1917 and All That
Where does Putin get his history from?
(Caveat: a not very scholarly piece I wrote in haste for an internship application.)
Ernest Renan famously wrote that nations are built as much on what they have forgotten as on what they can remember. More than race, geography or ruling dynasty, he argued that it is memory and consent which bind nations together. Once popular memory is weaponised and refashioned by political leaders, history becomes the stuff of which nations are made and unmade. Hence the fact that Vladimir Putin’s nationalist vision, set out in his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, is fixed as much on the rear-view mirror as on the road ahead.
Renan’s essay, written in 1882, almost reads as though it were composed for Putin’s benefit and perhaps this is because the Russian president’s historical perspective has increasingly come to resemble that of the nineteenth-century nationalists Renan sought to refute. If Renan, and Lenin after him, thought all nations “artificial”, the Russian president distinguishes between those which are “artificial” and those which are “eternal”. For Putin, identities are far more immutable. History governs the present. In his eyes, to misquote another nineteenth-century statesman, Ukraine cannot begin again.
Putin has a reputation for winding up Western journalists. “If you don’t mind,” he informed Carlson with mock courtesy, “I will take only thirty seconds or one minute to give you a short reference to history.” In the end, he took nearly half an hour to chronicle a thousand years of Russian-Ukrainian relations. Carlson looked on with horror as Putin spent precious airtime expounding the reforms of the succession laws under Yaroslav the Wise or the agreements made by the “pan-Russian assembly of clergy and landowners” in 1654.
Carlson was keen to skip to contemporary politics. “It’s not boring,” he claimed unconvincingly. “I just don’t see how it’s relevant.” Carlson was wrong on both counts. If his claim to find Putin’s rambling lecture interesting was a sign of his obsequiousness, that he thought it was irrelevant was a sign of the difference between how East and West regard the relationship between politics and the past.
History matters less to Western leaders. Since the end of the Cold War and the much-vaunted “end of history”, they have made and unmade polities in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq with an optimistic and arrogant disregard for long engrained historical facts. In the face of rational and universal practices, they thought, like their Enlightenment forebears, that history no longer mattered. In teasing Carlson, Putin was not only calling out Americans’ ignorance of the history of non-Western peoples, but also their refusal to admit what nineteenth-century critics of the Enlightenment recognised as the shaping power of the past. In Ukraine too, history has been utilised to construct a fragile nation: it was a historian, Mykhailo Hrushevksy, who founded the first Ukrainian state in 1917.
Many of the claims Putin put to Carlson were dubious. That the Viking warlord Rurik was “invited” to take over Novgorod is likely a face-saving fiction, while there existed no “centralised statehood” in early Medieval Europe, let alone in the lands now known as Russia. In a theatrical gesture, Putin produced for Carlson a sheaf of papers concerning the Pereiaslav Agreement of 1654, made between the tsar and the Cossacks, by which Ukraine was “included into the Moscow kingdom”. What was meant by “inclusion” has for three centuries been up for debate. For Ukrainians, it meant not a glorious reunification of a common people, but a mere feudal arrangement: protection in return for fealty. Once Catherine the Great abolished their political institutions, they claimed the deal was off.
Putin speaks about Poland in 1939 in much the same way as he speaks about Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. Poland “collaborated with Hitler”, then “turned out to be uncompromising and Hitler had nothing to do but to start implementing his plans with Poland”. He forgets that it was the Russians who cut a deal with Hitler to split Poland between them: “The USSR behaved very honestly”. “Of course,” Carlson concurred. Ironically, however, in his concept of a “Greater Russia”, his proposed anschluss with Ukraine, and his tendency to take a bite out of a country first before attempting to swallow it whole, of all the historical figures Putin cites it is Adolf Hitler that he resembles most, for all his talk of “de-Nazification”.
Finally, Carlson made a decent challenge: “Do you believe Hungary has a right to take its land back from Ukraine and that other nations have a right to go back to their 1654 borders?” Putin batted this away. That’s the problem with “historical rights”. It’s hard to know which take precedence. Why shouldn’t the Mongols or the Poles take back Kiev? Would Putin sanction a Starmer-led expedition to take back Normandy and Aquitaine for the Plantagenets? Now there’s a thought.
It’s not surprising that Putin spoke with pride of the millennial celebrations of Kievan Rus’ in 1862. In his references to ethnicity, language, national costume and historical lands, he resembles the pan-Russian imperialists of that era who sought to make out of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus a “triune nation”. He finds it hard to forgive Lenin for breaking up these territories into a federal union of separate national republics, each with a right to secede which they all exercised in 1991. Putin would rather be Emperor of All the Russias.
It is not language or ethnicity but political memory that separates Ukraine from Russia – and the recent conflict has only reinforced this fact. Ukraine has always defined itself in opposition to states while Russia has had difficulty defining itself outside one. Struggles against Poles, Ottomans, Nazis and Russians, what Renan called “a shared suffering”, have given Ukraine a different political character to its larger neighbour and they won’t be easily forgotten. It has become a commonplace that history is made by the victors. That Ukraine is a real country with a real history is an argument that can be made by countless Plokhys and Hrushevkskys but in the end perhaps it is only on the battlefield that the soundest refutation can be made.