Serhii Plokhy
speaker
375 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Serhii Plokhy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The fact that he was with Patriarch Kirill is a very important factor for understanding where the idea is coming from. This is the idea that was dominant in the Russian Empire of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are really great Russians, little Russians, and white Russians, and that they constitute one people.
Yes, there are some dialectical differences. Yes, Ukrainians sing well. Yes, they dance funny. But overall, that doesn't matter. And that idea actually was really destroyed, mostly destroyed by the revolution of 1917. Because it wasn't just social revolution. That's how it is understood in the U.S. and a good part of the world. It was also a national revolution. It was an empire.
It was a revolution in the Russian Empire. And to bring this piece of empire back within the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks had to make concessions.
And one of those concessions was to recognition of the existence of Ukrainians as a separate nation, Belarusians as a separate nation, Russians as a separate nation, endowing them with their own territorial borders, with institutions, and so on and so forth. But there was one institution that was not reformed. That institution was called the Russian Orthodox Church.
Because one of the ways that Bolsheviks dealt with it, they couldn't eradicate religion completely, but they arrested the development of the religion and thinking and theology on the level as it existed before the revolution of 1917.
So, the Russian Orthodox Church of 1917 continued to be the Russian Orthodox Church in 1991 and in 2013, continuing the same imperial mantra of the existence of one big Russian nation, one unified people. When you see the formation of the ideas about nations, about foreign policy in the Russian Empire after 1991, they're going back to the pre-Bolshevik times. Ukrainians do that as well.
Estonians do that as well. The difference is that when Ukrainians go back, they go back to the pre-1917, the intellectual fathers and writings of basically liberal nationalism. Or sometimes they go to the radical nationalism of Bandera, which would be not pre-1917, but pre-1945. When the Russians go to pre-Bolshevik past, looking for the ideas, looking for inspiration, looking for the narratives.
What they find there is empire. What they find there are imperial projects. And that's certainly the story of Putin's claim. That's the story of the argument. And to conclude, the argument that he lays out there, historical argument, comes also almost directly from the narratives of the late 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.
So it's not only the argument is coming from that era, but also the argumentation is coming from that era as well.
It's empire on the one hand, but also there is imperial understanding of what Russian nation is that doesn't allow for independence of its little Russian and white Russian branches, alleged branches, right? So what you see is the concept of the big Russian nation that's late 19th, beginning 20th century. Empire sees the writing on the wall. that nationalism is on the rise.
And it tries to survive by mobilizing the nationalism of the largest group in the empire, which happens to be Russian. Stalin is a big promoter of some form of Russian nationalism, especially during the war and after war. He started his career as a very promising Georgian writer, writing in Georgian.
He's not doing that for some personal affinity or cultural intellectual roots within Russian nation or Russian people. He is doing that for the sake of the success of his Soviet and communist project, and he has to get the largest ethnic group on board, which are Russians. But Stalin and Putin have different understanding of who Russians are.
Stalin already accepted Ukrainians and Belorussians, their existence. Putin goes back to pre-Stalin and pre-Lenin times.
First of all, especially when it comes to eastern Ukraine or to big cities. Many people in Ukraine spoke Russian, right? Generally, it's the same language. On the top of that, we started our discussion with talking about the Slavs, right? So both Ukrainian and Russian language are Slavic languages. So there is proximity there as well.
On the top of that, there is a history of existence in the Soviet Union and before that in one empire for a long period of time. You see a lot of before the war, a lot of Ukrainian singers and entertainers performing in Russia and vice versa. The biography of President Zelensky is certainly one of the If it's that particular model as well, that all talks about similarities.
But these similarities also very often obscure things that became so important in the course of this war. And I already mentioned the book titled by President Kuchma of Ukraine, Ukraine is not Russia. So that's the argument. Despite the fact that you think that we are the same, we behave differently. And it turned out that they behave differently.
You have Bolotnaya in Moscow and police violence, and that's the end of it. You have the Maidan in Ukraine, and you have police violence, and that's the beginning. That's not the end. History really matters in the way why sometimes people speak in the same language with different accents behave very differently.
Russia and Russian identity was formed around the state and has difficulty imagining itself outside of the state. And that state happened to be imperial for most of Russian history. Ukrainian project came into existence in revolt against the state. Ukraine came into existence out of the parts of different empires, which means they left different cultural impact on them.
For Ukrainians to stay together, autocratic regime so far didn't work. It's like the colonies of the United States. You have to find common language. You have to talk to each other. That became part of the Ukrainian political DNA. And that became a huge factor in the war.
And very few people in Ukraine believed what Vladimir Putin was saying, that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people. But the majority believed that they are certainly close culturally and historically nations. And from that point of view, the bombardment of the Ukrainian cities became such a shock to the Ukrainians.
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