The Greeks knew the coast, but not the hinterland, where they imagined mythical creatures guarding fields of gold and ambrosia. In fact, the city could grow olives only because it imported grain from ports on the Black Sea coast. In the founding myth of Athens, the goddess Athena gives the city the gift of the olive tree. Southern Ukraine, where Russian troops are now besieging cities and bombing hospitals, was well known to the ancients. In contemporary Ukraine, though, the nation is not so much anti-colonial, a rejection of a particular imperial power, as post-colonial, the creation of something new. We can find Ukrainian national feeling at a very early date. Yet Ukrainian history gives us something more interesting than a mere counter-narrative to empire. When the invasion began, in February, Russian publishers were ordered to purge mentions of Ukraine from textbooks.įaced with the Kremlin’s official mixture of fantasy and taboo, the temptation is to prove the opposite: that it is Ukraine rather than Russia that is eternal, that it is Ukrainians, not Russians, who are always right, and so on. It is also illegal to say that Stalin began the Second World War as Hitler’s ally, and used much the same justification to attack Poland as Putin is using to attack Ukraine. It is illegal for Russians to apply the word “war” to the invasion of Ukraine. Thus modern Russian imperialism includes memory laws that forbid serious discussion of the Soviet past. But empire enforces objectification on the periphery and amnesia at the center. Ukraine does have a history, of course, and Ukrainians do constitute a nation. Russia becomes itself only by annihilating Ukraine.Īs the objects of this rhetoric, and of the war of destruction that it sanctions, Ukrainians grasp all of this. His vision is of a broken world that must be restored through violence. The next year, he claimed that Russians and Ukrainians were joined in “spiritual unity.” In a long essay on “historical unity,” published last July, he argued that Ukraine and Russia were a single country, bound by a shared origin. In 2012, he described Russia as a “state-civilization,” which by its nature absorbed smaller cultures such as Ukraine’s. Putin took a pronounced colonial turn when returning to the Presidency a decade ago. As the philosopher Frantz Fanon argued, colonizers see themselves as actors with purpose, and the colonized as instruments to realize the imperial vision. As we see in the ruins of Ukrainian cities, and in the Russian practice of mass killing, rape, and deportation, the claim that a nation does not exist is the rhetorical preparation for destroying it.Įmpire’s story divides subjects from objects. For five hundred years, European conquerors called the societies that they encountered “tribes,” treating them as incapable of governing themselves. When Vladimir Putin denies the reality of the Ukrainian state, he is speaking the familiar language of empire.
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