Russia and Ukraine have diverged in the way the identities of their respective societies work. Russians identify with the state, Ukrainians identify with a civil society.
“Shall we hate Russians? Or is hatred the lot of the weak?” Yuri Biryukov,
a Ukrainian activist and blogger, posed these questions on Facebook after
recounting his feelings about bumping into ordinary Russians during a recent
vacation.
“I just felt squeamish about seeing them,” he wrote in a post that drew
thousands of “likes” from Ukrainians and outraged many Russians. “I had the
feeling one has when looking at a pest the second before reaching for a shoe
...”
Yes, this is how popular discourse sounds these days. Even when they aren’t
shooting at each other, Ukrainians and Russians exchange venomous comments on
social networks.
Meanwhile, despite the bile, the faint promise of a political settlement
has reappeared at the turn of the year. Russia seems to be engaging more
closely in the cease-fire process. President Vladimir Putin has appointed a new
envoy to the contact group on Ukraine and has discussed the crisis with
President Obama on the phone; talks behind closed doors were held between
Victoria Nuland, a United States assistant secretary of state, and Vladislav
Surkov, Mr. Putin’s aide on Abkhasia and South Ossetia and also, apparently, on
Ukraine.
Leonid Kuchma, a former president of Ukraine and his country’s envoy to the
contact group, said recently that the negotiations needed to continue in the
present format. He also suggested that he would welcome China getting involved
in the process.
Commentators may be debating whether these efforts reflect a new
determination to reach a conclusive resolution, but experience suggests that
even if Moscow does want a settlement, it only wants an interim one. The
Kremlin clearly prefers the conflict to keep simmering because being able to
turn the heat on and off (not just in Ukraine but in the Middle East too) is
Russia’s only functioning foreign policy lever. But the price for constantly
relying on this crude tool is Russian society’s continued disassociation from
its neighbors — Ukraine first and foremost.
Ukrainian attitudes toward Russia have always encompassed a gamut of
emotions, including an underlying resentment about a perceived sense of Russian
superiority. In the years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russians like me
thought that this would fade away, helped by continuing linguistic and cultural
links and a general opening up of civil society. We were wrong. Instead, in
both societies, tense historical undercurrents have taken over.
“The attitude started to turn more than 10 years ago, during the elections
of 2004 that became the Orange revolution,” Mikhail Minakov, a Ukrainian
philosopher and political scientist, wrote me in an e-mail. “Hatred toward
Russia, originally fostered by nationalists, caught on with the rest of
Ukrainian society and became, with time, the only legitimate language in
addressing Moscow. Russia became a legitimate enemy.”
A Ukrainian friend warned me before one of my recent trips to Ukraine,
“There are things you have to be cautious about,” adding, “try to avoid
referring to Russians and Ukrainians as being ‘one nation’ or ‘one people’ or
anything close.”
Even those Russians who are not supporters of Mr. Putin often deny their
Ukrainian neighbors a separate identity and do not recognize Ukrainian
“otherness.”
The “one people” phrase has long been an irritant for many Ukrainians, in
large part because Mr. Putin has used it so often. When Mr. Putin visited Kiev
in 2013 to mark the 1,025th anniversary of the conversion to Christianity of
the Kievan Rus — the Medieval kingdom that gave birth to both the common
culture of Russia and Ukraine — he told the assembled masses: “Wherever Ukraine
may go, we still meet again sometime and somewhere. Why? Because we are one
people.”
The Russian word he used, narod, was meant in Soviet and in Czarist times
to represent the kinship of all the peoples and nationalities that comprised the
Soviet Union and Imperial Russia. Today, the very word seems guaranteed to get
under almost every patriotic Ukrainian’s skin.
Mr. Putin’s politics of history may be working well for the Kremlin within
Russia, but it puts the country on ground where no one else wants to stand.
Many Russians continue to use official language rooted in the Soviet period. It
is difficult for them — for us — to talk without stepping into an unfortunate
turn of a phrase. We still, for example, refer to World War II as the “Great
Patriotic War.” But for Ukraine it was something else — something to move away
from.
Russia and Ukraine have diverged in the way the identities of their
respective societies work. Russians identify with the state, Ukrainians
identify with a civil society. Among Ukrainians today, the best way to escape a
totalitarian past is by developing a society that eclipses ethnic or state
identities.
This is beyond the ken of most Russians, who have trouble comprehending the
idea of a society comprised of many competing elements — business, labor
unions, independent political parties, courts, professional and civic groups.
The Russian body politic equates society with the state. Ukraine, with its
growing number of volunteer movements, nongovernment charities and independent
political parties, is occupied in framing a new civic identity.
Whatever the linguistic ties between Russia and Ukraine, the words we share
no longer have the same meaning. The vocabulary of the state is fading. If the
two countries are to forge a new understanding, we must negotiate using the
language of civility, one that can be spoken in any tongue — be it Russian,
Ukrainian, English or German — with far less danger of our words being lost in
translation.
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