Ukraine’s nightmare: The Russian Bear and its history

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Picture of Bill Nasson: provided; picture of brown bear: https://pixabay.com/photos/bear-brown-animal-zoo-predator-4118795/

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Russia has long been a country with an imperial habit of mind. Throughout the modern age, under its most ambitious Romanov Tsars – like Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great – it has sought to expand its size and influence through eastward imperial conquest. Along with 16th-century Spain and 17th-century Holland, Russia made colonisation big business.
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Russia has long been a country with an imperial habit of mind. Throughout the modern age, under its most ambitious Romanov Tsars – like Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great – it has sought to expand its size and influence through eastward imperial conquest. Along with 16th-century Spain and 17th-century Holland, Russia made colonisation big business. As a valuable territory which offered plenty of fresh land, an abundance of grain and a straight path through to the Black Sea, the Ukraine loomed large in Russia’s sights.

Increasingly fearful of their predatory neighbour by the 17th century, Ukrainian leaders tried to maintain their autonomy by attempting risky defensive alliances with the Turkish Ottoman Empire, Poland and Sweden. The parallels with Ukraine’s current independence crisis and its pleas to NATO and the EU are not only all too plain, but truly haunting.

Those for whom imperialism is the original sin of greedy Western powers such as Britain and France tend to overlook the biggest bully in the East. There, deserving of its place at the table of the Great Powers, the Russian Empire was actually the largest consolidated empire in the world by the end of the 19th century, covering about one sixth of the earth’s dry land. At the same time, while able to flex its muscle beyond its borders, Russia’s backward maritime transport capability restricted it to being a land empire. Consequently, Moscow’s dreams of conquest were limited by how far its rampaging armies could march from home before empty stomachs obliged them to stop.

In a sense, then, today’s Russian Bear vodka on the shelves of South Africa’s liquor outlets is especially well named. Russia can be seen as having grown up as a lumbering bear, or a very large man with rather short arms, heavy hands with long fingers and fairly slow-moving feet. It made it an unpredictable beast that was hard to ignore, extremely dangerous at close range, and from which it was advisable to maintain a cautious and respectful distance. A bear hug was to be avoided.

At first, the building of the Eurasian Russian Empire in conquered regions forged ahead on the usual basis on which empires were constructed – a bit of force, a bit of opportunistic collaboration between conqueror and conquered, and a bit of shrewd accommodation in which some power was left in the hands of indigenous elites. By the later 19th century, though, there was a fly in this ointment. The emergence of modern mass politics in Russia opened the door to growing nationalist movements in its Eastern European satellite regions. There, a Polish rebellion in the 1860s was followed a decade later by a wave of ethnic Ukrainian insubordination, directly challenging the authority of the Tsar. Thrown off balance, in the 1880s Tsar Alexander III embarked on a clumsy programme of forced cultural assimilation known as the “Russification” of restless groups such as Ukrainians, Poles, Latvians and so on. Not unlike Lord Milner’s “Anglicisation” policy in the conquered Boer republics after 1902, it was doomed. Imposed Russification simply increased separatist sentiment within the varied populations of Russia’s colonial borderlands, although nowhere did anti- colonial nationalism seriously threaten to undo Moscow’s empire.

Indeed, any thought of keeping the peace through compromise was out of the question. Pyotr Stolypin, Russia’s prime minister early in the 20th century, insisted on a fattening diet of Russian nationalism as the essential mother’s milk for all imperial subjects. It was not found to be tasty, not least by Ukrainian mouths. Having miraculously survived almost a dozen attempts on his life, in 1911 Stolypin was assassinated at the Kiev Opera House. Two years earlier, he had told a French journalist that if only his country were to be granted “twenty or more years of internal and external peace”, Russia would “not be recognizable” as a calm and modern state.

What it was granted, however, was not peace. Instead, it was to be struck by the shattering crisis of war, revolution and an empire coming apart at the seams. There can be scarcely anyone left among the people of today’s battered Ukraine who may have lived through those years. But, in one way or another, all of its inhabitants have had to live in the long shadow of their consequences.

The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 was the beginning of the end for old Matushka Rossiya or “Mother Russia”. None of the fighting between Moscow and Berlin on the eastern front of the Great War occurred in modern-day Russia itself. For the battlegrounds were all colonial, testing imperial power in territories which are now Latvia, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine. There was no escaping a profound consequence of this state of affairs. Even as it was fighting in defence of its homeland, the Russian army was also a force of military occupation, asserting its will through martial law. Civilian administrations were pushed out of the way.

Yet, however massive the army occupying Moscow’s borderlands, its performance against its enemy was utterly disastrous. By 1915, the old Russian Empire had lost all of its Polish lands and huge chunks of the contemporary Ukraine. At the end of the following year, the empire was broken, with its border regions either under foreign occupation or stuck in a political vacuum as a collapsing Tsarist state enabled awakened nationalists to gain influence. As Russia’s revolutionary year of 1917 dawned, its colonial fringes erupted into wholesale violence and disorder. Excited by the rise of domestic revolutionaries and by the prospect of the imminent collapse of the Romanov dynasty, itchy nationalists anticipated a dramatically improved – or more liberal – political situation.

Along with other surrounding nationalists, Ukrainian politicians and cultural leaders took to optimistic dreaming, tinkering with new ideas, new institutions and new policies. Newspapers that had been banned by Moscow reappeared, new political parties were established and a central parliament or Rada was set up in Kiev to oversee what its leadership called “the revival of a free Ukrainian political and cultural life”.

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Still, perhaps mindful that it was not yet peace at last, there was caution. In its first major constitutional step in the middle of 1917, a wary Kiev declared autonomy but not sovereign independence, aware that even self-government might be too much for the moderate liberals and conservatives of Russia’s post- February 1917 Provisional Government. For, whatever the chaos engulfing a country in the grip of revolution, it was still fighting a war to cling on to an empire.
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Still, perhaps mindful that it was not yet peace at last, there was caution. In its first major constitutional step in the middle of 1917, a wary Kiev declared autonomy but not sovereign independence, aware that even self-government might be too much for the moderate liberals and conservatives of Russia’s post- February 1917 Provisional Government. For, whatever the chaos engulfing a country in the grip of revolution, it was still fighting a war to cling on to an empire.

But Moscow’s circumstances simply worsened, with hardly anything working any longer, and its leadership at a loss over what to do about an increasingly enraged populace. Fatefully, the country’s disintegrating state of affairs fell under the extremist spell of Vladimir Lenin’s plotting Bolsheviks. There was, he announced, a simple – or simple-minded – solution to the wartime mess they were in: bread for the hungry; land for poor peasants; peace for all, instead of war; and the right to national self-determination, instead of the dictates of the empire.

With Russia showing a civilised way of getting out of the bloodbath of a world war, others would follow, starting with the Germans. Thereafter, all of Europe’s problems could be sorted out through talking. It was like waving a magic wand in a trick with no magic. By now impatient with new tricks of any kind, Ukrainian nationalists saw the October 1917 revolution as the signal that they could now break away. Had Lenin’s new Soviet utopia not promised national self-determination? Soon after the Communist seizure of power, Kiev’s Rada signed a separate peace with Germany to help in fending off the Russian Threat, and Ukrainian forces turned up the temperature of their simmering civil war with Moscow.

It was an ironic moment. For nationalists in Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania and other territories, a push for independence from Russia would now come to mean dependence on the ambitions of the German Kaiserreich, still firmly on its feet at the end of 1917. Early in the following year, circumstances looked right for Berlin to make one of Lenin’s big promises come true – to achieve peace. Russia got what it wanted in the March 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, but it came at a high price – the end of Russia as a great imperial power.

The armistice terms which Germany dictated were crafty. Leaving Russia itself alone, Berlin announced that virtually all of its western colonial territories were now to be “liberated”, leaving their subject peoples free to become independent. Understandably, the German expectation was that colonised non-Russians would waste no time in getting on with it. The greatest act in this drama was played out in the Ukraine, where Russia’s biggest grain basket, its main source of coal and iron and its major industrial centres, simply slipped from its grasp.

The immediate result of the Brest-Litovsk deal was that a massive chunk of Russia’s old empire fell into Germany’s lap, becoming the client or satellite states of an enormous German protectorate. As Red Army soldiers trudged out, “friendly” German troops marched in to protect Berlin’s new lands.

The Ukraine, a mainstay of the Soviet economy, was run from April 1918 by a German military governor, Field-Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn. A few months later, he met the same fate as that of Russian prime minister Stolypin, being assassinated in Kiev. While it may have become a dangerous city for bossy foreign men, it was the capital of a disproportionately important land. As Norman Stone, the late historian of Eastern Europe, remarks in a memorable judgement in his 2007 WWI: A short history: “with the Ukraine, Russia is a USA; without, she is merely a Canada – mostly snow”. Writing in his After Tamerlane: The global history of empire (2009), the leading historian of empires, John Darwin, concludes that “for the Russian heartland”, by 1914 the Ukraine “had been made into a milch cow of wealth”. It is tempting to wonder how long Russia’s Bolshevik regime would have lasted, had Germany ended up winning the First World War.

The resolution of that great issue was not only German defeat but the appallingly messy aftermath of the end of hostilities. Although violence ended and order returned in the European west, to the east bloodletting and disorder intensified. There, the green shoots of “decolonisation” in the former lands of the disintegrating Russian Empire soon withered. Worsening the crisis of governing authority, vicious civil wars erupted, involving inter-ethnic struggles and pro-Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik groups turning on one another.

Confronted by this upheaval, Russia’s new revolutionary rulers soon realised what the previous Romanov dynasty had always known – if their country was to parade as a big power, it needed to hang on to its strategically valuable bordering territories. In due course, the mobilisation of a gigantic Red Army of over six million men by the beginning of the 1920s enabled the Bolsheviks to regain what had been lost through Brest-Litovsk, reasserting control first over the Ukraine and neighbouring Belorussia.

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But Moscow was now also more alert to the nationalist opposition that had been stirred up. To keep an eye on the affairs of subject nations, it appointed its very first commissar of nationalities, a pushy expatriate from Georgia called Josef Stalin, who oversaw the damping down of chauvinist “Mother Russia” instincts in Russia’s settler communities in colonial territories. Following the surrender of a brief independence, the Ukraine was to be reinvented as a Soviet Socialist Republic under its “own” Communist leadership.
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But Moscow was now also more alert to the nationalist opposition that had been stirred up. To keep an eye on the affairs of subject nations, it appointed its very first commissar of nationalities, a pushy expatriate from Georgia called Josef Stalin, who oversaw the damping down of chauvinist “Mother Russia” instincts in Russia’s settler communities in colonial territories. Following the surrender of a brief independence, the Ukraine was to be reinvented as a Soviet Socialist Republic under its “own” Communist leadership.

Authentically local in origin, it would enjoy “cultural autonomy” as a separate Socialist Republic, free to build an autonomous nation through the promotion of its own language, culture and education. Of course, Stalin’s concession of such rights fell well short of any recognition of national sovereignty. There was to be no question of republics such as the Ukraine having their own foreign policies and foreign relations. In 1922, Stalin even gave the game away himself by assuring the Bolshevik faithful that “the game of independence” was exactly that, “a game”. It may even be possible to detect a little South African echo to this conjuring trick of independent nations. Several decades later, it would pop up as apartheid’s Bantustans or homelands.

A new Soviet constitution of 1924 entrenched what was a legal fiction of a Soviet Union made up of equal republican states. In practice, it was a Communist Party empire controlled from Moscow. Nonetheless, the principle of nationality had become rooted in the Soviet system. And, although bottled up, it was a genie that could be released.

Meanwhile, through the 1920s and 1930s, Stalin’s Soviet Union was obsessed with sealing its borders against possible attack from the west. Naturally, the Ukraine’s loyalty could scarcely be taken for granted, given its experience of famine and brutal repression under the iron heel of Stalinist rule. Accordingly, the only way to keep the wolf away from the door was a Soviet policy of staying on good terms with Germany.

But once Hitler came to power, those were bound to turn bad. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, its Ukrainian “bread basket” was predictably a tempting prize. Amid the horrors of mass killings and scorched earth, which convulsed the region in the Second World War, some militant Ukrainian nationalists threw in their lot with the invaders, collaborating with Nazi forces to create chaos and to try to foment an uprising against hated Soviet rule. A considerable number joined Berlin’s Wehrmacht both as soldiers and as concentration camp guards. For the renowned dissident Russian writer and journalist Vasily Grossman, the depths of degradation he witnessed on all sides was an “unspeakable nightmare”.

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Presently, in claiming that a “de-Nazification” of Ukraine is one of the aims of its brutal onslaught upon the country, the Kremlin – for its own spurious propaganda purposes – may be calling up a dark past more than a confused present. A stain on the fabric of Ukraine’s romantic nationalism just over three quarters of a century ago remains in the cradle of living memory, there to be exploited politically by an over-mighty neighbour with a lethal grudge.
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Presently, in claiming that a “de-Nazification” of Ukraine is one of the aims of its brutal onslaught upon the country, the Kremlin – for its own spurious propaganda purposes – may be calling up a dark past more than a confused present. A stain on the fabric of Ukraine’s romantic nationalism just over three quarters of a century ago remains in the cradle of living memory, there to be exploited politically by an over-mighty neighbour with a lethal grudge.

For a country where so many of its yesterdays live on today, that grudge is the dividend of a post-1945 history, which eventually took an unexpected and – for the Kremlin – unwelcome turn. Initially, as we know, after the end of the Second World War, Soviet power ensured that Communist-led governments prevailed across Eastern Europe – all, except Yugoslavia, subservient to Moscow. Its Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic remained never more than an internal colony, kept under tight control and with its rich natural resources exploited for Russia’s benefit.

Up to the very end of the Soviet Empire, Ukrainian products like food, metals and manufactured industrial products were shipped to the rest of the Union at artificially low prices. It cost the producing country severely. The fact that prominent Russian leaders such as Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev happened to come from eastern Ukraine may suggest a kind of poetic irony, but definitely not any sort of poetic justice. A Ukrainian birth did not mean any particular regard for Ukrainian people.

The sudden end of the Soviet show at the end of the 1980s exposed what had been a fairly long illusion. Liberated from Communist rule, along with the five other westernmost Soviet republics, the Ukraine became a sovereign independent state. In effect, Russia shrank, signifying the extinguishing of the last remaining European empire. But, as its atrocious war upon the Ukraine illustrates, it has done a poor job of coming to terms with its diminished place in the world. After nibbling away earlier at strategic portions of its independent neighbour, Moscow is now widening its jaws. The eventual outcome of its attack remains uncertain. But there can be little doubt as to why the target is Ukraine. There are, obviously, wealthy material resources to be regained.

Equally, there is another element, something almost existential. For many brooding Russian nationalists, it is Ukraine which remains the most intimate strand of their country’s own history and identity; Kievan Rus, the sprawling 13th-century kingdom based around Ukraine’s present capital, was as integral to Russia itself as to the core identity of Russia’s original “Muscovy” empire of the 14th century. A Ukraine without Russia may be struggling to realise its true destiny. Can a Russia without Ukraine be the Russia it thinks it should be?

Also read:

Oekraïne: Berigte te velde

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Kommentaar

  • Sakkie Spangenberg

    Excellent overview of the history of Ukraine. I hope it will be read by many - especially those in the ANC supporting "Mother Russia".

  • Thank you for an excellent overview of the Russian-Ukrain relationship and history. It offers a very clear window on the war situation.

  • Reageer

    Jou e-posadres sal nie gepubliseer word nie. Kommentaar is onderhewig aan moderering.


     

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