Ukraine and Russia – 20 years without empire: historical lessons

(Continued from the previous issue)

UKRAINE’S POLITICAL MAP WAS BEING FORMED IN THE CONDITIONS OF DEPENDENCE

L.I.: “But the problem also is that Ukrainian society is very slow to offer a qualitative alternative. Both Russia and Ukraine are in fact in the paradigm of the 20th CPSU Congress. The point is we have not yet cleared the bar that Russia set (but did not clear, either) at the time. Philosopher Aleksandr Zinoviev wrote that Stalin was a truly ‘people’s leader,’ for he appealed to the darkest depths of the people and destroyed qualitative alternatives by consistently cutting them off.

“The process of estranging the Ukrainians from ownership has some common features with the Russian situation. But Russia has an incomparably larger resource base. And, as far as the ways of ca­pital accumulation are concerned, Russian oligarchs have direct access to resources, while Ukrainian oligarchs were formed as spongers on the Russian oil and gas delive­ries to Europe. There is, in a way, a moment of national humiliation here. Korzhakov says in his me­moirs that Kuchma once personally came to Yeltsin to enlist his support for the first presidential term. Therefore, the political map [of Ukraine] was being formed in the condition of dependence on the neighboring country.

“Besides, we cannot but take into account that Ukraine is a post-genocide country. The thinking and free individual was suppressed so deeply that Ukraine, even though having some elements of a living body, is unable to offer resistance at a required level. And now, after a long way, we have a regime that knows only too well, in spite of everything, that ‘mine is mine.’ There is no humanitarian aura in sight. Can there be a way out of this depression?”

Yu.A.: “Our oligarchs are ‘coo­l­er,’ but the degree of their venality and parasitism is also much higher. They have repudiated Russia even in the way they are taping natural resources. Putin confirmed this during his visit to the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power plant. He complained in his speech that, although the government was trying to put things in order there, it could not trace the owner of this facility.”

IN THIS COUNTRY THE EUROPEAN IDEA STILL REMAINS AT THE LEVEL OF ARTISTIC FIGURES AND IMAGES

Oxana PACHLOVSKA:

“At the dawn of Putin’s presidency, Yurii Afanasiev wrote a stunning and, at the same time, tragic book titled Dangerous Russia. The Tradition of Autocracy Today. That was the only book that seriously warned about the danger and the historical genealogy of Putin’s government. I often quote this book in the West. But, asto­nishingly, it stirred up no active debates among the Ukrainian histo­rians because it seemed at the time that this kind of horror could not happen. But it happened. So I would like to divert the conversation into a cultural dimension.

“What is going on between Ukraine and Russia results from the pathologization of Orthodoxy, which has existed in the Russian version since the times of Ivan the Terrible, if not before: subordination of the church to the throne and, as a result, subordination to the political authorities of the whole set of social, moral, and other problems that the church traditionally deals with.

“When we ask where democracy is possible, we can see that democracy has been established in the countries of Western Chris­tia­nity. In his article ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’ written back in the 1980s, Milan Kundera says: ‘To die for one’s country and for Europe – that is a phrase that could not be thought in Moscow or Leningrad; it is precisely the phrase that could it be thought in Budapest or Warsaw.’ My question is: could it be thought in Kyiv? I think the time has come, when we cannot afford either hopes or optimistic forecasts. What is now going on leads Ukraine and Russia to moral death and the extinction of their states not because they will break up but because these societies are tired. Mr. Afa­na­siev uses a terrible term, ‘weariness of the human material.’ These societies were reduced to the condition of a material in the imperial and Soviet eras.

“Yes, Ukraine differs from Russia. But we must ask ourselves, why? Ukraine is different because it coexisted with Poland in one state for 300 years and was, albeit to some extent, part of European culture. We have linguistic, denominational, and cultural differences. But, no matter how different Ukraine and Russia are, power in both countries is being wielded by cheats accompanied by a host of criminal riffraff. This is the result of Soviet-era lumpenization, for the Russian Empire was, to some extent, a rational structure which was in line with worldwide deve­lopment for some time. Then the turning point came. Why did Western countries cleanse themselves and went out of the totalitarian system? Because, in addition to having an intellectual process, Europe also had a criterion of democracy, whereas in our country the European idea remained at the level of an ideal, some artistic figures and ima­­ges. The danger also lies in the fact that, while ideology decided everything in the Soviet era, now the money that plies among the cheats and the scum is holding sway. Whenever a society has been reduced to a survival level, this mo­ney is bound to work. So I think that we should focus more on the cultural aspect and decisions in the sphere of culture. For culture means ideas. We can do nothing without clear-cut ideas formulated in a certain way. I think it is imperative that these ideas reach the mass awareness which is deprived of notions, development vectors, and, in general, the realities of the pre­sent-day world. And may I ask Mr. Afanasiev two or three questions? It seems to me we are facing the prospect of the extinction of the Orthodox world as such, the withdrawal of Orthodoxy from the Christian system – you can see this very well if you compare Western and Eastern Christianity. For examp­le, Western students are saying: yes, a crisis, yes, it is difficult, but we have an alternative, we will reorient. In other words, they are restructuring the world. Then a Bulgarian student comes. He looks depressed and says: Europe or no Europe, I don’t know what there will be. I am exhausted; Bulgaria benefited nothing from joining Europe. Berdyaev said long ago that Orthodoxy could not compete with Western Christianity because the intellectual gains of Orthodoxy were either Byzantine theology or late 19th-early 20th-century Russian philosophy, i.e., an elitist pheno­menon that remained on the surface. What went to the depths is the mythological thinking of which you are saying. For this reason, Orthodoxy creates no ideas – neither new, nor modern, nor moral. And, opposing itself to Europe, Russia seems to be wresting Orthodoxy from the historical context. And a so­ciety deprived of moral vectors and crushed between the ideas of the Russian World and a Eurasian state, the product of Dugin’s lum­penized and fascist circles, is also a terrible phenomenon.”

TO CLARIFY THE NATURE OF POST-SOVIET DYNAMICS, ONE SHOULD UNDERSTAND RUSSIANNESS AS A SYSTEM

Yu.A.: “It is a huge question that Oxana has formulated. I do not know if it is possible at all to ans­wer this question jointly because one should speak about the very foundation of the so-called Eastern ci­vi­lization not in the meaning of the classical Orient but in its Asian interpretation. When I was talking about post-Soviet dynamics, I said it should be regarded from the very bottom – in the post-Soviet context. But if you take our Russian essence and system, not the ‘post-Sovietness,’ you will see that the bottom is very far away. But Oxana is asking a question that concerns Russianness as a civilizational particularity. An extremely important question. Incidentally, the answer to this question would also further clarify the nature of post-Soviet dynamics. But one cannot express this in a couple of words. Therefore, I will not be answering it now but will outline the area into which one should plunge in search of an answer to this question. Firstly, one must say about the civilizational essence of Eastern civilization or about Russia in terms of culture and ci­vi­lization. One must keep in mind that it is about the prevailing way of overcoming contradictions in a bi­polar opposition and the inversive logic typical of our civilization as distinct from the meditative logic typical of Western civilization. On the other hand, one should note that Western, or European, ci­vilization and European culture were formed on the basis of a synthesis of Roman Law, Western Christianity, and the Barbarian invasion. This also calls for being studied. By contrast with the formation of Western civilization, we had the establishment of the inversive logic of overcoming contradictions in a bipolar opposition. By explaining these two postulates, one could form an ans­wer to this question about the specifics of not only Russianness but also post-Sovietness.”

M.P.: “The term ‘Russian World’ was coined and used well before it began to be used by the current Orthodox hierarchy. For examp­le, Prince Trubetskoi used it. They were very intellectual guys. Incidentally, the proposed vision of Russianness as a symbiosis of the Slavic world with Genghis Khan set off Ukrainianness against Russianness event at that time. I do not want to idealize Ukrainianness, but still when Andrei Bogoliubsky ran away from Vyshgorod with an icon, he had already had something that allowed Kliu­chevsky to say that Bogoliubsky was the first Great Rus­sian. While his father, Yury Dolgoruky, tried to seize Kyiv, Andrei Bogoliubsky fled from here to Rostov, a city without a viche. It was only the beginning because there was also the school of the Golden Horde, with totally different ideas of governance. When the Russian World degene­rates into such a nightma­rish form as autocracy, it will inevitably receive an attitude cha­racterized by Khvyliovy’s phrase ‘Away from Moscow!’”

Yu.A.: “You named the crossroads that divide the world into Europe and non-Europe. And Ukraine is what Huntington and then Oxana called ‘caesura,’ i.e., the split of this world. And you showed whence the origin is. After Andrei Bogoliubsky, Russia chose the road, where only autocracy was possible, while Ukraine found itself at a crossroads, where both options were possible. Russia’s choice can be explained by the domination of the inversive logic in the settlement of disputes in a bipolar opposition.”

L.I.: “Mr. Afanasiev, the Kremlin has decided that 2012 will be Russian History Year. And we wrote that the newspaper Den/The Day was marking a decade of Ukrainian history. Our first book, Ukraina Incognita, which gave this name to the whole series, came out ten years ago. Incidentally, we began, fragmentarily, the discussion of Ukrainian history with these very questions of identity. The Ukrainians themselves did not know their Ukraine Incognita. In its turn, Russia does not know and, in most cases, does not want to know Ukrainian history because the true Ukrainian history is a big problem for Russian identity. We are taking a cautious approach to Russian national statehood because this may result into a fiercer battle for identity than it was in the Soviet Union. At the time, there were some fences, albeit demagogical, between the Russian Federation and Ukraine. Now we are face to face with true autocracy wrapped into up-to-date technologies, with enormous resources and penetrations into European civilization. We have published the book The Power of the Soft Sign, or the Return of the Rus’ Truth. We have named 2012 as Sandarmokh List Year. We recently held a roundtable on this issue, where our well-known historian Stanislav Kulchy­ts­ky quoted Kautsky as saying that ‘Bolshevik me­thods only lead to what we call Asian form of socia­lism, but this is unfair because Asia begot Confucius and Buddha, so it is better to call it Ta­tar socialism.’ In the same issue of Den/The Day we analyze the pre­sent day of Ukraine and see a tra­gic farce, when our communists follow lead of Putin’s ideas. Putin said he would like to see Ukraine in the Eurasian Union in three years’ time. It is good that 90 percent of the young people in TV talk shows vote ‘against,’ but special-operation-style policies suggest very many opportunities to put these ideas into practice. And we are again getting down to this farce, speaking about the Pereiaslav Rada events on which historians passed judgment long ago. But a lot of people who draw information from television alone still do not have a clear idea of these things. This is in fact a challenge for public intellectuals and historians. We should set an agenda that will make it finally clear that Russia and Ukraine have quite different problems. I liked very much the reaction of Mr. Shcherbak, when I said that our problems, like plague and cholera, should be treated in different hospital wards. He replied as befits an epidemiologist, and I fully support this.”

(To be continued)