As the famous Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov pointed out in a June article for “The New Statesman,” the atrocities of recent months have made it quite likely that Russian will cease to exist as a language of culture in Ukraine.
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The Russian military is deliberately targeting key farming-related assets and facilities with the aim of inflicting short- and long-term harm. Moreover, by blockading the Black and Azov seas, Russia controls how much Ukrainian grain, oilseeds and other food commodities reach global markets.
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In May 2022, while wrapping up edits on my contribution to Socrates in Russia amidst a stream of dreadful news from the Ukrainian front, I learned that the eighteenth-century estate where Skovoroda spent his final years, and nearby which he was laid to rest, was destroyed by Russian air strikes. Hryhoriy Skovoroda is still here, invisibly, in our cultural memory. Our world has once again become the one that Skovoroda despised, described as “flesh and whips and tears.” No to war.
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The story of Socrates has long been a vessel for interpretation. Philosophers, writers, and artists in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Soviet and post-Soviet space have actively participated in this process, creating their own Socrateses for their respective eras and environments.
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One striking strategy employed by Ukrainian writers across various genres is what literary historian Kate McLoughlin calls “parapolemics”—that is, focus on the spatial or temporal “outskirts” of war.
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Russian propaganda derives its effectiveness from political apathy rather than its ability to persuade. Because citizens understand that their actions cannot affect the autocrat’s policies, they invest only minimal resources in acquiring political information or thinking about politics at all. This state of affairs, in turn, leads to a very superficial processing of information.
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Skoropadskyi’s struggles have had a long legacy. Arguably, participants in the Orange Revolution, Euromaidan, and other transformative national events have had to confront some of the same thorny issues around Ukrainian national identity that confounded the onetime Hetman.
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Instead of giving funding for travel to archives in Russia, funding should be determined by the project itself. Scholars should be able to propose travel to a variety of places in the US or elsewhere other than Russia. The needs of the project would determine the places where research would be done. This would avoid fetishizing the Russian archives. Travel to Russia is not the main point. Collecting relevant material for a dissertation or other scholarly project is.
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Just as Europe must plan for an energy future without Russian fossil fuels, the field of history and related fields must plan for a future without access to Russian archives.
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On May 25, 2022, six scholars—all primarily Russia specialists—responded to the question of how scholarship on nineteenth-century Russian culture would change in response to Russia’s war on Ukraine. The present grouping of thought pieces, written by five of our six original participants, grew out of the online event. We are grateful to Ab Imperio for bringing these informal mini-essays to a wider audience in such a timely way, and we hope the articles will help advance our field’s urgent discussion of how best to move forward.
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After the fall of communism in Europe, a new generation of historians sought to overcome the East-West wall inside their own discipline. A history of East-West antagonisms was to be replaced by a history of Europe as an integrated whole, and of Russia as part of a wider world.
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Putin’s decision to mobilize Crimean Tatars may backfire. He has underestimated them just as he completely misunderstood Ukraine.
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During traumatic events we keep returning to the representations of the maternal, a manifestation of motherly protection, which is often coloured by our childhood fears that such protection will inevitably fade.
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Foreign fighters hailing from the former Soviet Union are more numerous, and better incorporated into Ukraine’s armed forces, than ever before. Their language skills, experience of post-Soviet armed conflicts, and shared post-Soviet heritage make them far more manageable and effective for Ukraine than more diverse units populated by Western volunteers.
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On a day when the news was silent about why the stock market had failed to open, and as protests were unfolding in major cities across Russia, watching ballet on TV felt profoundly dissonant.
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In my recent experience leading English classes for Ukrainian refugees, I have noticed students fluidly moving between Russian and Ukrainian. This phenomenon is well-documented across Ukraine, and there’s no need to rehash it here. I’ll admit, however, to being surprised: wouldn’t war with Russia, the symbol of the Russian language (and home of its institutions, such as the Pushkin Institute of the Russian Language), produce antipathy toward it, at the very least? And wouldn’t this antipathy lead people to abandon Russian en masse in order to assert their Ukrainian patriotism and difference?
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For many of us who feel complicit—through language, citizenship, or background—in the crimes Russia is carrying out in Ukraine right now, it feels necessary to reassess the metaphors we have been using in discourse and fiction. Do the figures of power that these metaphors represent preserve and prescribe the status quo (which does not even seem to be “just” a status quo anymore)?
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Polling in an authoritarian regime is a tricky business, all the more so when the country is at war. People are understandably wary of expressing an opinion to a random stranger. Nevertheless, the Levada Center has regularly asked Russians about their attitudes towards the “military operation.” They find a high level of support: 74% in April, 77% in May and 75% in June. Age differences are significant: more than 90% of respondents over 65 supported the war versus 36% of those aged 18-24. The May poll found that 44% expected the “operation” to last at least six more months.
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Putin is 69 years old. There has been much speculation about the state of his health. All we know for sure is that he will die at some point: that could happen tomorrow, or it could be 25 years from now. Putin has made no move to groom a potential successor. Such a step could lead to a palace coup and an involuntary and premature departure from power. Putin has structured his regime in a way that makes a successful coup unlikely to succeed.
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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. Continue reading…
