What Would the Ukrainian Oblastniki Say Today? On the Language of the Post-National Order The Ukrainian revolution unleashed – again – an experiment that could have long-term consequences for the post-Soviet space. This experiment has the potential to create a political community based on self-organization and democratic control of the authority combined with openness to the world. It is not a surprise that the current regime in the Russian Federation (which stands for the lack of popular control of the government, abuses of human rights, and massive corruption) will attempt to do anything to derail it. Whether driven by such considerations or by the growing fascist rhetoric and practice, Putin’s regime has tremendously high stakes in Ukraine. But so do all people who care not just about the survival of the Ukrainian state and the inviolability of borders in Europe but also about the democratization of the post-Soviet world. Whether the Ukrainian revolutionary experiment will succeed or not, it already laid bare the dilemmas and challenges of post-Soviet transformations. Putin’s regime uses the problems of Ukrainian statehood but it was not Putin who created them (similarly to Georgia, where Putin used the divisions in Georgian society but did not create them). It has become customary in US media to portray the Ukrainian society as divided between “Russians” and “Ukrainians.” Such a portrayal is misleading for a number of reasons. It applies drastically reductive categories to the complex identifications of people in the post-Soviet space. Linguistic preferences for Russian, Ukrainian (or surzhik) do not necessarily coincide with preferences for particular versions of the imperial and Soviet past (which we can conditionally term “nationalist Ukrainian,” “nationalist Russian,” and “Soviet,” the latter with its own divisions). Similarly, the matrix of historical and linguistic loyalties does not necessarily coincide with geographic divisions or (dis)loyalty to the Ukrainian state. After all, many of the leaders and participants in the Maidan protests are Russophone, and many grew up in the “Russian” parts of the former Soviet Union. On the other end of the spectrum, Valentina Matvienko, Putin’s chairperson of the Federation Council which unanimously voted for the required permission to use Russian troops in Ukraine, is an ethnic Ukrainian who grew up in Ukraine. Given the complexity of these divisions – which, no doubt, do exist in Ukrainian society – the key question for the emerging Ukrainian democracy will be if it can become a post-national one. In recent days, the national language became a default language for understanding the rapidly unraveling drama in Ukraine. Natalka Sniadanko, a Ukrainian writer who attempted to explain to the Western readers that Ukrainian divisions are a myth, rightly argued that the uprising against Yanukovich united people of very different backgrounds and linguistic preferences. She successfully debunked Kremlin propaganda, which paints democratic protesters in Ukraine as heirs to the Ukrainian nationalist movement of the 1930s and outright fascists. In the same text, however, she argued that “The agreement [between the Russian Tsars and Ukrainian Cossacks] had promised autonomy to the Ukrainians [in the 17th century]; that promise was never fulfilled. Instead, Ukraine was transformed into the province of an empire, Russia’s warehouse and supplier, a population with no right to its own history, culture or state. Russia continued to wage this ideological war during the Soviet era: mass deportations, exiles, famines, using Ukrainians as cannon fodder, sending them barehanded against German tanks in the name of Stalin.” Much of the argument in this trans-historical interpretation envisions the Ukrainian and Russian relations, understood in national terms, in the pre-national era, while conflating “Russia” with Stalinist Soviet Union. The same logic can be seen in recent comments voiced by many representatives of the US academia (Russianists in the first place), who are critical of the US foreign policy in general (“policing” of the world) and its role in the present conflict in particular: they envision two imperial states, the US and Russia, competing over the influence in the region in Crimea. The familiar Cold War perspective of the polarized world where two major imperial actors, USSR and USA, compete for control and domination, is applied to the post-cold-war reality where Russia automatically stands for “empire” and “USSR”. Ukraine in this picture emerges (even when this is not explicitly articulated) as a colonized nation. Needless to say, the Ukrainian protesters are deprived of their agency and are turned from people who rose against a corrupt government into pawns of the imperial states from the outside. Coming from a different perspective, Timoty Snyder very perceptively noted that Kremlin’s depictions of Ukrainian protests as “fascists” hide the reality of the rising fascist rhetoric overwhelming Russian mass media, especially the TV. However, Snyder, presumably a historian, chose to debunk Western inclination to believe Russian propaganda in the following way: “Why exactly do people with such views think they can call other people fascists? And why does anyone on the Western left take them seriously? One line of reasoning seems to run like this: the Russians won World War II, and therefore can be trusted to spot Nazis. Much is wrong with this. World War II on the eastern front was fought chiefly in what was then Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belarus, not in Soviet Russia. Five percent of Russia was occupied by the Germans; all of Ukraine was occupied by the Germans. Apart from the Jews, whose suffering was by far the worst, the main victims of Nazi policies were not Russians but Ukrainians and Belarusians. There was no Russian army fighting in World War II, but rather a Soviet Red Army. Its soldiers were disproportionately Ukrainian, since it took so many losses in Ukraine and recruited from the local population. The army group that liberated Auschwitz was called the First Ukrainian Front.” Obviously, ethnic Ukrainians and Belorussians made a tremendous contribution to the Soviet war effort, and suffered unspeakably at the hands of the Nazis and as a result of the war destruction (and, one must add, at the hands of Stalins no less brutal modernizing drive). But Snyder’s clumsy attempt (bordering on illiteracy) to fight the Kremlin propaganda again relied on the same perverse language of describing the complex reality of the war – which in much of Eastern Europe was also a civil war – in national terms. Leaving aside Snyder’s apparent belief that the name of the 1st Ukrainian front had anything to do with the ethnic Ukrainians (and, following this logic, the Leningrad front must have been a reflection of the war effort of ethnic Leningraders), the logic of national categories permeates not just his interpretation of history but clearly informs what happens in Ukraine today. As a matter of principle, this language is not different from a vision which sees Crimea as a “Russian land” and requires Putin to act upon this vision. It also, if we are to continue this logic, does not leave much room for a Ukrainian national community that is able to accommodate different visions of the past and effectively manage rather than annihilate differences. The logic of national categories will require loyalty to a particular vision of history rather than a common polity based on human rights, individual liberty, and rule of law. Paradoxically, it was in Ukraine that intellectuals in 19th century Russian empire began to imagine a post-imperial order in non-national terms. This vision, later known as “oblastnichestvo,” or, in a somewhat misleading translation, “regionalism,” gained momentum in the last decades of imperial Russia, in particular in Siberia, the Caucasus, Middle Volga and Ukraine. By 1917, oblastnichestvo became a staple of the political menu of most political parties in one or another way. Even Stalin, who famously defined nationhood in terms of language, history, national character, economic life and territory, in 1913 saw regional autonomy as the most natural solution to the problem of the diverse society (in the 1920s, he presided over the realization of a different program, the one that envisioned nation-building as the solution to Soviet diversity). The ideas of the oblastiniki – and we can take the most articulate of them, the Siberian ones, as an example – envisions a federation of regions empowered to address local issues through the lens of progressive, socially oriented politics. The regionalists constructed their own difference in a way that combined loyalty to the larger political unit – in this case, the future free Russia – with recognition of the specificity of historical development and socio-economic needs of their region. Of course, their position in the conditions of late imperial Russia was often accused of separatism, a charge that they attempted to dispel. The regionalist movements tended to be accommodating of a variety of political concerns and interests, and offered a mid-range vision of political community, avoiding the dangers of both nationalist rigor and imperialist grandeur. I would venture to say that post-maidan Ukraine will be facing some of the same problems that the progressive forces of late imperial society had before them: how to self-organize progressive forces for the solution of immediate social needs, how to accommodate difference, and at the same time not challenge the unity of larger political unit. Obviously, I am not suggesting that post-Maidan Ukrainians should accept oblastnichestvo as the guidelines for the organization of the Ukrainian political space. What I do suggest, though, is that the present development in Ukraine clearly demonstrates the extent to which the language of national categories can be damaging to the project of political self-organization. A search for a different language, the one that can mobilize diverse groups – ethnic, linguistic, social and political – and at the same time mobilize people for the support of the new democratic political community – is a matter of success of the Ukrainian revolution and, ultimately, of democratic self-organization in the post-Soviet space as a whole. Sergey Glebov net.abimperio.net/node/3149
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 23:37:30 +0000
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