Putin’s Lessons from History

[Tommy_Carcetti]

Last edited Mon Feb 23, 2015, 02:44 PM - Edit history (1)

http://activehistory.ca/2014/12/putins-lessons-from-history/

Putin’s Lessons from History
By Andriy Zayarnyuk

Now that Vladimir Putin has acknowledged his responsibility for invading Ukraine in February 2013, finding out about his worldview is no longer a matter of mere curiosity. Putin’s statements of the last decade demonstrate that his thinking about Ukraine and Russia is deeply mired in history. Already in 2005, reminding the upper chamber of the Russian parliament of “how contemporary Russian history was born,” he called the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” [1] The remarks that followed made it perfectly clear that “geopolitical” was not a slip of the tongue. He did not mean the imploding system of social security, post-Soviet economic decline, and people’s misery, reflected in plunging life expectancy. He meant exactly what he said: that the disappearance of the Soviet state’s borders was a disaster for the Russian nation per se.

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Unfortunately, Ukraine happened to be on top of Putin’s list of wrongs that allegedly have been done to the Russian nation. It is no accident that Putin made his first frankly revanchist “geopolitical” statement less than a year after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. The Orange Revolution was a profound shock to Putin, who, it is clear, believes that most of Ukraine on some profound ethnic level is Russian and ought to be part of the Russian political space.

In 2008, alarmed by Ukraine’s attempt to join the NATO Membership Action Plan, Putin delivered his first “analysis” of Ukraine: “in Ukraine one–third are ethnic Russians. According to the official census alone, there are 17 million ethnic Russians out of a population of 45 million.” [4] (The only census completed in independent Ukraine in 2001 revealed 11,333,000 ethnic Russians). In the same speech Putin claimed that the Crimea was 90% Russian (58.5% according to the same 2001 census), and that there are “only Russians in the south, the entire Ukraine’s south” (the Crimea is the only region in Ukraine with a slight Russian majority). Where does Putin get his facts if not from empirical data? There is no denying that his version of Ukrainian and Russian history stands behind his misapprehension of the present.

Putin’s vision of history includes an element of the canonical Stalinist version of Ukrainian and Russian history. For example, Putin claims that “contemporary Russian statehood has Dnieper roots … Kievan Rus was the foundation of the future, enormous Russian state….” [5] The Soviet historical narrative also presents Kievan Rus? as the “common cradle” of Ukrainians and Russians. The vicissitudes of history forced them to part and they suffered; eventually, after many struggles, they came together and were able to consummate their happy union. Clearly, Putin also believes in this romantic story of peoples destined for permanent union. He claims that Ukraine’s development, modernization, and industrialization were possible only in the Russian state. Faithful to his view of Soviet statehood as Russian, Putin presents even the post-World War II reconstruction of the Ukrainian economy as Russia’s gift to Ukraine.[6]

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Since, according to Putin, Ukraine has never been an agent of history on its own, he believes that both the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, popularly known as the Maidan, were anti-Russian coups staged by the West in Russia’s backyard. Putin is convinced that in 2014 the West used “nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and anti-Semites,” while the interim Ukrainian authorities were “the ideological heirs of Bandera” (a Ukrainian nationalist leader in the second-quarter of the twentieth century). Since he brands Bandera as “Hitler’s henchman,” [22] Putin is implying that the true heir of the Nazi system is today’s “West.” Ultimately, for Putin, in history as well as in the present, the game is actually between two real players—Russia and the West—and not between Russia and Ukraine.

Putin’s historical illiteracy is nothing unusual in today’s world. He, however, believes that he knows history and is able to draw on “the lessons of history.” [23] One history lesson that I am trying to convey to my students is that fantasies should be taken seriously when espoused by the leader of a large state. In the twentieth century the world community made the mistake of neglecting one leader’s fantasies and paid dearly for this political myopia. We should not step on the same rake again, and revanchist lunatics should not be treated as sensible and pragmatic politicians.



More at link

[jakeXT]

1. Putin was busy writing his OpEd for the NY Times in 2013

A Plea for Caution From Russia
What Putin Has to Say to Americans About Syria

By VLADIMIR V. PUTIN
Published: September 11, 2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-caution-from-russia-on-syria.html?src=twr&_r=2&

[Igel]

2. Mostly agree.

The guy needs to add a hefty dose of Berdyaev and possibly Sovolyov to round out the narrative, unless he does at the link. (Not clicking it.)

Nice to see actual census results posted. Many sputniki--fellow travellers--just quote Putin's views of demographics as facts.

[uhnope]

3. K&R

[MBS]

4. K & R n/t