Plokhy Interview_Russian Nationalism

Year: 2021
Class: Source
Authors:

Title: Contextualizing Putin's "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians" | Ukrainian Research Institute
URL: https://www.huri.harvard.edu/news/putin-historical-unity
Zotero Link:

🟥 Red Highlights

• “A monument to St Volodymyr/ St Vladimir was recently constructed in the most coveted, the most prestigious, the most visible place in the Russian capital, right across from the Kremlin.”
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• “Muscovites protested against the plan to place the monument at Voroviev Hills, overseeing the city, but I do not think anyone said that it honored the wrong person or anything like that.”
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• “For example, the first published textbook of “Russian history” was written and published in Kyiv in the 1670s. This Kyivan book became the basic text of Russian history for more than 150 years.”
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• “we see the continuing importance of Ukraine in the ways the concept of the Russian world is formulated, the idea of Holy Rus', church history and church narrative”
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• “The model of Russia consisting of Great Russia and Little Russia was the product of the thinking of Kyivan clergy of the 17th century, who needed the protection of the Orthodox Tsar.”
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• “he closest parallel would be Stalin, but they each viewed and imagined Ukraine differently. Despite the famine, Stalin never questioned per se the right of the Ukrainian nation to exist.”
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• “That's a big difference in thinking from what we had in most of the 20th century, when there were all sorts of atrocities but at least on the theoretical level the Ukrainian nation’s right to exist was never questioned.”
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• “Russian elites prefer to think about Ukraine in pre-revolutionary terms, pretending as though the revolution that helped to create an independent Ukrainian state and the Soviet period with its nation-building initiatives had never taken place.”
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• “We see a much bigger spike of hostility toward Ukraine on the side of Russian population as compared to the spike of anti-Russian feelings in Ukraine”
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• “It's not just anti-Western, it puts primacy on the ethnically, linguistically, culturally understood Russian people, which certainly threatens relations with non-Russians within the Russian Federation.”
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• “Russians redefine what Russians are by putting emphasis on ethnicity. We witnessed such processes in Germany, and in France, and in both countries there were a lot of unpleasant things, to put it mildly”
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• “For a long time, Russian ethnic nationalism, particularly in the Soviet Union, was basically under attack.”
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• “Today, Russia is much less multi-ethnic than it was during Soviet times, and the regime is much more prepared to use ethnic Russian nationalism for self-legitimization or mobilization for war, like the war in Ukraine. All of that contributes to the rise of ethnic nationalism.”
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• “culture-focused Russian nationalists are saying that Russia should actually separate from the Caucasus. If you bring ethnonationalist thinking to its logical conclusion, that's what you get, and that's what some people in Russia argue. They're not an influential group”
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• “extreme Russian nationalism is an export product for the Russian government, rather than the remedy the doctor himself is using at home. It is used to either annex or destabilize other countries, but within the country itself there is an emphasis on the multi-ethnicity of the Russian political nation.”
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• “The Yeltsin-era attempt to shift from “Russkii” to more inclusive “Rossiyanin” as the political definition of Russianness also found itself under attack. The rise of ethnic Russian nationalism undermines the liberal model of the political Russian nation.”
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• “The majority of countries that were subjects of empires probably go through a period of authoritarian rule, and that's because they have to organize themselves, they have to build institutions. Think about Poland or Romania during the interwar period.”
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• “two attempts -- one under President Kuchma, which resulted in one Maidan, and one under President Yanukovych, which resulted in another Maidan”
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🟩 Green Highlights

• “there has to be a very particular understanding of Kyivan history to allow one to place in the very center of Moscow a statue of a ruler who ruled in a city that is the now the capital of a neighboring country.”
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• “One common thread is the centrality of Ukraine in defining what Russia is and is not.”
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• “Russians today have a difficult time imagining Kyiv being not part of Russia or Russia-dominated space and Kyivan Rus' not being an integral part of Russian history.”
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• “Kyivan vision of Little Russia was linked very closely to the idea of the distinctiveness of “two Russias” and the equality of Little Russia to Great Russia”
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• “That's why in 1863 it was the Minister of Interior who issued the decree limiting use of the Ukrainian language, not the Minister of Education, not the President of the Academy of Sciences, but the Minister of Interior. It was a matter of security.”
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  → Valuev Directive referenced

• “The idea of Ukrainian independence in earnest was put on the political agenda in the 20th century and since then it's refused to leave. In the 20th century, we had five attempts to declare an independent Ukrainian state.”
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• “Because of these connections, if Ukraine could do certain things, it would be much more difficult to say it can’t be done in Russia, that Russia has a special destiny, that democracy would never work in Russia, and so on and so forth. That would be not just a geopolitical setback for Russia, but would undermine the legitimizing myth Russia needs in order to have an authoritarian regime.”
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• “When Putin pushes the idea that Russians and Ukrainians are the same people, he doesn't mean that Russians are Ukrainians. The underlying argument is that Ukrainians are really Russians.”
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• “The goal is to keep the post-Soviet space within the Russian sphere of influence. In the case of Georgia and Ukraine, the goal is also to preclude a drift over to the West”
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• “Putin and the people around him are not ideologically driven doctrinaires. They use ideology to the degree that it can support great power ambitions and their vision of Russia’s role in the world.”
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• “discredited the liberal project as a whole, in terms of foreign policy, in the organization of a political system, in the idea of democracy itself.”
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• “disappointment in the 1990s led to a search for alternatives, which were found in the idea of strengthening the power of the state and led to the rise of authoritarian tendencies.”
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• “Russia fell in that category as well. It was running an empire and had a long tradition of institutions, but none of those institutions were democratic.”
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• “Ukraine is an outlier in that sense. It's maintained its democratic institutions. It's paying a price for that, but the society is quite committed to keep going as a democratic country.”
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• “Both attempts were rejected by the Ukrainian society.”
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