Foreign Affairs, Nova York – Maio-Junho 2022
Putin’s War on History
The Thousand-Year Struggle Over Ukraine
Anna Reid
ANNA REID is former Kyiv Correspondent for The Economist and the author of Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine.
On the evening of February 21, 2022, three days beforeRussian forces began the largest land invasion on theEuropean continent since World War II, Russian PresidentVladimir Putin gave an angry televised speech. In it, heexpressed familiar grievances about the eastwardexpansion of NATO, alleged Ukrainian aggression, andthe presence of Western missiles on Russia’s border. Butmost of his tirade was devoted to something else: Ukrainian history. “Ukraine is not just a neighboringcountry for us,” Putin said. “It is an inalienable part of ourown history, culture, and spiritual space.” Ukraine’sborders, he asserted, have no meaning other than to mark a former administrative division of the Soviet Union: “Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia.”
To many Western ears, Putin’s historical claims soundedbizarre. But they were of more than casual importance. Farfrom an innovation of the current crisis, Putin’s argumentthat Ukraine has always been one and the same withRussia, and that it has been forcibly colonized by Western forces, has long been a defining part of his worldview. Already during the Maidan popular uprising in Kyiv in 2013–14, Putin claimed that the people leading the hugeprotests were Western-backed fashisti (fascists) trying totear Ukraine from its historical roots. (In fact, the protestscaught the West by surprise, and although they included a far-right fringe, they were no fascist takeover.) And in July 2021, well before the buildup of Russian troops on theUkrainian border, the Kremlin published a 7,000-word essay under Putin’s byline with the title “On the HistoricalUnity of Russians and Ukrainians.” Both Russia andUkraine, it asserted, have not only common roots in language and faith but also a shared historic destiny. Sinceits publication, the essay has become part of the requiredcurriculum for all service members in the Russian armedforces, including those fighting in the current war. According to Putin’s logic, all divisions between Russiaand Ukraine are the work of Western powers. From Polandin the sixteenth century to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the nineteenth century and the Nazis in World War II, theyhave periodically coerced Ukraine or led it astray. In thisreading, Kyiv’s pro-Western outlook over the past decadeis only the latest form of external interference—this time by the European Union and the United States—aimed atdividing Russia against itself. Ukraine’s “forced change ofidentity,” Putin wrote, is “comparable...to the use ofweapons of mass destruction against us.” In Putin’smeaning, “us” included Ukrainians. Ukrainians andUkraine, in other words, aren’t just naturally part ofRussia; they don’t even really exist.
A variation on the “Ukraine doesn’t really exist” theme isthe Kremlin’s assertion that Ukraine is a foregone failure. According to this view—long echoed in a more sophisticated form by Western commentators—thanks toits geography and political history, Ukraine is foreverdestined to be riven by internal division or torn apart bymore powerful neighbors. This was the core narrative ofPutin’s propaganda the last time he invaded Ukraine, whenhe grabbed Crimea and the Donbas following the Maidanprotests in Kyiv. Then, Russian state media reported thatUkraine was a failed state taken over by a neo-Nazi junta and that Russian forces were riding to the rescue. The close Putin adviser who directed all this propaganda, thebodyguard turned strategist Vladislav Surkov, reprised thetheme in an interview with the Financial Times last year. Ukraine, he said, using an odd analogy, was like the “soft tissue” between two bones, which, until it was severed, would rub painfully together. (With Russian journalists, hewas more straightforward: the “only method that hashistorically proved effective in Ukraine,” he said, is“coercion into fraternal relations.”)
As the extraordinary resilience and unity of the Ukrainianpopulation in the current war have demonstrated, theseRussian claims are nonsense. Saying that Ukraine doesn’treally exist is as absurd as saying that Ireland doesn’t existbecause it was long under British rule, or that Norwegiansare really Swedes. Although they won statehood only 31 years ago, the Ukrainians have a rich national historygoing back centuries. The idea that Ukrainians are too weak and divided to stand up for themselves is one theyare magnificently disproving on the battlefield. As for theneo-Nazi insult, this is belied by the fact that Ukraine’spresident, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish and that in themost recent parliamentary elections, in 2019, Ukraine’sfar-right party, Svoboda, won less than three percent of thevote. As Putin’s imagined Ukraine has increasinglydiverged from Ukrainian reality, the myth has becomeharder to sustain, the contradictions too acute. But ratherthan adjusting his historical fantasy to bring it closer to thetruth, Putin has doubled down, resorting to military force and totalitarian censorship in a vain attempt to make reality closer to the myth. He may now be learning thatreality is hard to defy: the wages of bad history are disaster in the present.
GATHERING RUSSIA
Putin’s obsession with Ukraine’s past can be traced to thetrauma of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Until 1991, most of today’s Ukraine had been ruled by Russia for 300 years—slightly longer, in other words, than Scotland hasbeen ruled by England. And with a population that istoday nearly as large as Spain’s, Ukraine was by far themost significant Soviet republic besides Russia itself. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former U.S. national securityadviser, famously wrote, “Without Ukraine, Russia ceasesto be an empire.” This isn’t literally true. Russia today isstill a vast multiethnic empire, taking in a 3,000-mile-wide slice of northern Asia and including more than a dozenAsian nationalities, from the 5.3 million Tatars on theVolga River to a few thousand Chukchis on the Bering Strait. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union and theWarsaw Pact, Moscow lost its West.
For Putin, Russia’s European empire was all-important. Although there has long been an exoticizing streak toRussia’s self-image—“Yes, we are Scythians!” the hithertogentle poet Aleksandr Blok declared after the 1917 revolution—the country has always seen itself as a European, rather than an Asian, power. Its greatcomposers, novelists, and artists have been European in orientation; its historic military triumphs—againstNapoleon and Hitler—made it a senior player in Europe’s“concert of nations.” By pushing Russia back into hergloomy pine forests, away from such ringing old placenames as Odessa and Sevastopol, the loss of Ukraine, in particular, injured the Russian sense of self.
At the heart of Russia’s Ukraine problem, then, has been a war over history. The first battle is over where the storybegins. Conventionally, the story starts with a legend-wrapped leader from the Middle Ages, Volodymyr (orVladimir in Russian) the Great. A descendent of Norseraiders and traders from Scandinavia, Volodymyr foundedthe first proto-state in Kyiv toward the end of the tenthcentury. A loose but very large fiefdom known as Rus, it was centered on Kyiv and covered today’s Belarus, northwestern Russia, and most of Ukraine. Volodymyralso gave Rus its spiritual foundations, converting hisrealm to Orthodox Christianity.
Although Russians and Ukrainians concur on Volodymyr’simportance, they disagree over what happened after hiskingdom broke up. Through the eleventh and twelfthcenturies, it disintegrated into warring princedoms, and in the thirteenth, it was overrun by the Mongols, under BatuKhan. In Russian accounts, the population—and, with it, true Rus culture—fled the violence, heading northeast, toMoscow and Novgorod. Ukrainians, however, argue thatRus culture remained squarely centered on Ukraine andthat what emerged in Moscow was a separate and distincttradition. To Western readers, the argument seems trivial: it is as though the French and the Germans were locked in battle over whether Charlemagne, the ninth-centuryfounder of the Carolingian Empire, belongs to modernFrance or modern Germany. Ukrainians, however, understand the significance of the Russian claims. One ofKyiv’s landmarks is a large nineteenth-century statue ofVolodymyr the Great, holding a cross and gazing out over the Dnieper River. When Putin put up his own, evenbigger Vladimir the Great outside the Kremlin gates in 2016, Ukrainians rightly saw it not as a homage to a tenth-century king but as a blatant history grab.
In fact, for most of the next seven centuries afterVolodymyr’s reign, Ukraine was outside Muscovitecontrol. As Mongol rule crumbled through the 1300s, theterritory of present-day Ukraine was absorbed by theemergent Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which in turncombined by dynastic marriage with Poland, so that for the next two and a half centuries, Ukraine was ruled fromKrakow. Eventually, even Ukraine’s faith acquired a Western veneer: in 1596, the Union of Brest-Litovskcreated the Greek Catholic, or Uniat, Church—a compromise between Catholic Poles and OrthodoxUkrainians that acknowledged the pope but was Orthodoxin ritual and allowed priests to marry. A politically cannyhalfway house between the two religions, the union helpedPolonize the Ukrainian nobility, part of what Putin sees as a long pattern of the West pulling Ukraine away from its rightful Orthodox home.
It was not until the late seventeenth century that Moscowforcefully entered the picture. A series of uprisings byUkrainian Cossacks—militarized frontier groups, centeredon the lower Dnieper—had weakened the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom. Then, following a long war withPoland over Ukraine, expanding Muscovy was finally ableto annex Kyiv in 1686. For Ukrainians, it was an “out ofthe frying pan into the fire” moment: Polish rule wassimply swapped for its harsher Muscovite counterpart. Butin Putin’s telling, it was the beginning of the “gathering ofthe Russian world,” using an archaic phrase that he hasresuscitated to justify his war against Ukraine today. Another century later, Poland itself was partitioned amongAustria, Prussia, and Russia, with Russia ending up withwhat is today Belarus and central Ukraine, including Kyiv, and Austria with today’s western Ukraine, then known as eastern Galicia, which included Lviv.
STATE OF STRUGGLE
Ukraine’s modern national movement began in the 1840s, led by the first great Ukrainian-language writer, Taras Shevchenko. Born into an enserfed peasant family in a village near Kyiv, he exhorted Ukrainians to throw off theRussian yoke and excoriated the many who Russifiedthemselves in order to climb the socioeconomic ladder. (These views earned him ten years in Siberia.) As thecentury progressed, and especially after Tsar Alexander II’s assassination by anarchists in 1881, tsarist rule becamemore repressive. Hundreds of Ukrainian socialistsfollowed Shevchenko into exile, and Ukrainian-languagebooks and education were banned. At this point, Ukraine’seast-west divide turned into an advantage—at least for those living in the western part—because in Austrian-ruled Galicia, Ukrainians were able to adopt the freer civicculture then taking root in Europe. In Lviv, they publishedtheir own newspapers and organized reading rooms, cooperatives, credit unions, choirs, and sports clubs—allinnovations borrowed from the similarly Austrian-ruledCzechs. Although disadvantaged by a voting system thatfavored Polish landowners, they were able to form theirown political party and sent representatives to Lviv’sprovincial assembly, to which the typical Ukrainiandeputy was not a fiery revolutionary but a pince-nez-wearing, mildly socialist academic or lawyer.
Ukraine’s reputation as a land cursed by politicalgeography—part of the “bloodlands” in the title of thehistorian Timothy Snyder’s best-selling book—was earnedduring the first half of the twentieth century. When thetsarist regime suddenly crumbled in 1917, a Ukrainianparliamentary, or “Rada,” government declared itself in Kyiv, but it was swept away only a few months later, firstby Bolshevik militias and then by the German army, which occupied Ukraine under the March 1918 Treaty ofBrest-Litovsk. After the armistice that November endingWorld War I, Germany withdrew again, leaving the RedArmy, the reactionary Russian White Army, the Polisharmy, a Ukrainian army under the socialist Rada ministerSymon Petlyura, and an assortment of independentwarlords to fill the power vacuum. In the chaotic civil warthat ensued, the group worst hit was Ukraine’s Jews. Scapegoated by all sides, more than 100,000 were killed in 1919, in a series of massacres unmatched since the 1600s. Beaten by the Reds, Petlyura formed a last-ditch alliancewith Poland, before fleeing to Paris when Poland and theSoviet Union made a peace that divided Ukraine again, theRussians taking the east and the center, the Poles the west. Two small borderland regions—today’s Bukovina andTranscarpathia—went to newly independent Romania andCzechoslovakia, respectively.
Not surprisingly, Petlyura is a hotly contested figure. For Russians, he was just another pogromist warlord. (Thatviewpoint saturates the Kyiv-bred but ethnic Russianwriter Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The White Guard, for whose characters Petlyura’s army is a frightening mob.) For Ukrainians, conversely, he led their country’s first stabat independent statehood, which might have succeededhad the Allies only given him the same diplomatic andmilitary support that they did the Balts and (lesssuccessfully) the Armenians, the Azerbaijanis, and theGeorgians. To accusations of ethnonationalism, they rejointhat the Rada government printed its banknotes in four languages—Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and Yiddish—andthat the leader of the Ukrainian delegation to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference was a distinguished Jewishlawyer, Arnold Margolin. Petlyura’s army rampaged, theyconcede, but he could not control it, and so did all theothers. The controversy played out in 1926 in a Paris courtroom, after Petlyura was assassinated by a Jewishanarchist who claimed to be avenging family memberskilled by Ukrainian soldiers. The three-week trial was aninternational sensation, with the defense presenting a devastating dossier of evidence about the pogroms, whilethe prosecution sought to paint the assassin as a Sovietagent. After only half an hour’s deliberation, the jurydeclared him innocent, and debate over the affair still rages.
BETWEEN STALIN AND HITLER
In fact, the violence and chaos of the Petlyura era weremerely a prelude to much greater Ukrainian tragedies in the years that followed. Beginning in 1929, Joseph Stalin launched the Holodomor—literally, “killing by hunger”—a program of forced deportations and food and landrequisitioning aimed at the permanent emasculation ofUkraine’s rural population as a whole. Rolled out in parallel with a purge of Ukraine’s urban intelligentsia, it resulted in the deaths of nearly four million Ukrainians. Covered up for decades, there is no doubt that thisextraordinary mass killing was deliberate: the Sovietauthorities knew that villagers were dying in greatnumbers, yet they persisted in food requisitioning andforbade them from leaving the famine areas for the towns. Why Stalin perpetrated the famine is less clear. Anestimated three million Kazakhs and Russians also starvedto death during these same years, but he chose to hit Ukraine hardest, probably because it embodied his twindemons in one: the conservative peasantry and a large, assertive non-Russian nationality. Even today, however, there is an ongoing effort by Russia to block internationalrecognition of the Holodomor as a genocide. In his“Historical Unity” essay, Putin refers to the famine onlyonce, in passing, as a “common tragedy.” Stalin’s name isnot mentioned at all.
Less than a decade later, a new round of horror was visitedon Ukraine following the signing of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Red Army occupied the Polish-ruledwestern part of the country—the first time Russia had evercontrolled this territory. Two years later, however, theWehrmacht marched in anyway, and two years after that, the Red Army returned. Both armies deported or arrestedthe Lviv intelligentsia—a rich mix of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews—as they arrived and killed political prisoners as they departed. For a few months in 1943, a largeethnonationalist Ukrainian partisan army controlled mostof northeastern Ukraine, establishing a primitiveadministration and its own training camps and militaryhospitals. Remarkably, small units of this army carried onan assassination and sabotage campaign for years after thewar ended, with the last insurgent commander killed in a shootout near Lviv in 1950.
Overall, 5.3 million Ukrainians died during the war years, an astonishing one-sixth of the population. Again, manydied of hunger, after Germany began confiscating grain. And again, it was Jews who suffered most. Before the war, they made up a full five percent of Ukraine’s population, or some 2.7 million people; after it, only a handfulremained. The rest had fled east or lay in unmarked massgraves in the woods or on the edge of cemeteries. (In thefall of 2021, as part of an effort to commemorate theseevents, Zelensky presided at the opening of a new complex at Babi Yar, or Babyn Yar, the park next to a metro station where nearly 34,000 Kyivan Jews weremassacred in September 1941. On the sixth day of Putin’sinvasion this year, three Russian missiles landed in thepark, causing damage to the Jewish cemetery there.)
For the Soviets, and for Putin today, the most importantfact about the Ukrainians during the war was not theirvictimhood but their alleged collaboration with the Nazis. The most controversial Ukrainian figure of the period isStepan Bandera, the leader of a terrorist organization in Polish-ruled interwar western Ukraine. Having alreadybeen sour when the area was under Austrian rule, Polish-Ukrainian relations dramatically worsened with the new government’s Polonization drive, in the course of whichUkrainian-language schools were closed, Ukrainiannewspapers strictly censored, Ukrainians banned fromeven the lowliest government jobs, and Ukrainiancandidates and voters arbitrarily struck from electoralrolls. The repression radicalized rather than Polonized, sothat the largest Ukrainian parliamentary party, thecompromise-seeking Ukrainian National DemocraticAlliance, was increasingly squeezed out by Bandera’sunderground nationalists. When the Wehrmacht enteredwestern Ukraine in June 1941, Bandera joined forces withthe Germans, organizing two battalions, Nachtigall andRoland, although he was almost immediately arrested bythe Nazis, who found him too hard to control.
Ever since, Russia has used Bandera as a stick with whichto beat the Ukrainian national movement. No matter thatfar more Ukrainians fought in the Red Army than in theWehrmacht and that Germany was able to recruit tens ofthousands of Russian prisoners of war, too. As in Sovietdays, a standard epithet for Ukrainians in Russian statemedia today is Banderivtsi—“Banderites”—and Putin revisited the trope in an even odder than usual speech onFebruary 25, the day after the Russian invasion began, in which he called on the Ukrainian army to overthrow the“drug addicts and neo-Nazis” in power in Kyiv.
After the end of World War II, and especially after Stalin’sdeath in 1953, Ukraine enjoyed several decades of relativestability. Compared with the other non-Russiannationalities in the Soviet Union, the Ukrainians weresimultaneously extra repressed and extra privileged, making up the largest single group of political prisonersbut also acting as Russia’s junior partner in the union. The Politburo was packed with Russians and Ukrainians, andin the non-Slavic republics, the usual pattern was for anethnic national to be appointed first party secretary, whilea Russian or a Ukrainian wielded real power as numbertwo. When the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991, Ukrainefloated to independence without bloodshed, after its ownCommunist Party leadership decided to cut the tow rope tothe sinking mother ship. It is this late-Soviet “littlebrother” relationship that Putin grew up with—and whichhe may believe (or have believed) Ukrainians would beready to return to were it not for the West’s interference.
WESTWARD OR BACKWARD
Ukraine’s political path in the three decades sinceindependence has accentuated all of Russia’s fears. At first, it seemed as if Russia and Ukraine would move onparallel tracks in the post–Cold War era. Both countries were riding the rapids of economic collapse combinedwith new political freedoms; neither seemed interested in the past. In Ukraine, nobody bothered to take down Kyiv’sLenin statue or rename its streets. Russia’s new rulingclass, for its part, seemed more interested in making money than in rebuilding an empire. It was easy toimagine the two countries developing along separate butfriendly paths: like Canada and the United States orAustria and Germany.
That happy illusion lasted only a few years. The two hingemoments of Ukraine’s post–Cold War history were twohighly effective and genuinely inspirational displays ofpeople power, both provoked by the Kremlin. In 2004, Putin tried to insert a burly ex-convict and regional political boss from Donetsk, Viktor Yanukovych, into theUkrainian presidency, an effort that seems to haveincluded having his pro-European electoral rival, Viktor Yushchenko, poisoned. After Yushchenko survived theattack (with his face badly scarred), the vote was blatantlyfalsified instead. Sporting orange hats and ribbons, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians poured into thestreets in protest and stayed there until the electoralcommission conceded a rerun, which Yushchenko won. For Putin, the protests, known as the Orange Revolution, were a plot orchestrated by the West.
In 2010, Yanukovych finally won the presidency, after thepro-European bloc rancorously split. For the next four years, he devoted himself to looting the Ukrainiantreasury. But in November 2013, he went a step too far: just as Ukraine was about to ink a long-planned andwidely popular trade deal with the European Union, heabruptly canceled it and, under pressure from Putin, announced a partnership with Russia instead. For Ukrainians, as for Putin, this was not just about how bestto boost the economy but also about Ukraine’s veryidentity. Instead of heading westward—perhaps even oneday joining the European Union—the country was beingcoerced back into the Russian orbit. Initially, only a fewstudents came out in protest, but public anger grewquickly after they were beaten up by the police, whoseupper echelons Yanukovych had packed with Russians. A protest camp on Kyiv’s central square, known as theMaidan, turned into a permanent, festival-like city within a city, swelling to a million people on weekends. In January2014, the police began a violent crackdown, whichclimaxed with the killing of 94 protesters and 17 policeofficers. When the crowds still refused to disperse, Yanukovych fled to Moscow, and the contents of hisluxurious private compound—Hermès dinner services, chandeliers the size of small cars, a stuffed lion—went ondisplay in Ukraine’s National Art Museum. In the powervacuum that followed Yanukovych’s flight, Putin invadedfirst Crimea and then, via thuggish local proxies, theeastern border cities of Donetsk and Luhansk.
The land grab pleased the Russian public, but if Putin intended to pull Ukraine back toward Russia, his actionshad the opposite effect. New presidential elections broughtin another pro-European, Petro Poroshenko, a Ukrainianoligarch who had made his money in confectionary ratherthan corruption-ridden mining or metals. Then, in theyears that followed, a mass civilian effort supportedUkrainian forces in a low-level but grinding conflict withRussia in and around Donetsk and Luhansk. (Until theMinistry of Defense was reformed, the previouslyneglected Ukrainian army was literally crowdfunded bydirect donations from the public.) Ukrainian support for NATO membership rose sharply, and in June 2014, Ukraine signed a wide-ranging association agreement withthe European Union. Most symbolic and popular—or, in Putin’s eyes, most cunning—was the EU’s 2017 grantingto Ukrainians of bezviz, visa-free 90-day travel to thewhole of the Schengen area. Russians still need visas, which are extortionately expensive and burdensome. The contrast grates: little brother has not only abandoned big brother; he is better traveled now, too.
RUSSIAN BONES, UKRAINIAN SOIL
Ukraine’s progress before the invasion should not beoverstated. Shady oligarchs pulled strings behind thescenes, and the country was hobbled by pervasivecorruption. (Transparency International’s 2021 CorruptionPerceptions Index puts Ukraine alongside Mexico andZambia but ranks it as slightly less corrupt than Russia.) But for all of the country’s problems, its history sinceindependence has been one of real changes of power, brought about by real elections, between real candidates, reported by real free media. For Putin, the Ukrainianexample had become a direct political threat. What ifRussia’s own population—and not just the urbanintelligentsia—started demanding the same freedoms? In his “Historical Unity” essay, Putin explained away the factthat Ukrainian presidents change as being the result of a “system” set up by “the Western authors of the anti-Russian project.” Ukraine’s pro-Russian citizens, hewrote, are not vocal because they have been “drivenunderground,” “persecuted for their convictions,” or even“killed.” Whether he actually believes this is unclear, butit might explain the slightly ad hoc tactics used by theRussian army in the first week of his war on Ukraine. Putin may really have expected his tank battalions to begreeted as liberators.
As during the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2013–14 Maidan protests, which came to be known as theRevolution of Dignity, Ukraine’s fierce self-defense todayis a defense of values, not of ethnic identity or of some imagined glorious past. Putin’s obsession with history, in contrast, is a weakness. Although earlier in his presidency, banging the “gathering of the Russian world” drumboosted his approval ratings, it has now led him downwhat may turn out to be a fatal dead end. In terms ofsquare mileage alone, Ukraine is the second-largestcountry in Europe, after Russia itself. If you placed it over the eastern United States, as The Washington Post recentlyobserved, it would stretch “from Missouri to the AtlanticOcean, and from Ohio to Georgia.” Occupying it permanently would be enormously costly in troops andtreasure. Moreover, Putin’s war has unified Ukrainians as never before. And whether they are speaking Russian orUkrainian, their sentiment is the same. Already, videoclips have gone viral of babushkas telling Russian soldiersthat they will leave their bones in Ukrainian soil and ofUkrainian soldiers swearing joyously as they fire bazookasat Russian tanks, all in the purest Russian. The war islikely to go on for a long time, and its final outcome isunknown. History, Putin may be learning, is only a guidewhen it’s the real sort.
