Putin and Ukraine: power and the construction of history: Dmitry Shlapentokh considers Ukraine's place in the Russian dictator's geopolitical orbit.

• Author: Shlapentokh, Dmitry

In July 2021, Vladimir Putin wrote an article in which he presented his vision of Ukraine's past and present. His major point was that Ukrainians and Russians are actually the same people, or at least that the people are quite close to each other; while Ukraine might be an independent country, he maintained that it should be closer to Russia. Putin certainly presented a fact that is well known. He noted that both Russia and Ukraine had emerged from Kyivan [Kievan] Rus', the medieval Slavic state. As time progressed, culturally, linguistically and historically, the two nations continued to be close to each other. Finally, in 1653 Ukraine became a part of the Russian state and the unity of the two countries was unshakable.

In presenting these facts, Putin actually followed the line of thought of Prince Trubetskoy, one of the founders of Eurasianism. He noted that Russians actually include three parts--Great Russians, 'small' (malo) Russians (Ukrainians) and Belarusians. Putin was clearly right in seeing Ukrainians and Russians as quite close to each other. Even so, he ignored facts which do not fit into the model of the friendly relationship between Russians and Ukrainians. Most importantly, Putin ignored in this article what he himself knew well: that the closeness and distances of various nations are 'constructed' by force. Imperial powers 'discover' sameness, whereas weakness and, even more so, disintegration invite a sense of differences. For example, the 'construction' of Soviet or 'Eurasian' identity was directly related to the power of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union. It was this power which 'discovered' the similarities between peoples who belonged to absolutely different cultures, linguistic groups and ethnicities or races.

Soviet identity

Although Putin implied that Russians and Ukrainians are almost the same, one could ask him if Russians and non-Slavic minorities of the Federation, such as Tatars, are also quite similar to each other. In response to this rhetorical question, Putin--and not just him--would assert that, while Tatars might look different from Russians, both peoples indeed constitute one holistic entity, plainly because Russians and Tatars have lived so long together that they influenced each other to the degree that they have become a quasi-nation, a Eurasian union. One might state that before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, official Soviet ideologists emphasised the unshakable unity of all ethnicities of the Soviet Union. In their view, various ethnicities of the country were united not just by the common political and economic system but also by the common cultural traits, for they had lived together for centuries. 'Eurasianists' elaborated on this notion forcefully.

Eurasianism, the teaching which emerged a hundred years ago (in 1920-21) among Russian emigres, noted that Russia belonged neither to the West, as was supposed by Russian Westernisers, nor to the Slavic world, the point of Slavophiles, the other major trend in 19th-century Russian thought, but rather to 'Eurasia'. In their narrative, Russia belonged to a unique civilisation which was based on the unique union or 'symbiosis' between ethnic Russians (and Slavs in general) and Muslims, mostly Turkic by ethnic background. Eurasianists noted that this proximity lasted for centuries and moved these various ethnicities closer to each other. As a result of living in one empire for a long time, they acquired common cultural traits and even the structures of their languages became deformed, so to speak, under each other's influence. This happened despite the fact that these people originally had belonged to different ethnic and linguistic groups.

Roman Jakobson, one of the leading Russian linguists, and a...