Like the Russian tsars who preceded him — like Stalin, like Lenin — Putin also considers “Ukraine” a threat. Not a military threat, but an ideological threat.
My God, calamity again!
It was all so peaceful, so serene;
We had just started to break the chains
That hold our people in slavery
When stops! Once again the blood of the people
It's pouring…
The poem is called ‘Calamity Again’. The original version was written in Ukrainian in 1859, and the author, Taras Shevchenko, did not speak metaphorically when he wrote about slavery. Shevchenko was born into a family of serfs—slaves—on an estate in what is now central Ukraine, in what was then the Russian empire. Taken from his family as a child, he followed his master to St. Petersburg, where he learned painting and also began writing poetry. There, impressed by his talent, a group of other artists and writers helped him buy his freedom.
When Shevchenko wrote 'Calamity Again' he was universally recognized as Ukraine's most prominent poet. He was known as Kobzar or “The Troubadour” — a name taken from his first collection of poems, published in 1840 — and his words defined the particular set of memories and emotions that we would now describe as Ukraine’s “national identity.” His language and style are not contemporary. However, it suddenly seems important to introduce this 19th-century poet to readers outside Ukraine, because it suddenly seems important to make this same set of memories and emotions tangible to an audience that won't read Shevchenko's romantic ballads. Much has been written about Russian views of Ukraine; many speculated about Russian objectives in Ukraine. The President of Russia, on Monday, February 21, informed us in an hour-long speech that he thinks Ukraine should not exist. But what does Ukraine mean to Ukrainians?
The Ukrainians emerged from the medieval state of Kyivan Rus—the same state from which the Russians and Belarusians also emerged—to, at some point, become, like the Irish or Slovaks, a colony of other empires. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Ukrainian nobles learned to speak Polish and participated in Polish court life; later, some Ukrainians strove to be part of the Russian-speaking world, learning Russian and aspiring to positions of power first in the Russian empire, then in the Soviet Union.
However, during these same centuries, a feeling of “Ukraine” also developed, linked to the peasantry, serfs and farmers who could not or did not want to assimilate. The Ukrainian language, as well as Ukrainian art and music, were preserved in the countryside, despite the fact that Polish or Russian is spoken in the cities. Saying “I am Ukrainian” was once a statement about status and social position as well as ethnicity. “I am Ukrainian” meant that people deliberately defined themselves against the nobility, against the ruling class, against the merchant class, against the townspeople. Later it could mean that people were defining themselves as being against the Soviet Union: Ukrainian resisters fought the Red Army in 1918 and then again in the last days of the Second World War and the early years of the Cold War. Ukrainian identity was anti-elitist, before the term anti-elitist was commonly used, often furious and anarchic, occasionally violent. In fact, some of Shevchenko's poetry is very angry and very violent.
In the 19th century, Ukrainian patriotism, as it could not be expressed through state institutions as Italian or German patriotism at the same time, was expressed through voluntary, religious and charitable organizations, early examples of what we now call “civil society”. ”: study and self-help groups that published newspapers and magazines, founded schools and Sunday schools, promoted literacy among peasants. As they gained strength and supporters, Moscow came to see these popular Ukrainian organizations as a threat to the unity of imperial Russia. In 1863 and again in 1876, the empire banned Ukrainian books and persecuted Ukrainians who wrote and published them. Shevchenko himself spent years in exile.
Still, “Ukraine” survived in the villages and grew stronger among intellectuals and writers, remaining powerful enough to persuade Ukrainians to make their first state proposal at the time of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. ensuing civil war, the Bolsheviks immediately realized that Ukraine should have its own republic within the Soviet Union, run by Ukrainian communists. Ukrainian distrust of authority, especially Soviet authority, remained. When, in 1929, Stalin began the forced collectivization of agriculture throughout the Soviet Union, a series of rebellions broke out in Ukraine. Stalin, like the Russian imperial aristocracy previously, began to fear that he might, as he put it, “lose” Ukraine: he feared that even the Ukrainian communists would not want to obey his orders. Shortly afterwards, members of the Soviet secret police organized teams of activists to go from house to house in rural Ukraine, confiscating food. About 4 million Ukrainians died due to the famine that followed. Mass arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals, writers, linguists, museum curators, poets and painters followed.
Simple lines cannot be drawn between the past and the present. There are no direct analogies; no nation is forced to repeat its past. But the experiences of our parents and grandparents, the habits and lessons they taught us, shape the way we see the world, and it is perhaps no accident that at the end of the 20th century, Stalin's greatest fear happened and Ukrainians once again organized, this time successfully, a popular civic movement that achieved independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. It is perhaps no accident that many Ukrainians have remained suspicious of the state, even their own state, in the years following. Because the state — the government, the rulers, the “power” — had always been “them” and not “us”, there was no tradition of Ukrainian civil service or military service; there was no tradition of public service. If the cancer of corruption, which afflicted all the weary, cynical and exhausted former republics formed in the wreckage of the Soviet Union, was particularly virulent in Ukraine, this is part of the explanation.
But in the long tradition of their parents and grandparents, millions of Ukrainians continued to resist both corruption and autocracy. And precisely because it opposed post-Soviet kleptocracy, “Ukraine” in the 21st century has become intertwined with aspirations for democracy, freedom, rule of law, integration in Europe. At the beginning of the 21st century, Ukrainians began to oppose the post-Soviet system, linked to Russia by financial interests, and began once again to intervene for something more just and honest.
Twice, in 2005 and 2014, Ukrainian self-organized street movements toppled kleptocratic and autocratic leaders who, backed by Russia, had tried to “steal” Ukrainian elections and overturn the rule of law. In 2005, Russia responded with a renewed effort to interfere in Ukrainian politics. In 2014, Russia responded with an invasion of Crimea and several attacks on cities in eastern Ukraine. The only successful attacks were in the far east, in Donbas, because the “separatist” movement created by Russia could be supported by the Russian army.
But Ukraine's character remained unchanged. In 2019, 70% of Ukrainians once again voted against the system. A complete stranger has become President: a Jewish actor born in eastern Ukraine, with no political experience but a long history of making fun of those in power — the kind of humor that Ukrainians value most. Volodymyr Zelensky was known for playing an oppressed professor who speaks out against corruption and is filmed by a student. In the television series, this footage goes viral, the professor accidentally wins the presidency, and then everyone — his nasty boss, his unfriendly family, wealthy strangers — is suddenly sycophantic. Zelensky, the actor, makes fun of them, tricking them. The Ukrainians wanted Zelensky, the real-life President, to do the same.
During the election campaign, Zelensky also vowed to end the war with Russia, the ongoing and debilitating conflict along the border with eastern Ukraine that has claimed more than 14,000 lives in the past decade. Many Ukrainians expected him to achieve this too. The President tried to establish links with the inhabitants of the occupied areas of Crimea and Donbas; he asked for meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin; however, he continued to seek Ukrainian integration with the West.
And then, calamity again.
It was all so peaceful, so serene;
We had just started to break the chains
That hold our people in slavery
When stops! Once again the blood of the people
It's pouring…
Ukraine is now under brutal attack, with tens of thousands of Russian troops pouring through its eastern provinces, along its northern border and along its southern coast. For, like the Russian tsars who preceded him — like Stalin, like Lenin — Putin also considers “Ukraine” a threat. It is not a military threat, but an ideological threat. Ukraine's determination to become a democracy is a real challenge to Putin's nostalgic imperial political project: the creation of an autocratic kleptocracy, in which he is all-powerful, within something akin to the former Soviet empire. Ukraine undermines this project solely for its existence as an independent state. Fighting for something better, for freedom and prosperity, Ukraine becomes a dangerous rival. For if Ukraine were to succeed in its decades-long struggle for democracy, rule of law and European integration, then Russians might ask: why not us?
I am not romantic about Zelensky, nor do I have any illusions about Ukraine, a nation of 40 million people, among them the same percentages of good and bad, brave and cowardly people, as anywhere else. But at this moment in history, something unusual happens there. Among those 40 million, a significant number — at all levels of society, across the country, in all fields of activity — aspire to create a fairer, freer and more prosperous country than they have ever inhabited in the past. Among them are people willing to dedicate their lives to the fight against corruption, to the deepening of democracy, to remain sovereign and free. Some of these people are willing to die for these ideas.
Conflict will be important to all of us in ways we cannot yet understand. In the long struggle between autocracy and democracy, between dictatorship and freedom, Ukraine is now the front line — and our front line too.
#unitedphotopress
Anne Applebaum
“The Atlantic” Journalist, writer, author of “The Twilight of Democracy”
