Awakening to Nationhood

At the heart of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the Russian president’s apparently sincere believe that Ukraine does not—or at least should not—exist, that it isn’t a real  country, that its existence is a kind of historical error that enshrines in geo-political reality a present that corresponds neither to the past nor, if he can have anything to do with it, the future. As I wrote a few weeks ago, Putin’s gaze seems to focused on the distant past, on Kievan Rus, the enormous confederation of Northern and Eastern European peoples that existed from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries and which managed to expand eventually include territory that today constitutes all or part of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Finland, and Romania. It was an enormous state, significantly larger than the Holy Roman Empire or the Byzantine Empire, the only two nations even remotely as large as Kievan Rus at its largest or as powerful.

People interested in getting inside Putin’s head need, I think, to focus on the history of Kievan Rus, the nation-state that existed long before Russia or Ukraine on the territory that both now occupy. Part of the problem, in fact, in interpreting the events of the last few weeks has to do with the remarkable lack of knowledge most Americans have of early Russian history. Sviatoslav I (943–972), Vladimir the Great (980–1015), and Yaroslav the Wise (1019–1054)—these names are unknown to most, but they are the ghosts hovering over Putin’s bed at night while he sleeps and dreams his dreams of a world without Ukraine. Lenin, not so much!

I made reference a few weeks ago to an essay by Vladimir Putin available for all to read on the  website of the President of Russia. (Click here to take a look if you haven’t yet. The country he references as Ancient Rus is what historians call Kievan Rus.) The man couldn’t be clearer. Waving away his prose as grandiose posturing is no wiser than it was in the 1930’s to wave away Mein Kampf as the ravings of a madman. And his prose is actually clear as a bell. Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians are, he writes totally unambiguously, all “the descendants of Ancient Rus, the largest state in Europe.” In Putin’s historical recollection, the ancestors of today’s Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, and I quote, “were bound together by one language (which we now refer to as Old Russian), economic ties, the rule of the princes of the Rurik dynasty, and—after the baptism of Rus—the Orthodox faith.” It’s a remarkable essay and I recommend it to all who wish to understand what is really going on in Vladimir  Putin’s head.

As noted, it is a fascinating essay. But it is predicated on the assumption that, for it to be legitimate, the future must mirror the past. But is that really true? Are new developments in the world by definition inauthentic if their point is not to restore a glorious past and retrace a nation’s steps to locate the precise point at which it went off-track, then to fix the errors that led the nation astray and restore—or rather, create—the future that was meant all along to have been that nation’s destiny? Can’t new developments be authentic without leading to a replication of the past?

Where do nations come from? To argue that the existence of the United States, for example, is illegitimate because its independence was the first of a long line of tragic events that reduced the British Empire, an imperialist invention that once claimed as its territory a full quarter of the earth’s landmass, to the actual British Isles (minus the Republic of Ireland) and a handful of bits and pieces of almost no geopolitical importance spread out over the world—that would be absurd. And yet the world is full to overflowing with ethnic groups that would like to exist as independent nations but whose right to chart that specific path forward for themselves has been denied to them for reasons that are hard to explain with any sort of convincing rationale. The Chechens, the Basques, the Uighurs, the Rohingya, the Lapps, the Catalonians, the Inuit—all of these are groups that will probably never attain statehood. But to explain why Bhutan or Iceland should awarded by all the status of independent nations, but none of the above should, is hard to say. There are, after all, more than two times as many Chechens in the world as there are Bhutanese…and more than four times as many Chechens as there are Icelanders!

Amir Gilboa (1917–1983), one of Israel’s greatest poets, wrote in one of his best-known poems, later a familiar Israeli song, that it occurs from time to time that “a person wakes up in the morning / and feels himself to be a nation and starts to walk / and to all whom he meets on his way, he calls out “Shalom.” The idea here is both simple and complex. Nationhood, the poet is saying, is a feature of self-awareness, of self-conception, of willing self-determination. The past exists, obviously. But nations do not come into being because of history, but because the arc of national purpose and will bends towards autonomy and independence. Our nation came into being not because declaring independence from Britain wasn’t a seditious act of open treason against king and country, but because, by the end of the eighteenth century, the colonials living in British North America woke up one morning possessed of the sense that they were a nation unto themselves and could no longer be content to exist as a mere appendage to somebody else’s empire. Gilboa was thinking about Israel, I’m sure. (He fought in the War of Independence, which experience influenced his poetry for the rest of his life.) The tragedy of the Palestinians can be charted along these lines as well, by the way: when the opportunity was handed to them on a silver platter in 1948 to declare independence and get on with the work of building a nation, they simply didn’t possess the national will to be a nation. (In my opinion, the solution to the Palestinian problem cannot be based on endless disappointment that in 1948 they hadn’t woken up to nationhood yet. A topic for another letter!)

And that brings me to Ukraine. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, the Ukrainian Parliament, formerly a toothless organization that existed merely to rubberstamp directives from Moscow, adopted what it called a Declaration of State Sovereignty. A year later, that same parliament adopted a formal document called the Act of Independence. A referendum was conducted; 92% of the population supported the concept of Ukraine as a fully independent nation. In 2004, the so-called Orange Revolution took place as the nation, almost as one, rose up to protest against the results of a corrupt election and to insist on a new referendum to choose a national leader: clearly, the people had become used to thinking of themselves as a nation and, although surely ever mindful of the nightmare of the USSR years, were not prepared to be slaves again. And as the nation has charted its course forward, coming closer and closer to the West and doing its best to distance itself from Putin’s Russia and its imperialist fantasies about restoring the good old days of Kievan Rus, the Russians did what they could to thwart the Ukrainians’ plans for their own nation. The invaded and seized Crimea, which had been part of Ukraine since the 1950s, then continued to rebel forces in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions eager to turn back the tide of history and re-integrate Ukraine into a restored Grand Russia.

When Putin attempts to justify his invasion of Ukraine, he falls back on the legacy of Kievan Rus. But the Ukrainian people have long since moved forward. Just as Amir Gilboa wrote would have to be the case, the populace woke up and realized they were a nation. And, just as was the case with the colonials in the thirteen colonies, there could be no turning back. Our Founders all knew that. And the Ukrainians know it as well. Only poor Vladimir Vladimirovich seems unaware that the yearning for freedom cannot be extinguished even when the freedom fighters are outnumbered and out-armed. As noted, the arc of national self-awareness bends towards autonomy and independence. And that is why, no matter what the outcome of the current war, the idea of an independent Ukraine—rooted, as it is, in the self-conception of the Ukrainians themselves—cannot be eradicated by violence or bloodshed. It is far too late for that! And where should our nation stand in all of this turmoil? As a people who precisely did wake up one morning and realize it had matured into nationhood, we have no choice but to support the Ukrainians as they struggle not to become a historical footnote to a different nation’s imperialist fantasies.