Failed Decolonisation: Russia, Ukraine and Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression against democratic Ukraine is legitimised in part by the claim that there is no Ukrainian nation. Contemporary Ukraine, Putin maintains, is an artificial state created for no good reasons by the Bolsheviks. It has always been Russian and should be Russian again. He developed these notions in a July 2021 article which became something of a historical justification for the invasion.
In the 2022 Kathleen Fitzpatrick Lecture, Hansen Professor in History and Faculty of Arts Deputy Dean Mark Edele engages with the President-Historian’s thoughts and explores to what extent his arguments conform to historical reality. The lecture shows that Putin’s claims about the non-existence of the Ukrainian nation are not only historically ill-informed – they are a projection of problems with Russian national consciousness. In sharp contrast to Ukraine, the Russian state has not managed to find a national identity which would break with the imperial past. Intellectually, a decolonisation of Russian self-understanding is possible. But the historical unity of the Russian state, the Russian empire, and Russian nation make such a post-imperial consciousness difficult.
As one historian has put it: Russia never had an empire; it was one from the outset. The war on Ukraine is one outcome of the inability of Russia’s political elite to find a positive sense of self after the breakdown of the Soviet empire in 1991.
The videorecording of the lecture can be found in the player below.
Biography
Mark Edele is a historian of the Soviet Union and its successor states, in particular Russia. He was trained as a historian at the Universities of Erlangen, Tübingen, Moscow and Chicago.
His publications include Soviet Veterans of the Second World War (2008), Stalinist Society (2011), Stalin’s Defectors (2017), Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (edited with Atina Grossmann and Sheila Fitzpatrick, 2017), The Soviet Union. A Short History (2019), Debates on Stalinism (2020); and, with Martin Crotty and Neil Diamant, The Politics of Veteran Benefits in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative History (2020).
His latest book, entitled Stalinism at War. The Soviet Union in World War II, was published in 2021.
Feature image: Monument to Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko in the town of Borodianka, Kiev Region, Ukraine, 2022. via Розбита Бородянка (Rozbita Borodyanka) on Twitter @StahivUA