I grew up with the Soviet Union as the great antithesis of the US. Often a literalist I was confused by the conflation of the USSR and Russia. Were they one and the same or two entities? Within the USSR’s sphere of influence were other nations with their own names, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and so on. But the USSR itself was usually just called “Russia” despite there being entities within the USSR (regions or republics) that had different names — Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc. I couldn’t have named them all. I remember analogizing them to the states of the US. Texas was big like Russia was big, and Rhode Island was tiny like Estonia, but the USA was a single unit, America, the individual states no less America, and far from being independent nations. Of course, I grew up a century after the US Civil War when the South tried to remove itself from that America, and thought surely such ancient history did not impinge on the present. The Soviet Union’s formative struggles were rather more recent, but seemed to me equally settled.
In the 1980s there were various movements to cool the antagonism between the USA and the USSR, from the Nuclear Freeze to the building of sister city connections. My own small Northern California town of Sebastopol developed a sister city connection with Cherkasy in the Ukraine. I attended an event or two to see photographs of Cherkasy and talk to people from Sebastopol who went there. Everybody with any authority always used “Russia” as shorthand for “USSR,” so I let my thinking subsume the other republics under that name. Sebastopol had a sister city in Russia, I said to myself.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall and, soon thereafter, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the non-Russian Soviet Socialist Republics began to reassert individual identities. The Baltic States were the noisiest about it, as I recall. Suddenly I knew the names Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as something other than words on a map.
Ukraine’s independence, however, looked unlikely. Wasn’t it virtually Russia? Ukraine’s first years of independence did appear to be in name only, Russia seemingly dictating the nation’s politics and policies. I noticed the Orange Revolution and the subsequent Maidan, and I rooted for positive change, but it really wasn’t until Russia invaded Ukraine that I had a clear idea of Ukraine being Not Russia. I have followed the prosecution of the war, and it’s clear how horrendous the Russian army is being and the lies Russian leader Vladimir Putin has spewed to justify the attack. But what exactly was Ukraine? Wasn’t it “The Ukraine”? (The definite article is not an official part of the country’s name but an artifact of translation.)
I have finally read a history of Ukraine, Anna Reid’s Borderland. The Ukrainian language is different from Russian, though closely related. Most Ukrainians are bilingual in Ukrainian and Russian — although the very large Russian ethnic minority in the country tends to be monolingual in Russian. Language is an indicator of identity. If your community speaks one language and the community across the way speaks another, the two communities are a long way toward being ethnically distinct.
I knew something of the horrors of the 20th century in the USSR — the famines caused by agricultural collectivization, the gulag, the two invasions of the Germans. But in reading Borderland (a translation of the word “Ukraine”) I could see these horrors being visited specifically on Ukraine, not just Russia. It was worse in Ukraine than in Russia — one reason being that Russia considered Ukrainians to be lesser than themselves. Genocidal policies were imposed on Ukraine by the Russian regime partly to prevent Ukraine from being anything other than a sidecar of Russia. I got the feeling that Russians were afraid Ukrainians could assert themselves as Not Russia, while at the same time Russia tried to claim no belief in Ukraine at all.
I am not going to try to recapitulate Ukraine’s history here. I have to admit I am still disambiguating the two countries. But having now read something of the history I am clear that the people of Ukraine deserve a future uncoupled from Russia.
Here’s a passage from Borderland describing the early days of the Maidan protests, which led to the ouster of President Yanukovych, and inaugurated a new era for Ukraine. As Ukraine was turning toward the West, Russia gobbled up the Crimean Peninsula, and occupied a band of territory in Ukraine’s East (2015). Ukraine has essentially been at war with Russia in the years since. In February 2022 Russia, however, majorly escalated, seeking to swallow everything it hadn’t yet taken.But the nastiness was in the future when the Maidan protests against Yanukovych began. (A maidan is a city square, and Kyiv’s main square was the gathering place.)
Bounded by barricades, the protests initially had a music festival air. On the Maidan itself, green canvas tents filled the area round the fountains where in normal times elderly men gather to play chess. Facing the Stalinist Ukraine Hotel, a covered sound stage hosted an almost round-the-clock stream of speakers and performers. Ruslana, winner of the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest, appeared night after night, leading the crowds in the national anthem. So did rock bands, folk singers, children’s choirs, Cossack drummers and a seemingly endless procession of poets.
“A seemingly endless procession of poets.” Yes! Suddenly Ukraine felt real to me.
source:
Borderland: a journey through the history of Ukraine
Anna Reid
1997, 2015. Basic Books / Perseus, New York
