We at the Jordan Center stand with all the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world who oppose the Russian invasion of Ukraine. See our statement here.
Above: "The Triumph of Mordecai" (1624) by Pieter Pietersz Lastman. Source
Ilya Kukulin is a cultural historian and literary critic.
I’ve been thinking about this since the first days of the war but haven’t dared post it until now, because (1) at this point — after Mariupol — I don’t know who could find such reflections useful, and (2) I’m afraid that what I have to say will elicit comments to which I’m incapable of replying, simply for lack of moral strength.
Why did Western political elites, Russia experts, and intellectuals react so passively to events in Russia up until the moment when the war in Ukraine took on such blatant hatefulness on the Russian side? There are, it seems, two reasons, and these reasons are intellectual, even ideological.
The first reason lies in the vestiges of colonial thinking. The wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Syria, it seems to me, were perceived by many Western political elites as bad wars, but also as colonial wars. The kindly and judicious man of the gentry knows very well that his gentry-neighbor flogs his peasants to death and rapes peasant women, but all the same he perceives this neighbor as a man of his own circle (i.e., a colonizer). Such thinking is not based on the overtly racist presumptions usually associated with colonialism. Rather, it is an expression of the idea that the world has a center and a periphery, as in Immanuel Wallerstein’s concept of a “world-system” — which, incidentally, I dislike very much because it relies on an economic essentialism that, in effect, reproduces the cultural essentialism of previous epochs.
When viewed through this lens, what happens on the periphery is seen much the same way that the colonial administrator Pontius Pilate sees Judea in Alexander Gorodnitsky’s song: “What kinds of strange ideas / are out there in wild Judea? / There everything’s hatred and poison — / Who knows who’s right, who’s wrong?” Read the White Helmets’ reporting from Syria and you’ll see that Russian troops—together with those of Bashar al-Assad—acted in precisely the same way they’re now acting in Ukraine: indiscriminately bombing residential areas, attacking hospitals, generating endless lies and distortions, and accusing independent observers of fraud.
The second reason lies in an essentialist attitude towards Russia: the West’s assumption that Russia today, just as in Soviet times, is just a place where “some nastiness is always going on.” Those monsters, they poisoned Litvinenko and the Skripals—but then, in the USSR, too, they were always poisoning the lives of their dissidents. It’s as if we’re returning to the days of the Cold War: in the words of Leonard Cohen, “Give me back the Berlin wall … I've seen the future, brother, it is murder.”
No, it's not like that: today something new is happening.
Back in 2004, in his brilliant essay “Déjà lu,” the historian Oleg Ken revealed a deep, consistent connection between Putin’s and Stalin’s rhetorics. This kinship stems not from the fact that both Putin and Stalin are Russian rulers, but from the fact that each of them, under different historical conditions, undertook the same task: the establishment of one man’s despotic rule, unlimited by law or consent or even by such “mutually beneficial” arrangements as the unspoken rules of organized crime.
What is happening today is not the same fascism we have witnessed before. This is a new form of false consciousness, and it is important that we analyze it.
In Night of Stone, Catherine Merridale writes that the Kolyma camps were phenomena of European history, just as Versailles was. I agree. What is happening in Ukraine is happening in Europe. But the destruction of Aleppo, too, is an event in recent European history — not just global history — regardless of the location of Aleppo.
Chag Purim Sameach. Happy Purim to people of all religions, and to atheists. May the plans of all modern Hamans be destroyed.
Translated by Anne Lounsbery
