The invasion of Ukraine by the forces of the Russian Federation has, for several weeks now, been a bloody reality. This invasion is accompanied by a fierce will to prove the legitimacy of the attack, even seeking justifications in the distant past. Vladimir Putin is all too familiar with this quest for fallacious historical arguments, which he has been using in his speeches and written propaganda for years. This text aims to undermine just one of these arguments, which plays a key role in the neo-imperialist ideology that caused the Russian army to act.

On the eighth day of the invasion, Vladimir Putin, speaking on the Rossia 24 YouTube channel, declared: “I will never give up my conviction that Russians and Ukrainians are one people”. What we’re offering here is a critical analysis of this statement. First, because it has been a recurrent theme in Putin’s public statements since the early 2010s. Second, because it’s an idea with a long history behind it: he’s far from the inventor of such a notion. In fact, the root of this argument can be found in a little-known history in Western Europe, that of the Eastern Slavs. So, how can we decipher the Putinian argument used to deny Ukraine the right to an autonomous existence?

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Unequal brothers

In my endeavour, I will base myself on a book published in 2017 by the historian Andreas Kappeler, the title of which translates as Unequal brothers: Ukrainians and Russians from the Middle Ages to the present.

It’s an engaged text and a truly reflective essay, written after the annexation of Crimea (peninsula located in the south of Ukraine) and the secession of part of the Donbass (a mining and industrial basin, now cross-border, originating in the 19th century and part of which is located in Russia) in 2014. It is not yet available in French, but should be soon. Hence the interest in bringing this Viennese historian’s point of view to the French public’s attention today, a renowned specialist in the Europe of empires and nationalities in the East, a topic which certainly strikes a contemporary chord.

The quotes from Russian or Ukrainian historians, writers and politicians, as well as their contextualisation, are taken directly from this book, and I thank Andreas Kappeler for encouraging me to use my translations of his work to help the French-speaking public understand the present.

But, for now, let’s return to Putin’s assertion that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. It’s linked to a notion that there is only one Russian “meta-people”, called the “All-Russian people”, made up of three elements: the “White-Russian” people (Belarusian), the “Little Russian” people (Ukrainian) and the “Great Russian” people (Russian).

It’s an old-fashioned idea among historians of Tsarist Russia, repeated many times since it was first formulated in the 19th century by Nicolas Oustrialov who, in his History of Russia (1837-1841), came up with this all-encompassing notion of a great Russian people and a single State founded around the year 1000, the subsequent breakup of which would be a historical contingency to be corrected.

What lies behind a series of maps

Let’s take a look at one of the most famous productions of this idea of an All-Russian people. It’s found in the famous Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopaedic Dictionary, published from 1890 to 1907 in Saint Petersburg. Here, a spectacular map plate offers an interpretation of the distribution of the “main ethnic groups of European Russia ”.

Four stunning duotone maps on the Eastern Slavs are organised on a very structured plate: the Russian ethnic group (here, called “Great Russian”), then Ukrainian (“Little Russian” using the Imperial terminology) and finally Belarusian (literally, “White-Russian”).

In fact, the data used for the maps is purely linguistic: shown here, for each region, we find the percentage of inhabitants who declared to have spoken a certain mother tongue in the first population census of the Russian Empire in 1897. Subsequently, in a gradient rising from pale pink to bright red, we can see the areas where one of the three East Slavic languages was the mother tongue of at least 1% of the local population, up to over 95%.

First, we should note that the author of these maps has assumed that stating a mother tongue makes it possible to deduce belonging to a people, whereas the people listed did not actually declare their ethnic group. According to this reasoning, everyone with Russian as their mother tongue is automatically part of the Russian ethnic group.

This plate therefore carries a very precise ideological message. What it’s doing is automatically putting a group of speakers of a certain language into an ethnic group, a magical operation which would transform the French-speaking Belgians, the French and the French-speaking Swiss in Western Europe into a single French people, without even asking anyone.

Let’s take a closer look: this map plate is simply extraordinary. While we are presented with speakers of three languages, we can see four ethnic groups! Indeed, if we follow the reading direction, at the top left, we find a map with a large red stain, which represents the distribution of the “All-Russian” ethnic group.

 

What language do these “All-Russian” people speak? In actual fact, none. Or, rather, they each speak their own. You see, this statistical map is created by adding up the percentage of speakers of the languages featured in the three other maps on the page: Russian speakers, Ukrainian speakers and Belarusian speakers. The cartographic fusion of three linguistic groups, also represented in the same shade of red as the other maps to emphasise proximity, is a processing operation of the statistical information from the census.

Creating peoples

So, how could readers have interpreted this page? The first perception is obvious: the All-Russian people exist and its distribution is the product of the natural addition of its three constituent elements. The reading direction is far from insignificant: the All-Russian people come first, followed by the break-down into linguistic-ethnic components.

We should also note the powerful effect that this overlap of the three linguistic groups’ statistical values has on the map of the All-Russian people: the darker shades mark out a “heartland” of this meta-Russian people, corresponding to a large area running from the surroundings of Saint Petersburg to the middle course of the Dnieper, that is, the heart of historic Ukraine, notably including the lands of the former 17th-century Cossack Hetmanate.

This message fits into a familiar cognitive framework. It is because of Oustrialov, with his History of Russia and then his successors who repeated and reiterated this idea for decades, that the cartographers of Brockhaus and Efron managed to “naturalise” it in the form of an apparently indisputable “scientific” document which mobilised, in a very effective visual rhetoric, “objective” data from the census.

Oustrialov, although the first to mobilise the notion of an all-encompassing people, had posterity. In the classic works of Sergey Solovyov (1820-1879) and Vasily Klyuchevsky (1841-1911), the history of the Russian state, as well as that of Great and Little Russia, was unified, as with their predecessor, into one “grand narrative”.

The Russian state would have been founded around the year 1000 in Kyiv, the people originally united under the authority of the grand princes of the Rus’, then separated into several branches by the vagaries of history. Its “reunification” would have begun under the aegis of the Muscovite tsars from the 17th century onwards, and then culminated under the Petersburg Empire.

Records from the Russian Orthodox Church point in the same direction: the story also begins in Kyiv, with the baptism of Saint Vladimir, the founding act of Eastern Slavic Orthodox Christianity, and culminates with the establishment of the Patriarchate of Moscow. We therefore find a convergent representation of a thousand-year history of the State, a people and a Church which flies in the face of historical complexity, but which has once again become dominant in present-day Russia.

Historical myths

This narrative of continuity is, however, just one historical myth among many others. It neglects the Mongol invasion in the 13th century which destroyed the Rus’ confederation and inaugurated a period of fragmentation and total reconfiguration of geopolitical space. In the following centuries, the seats of power were, among others, the powerful Polish-Lithuanian state, the Cossack Hetmanate of the Dnieper River (the territorial, political, military and social organisation of the Ukrainian Cossacks), and of course the princes of Moscow whose continually expanding territories were the matrix of the Russian Empire. The social, economic and cultural characteristics of this vast area are impossible to subsume under an ethno-national banner: each group evolves individually.

However, Klyuchevsky affirms that the Russian state which emerged from the 16th century onwards (princes and tsars of Moscow, then of Saint Petersburg) fulfilled a historical mission: “to reunify South-West Rus’ with Great Russia”, to achieve the “political-ethnic reunion of the Russian people”. The course of history was therefore that of indispensable reparation, a return to the proclaimed unity of the origins, hence the repeated use of the term “reunification” of lands and peoples.

A competing (and equally problematic) narrative was constructed from the beginning of the 20th century by supporters of the Ukrainian national line, affirming the continuity of state forms specific to Ukraine since the origins of Rus’. However, in the West, we have broadly followed the Russian founding story, accepting the hypothesis of continuity and reunification. We used (and still use) the terms Kiev Russia and Old Russia.

However, recently, international historians have become accustomed to using the historical term “Rus’” to describe the medieval kingdom of Kyiv, to emphasise its otherness in relation to state formations and largely posterior ethnic realities.

One last point. As the 1907 map plate suggests, there would be a natural unity of the peoples in this eastern Slavic group. Let’s take this further: an organic unity. Ukrainian national affirmation, every time it rears its head, has been perceived by the advocates of the All-Russian ideology as a mortal threat to the survival of Russia.

According to the Slavophile, Konstantin Aksakov (1817-1860), “Little Russia is a living component of Russia, modelled by the powerful Great Russian genius […] We must understand that the unity of Russia comes from the Great Russian element, which has maintained its legitimately dominant position, which is that of the head in the human body”. Organic metaphors subsequently abound: in 1862, man of letters Ivan Aksakov wrote: “Little Russia, Belarus and Great Russia are a body, an inseparable whole, wanting to remove a part of it amounts to dismembering a body. Removing Kyiv would be like carving away part a body”.

A year later, conservative Mikhail Katkov came to the rescue, asserting that “the Ukrainian people are a purely Russian people, have always been a Russian people, an essential part of the Russian people, which cannot be what it is without the Russian people… There can be no rivalry between the northern and southern parts of the same nation, it is as unthinkable as between two hands or two eyes of a living organism”.

We can trace the trajectory of this discourse back to the middle of the 19th century, passing through very different historical contexts and political sensitivities: the liberal Peter Struve (1912), General Denikin’s white armies (1920) or, of course, in its form reinterpreted by the USSR in the discourse on “Soviet people” who benefit from the “driving force of the Russian people” (Stalin, 1945) and, in the final year of the Union’s existence, by Mikhail Gorbachev. Boris Yeltsin also had something to add.

We will end with the statements made by Vladimir Putin in 2013, a few months before the annexation of Crimea and the destabilisation of Donbass: “ I repeat, we are one people […]. Ukraine is part of our great Russian world”.

A story seen from Moscow

We are undoubtedly well aware that at several points in history, under Imperial Russia and even more so under the USSR, Russians and Ukrainians had a shared history. From the 19th century and thanks to industrialisation, migrations have interwoven the populations of this area. The question today is not whether the Russian speakers of Ukraine make up an ethnic group that Russia should protect from an unfathomable threat, or whether Ukrainians as a whole are naturally destined to live under the roof of the large house which is Russia.

The issue at hand is that of the Citizen Nation: with their differences, their horizons, their varying relationship to “Ukrainianness” and “Russianness”, with their actions, citizens of Ukraine show their desire to live in a democratic society, separate from Russia and its dictatorial regime. The best example of this is the Russian-speaking Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov (born in Soviet Leningrad) who, after the outbreak of the invasion, declared “I am an ethnic Russian, I have become a political Ukrainian” (Le Monde des Livres, March 4, 2022).

The loss of control over Ukraine: a mortal threat to Russia, a threat set to mutilate the body of Great Russia? The idea is far from new. Albeit reluctantly, when we look from Moscow, the Ukrainians seem to be indispensable to the existence and greatness of Russia. But were they even asked what they think of this vision of their destiny?

Eckert D., 2017, “L’Ukraine ou les contours incertains d’un État européen”, special edition Frontières de guerre, frontières de paix, L’Espace Politique, 33

 

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Illustration by Adèle Huguet for Mondes Sociaux: CC BY-NC-ND
To see more of her drawings, visit https://adelehuguet.wordpress.com/

Image credits in CC : Freepik, Agun rama, GOWI

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