The empire returns: Russia, Ukraine and the long shadow of the Soviet Union

 

The empire returns: Russia, Ukraine and the long shadow of the Soviet Union

As the Kremlin attempts to reassert control over its neighbours, Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy uncovers the deep roots of the crisis

© Associated Press

Serhii Plokhy 11 HOURS AGO

As Russian troops amass on the approaches to Ukraine, Ukrainian citizens are bracing themselves for war. “Emergency kit” is a phrase I hear used more and more among my friends and acquaintances all over the country; the question on everyone’s mind is whether there will be an attack. I have been asked this numerous times over the past few weeks and I cannot provide a satisfactory answer. The only thing I am sure about is that every bit of moral, political and military support that Ukraine gets from its friends and allies makes an invasion less likely.

The crisis erupted on December 17 when Russia presented the west with an unexpected ultimatum. Its list of demands included a commitment in writing to halt any further eastward expansion of Nato, the removal of multinational Nato troops from Poland and the Baltic states, and the possible withdrawal of US nuclear weapons from Europe. Most crucial was that Ukraine never be allowed to join the alliance.

The demands were considered non-starters in Washington and found unacceptable by all members of Nato. The result is that we now find ourselves locked in the most intense diplomatic confrontation between east and west since the end of the cold war.

There are significant differences between this crisis and previous ones. Most important is the emergence of China as the leading partner in what began as the Sino-Soviet alliance, accompanied by the reduction of the former Soviet Union to the territory of Russia — a state whose economy is not in the world’s top 10.

Putin’s essay suggesting there had been no such thing as a separate Ukrainian nation was perceived as a denial of Ukraine’s right to statehood

These changes are crucial for understanding Russia’s foreign policy today. Its aggression towards Ukraine can be seen as part of an attempt to turn the clock back to Soviet times and reinstate Russian control over the former Soviet space — or at least limit western influence over what used to be Moscow’s east European empire.

So does Vladimir Putin want to re-establish the Soviet Union, as is occasionally suggested today? Not really. His goal is rather to reinstate or maintain the Kremlin’s control over the former Soviet space more efficiently by creating dependencies, preferably ruled by autocrats, in place of the former Soviet republics — an imperial power structure with him as the ruler of rulers at the top.

History cannot tell us what might or might not happen tomorrow. But what it can do is provide a better understanding of how we got to the situation we are in today and what is at stake — especially as in this case the discipline of history, or at least a version of it, is right at the heart of the dispute.

A likeness of Vladimir Putin used for target practice at a Ukraine military base last week © New York Times/Redux/Eyevine

The current crisis is a reminder that the dissolution of the Soviet Union — closely associated in the public mind with Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation as president of an already non-existent country on Christmas Day 1991 — was not a one-act play. It is, rather, a continuing saga with numerous sequels; a process rather than an event.

Last July, Putin published a long essay specifically dealing with the history of Russo-Ukrainian relations. The key argument of the article, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, was formulated in its very first paragraph. Referring to a recent press conference, Putin stated that “when I was asked about Russian-Ukrainian relations, I said that Russians and Ukrainians were one people — a single whole. These words were not driven by some short-term considerations or prompted by the current political context.”

A member of the Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces © Lorenzo Maccotta/Contrasto/eyevine

Russian soldiers on drills in the Rostov region of southern Russia © Associated Press

What the essay suggested was that there had been no such thing as a separate Ukrainian nation. The argument, which swept aside differences in language, history and culture — especially political culture — between Russians and Ukrainians, was perceived by many as a denial of Ukraine’s right to statehood. But the claim that the Russians and Ukrainians constitute one people is not new, either in Putin’s pronouncements or in the history of Russian political thought.

The origins of that claim go back at least to the mid-19th century when, in order to accommodate the rising Ukrainian national movement, Russian imperial thinkers formulated a concept of the tripartite Russian nation consisting of the Great Russians (or Russians in today’s understanding of the word), Little Russians, or Ukrainians, and the White Russians, or Belarusians. It was also around this time that the imperial authorities prohibited Ukrainian-language publications in the empire, all but arresting the development of the Ukrainian political and cultural movement.

Prince Leopold of Bavaria, commander of troops on the eastern frontier, signing an armistice with the Russians in March 1918 at Brest-Litovsk. Under the treaty’s terms, Russia recognised the independence of Ukraine and the Baltic States — but the treaty was annulled in November that year. Soviet commissar Leon Trotsky can be seen second right © Getty

That policy had its limits. It slowed down the development of a modern Ukrainian national project but did not stop it altogether. As the empire fell in the flames of the Russian Revolution, the Ukrainian activists created a state of their own and in January 1918 declared independence. In neighbouring Austria-Hungary, Ukrainians declared independence as the Western Ukrainian republic. This independence turned out to be shortlived, but it set the agenda for generations of Ukrainian leaders.

By the time the Bolsheviks had taken control over most of what used to be the Russian Ukraine in 1920, the idea of independence had gained popularity among the Ukrainian masses and could not be simply dismissed by the new authorities — the Bolsheviks were forced to recognise Ukraine as a separate nation and even grant a pro forma independence to the Ukrainian Soviet republic. Indeed, the Soviet Union was created in 1922-23 as a pseudo-federal rather than a unitary state precisely in order to accommodate Ukraine and Georgia, the two most independent-minded republics, whose communist leaders simply refused to join the Russian Federation.

Ukraine, as the most populous republic after the Russian Federation, played the key role not only in the creation of the USSR but also in its dissolution. It was the Ukrainian referendum of December 1 1991, in which over 90 per cent of participants voted to leave the USSR, that spelt the end of the cold war superpower.

Ukrainian flags brandished outside Communist party HQ in Kyiv to celebrate independence from the Soviet Union at the end of August 1991 © Anatoly Sapronenkov/AFP/Getty

The Ukrainians had answered the question of whether they wanted their country to be independent — not whether they wanted to dissolve the USSR. But the USSR fell apart within a week, when Russia’s parliament approved an agreement negotiated by Boris Yeltsin and his Ukrainian and Belarusian counterparts, Leonid Kravchuk and Stanislav Shushkevich, in the hunting lodge of Viskuli in western Belarus. That agreement dissolved the Soviet Union, recognised the independence of the former Soviet republics, and established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in place of the now defunct USSR.

The CIS, a compromise forced on Yeltsin by Ukraine, became central to Russia’s bid to re-establish its control over the post-Soviet space

The explanation for this was given more than once by President Yeltsin in conversations with President George HW Bush: without Ukraine, Russia would have been outnumbered in Gorbachev’s Union by the Muslim Central Asian republics. Demographic and cultural factors certainly figured in that calculation, but so did economics. Russia was not prepared to bear the burden of the Union without the Union’s second-largest economy, that of Ukraine. So the old Union had to go.

Addressing the Russian parliament on December 12 1991, Yeltsin stated that the formation of the CIS was the only way to “ensure the preservation of the political, legal and economic space built up over centuries but now almost lost”. Yeltsin did not want Gorbachev’s reformed Union: his preferred political model was confederation, not full independence for the republics. The Commonwealth, whose creation was a compromise forced on Yeltsin by Ukraine, became central to Russia’s bid to re-establish its control over the post-Soviet space and its status as a global power.

It seemed that the leaders of the Soviet republics, the Russians in particular, had managed to avoid the usual violent disintegration of empires, preventing not only a widely feared nuclear war between the newly minted nuclear powers of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, but also a conventional war between the main post-Soviet successor states. But the subsequent years found Russia involved in conflicts with post-Soviet states, offering support to separatist movements and eventually using its military forces outside its own borders. That was hardly a scenario imagined in the euphoria of the early post-cold war years, given the victory of democratic forces in Russia and some other former Soviet republics.

A family in Moscow watching Mikhail Gorbachev’s televised resignation as Soviet leader on December 25 1991 © Sergei Karpukhin/Associated Press

The Soviet Union ceased its existence in a manner reminiscent of other continental empires, including its neighbours, the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary, disintegrating along ethnic lines.

But the end of the competition between Moscow and Washington never included a political settlement concerning the post-Soviet space. The US, having sought to prevent the disintegration of the USSR as long as possible, ultimately decided to recognise and support the independence of the former Soviet republics. Russia, for its part, never accepted anything but the conditional independence of the former republics, predicated on an alliance with Moscow and belonging to Russia’s sphere of influence.

1991

Year of the break-up of the Soviet Union, formalised in the Belovezh Accords in December that year

Although the CIS was devised for the specific purpose of accommodating Ukraine, the Ukrainian leadership was not interested in any form of joint statehood with Russia. It even formally refused to join the Commonwealth that it had helped to create.

Kyiv’s stubborn reluctance to give up the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the USSR — the third-largest arsenal after those of the US and Russia — was based on its concern about possible Russian aggression. When the Ukrainians finally agreed to give up nuclear weapons in 1994, they insisted on guarantees of their territorial integrity and sovereignty. The Budapest Memorandum, which provided Ukraine with assurances instead of guarantees, was the result. One of the “assurers”, apart from the US and the UK, was Russia.

A Ukrainian soldier in a trench along the front line in December 2021 as Russian troops amassed on the border nearby © Brendan Hoffman/Getty

Yeltsin’s Russia attempted to keep Ukraine within its sphere of influence by means of economic ties, especially Ukraine’s dependence on Russian gas. Putin’s Russia tried to follow suit, but as Ukraine continued its drift away from Russia towards the European Union, Russia tried to bribe President Viktor Yanukovich with a $15bn loan to prevent him from signing an association agreement with Brussels. A popular uprising drove Yanukovich out of the country when he ultimately refused to sign such an agreement with the EU, although he had promised Ukrainian voters that he would do so.

Russia accepted the fugitive, blamed the US and Europe for provoking and supporting the popular revolt and annexed Crimea. Moscow then began its destabilisation of the Donets Basin (Donbas), the easternmost part of Ukraine, bordering on Russia. The resulting war is still going on, and many expect the Donbas to be the flashpoint of a new conflagration if a Russian invasion takes place. Some are concerned that the conflict could engulf other European countries and go global.

How does Nato fit into this story? As the second world war drew to a close, Soviet armies conquered eastern Europe and occupied it for two generations. Nato was established in 1949 as a defensive alliance to prevent further Soviet westward penetration.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea drove a majority of Ukrainians into the pro-Nato camp. If less than 20 per cent of those polled supported joining Nato in 2013, almost 60 per cent favour it today

Not surprisingly, after the disintegration of the USSR, east European nations joined the alliance in order to prevent a recurrence of their long political and economic subjection — a process that Russia now deliberately misrepresents as an aggressive “eastward expansion” of Nato led by Washington and Brussels. Poland offers a particularly striking illustration of east European insistence on joining Nato: the Poles threatened Washington with the development of their own nuclear capabilities if they were not offered membership.

Russia’s invasion of 2014 became the driving force behind Ukraine’s insistence on joining the alliance. Immediately after the fall of Viktor Yanukovich’s government in February of that year, the new Ukrainian leadership declared that it had no plans to join Nato. But the annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas brought the majority of Ukrainians into the pro-Nato camp. If less than 20 per cent of those polled supported joining Nato in 2013, almost 60 per cent favour it today. Despite this change in attitude, Nato continues to deny Ukraine a Membership Action Plan. But Russia’s current demand to bar Ukraine from Nato forever may very well backfire, leading ultimately to the opposite result.

Russia now gives the impression of moving faster than ever before to re-establish its control over the post-Soviet space. The Kremlin’s support for Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus has helped him to quash peaceful protests against his corrupt rule. Russian military intervention in Kazakhstan this month helped President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev put an end to the violent protests in that country.

But Russia is paying a price for its support of authoritarian regimes in the post-Soviet space. The Belarusian opposition, which had regarded Russia as an ally, has ceased to do so and is now looking more than ever towards the west. It remains to be seen how soon Tokayev will manage to repair the damage done to his reputation in the eyes of Kazakh elites and citizens for inviting foreign troops into his country.

Russia today is following in the footsteps of former imperial powers, from the Ottomans to the French, who lost political, financial and cultural capital the more they clung to their imperial possessions. Attempts to resuscitate a failing empire alienate neighbours — and even potential allies — leading to isolation. And if history shows us one thing, it is that eventually every empire must fall.

Serhii Plokhy is professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University. His new book ‘Atoms and Ashes: From Bikini Atoll to Fukushima’ will be published in May by Allen Lane. Copyright © 2022, Serhii Plokhy