What sets the peoples of Russia and Ukraine apart most clearly is their attitude toward the past, with the former preferring to retreat to the comfortable lies of Soviet times and the latter willing to face the hard facts of the past, Franco-Russian essayist Galia Ackerrman says.
The author of many works on Russian and Ukrainian affairs and most recently of “Le Régiment Immortel. La Guerre Sacrée de Poutine” (The Immortal Regiment: Putin’s Sacred War; Paris: Premier Parallèle, 2019), Ms. Ackerman argues that far more than tearing down Lenin statues is needed to overcome the noxious legacy of the Soviet past (graniru.org/opinion/m.276245.html).
“Not everything in the Soviet Union was narrowly Soviet,” she continues. “Perhaps it is difficult to define just what that Sovietness is, but intuitively we understand it perfectly well. Those few… who rejected not simply communist ideology but the entire system of Soviet life… lived in a world of creators and thinkers who were able to preserve spiritual honor.”
That was “the world of Bulgakov and Mandelshtam, Tarkovsky and Paradzhanov, Mamardashvili and [her] teacher V.V. Ivanov, of Sakharov and Shalmov, of Vysotsky and Galich, and of hundreds of others who lived, created, suffered and died in Soviet times but were not (or ceased to be) Soviet people.”
For people like these and others who were informed by them, a novel like Vasily Grossman’s “Life and Fate” were critical because it clearly distinguished between the achievement of citizens of the USSR in liberating lands from the Nazis and the bestial actions of the Stalin regime that oppressed people there and elsewhere “before, during and after the war.”
According to Ms. Ackerman, “Grossman was brave enough to compare the two totalitarian regimes in his dialogue between Liss and Mostovsky, possibly without even having been acquainted with the works of Hannah Arendt or with the shocking testimony of Margarete Buber-Neumann.”
In perestroika times, the peoples of the USSR were more broadly confronted by revelations about the horrors of the Soviet past. Many incorporated these things into their understanding of the world, the essayist says, but many resisted because it was hard for them to “separate normal patriotism from service to the regime.”
All too few wanted to admit that they had been serving something evil and, consequently, they welcomed the rise of Vladimir Putin as giving them a break because he argued “Soviet power was only a means of preserving the Russian empire and that the main impulse of the Soviet leaders and the Soviet people… was patriotism, love for the motherland and concern for its flourishing.”
But “returning to the Soviet past and its glorification could not take place without a significant rewriting of history,” Ms. Ackerman points out, noting that the Putin regime in Russia was more than ready to engage in that. As a result, once again any crime became justified if it was committed in the name of the Leviathan state.
But not all the people who emerged from the collapse of the USSR have gone in this direction. One nation that hasn’t is the Ukrainians. And it is in this regard that one must look for “one of the main causes of the break between Russia and Ukraine.” Russia wants to return to a rose-colored vision of the Soviet past; Ukraine doesn’t.
“By law, Ukraine has equated Nazism to communism and banned their propaganda and symbolism,” Ms. Ackerman writes. “After the defeat of the Nazis, the Banderite OUN fought against the occupation of western Ukraine by Soviet forces.” Russians view its actions as a crime, even though “this was a classic national-liberation struggle.”
“In Ukraine, great work on restoring national culture and the national past is going on, including research on the Holocaust and the Holodomor on Ukrainian territory, but also on the destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the 1930s, de-kulakization and political repressions throughout the entire Soviet period and so on.”
In many ways, these actions recall what happened in the Soviet Union during perestroika, and that is important to remember now because “in Ukraine, there are millions of former Soviet citizens who, just like many Russians, feel uncomfortable in the cold win of historical truth and want to return to the comfortable and idealized cocoon of the past.”
As Ms. Ackerman puts it, “here lies the essence of the conflict between progressive Ukraine and part of its south-east, in the first instance the Donbas.” The struggle of these two views of the past will determine whether “Ukraine will be able to finally break out of the suffocating embrace of ‘the elder brother.’”
Paul Goble is a long-time specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia who has served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau, as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The article above is reprinted with permission from his blog called “Window on Eurasia” (http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/).