Russia’s banality of evil

Evil, regardless of how unspeakable, can be, as Hannah Arendt had shown us in her body of work on the subject, quite banal — even in its Russian manifestation. Still, we need to ask: Will Russia see the writing on the wall and retreat from Ukraine, recognizing that the parameters that defined the world in Tzarist and Soviet times no longer apply? A tough call, I say.
Talks began in Geneva last Thursday between Russia, Ukraine, the European Union and the United States to resolve the crisis. Ukraine has made its aspirations known since day one, following the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych by supporters of an independent nation free of Russian domination, a nation more engaged with the West. In short, Kiev is saying let my people go, for Ukrainians no longer want or need to be tethered to Russia. We equally know the West’s position on the issue: Democratic elections, free of thuggery and intimidation, will determine the country’s future.
But what about Moscow? What is its angle? Moscow clearly does not see it all in such black and white terms. For Vladimir Putin and other Russian leaders, still nostalgic for that lost Eden known as the Soviet Union, indeed for Russians as a whole, Ukraine is not just another breakaway republic weaned away from Russia by the geopolitical imperatives that followed the collapse of Communism in 1991. For these folks, Ukraine constitutes a special, even an emotional, narrative woven into the fabric of their history. They will fight tooth and nail, at the Geneva talks and beyond, to see to it that Kiev will never, ever turn West.
Why the vehemence? Finding an answer to that question will help us better understand why Putin is so adamant on the issue, prepared to face a dramatic downturn in Russia’s economy, including a rise in inflation, a looming recession, a plunge in the value of the ruble and the flight of capital (by some accounts, more than $70 billion in capital has fled the country so far) in order to hold on to his guns — and just figuratively — in Ukraine? Why is Ukraine and not, say, Latvia so special to Russia that Moscow would go to such lunatic extremes in order to assert its position there?
Ever since Ukraine was annexed into the Russian Empire in the late 18th Century, the former became so absorbed, or “Russified,” by the latter that for some at the time to imagine the two countries as separate would have been unthinkable, an act of cognitive dissonance, as it were. Even after Ukraine’s putative independence in 1991, Russian politicians openly lobbied for a continued dominant voice in Ukrainian affairs. Indeed, from the very outset of the annexation, Ukraine came to be known as “Little Russia,” as opposed to “Great Russia,” whose Tzarist rulers were determined to impose a Russian identity on the annexed territory.
By the second half of the 19th Century, the Ukrainian sense of a separate identity was considerably weakened and Ukrainians were left with no wider national consciousness. Most Russians viewed their language as farmyard vulgate. To that extent, the assimilation of the Russian language, not to mention Russian popular culture, was common among the Ukrainian elite. Yet Ukraine’s own culture lingered and somehow survived, borne by writers, intellectuals, poets, theoreticians and historians — much in the manner that, say, the Arab identity, culture and language, subsumed by Turkish mores during the Ottoman Empire, survived intact through the efforts of the Nahda ideologues active in the late 19th Century in places like Beirut, Damascus and Cairo. Thus Ukrainian pride in the ethos of their “Ukrainianess” thrived, as Little Russia chafed under Great Russia’s yoke.
Today every Ukrainian youngster is familiar with the work, much of it composed as fable, of the Ukrainian poet Semen Divovych who in 1762 wrote a “Dialogue” between Little Russia and Great Russia — predictably, in Russian — titled “A Talk between Great Russia and Little Russia.”
In the decades that followed, Ukraine experienced a kind of swan song, losing practically all her rights, becoming a normal part of Tzarist Russia. Ukrainian activists, as a reaction, began to develop their own national movement, which questioned the subservient status their nation was accorded by Moscow, and questioned how the Ukrainian language, the vehicle for disseminating literature, and Ukrainian culture, the repository of Ukrainians’ collective identity, were subjected to savage “Russification.” And later still, under Stalinist rule, the Communists bludgeoned Ukraine with terror, reducing it to an obedient vassal of the Great Russian Bear. But, along with officialdom, ordinary Russians were also convinced, or worked on convincing themselves, that without Ukraine not only can there be no Great Russia, but any kind of Russia at all.
That is the backdrop against which we ought to look at Putin’s stubborn posture about Ukraine. Ukraine, or for Russians the “notion of Ukraine,” is woven into the very fabric of Russia’s historical archetype, of which the Russian president is a product. You could no more convince him — or could have convinced other Russian leaders before him, whether Russian Tzars or Communist Commissars — that Ukrainians are an independent people, separate from Russia, anymore than you could have, say, in the 1890s, convinced Sultan Abdul Majeed, the last Ottoman Caliph, that Arabs were a separate people entitled to their national aspirations.
Ukraine, the EU and the US will have their work cut out for them in Geneva and beyond. Try to disabuse Russia of an imperial mindset that was centuries in the making, via a few sessions around the negotiating table in the Swiss capital. Tough call, I say.