Ukraine, Russia, Two Vladimirs, and the burden of history

Are Russians comfortable in submitting themselves to the greatness of the state? And how does that imperial tendency conflict with the more open-minded, liberal spirit at play in Kiev? The double-headed eagle is an apt symbol; one head faces west, the other looks toward the eastern empire. 

By Greg Guma

Rutland Herald, Brattleboro Reformer, Times-Argus

No long ago, to many North Americans, Ukraine was just another obscure eastern European region. Most people could not find it on a map. Today it is hard to avoid, although many people still prefer to ignore the barrage of disquieting reports that it could be the place where the next “world war” begins.

Along with wall-to-wall news coverage has come a firehose of misinformation. I won’t detail or amplify any of that in this article. But it might be helpful to understand some of Ukraine’s complex history, as well as its relationship with Russia. 

More than a century after the 1917 revolution that led to the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Kiev’s prince Vladimir the Great remains a revered figure. He ruled from 980 to 1015, brought a form of Christianity to what was known then as Kievan Rus, and is a key to understanding the enduring tension between Russia and Ukraine. The region’s name itself underlines the problem. But when that ancient Vladimir was in charge, Rievan Rus was a voluntary group of independent states, an embryonic democracy that was ultimately destroyed by Mongol invaders.

The region’s embrace of Byzantine Christianity rather than Roman Catholicism, however, had long-term consequences for world history. In the end, it placed Russia, at least spiritually, outside Western Europe and encouraged a faith-based isolationism, along with the idea that Moscow could become the Third Rome. Russia, went the prophecy, was destined by God to shape the fate of humanity.

Even Stalin admired the first Vladimir, and renovated the huge statue of him erected in Kiev in 1853. For many Russians he remains a link to their distant past. But for modern Ukrainians he is primarily the medieval leader who established Kievan Rus long before Moscow even existed. In The White Guard, Mikhail Bulgakov explored the historic split between Russia and its rebellious neighbor. A former journalist who became a novelist, he wrote perceptively about the tension between the Ukrainian people and Russian state power, and also about the difficult transition from monarchy to the USSR’s “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

In general, he asserted, Russians admire leaders who exhibit (and use) their power. But are they completely comfortable in submitting themselves to the greatness of the state? And how does that imperial tendency conflict with the more open-minded, liberal spirit at play in Kiev? The double-headed eagle, dating from the Byzantine period, is an apt symbol; one head faces west, the other looks toward the eastern empire. 

After annexing Crimea in 2014, the new Vladimir justified Russia’s claim to the peninsula in an address to the Duma (legislature). “We are not simply close neighbors but, as I have said many times, we are one people.” he announced. “Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus is our common source and we cannot live without each other.” Today he is taking that belief to its logical but brutal conclusion.

The implications are clear. When the European Union supported the Maiden uprising eight years ago, Putin saw it as an assault, as well as an attempt to destroy Russia’s supranational identity. Maidan and what followed revealed a sharp turn to the west, a move Putin viewed as a betrayal that endangered Russia’s national security. 

Two year later, the new Vladimir had another statue of Vladimir the Great built just outside the Kremlin wall. It was a symbolic call for national unity, but one seen by many Ukrainians as an appropriation of their heritage. What did the earlier Vladimir have to do with Moscow, they wondered.

There was one Russia leader who did have a decent relationship with Ukraine. Nikita Khrushchev was born on the Ukrainian border, and moved to Yuzovka, a mining town in Donetsk, in his teens. In 1938, Stalin appointed him as Communist Party Secretary in Kiev. His job: to restore normalcy after the man-made famine of 1932-33, known as Holodome. Over six million people had died after grain was confiscated for export from Russian and Ukrainian peasants, in exchange for the heavy machinery needed for Stalin’s industrialization campaign. Khrushchev argued against relying on Ukraine for agriculture and did what he could to mitigate its impact.

Khrushchev also served in Ukraine during the “Great Patriotic War” (the West calls it World War II) and afterward ran the Communist Party in Kiev. But in 1956, upon taking national power, he denounced Stalin’s crimes and launched de-Stalinization, known in the USSR as the Thaw. No other Soviet republic responding to this move more enthusiastically than Ukraine. 

Today some Ukrainians consider Khrushchev, despite his actions, just one more Soviet oppressor. But many show him respect. Although he was an ethnic Russian, they know that he often said, “in his soul” he wanted to be Ukrainian. Khrushchev understood that, with its warmer climate and fertile land, the country had served as the empire’s “bread basket.” But when it counted, he argued that it should not be the only one.

Since the Maidan revolt, Kiev has become home for many exiled opponents of the current Russian regime. In the Ukrainian capitol they can pursue careers and conduct business without the surveillance and limitations that would face them at home. One of them, profiled in the 2019 Russian study, In Putin’s Footsteps, is Ilya Ponomarev, at one time an opposition member of the State Duma. “Before Crimea,” he claimed, “our country was an example to the world. Now Russia is just like the United States — aggressively interfering in other countries’ affairs when they disagree with those countries’ politics.” 

Most Ukrainians don’t see it exactly that way. As a Ukrainian diplomat has admitted, the country could do better in fighting corruption and building its economy. On the other hand, “Ukrainians do not believe state power is sacred, as they do in Russia. There the Kremlin is the center of the state that people serve. Here those on top of the political ladders are just the hired hands of the people.”

The past has not been forgotten in Ukraine. In 2006, specifically, a law recognized the Holodome famine as an act of genocide — a charge currently being thrown back at Ukraine without proof as a justification for invasion. Following the Holodome law a monument recognizing its cost was built near an 11th Century monastery, just yards from a World War II memorial. 

Despite current Russian charges — echoed by some on the far left and right — that the Maidan movement was the start of a neo-Nazi resurgence, the two monuments illustrate a different reality. Ukrainians do appreciate the sacrifices made by Russia and others during war in the 1940s. But they also suggest that Ukrainians remember other terrible moments in their fraught relationship with Russia, have their own interpretation of the past, and don’t want to be any other state’s subjects in the future.

Extreme Thinking: A Strange Convergence IS Happening

By Greg Guma 

They believe in the “deep state,” a secretive cabal of powerful people in the public and private sectors that has controlled governments for more than a century. If you haven’t noticed, they explain, it is likely because much of what is broadcast and printed as news is really a barrage of lies and propaganda. As a result, Russian television (RT) is a more reliable source than outlets like CNN and The New York Times. Tucker Carlson makes more sense to them about Ukraine and other issues than Rachel Maddow.

Internationally, they are certain that the US government, led by hypocritical Democrats and willing dupes, is eager to wage war against Russia, China, and any other potential rivals. The leaders of those nations, they believe, are actually victims, just protecting national sovereignty and their way of life against a ruthless empire bent on destruction and global control. Since Ukraine is full of  Nazis and bent on genocide, they are not worth defending. And NATO? It’s a dangerous bully that ought to be dismantled.

Another threat, in their view, is government mandates, manifested in the form of public orders to wear masks or get vaccinated. That and the “lockdowns” imposed in response to the COVID pandemic were really just strategies to prepare people for a police state. So they cheer on truckers who try to shut down cities to make this point.

Hearing such sentiments from the right shouldn’t come as a shock. What has largely been ignored, however, is that some of those loudly voicing these views consider themselves leftists or progressives. Unfortunately, disinformation migrates too easily from media fronts and diplomats in Russia to Democratic Socialists and self-proclaimed radicals in the US. This is one of the reasons that the current political system, often called bourgeois democracy in such circles, is in the process of slow collapse. 

After decades of open hostility, the far right and far left have finally found common ground — contempt for liberal elites and their “oppressive” governments.

In political science this is known as the horseshoe theory. The idea is the far left and far right, rather than being at opposite ends of the spectrum, actually resemble each other in many ways. They are the two ends of an ideological horseshoe.

Political scientist Jeff Taylor has noted that the political spectrum “may be linear, but it is not a straight line. It is shaped like a horseshoe.” Some argue that this may explain the resurgence of antisemitism on both the right and left.

In 2018, Kyrylo Tkachenko warned that the common ground is “based on shared anti-liberal resentment. Of course, there remain palpable differences between far left and the far right. But we should not underestimate the dangers already posed by these left-right intersections, as well as what we might lose if the resentment-driven backlash becomes mainstream.” 

Often the response is dismissive:  this is a gross and insulting oversimplification. Both the far-right and far-left may oppose the liberal democratic “world order,” they admit, but for very different reasons.

Despite such differences, however, the extreme declarations and leading questions of popular figures, so-called “defenders of liberty” from Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan to Vandana Shiva and Robert Kennedy Jr., are increasingly music to many ears. For some it’s an addiction, for others a guilty pleasure. As strange as it seems, this unlikely convergence is one of the reasons that Trump (or someone like him) could become president again.

Consider the conspiracy theorists who discounted the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines and other public-health mandates. They are often portrayed as right-wing, but many anti-vaxxers are organic farmers, members of homeschooling and alternative-education communities, and anti-war hippies. The anti-vax faction is strongly linked to left-libertarian politics and a deep mistrust of institutional authority.

In a 2021 article for The Atlantic, Eoin Higgins noted that some progressives are drawn to ideas commonly associated with conservatives. One example is “a local journalist and Bernie Sanders supporter whom I know through Facebook… She told me she finds the idea that COVID is caused by 5G cellphone towers more believable than person-to-person transmission.”

Last September George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian, “It’s not just anti-vax beliefs that have been spreading through these movements. On an almost daily basis I see conspiracy theories travelling smoothly from right to left. I hear right-on people mouthing the claims of white supremacists, apparently in total ignorance of their origins. I encounter hippies who once sought to build communities sharing the memes of extreme individualism. Something has gone badly wrong in parts of the alternative scene.”

Mother Jones has also weighed in. In 2020, Keira Butler noted in an article that some of the loudest anti-vaccine voices have come from “politically liberal, mostly white, and affluent enclaves — think famously hippie places like Marin County, California, or Boulder, Colorado — where parents worried about the side effects of what they perceive as toxins in vaccines. Anti-vaxxers in these places tended to pride themselves on the purity of their lifestyles — they bought organic groceries, railed against genetically modified food, and were suspicious of the electromagnetic waves emitted by cell phones.” 

We are seeing the same phenomenon in Vermont. But most so-called “thought leaders” are too polite to discuss this. It might offend some of their friends. Or, despite the state’s progressive reputation, they just don’t care. 

Bottom line: Along with truth — often the first casualty of war, whether it’s kinetic or cultural — democracy is also in decline. But it’s not dying in darkness. It’s fading away in broad daylight and plain view. So far we’re only looking at — and talking about — part of the picture.

* * * *

After I published this essay, it was submitted to a Vermont-based publication I had edited for more than a decade. What followed was an apt example of the problem. Rather than posting it, or responding with a substantive criticism, the editor instead published an eight-year old article that makes a very different point. The headline claims: “Left-Right White Solidarity Basis of Support for U.S./EU/NATO Wars on Global Humanity.”

In a note running before the essay, the editor asserted as a fact that what occurred in Ukraine in 2014 was a “U.S.-backed neo-Nazi coup.” She also attacked the horseshoe theory — without bothering to explain what it is. As she later explained, she simply doesn’t think it’s “valid.”

What she does endorse is the neo-Nazi coup charge, a recurrent Russian disinformation narrative, along with the argument that Ukrainian politics is dominated by fascists and Nazis. The actual evidence, and the testimony of those who took park in the movement, does not support that. Instead, it reveals a broad-based grassroots uprising, launched by a diverse group of people who were tired of President Viktor Yanukovych. Some demonstrators were certainly nationalists, but others were liberals, socialists, libertarians, Christians and atheists. There were also workers from the countryside and IT geeks from Kiev. 

The person widely credited with lighting the match was Mustafa Nayem, a Ukrainian journalist, who asked a simple question on Facebook after Yanukovych stopped preparations to sign a deal with the European Union and turned toward Russia: Was anyone planning to go to the Maiden? In just an hour he had more than 1,000 likes and that night 400 people showed up. He described them as “the so-called creative class.” 

The mass demonstrations that followed remained peaceful for weeks. But eventually, the government responded with force. In the regime’s last hours, snipers killed dozens of protesters; eleven police also died. Nevertheless, the Russian version has persisted, used as a pretext to justify its aggressive response ever since. Unfortunately, some activists and writers on the left have joined the chorus. 

As George Monbiot wrote, “Something has gone badly wrong in parts of the alternative scene.”

* NATO critics and those sympathetic to Russia’s concerns point to its expansion since the Cold War. In fact, the last time any new members bordering Russia joined NATO was 2004. They were Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. Leaders of all three Baltic states have recently expressed concerns about Russian destabilization.