On the Russian soul, imperialism and moral obligations
My mom recently wrote a post on her English-language blog that was mostly about the state of Russian society and Russian opposition to Putin’s rule, and… Those are some of the issues I’ve been thinking about, and this post just compelled me to finally put it to digital paper.
First of all, a bit of context that I’m not sure comes through in the original post to those who didn’t grow up in the former Soviet Union. There are two related pieces here. One, because Soviet Union was officially anti-imperialist and the Russian education system didn’t make an effort to reject many underlying Soviet-era assumption, there is a widespread belief that Russia and Soviet Union after it, wasn’t imperialist or colonialists. There is the idea that, unlike those evil Americans who killed Native Americans and forced them into reservations, we integrated native peoples of Siberia and parts of south and west peacefully. The whole thing doesn’t stand up to scrutiny - as I’ve often pointed out, the Soviet Union had its own version of reservation schools, there were policies that actively encouraged ethnic Russians to settle in territories that weren’t majority-Russian at the start of the 20th century, the way Soviet Union went back and forth of encourgaing multiculturalism and promoting Russian supremacy, that sort of thing. And, of course, it’s hard to see Russian imperial expansion into Caucasus mountain and Central Asian region as any different from what Western powers were doing outside Europe at the time. Even with Ukraine and Belarus, where things are more ambiguous due to their shared heritage, too many people accept the idea that Ukraine “returned” to Russia voluntarily, at face value, which just isn’t the case.
None of this is secret. Just recently,the Kommersant newspaper, a major Russian daily newspaper, published an article doing a pretty thorough deconstruction of that version of history, and showed how much of what we learned as kids omitted some very important context. Like, the entire history of centuries of Ukrainian uprisings and push-and-pull between Ukrainian and Russian leaders. But thing is, the way history gets contextualized in school matters. If you have the idea of how the history is “supposed to be,” you’re not going to want to seek out things that don’t fit that. Not unless something compels you.
The second part of this is the “Big Brother” line. This isn’t a reference to the antagonistic force in George Orwell’s 1984, but a reference to a more subtle and insidious bias that pervades Russian cultural discourse - that, to borrow a a phrase from another Orwell classic, all cultures within Soviet Union/Russian Federation are equal, Russians are more equal than others. Or, to put it another way, that Russian interests are ahead of everyone else’s. And it manifests in all kinds of ways. Like how many who lived in Baltic countries for decades since USSR’s collapse built almost a parallel society for themselves, where they never have to learn local languages or participate in the local culture. Or how, in the months following the Maidan protests, I’ve seen a Russian complain about Ukrainians taking Alexandr Pushkin’s statue down in some city, and I just asked why should they have any special reverence for him. Pushkin wasn’t a Ukrainian poet.
To my mom’s point, I do think that there were people in the opposition who expected to be welcomed in ex-Soviet countries with open arms (when there’s really no way that having a bunch of citizens of their former colonizer coming in for any reason was ever going to go over too well). The fact that some of them thought they could get by with their Russian didn’t help.
(And it isn’t just about the legacy of colonialism. Settling refugees is hard for any country, and the uncomfortable fact of the matter is all those Russians coming has driven up rents in places like Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan)
Having said all that… I would argue that some of the backlash did got a bit too far. I think closing the borders was the mistake, for the simple reason that getting Russians outside the increasingly isolated propaganda bubble is a good thing, and it provides more venues for people who are in danger of being drafted or worse to escape. I do think some of the backlash was a bit much. Not things like Baltic countries taking down World War II memorials (lest we forget, they gained independence from Russia, only to be occupied by the Soviet Union, then get occupied by the Nazis, then get re-occupied by the Soviet Union again. If the Red Army kicked out the Nazis and let them go their own way, it would be one thing, but that’s not what happened). I'm taking about things like Latvia yanking Dozhd’s TV license (though the outlet’s continued propensity for unforced errors is kind of astonishing), or keeping an ethnic Russian from returning to the only homeland he ever knew. And that is to say nothing of the crap I had to deal with on Twitter, when me expressing support for anti-war protests when the Russian draft started led a bunch of well-meaning Westerners to call me a Putin supporter (which is just absurd given everything I ever said on any social media, but i had to deal with that nonsense for days).
A couple of months ago, my mom wrote about how she got an extra scrutiny at the Finnish border just for being Russian and how she felt she deserved it, and I was just like… When a woman whose father and uncle survived labor camps, who e xperienced Soviet-sanctioned antisemitism first-hand, feels like she deserves to suffer for the action of the nationalist, fratricidal government… Like, understanding it is one thing, but to feel like she deserves it?
I want Ukrainians to win this war, because they deserve to have a free and peaceful homeland. I think going back to 2021 borders stopped being something Ukrainian society will accept months ago, so yes, go all the way to the 1991 borders. Maybe give Crimea back to the Crimean Tatars (I’m not even kidding - given the historic injustice done to them, all hail Crimotatarskaya Autonomous Republic, or however you’d call it in their language)
But one thing that the rally we attended in Ukrainian Village not long after the war started threw into a sharp relief was that, in the end of the day, my duty is, first and foremost, to my people. My obligation as a Russian citizen (of Belarusian, Jewish, Polish and Russian descent) is to help build a just Russia, a fair Russia, a Russia that, at long last, fully comes to grip with its misdeeds and learns from them.Ukrainian victory will not, in on itself, free Russia. Russian diaspora supporting Ukraine is laudable, but energy should also be put in supporting the opposition at home - and, if you’re not satisfied with any other smattering of groups that can be loosely called “opposition,” support efforts to create something new.
Let’s imagine, for the sake of the argument, that, by this time next year, Ukraine is back to its 1991 borders. Let’s imagine, for the sake of the argument, that Russia has a different government. The cultural assumptions I outlined at the top of the post aren’t just going to go away. There needs to be a coherent, systemic way to uproot it and, just as important, replace it with something else, something people can believe it. And it’s not something that’s going to change overnight, and will require work.
My mom wrote about how she and her friends talked about going back to Russia and bringing back what they learned. And there is something to be said for supporting people who would be willing to do that hard work. The preparation for that should have started months ago - but we will probably have months, if not years, ahead of us. There’s still plenty of opportunities to catch up.