Diarmaid Ferriter: Ukraine arguments risk denigrating its complex history

When journalist Anna Reid, who lived in Ukraine in the mid 1990s, published her book Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine in 1997 she noted that being a borderland has had two serious consequences for Ukraine. Because it was “flat, fertile and fatally tempting to invaders”, Ukrainians were inheritors of a long legacy of violence, and this left them with “a tenuous, equivocal sense of national identity”.

Although consistent rebels, when Ukrainians did achieve some semblance of self-rule – during the Cossack Risings of the 17th century, or the civil war of 1918-20 and towards the end of Nazi occupation – these periods were “nasty, brutal and above all short”. They were also complicated by those who always refused to accept the legitimacy of a separate Ukrainian history.

Tellingly, Reid’s final chapter posed a question about the essence of 1990s Ukraine: Europe or Little Russia? What it could not do, of course, was “alter its geography. With a bearish Russia to its east and an expanding NATO and European Union to its West, Ukraine remains, as ever, a disputed borderland between rival powers. Ukrainians try to view their position as a blessing. They talk about being a ‘crossroads’, a ‘doorway’ a ‘lever’, a ‘bridge’. But bridges, in this part of the world, tend to get marched over or blown up.”

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, could Ukraine rise to the challenges of corruption, violence, economic backwardness and lack of experience of self-rule? Success for Ukraine would be about not being primarily thought of as “on the edge” or a borderland to other nations, but the current horrors and outrages underline the endurance of the border dilemma.

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The invective from Putin disallowing Ukrainians their own history is a reflection of the extent to which the Soviet narrative of Ukraine’s past has been challenged since the early 1990s. The emergence of a new history of Ukraine for Ukrainian nationalists required the framing of accounts emphasising sacrifices and suffering – including, in the twentieth century, the famine of 1932-33, the Purges, the impact of the Nazi-Soviet Pact that altered its boundaries, German invasion and internal conflict – as down payments on the winning of control of its destiny. The history of struggles against foreign oppressors – Germans, Russians and Poles – and internal disarray is undoubtedly more complicated, but a nationalist narrative was part of the need to give legitimacy to the modern state.

An unexpected nation

Andrew Wilson’s The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, published in 2002, required an explanation of its title. Ukraine’s emergence as an independent state in 1991, he points out, came as a surprise to many in the West and it was considered dubious by some to confer it with the status of nation, “give its pronounced patterns of ethnic, linguistic, religious and regional diversity. However, an unexpected nation is still a nation – no more and no less than many others.”

Putin's focus is not on the restoration of the Soviet Union, but of imperial Russia

Building unity out of that diversity represented a mammoth challenge. Nationalism can involve illusions and delusions and it is erroneous, Wilson argues, to see Ukraine as incontrovertibly European: “Ukraine has always stood at the crossroads of cultural influences”. As Ernest Renan remarked, history is about forgetting as well as remembering: “getting history wrong is part of being a nation” with historical narratives inevitably shaped by the present. The question remained in 2002, according to Wilson, whether “Ukraine is willing or able to Europeanize its society as well as its foreign policy, or whether it will slip back into the ‘Grey Zone’ between expanding institutional Europe or a recrudescent Russia”.

After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, American political scientist John Mearsheimer dismissed the idea of Ukrainian self-determination as an unaffordable abstract: “the sad truth is that might often makes right when great power politics is at play”. Misguided thinking about Nato expansion, he argued, was unnecessarily provocative to Russia, and the answer lay in Ukraine being a “neutral buffer” between Nato and Russia. There are compelling arguments to be made about the consequences of Nato enlargement which should not be forgotten amidst the fog of war. But stripping Ukraine of its right to be other than a buffer is also a condescending trouncing of its dignity and complex history, especially as it faces the consequences of a deep imperialism, summed up in Putin’s bogus contention that Ukraine “was entirely created by Russia”.

Putin’s focus is not on the restoration of the Soviet Union, but of imperial Russia: a 19th century conception of what Russians are. This is his solution to what the Harvard Professor of Ukrainian history Serhii Plokhy has described as the “enormous difficulty in reconciling the mental maps of Russian ethnicity, culture and identity with the political map of the Russian federation, especially when it comes to neighbouring Ukraine”.

As the physical foundations are razed in Ukraine, the ideological foundations will harden, making the barbarous imperialist Putin’s dream further out of reach.