nation of Ukraine, though the Crimean city of Sevastopol remained the home port
of the Russian Black Sea fleet, something it had been for a long time before
1991.
In 2014 Russian
forces invaded Crimea. Shortly thereafter the Russians conducted a popular referendum
on whether Crimea should be part of Russia or part of Ukraine. That vote surely
was for appearance only, but then Russian elections, including Soviet
elections, usually have been only for show, Russia lacking anything like a
democratic tradition. Many of the people of Crimea are Russians not Ukrainians,
and, according to the Russians, the people voted to become part of Russia. Russia
then annexed Crimea to the Russian state. Most of the world’s nations, including
the United States, railed against the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea
and have refused to recognize it. They railed against it because they had
recognized Ukraine as a sovereign nation, a fact which did make the Russian
invasion a violation of international law. They seem to have done so with
little or no consideration of the historical context in which that invasion and
annexation had taken place.
That historical
context is long and complex. A state that could be recognized as Russian appeared
first in Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine. Russia became Orthodox Christian in
988 when the Grand Prince of Kiev converted to that faith. This first Russian
state is known as Kievan Rus’, Rus’ being of course the source of the word
Russia (Rossiya in Russian). In the thirteenth century the Mongols from much
farther east in Asia invaded and destroyed Kievan Rus’. The political center of
the Russian lands then moved north, where Moscow eventually became the dominate
power and creator of a new Russian state. From a small amount of land around
Moscow, the Russians gradually expanded their power in all directions, though
at first much to the south because that’s where the Mongols were. Moscow acted
at first as the Mongol’s collection agent for tribute, but by the sixteenth
century Moscow had defeated the Mongols militarily. After Byzantium fell to the
Turks in the mid-fifteenth century the Grand Dukes of Moscow began to call
themselves “tsar’,” a Slavic rendering of the Latin word Caesar.[2]
Russian expansion
continued, but Ukraine eventually came under the control of the Ottoman Turks
ruling from Istanbul. By 1793, however, Russia, under Catherine the Great (who
was a German not a Russian, but never mind), had annexed much of the land we
now call Ukraine. The geographic relationship of Ukraine to the Russian Empire
explains the name Ukraine. It comes from the Russian and means “on the border,”
which Ukraine was to the Russians at the time. To this point the Ukrainians had
never had an independent state of their own, though of course Kievan Rus’ had
existed in territory that eventually became Ukraine. The lands we now call
Ukraine became part of the Russian Empire with no distinction being made between
Russians and Ukrainians. In the nineteenth century Ukrainian nationalism arose,
but the imperial government of Russia never recognized the Ukrainians as a political
entity of any sort. Neither did it consider Ukrainian to be a distinct language
in its own right. The Russians mostly thought of Ukrainian as only a dialect of
Russian.[3]
The Russians never allowed schools to use Ukrainian as their language of
instruction. Ukraine went from being just a part of the Russian Empire to being
a Soviet Socialist Republic, to being an independent nation when the Soviet
Union collapsed.
Most of us
consider the collapse of the Soviet Union with its Communist government to be a
very good thing. Soviet Communism was oppressive, totalitarian actually. By the
1970s it wasn’t nearly as brutal as it had been under Stalin (died 1953). Yet
it wasn’t anything we or some Soviet people themselves considered to be good.
In 1976 a journalism student at Moscow State University told me that journalists
were allowed to write only about what was good but everything they saw was bad.
Yet many Russians do not consider the disintegration of the USSR to have been a
good thing. Vladimir Putin has called the end of the Soviet Union “the greatest
geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century.” One wonders if he had
forgotten about World War II, in which the Soviets lost something like twenty
million people, but never mind. It was as the dominant part of the USSR that
Russia became a world power that other nations had to take seriously. As part
of the USSR Russia ruled over most of what had been the Russian Empire.[4]
It was the USSR not the western allies who were most responsible for the defeat
of Nazi Germany. The USSR launched the first earth satellite and put the first
person in space, accomplishments of which the Russians were and are appropriately
proud. The Russian state that has existed since the end of the Soviet Union is
very significantly smaller than Russia had been for the last two hundred years
or so before 1991. Putin and many Russians regret Russia’s loss of size and
stature since the end of the USSR.
Once they were
free from Soviet Communism either as independent nations or as members of the
Warsaw Pact, the eastern, Soviet version of NATO, many nations Russia had
previously dominated, together with NATO did something profoundly unsettling to
many Russians. Several of those nations applied for and were granted membership
in NATO. Today the former Soviet republics of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania
are members of NATO as are the former Warsaw Pact members Bulgaria, Poland,
Hungary, Romania, and the two countries that used to be one, the Czech Republic
and Slovakia. The former Warsaw Pace member the German Democratic Republic
(East Germany) no longer exists and is part of NATO member the Federal Republic
of Germany. Ukraine is not a member of NATO, but many of its people want it to
become one or at least to see their country more aligned with NATO and the
European Union than with Russia.
Consider for a
moment if you will what the NATO membership of countries the Russians used to
dominate looks like to the Russians. NATO was the Soviet Union’s great
adversary during the Cold War. NATO was created specifically as a way to stop
Soviet expansion into western Europe. The Soviet Union had had a string of
buffer states, all members of the Russian dominated Warsaw Pact, between itself
and NATO. Today the NATO members Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania are on Russia’s
border or on the border of Belarus, a former Soviet republic that is now
independent but very much in Russia’s sphere of influence. The former buffer
states of the Warsaw Pact are now members of NATO. Vladimir Putin considers
NATO’s incorporation of those nations to be an act of aggression toward Russia
and a vey real threat to Russia’s national security. I find it easy to
understand why he does. Just think. How would the United States have reacted if
during the Cold War Canada and Mexico had joined the Warsaw Pact? That is what
has happened to post-Soviet Russia. Putin fears that NATO may some day admit
Ukraine, something he could only interpret as another anti-Russia measure and a
most threatening one at that.
So we need to
understand Russia’s reaction to a couple of historical realities. Ukraine,
which had been part of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union since the
late eighteenth century, is now an independent nation leaning toward the west. The
Russians used to call much of what is now Ukraine “Little Russia.” For most of
Russia’s history Russians have not considered Ukrainians to be Ukrainians but
to be a slightly odd sort of Russians. Add the fact that Russia’s Cold War
adversary NATO is at Russia’s doorstep, and you have a volatile situation at
best.
I do not mean to
suggest that Russia would be justified in launching a military invasion of
Ukraine larger than the ones they have already launched, something Russia is
quite capable of doing. I do mean to suggest that we absolutely must consider
the current tension between Russia and Ukraine in its historical context. Putin
is no saint to be sure, but he isn’t doing what he is doing with regard to
Ukraine because he is evil. He is doing it because he is Russian. Putin is in
many ways a relic of the Cold War. To him the west in general and NATO in
particular have been the enemy or at least a primary adversary for a very long
time. The United States and NATO have done nothing to assuage his historically
understandable paranoia about the west. I find it reassuring that President Biden
has said that though we would support Ukraine if Russia invaded we would not
become involved militarily in defense of Ukraine. I do hope that more Americans
and more of our leaders become more aware of the history of relations between
Russia and Ukraine. We can’t possibly understand what’s happing between those
two nations without knowing that history.
[1] I
used the term “republics” here cautiously. The constituent republics of the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were not republics in any meaningful way.
They were parts of a totalitarian regime completely dominated by the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union and Russia. I call the former republics of the USSR
republics only because that’s what the Soviets called them, Republic being part
of their official names.
[2]
When transliterated from the Cyrillic alphabet in which Russian is written to
the Latin alphabet the words Rus’ and tsar’ end in an apostrophe because in the
Cyrillic they end with a character called a “soft sign,” which has no Latin
equivalent.
[3]
Today linguists and of course the Ukrainians themselves consider Ukrainian to
be a distinct language different from Russian. The two languages are closely
related, both of them being eastern Slavic languages.
[4]
The only parts of the Russian Empire that were never again ruled by Russians
were Finland and part of Poland.
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