REVIEWS / BOOKS — Two books appeared this year that offer helpful and enlightening insights into the importance of history and its perception – or misperception – by leaders in Russia and Ukraine and how that has influenced Russia’s aggression and Ukraine’s spirited defense of its independence and territorial integrity.
War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine by Mikhail Zygar, and The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History by Serhii Plokhy cover much of the same ground and themes from Russian and Ukrainian history, and they agree that Vladimir Putin’s embrace of some of the central myths of the Russian past has provided the principal motive and objectives for his war. Unfortunately, the implications of the impact of Putin’s world view and his distorted historical perspective give little encouragement about future prospects for peace in the region.
In the first book, Zygar, a Russian journalist and political activist now living in exile, travels back as far as the sixteenth century to examine the origins of one major myth, that of the ethnic unity of the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. Ironically, that particular fantasy was promoted by an East Prussian convert to the Orthodox faith who was looking for protection from what he believed was the greatest threat to his newfound religion, namely Poland.
The image – and excuse – of a Polish or other western threat to the world of Russian Orthodoxy would re-occur over the centuries, as would the claim that the lands of Kievan Rus, the mythical source of modern Russia, once provided the original home for all three groups.
Zygar goes on to cover the various permutations of that myth and its influence on Russian and Soviet policy from the reigns of Peter and Catherine the Great, through the imperial expansion and Russification programs of Tsarist Russia in the nineteenth century and the creation, expansion, and collapse of the Soviet Union.
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Zygar’s history spends as much time on the growth of a Ukrainian national identity and culture. He extends that back as far as the time of the Cossacks, who sought to preserve some autonomy for the region when they agreed to subordinate their leadership to Moscow in the seventeenth century.
This, of course, was crushed by Catherine the Great, the first ruler in the Kremlin to speak of a ‘New Russia’ when discussing the southern rim of the Tsars’ empire (but which referred then to a much smaller slice of territory than the area Putin has tried to label as such) and who completed the incorporation of Ukraine into the realm of the Tsars.
Nonetheless, a Ukrainian literary and artistic cultural movement flourished in the nineteenth century, part of the Romantic Movement sweeping the rest of Europe and one that would give birth to national aspirations throughout the continent. Moscow wasted little time in trying to suppress that movement, especially after the Polish revolt in 1863, which Kremlin rulers would continue to use as an excuse to suppress Ukrainian culture on the grounds that it was inspired by the Poles as a separatist movement without popular roots.
Even the Ukrainian language was dismissed as nothing more than an ‘idiom.’ Still, Ukrainian national aspirations roared back with a vengeance after each of the world wars, only to be repressed, first by Lenin and the Red Army, and later by Stalin and Brezhnev. Finally, in 1991, Ukrainians won their independence, which enjoyed overwhelming support—including in the Russian speaking regions–in the only popular referendum held among the former Soviet states.
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The author’s journalist approach to his topic provides a blend of straight chronology and anecdotal narratives of Russian and Ukrainian leaders, academics and historians, artists and poets that allows him to illustrate and highlight his themes on a more personal level, and one that is both informative and entertaining.
He also reviews the personal history of both Putin and Zelensky and how that has brought them to their bitter confrontation today. In many ways, the more interesting evolution is Zelensky’s, as he goes from cabaret and television entertainer – working more often in Moscow than Kyiv – to an inspirational leader resisting the brutal Russian aggression against his homeland. His epiphany appears to have come from the Russian seizure of Crimea in 2014.
Ploky’s book is a more traditional academic treatment of the subject, as one would expect from an author who holds the Chair for Ukrainian History at Harvard University. In contrast to Zygar’s extensive approach, Plokhy lays down a shorter, yet broader historical span, beginning with the emergence of new nation states that evolved from the break-up of the varied empires in eastern Europe in 1919. He sees the current Russo-Ukrainian conflict as an extension of the earlier battles that followed the dissolution of those imperial domains from the Rhine to the Volga.
Within the Russian paradigm, Plokhy claims that today’s battle is not a new phenomenon, but rather an extension of the old-fashioned wars of imperial conquest that Russian elites have sought to impose on their neighbors for centuries, by elites who see themselves as the heirs to the great power and expansionist traditions of Tsarist Russian and the Soviet Union.
For the Ukrainians, on the other hand, it is a war of independence, a desperate attempt to defend their right of existence that grew from the end of the Soviet Union.
Zygar would agree.
He believes his countrymen have been blinded by visions of imperial and historical grandeur (false ones, mind you) to the reality of Tsarist and Soviet misrule, a blindness that continues to this day, especially in the Kremlin. When coupled with the blatant distortions that mark the steady reinterpretations of the historical record, it is little wonder that Putin and his acolytes in the Kremlin have launched another war of conquest in the fabled lands of ‘New Russia.’
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Plokhy’s narrative takes the reader through the collapse of the USSR, the internal political battles, and broader diplomatic maneuvering that created an independent Ukraine and truncated Russia in the 1990s, as well Putin’s increasing opposition to, isolation from, and vehement hatred of the West after his assumption of power following Yeltsin’s retirement.
Plokhy points to the changing and increasingly aggressive behavior of Putin in the 2000s, as he dropped his previous outreach to the United States and Europe and by the late 2000s, had come to view Washington in particular as the source of all Russian misfortunes.
Throughout the period, he responded to a series of events on the global stage with growing distrust and vehemence, evident in his Wehrkunde speech in 2007, the invasion of Georgia, and repeated calls for a reversal of NATO expansion into eastern Europe.
Regardless of his policies and behavior dating back to the beginning of his regime, Putin never wavered in his principal objective of restoring Russia as a great power and reinventing Russian history along more benign and mythical lines to shore up popular belief in his country’s greatness and superiority.
Plokhy’s final chapters march through the seizure of Crimea in 2014, the proxy war in eastern Ukraine, and the invasion and occupation in February 2022, and immediately after. He also reviews the shifting international dynamics following that invasion, and his message is not a heartening one for the Kremlin.
Putin, according to Plokhy, has built a new wall between Russian and Europe and has struggled to find credible and useful allies elsewhere in the world. His most significant potential source of support (i.e. China) will always be the stronger of the two with Moscow struggling to be anything more than a junior partner to the increasingly powerful neighbor to its east.
In Plokhy’s mind, the Russo-Ukrainian war marks the end of the post-Cold War era – in which the so-called peace dividend has been squandered – with no clear view of what will replace it. But he does expect this new period to be one in which the two major contenders will be the United States and China, with Russia as a second-string player.
One final, and depressing, postmark comes from a recent editorial by the imprisoned and twice-poisoned Russian activist Vladimir Kara-Murza. Writing from his prison cell somewhere in the Putin Gulag, Kara-Murza decried the reinvention yet again of Russian history, this time by the Putin regime. Russian schoolchildren, and presumably university graduates, will now be spoon-fed a rehashed version of earlier Russian themes, ones sadly reminiscent of those covered in these two books.
This new version also underscores themes worked repeatedly by Putin, as he blames all of Russia’s misfortunes on a malevolent West, and in which only generous and humane motives can be ascribed to St. Petersburg and Moscow over the years. The peoples of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, for example, invited Soviet troops in to protect them from fascists and other bad people, and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, was only a temporary measure to protect Russia’s Slavic brethren from the oppression and depredations of the Nazis and others.
Given this, it is difficult to find a source of hope or to expect anything positive from a Putin-led Russia in the years ahead. There can certainly be little benefit in – or purpose to – negotiating a peaceful resolution to the current war, as Putin is unlikely to give up on his goal of fully reincorporating Ukraine into the Russian Empire he seeks to rebuild. He has reportedly been told that his legacy will depend on the success of his campaigns to restore Ukraine to its place in the Greater Russian pantheon.
Indeed, one can only recommend books such as these two for those who are foolishly thinking of blocking continued support and military aid to Ukraine.
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