Slava! Slava!
A few hours before dawn, heavy traffic on several small roads leading into Ukraine from the direction of temporary Russian military encampments near Belgorod was observed by users of the Google Maps service a week ago today. It was possible to watch the little concentrations of red and orange move further and further towards the border as the night progressed. It is perhaps appropriate that first confirmation of an invasion that has been characterised by an atmosphere of the surreal abrogation of normality and of blackly ironic events occurred in the most strangely postmodern manner possible. Yet for all of this air of unreality, the war is extremely real: thousands have died and thousands more doubtless will over the next few weeks and perhaps beyond. This is a high intensity war on a huge scale fought with high explosives and fully automatic weaponry: the direct casualty rates will tower over those of small punitive campaigns waged by Western and Western-style militaries and the speed at which they will occur will dwarf those of brutal civil wars between ethnic and sectarian militias. This is a war of a sort that has not been seen for a long time.
Although dishonest liars of various stripes have been peddling all sorts of absurd and craven alternative explanations for the invasion,
i the simple truth of the matter is that this is a war about Empire, or, to be more specific, about the hole left where there used to be one. It is a war caused by the Post Imperial mindset, something that British observers, at the very least, ought to be familiar with. It is that sense of frustrated longing in the minds of politicians, state officials and military figures for a return to the glories of the old Empire that they were socialised in and trained to serve. Seen like this, Vladimir Putin is not so much a Hitler or Stalin for our times as a darker version of Anthony Eden, and there have been distinct echoes of Eden’s amphetamine-fuelled broadcasts during the Suez Crisis to Putin’s recent media performances.
Yet the Post Imperial mindset of Vladimir Putin is a peculiar one. Which former Russian Empire is he nostalgic for? The Empire of the Tsars or the Empire of the Soviets? It is both and it is neither. Putin might admire the aesthetics and expansionist vigour of the Romanovs, but their Empire is now too distant to inspire the white-hot revanchism that has so marked his recent speeches, writings and actions. Moreover, his actions are not justified in the monarchist and religious terms of theirs, and Western observers who insist otherwise due to compromised position of the Orthodox hierarchy in contemporary Russia or due to Putin’s occasional efforts to lean in to a more ‘organic’ form of Russian political conservatism (which in reality always come across as rather flat and hollow: a clear pastiche pursued with little feeling), they err greatly, falling victim to tired old stereotypes of Russia as the home of an inscrutable ‘oriental’ civilisation, beyond all reason and so different to the West that the actions and policies of its rulers cannot be understood, merely observed. Fundamentally an invasion motivated in any meaningful sense by Orthodoxy would not be bombarding Kiev,
ii a city as important to most shades of Eastern Orthodoxy as Rome is to Catholicism.
The relationship of Putin and the other one-time mid-tier KGB hacks who run the country under his wing to the
other Russian Empire, the one that formed them, the one that they were trained to serve, is stronger but also stranger. The glory and grandeur that they once knew, if from a low rung in the imperial hierarchy, and that which they seek to restore was its glory and grandeur, and its achievements and triumphs, such as they were, are ones that they are ever keen to associate themselves with. Yet they do not believe in the ideology that motivated it and they resent it for its weaknesses, they resent it for its ultimately centrifugal ‘nationalities’ policies and the legal fiction that each constituent Republic was an independent polity that formed part of a great and voluntary union of socialist nations; above all they resent it for its collapse.
iii As such, the Great Russian Empire that Putin believes it is his duty to restore is not one of the two historical Russian Empires, but one that never actually existed: a composite and thoroughly postmodern historical fantasia created to make sense of contradictory, even somewhat Oedipal, impulses. As utterly absurd as this may seem to us, and as utterly absurd as it surely is, to men of his age and background it is perfectly logical for all that it is absurd. As such it is extremely dangerous, far more dangerous than a Post Imperial revanchism grounded in historical realities would be. For few things motivate extreme actions and extreme policies with the dismal reliability of the belief that reality is
wrong and ought to be made to conform to fantasy.
i To remove agency from political actors and transfer it to States as if corporate entities developed policy rather than those who control them is an obvious absurdity; to insist that conflict between Russia and Ukraine is historically inevitable is obscene; to argue that hostile relations between Russia and the West are simply the way of things is historically illiterate.
ii The use of the Russian transliterated spelling here does not imply any sort of political preference, but simply reflects my bias as an historian towards stability in nomenclature except in cases of a major historical breach. Were I some form of political analyst by training I would certainly write ‘Kyiv’.
iii This is the thinking behind Putin’s rather curious criticism of Lenin for ‘creating’ modern Ukraine, by which he means the Ukrainian S.S.R. In reality the various Republics were not remotely autonomous and their status was pure Potemkinism, an attempt to control national sentiment that happened to coincide with administrative convenience. As was widely noted after Putin’s speech, the creation of the Ukrainian S.S.R. in fact marked the formal incorporation of the re-conquered Ukraine into the new Soviet Empire.
