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Putin’s ‘history’ of Ukraine has an all-too Soviet legacy

By:   []

Date: 2022-02 

In a televised speech on Monday, Vladimir Putin claimed that Ukraine is an inalienable part of Russian “history, culture, and spiritual space”. He portrayed Ukrainians as a mere sub-group of a larger Russian nation, stressing that people in Ukraine have called themselves Russian “since time immemorial”.

This vision of a great Russian people comprising all East Slavs, including those who identified as Ukrainian or Belarusian, has a history.

First, it was invented to justify Tsarist rule in the 19th century. Then, it formed the cornerstone of Soviet national policy.

Today, it is used to justify Russian ambitions to destroy the state of Ukraine. Emphasising that Ukraine “never had stable traditions of real statehood”, Putin’s speech on Monday portrayed the very existence of the country as an aberration because, in his view, all Slavic peoples are “bound by blood”.

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This obsession with Slavic unity was paramount when Moscow launched another attack on a peaceful neighbour 50 years ago – when the Soviet Union and its allies invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to prevent its democratisation.

The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia

In 1968, Czechoslovak society and government made ambitious attempts at democratisation, not unlike Ukraine has since its 2014 revolution. In response, armies of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact marched into Prague to install a more compliant leadership. Histories of ‘Slavic brotherhood’ helped legitimise the military intervention.

At home, Soviet leaders emphasised that challenges to Soviet rule in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary exposed the USSR to German and American threats – in parallel with Putin’s claims that an independent Ukraine is a pawn of NATO.

At the same time, the Soviet press emphasised that Czechoslovak attempts to resist Soviet authoritarian controls were an assault against supposedly natural, inborn ethnic affinities among Slavs; a ploy by ‘Western imperialists’, ‘Chinese revisionists’ and ‘Zionists’.

Soviet media also stressed that a democratic Czechoslovakia might claim territories of western Ukraine. The idea that the Russian ‘elder brother’ helped Ukraine to protect its borders was fundamental to the legitimacy of the Soviet regime. Soviet history textbooks highlighted that the ‘tall, strong and beautiful’ Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians had always fought hand-in-hand against foreign attempts to break their unity.
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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/putins-history-of-russia-ukraine-has-an-all-too-soviet-legacy/
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