Separatists were going to assault a Ukrainian checkpoint on the Ovidiopol-Odesa driveway on April 23. They were arriving in small groups on cars and settling on the road curb, forming a black-green spot. Across the road, there were cars of some ordinary people who stopped to look on out of either sheer curiosity or genuine concern over all the troubles of today. There were quite a few of those who drove up: men and women of different ages and, judging by the car makes, incomes. All were resentful of the behavior of “idiots unaware of what they were doing.”
“They are not ours,” a young guy beside me said. “See the way they’ve parked. Ours know that tractor-trailers will barely pass here.” “I can tell them by the eyes,” a woman with seedlings in hand said to support him. “They look like drug addicts.”
In this spontaneously emerged community, everybody talked in Russian but their conclusions were Ukrainian. And it is not just the caption under a picture of today’s life. It is a new reality which we feel but have not yet fixed into our consciousness.
A surreal and, at the same time, very much real Russian-Ukrainian war could have broken out in 1991, when, taking advantage of the time of troubles, the Moscow establishment snitched all the money from Ukrainian banks. It could have begun in 2003 during the Tuzla conflict – or every time Kyiv counteracted Moscow’s influence. Take, for example, 1855, when Kyiv gubernia peasants decided to sign up for Cossacks en masse in order to escape from serfdom. In response, Nicholas I sent the army towards the banks of the Dnipro. Like an experienced hyena, Russia always closely watched our aspiration for independence in a herd of the enslaved, trying to seize any opportunity to bite a morsel of flesh off the “dearest” body in the shape of freedom or territory.
Those who studied the history of the Central Rada, the UNR, and the Directory from the sources other than Dmytro Tabachnyk’s Russia-oriented schoolbooks, know that neither the Provisional Government, nor Lenin, nor Stalin managed to lay their hands on Ukraine. The hetman’s coup, concessions to the Germans, the White movement, Budionny’s marches, and the efforts of Frunze’s army turned out to be in vain. We did not join communist Russia, although its troops had seized our capital three times. So Stalin resorted to a stratagem by declaring total Ukrainization, whereby not a single official, serviceman, or Party functionary was allowed to work in Ukraine unless they knew our language and culture. This occurred in 1923 at the 12th Congress of VKP (b) that proclaimed a course towards “indigenization,” i.e., involvement of non-Russian peoples in Bolshevism. At the time, Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote his poem “A Duty to Ukraine” which my colleagues like to quote. But those emotional lines were a flash of inspiration at the Party’s command.
I am saying to you, Comrade Muscovite, you’d better not make fun of Ukraine.
Learn this language by the vocabulary of red banners.
This language is majestic and simple:
“Forward, brothers and sisters, and the last fight let us face!”
Boris Yeltsin used to urge Russian officials “to think day and night about Ukraine.” There was the same situation in the times of Nikita Khrushchev had to tackle the problem of the acute shortage of food by tapping the resources of the Ukrainian countryside and the virgin lands of Kazakhstan.
The Bolsheviks tried to subjugate Ukraine by Ukrainization rather than by use of military force. This is an important historical lesson which many of the current leaders of a large unhappy country have ignored.
By unleashing a Russian-Ukrainian war, they in fact show contempt for their own historical experience as well as political incapacity of an empire. If the Kremlin people were of the magnitude and importance they ascribe to themselves, it would take them 50 billion dollars and a few months of a favorable energy policy to take full hold of Ukraine. Why did they prefer to spend several times as much and undermine their own economy and tarnish their foreign political image to boot?
In addition to the obvious answers about Putin’s personality and his corrupt regime, there are some other, more significant, ones. Most citizens of Russia support the war with Ukraine and annexation of its primordial lands. They view annexation of the new old territories as realization of their dashed hopes. Since the beginning of a new century, the Kremlin’s ideology has been nourishing the people with the ideas of and clams to global leadership. But a country that spans two continents and has unheard-of resources has failed to become a player that dominates on the world’s oil and gas market. Skolkovo, which was conceived as a challenge to Silicon Valley, has proved to be a 19th-century craftsman’s workshop. The ballistic missiles are obsolescent, while ballet no longer kindles public enthusiasm. Russian culture and science, represented by world-level personalities, now occupies laboratories and stages outside Russia. Friedrich Nietzsche, whom the Kremlin’s ideologists are fond of reading, gives a curious description of the so-called calm of strength, when an aggressive society has to forbear from its inherent reaction by force. The philosopher says this condition results in “rigidity to the point of anesthesia.”
We can see today the eruption of the lava of rigidity and malice the world has amassed in the course of many years. Will it be able to engulf Ukraine? If the seven years of never-ending wars and social upheavals from 1914 until 1921 failed to break down the national identity and, instead, brought it from the rural hinterland up to the level of intellectuals in megalopolises, then what can be said of the present day? The 22 years of independent existence have brought Ukraine a lot of disappointments, but this extremely contradictory period of time, full of global and local changes, has seen an invisible transformation of the residents of Soviet cities and villages into Ukrainian citizens.
They stood by the Odesa checkpoint, not yet prepared for resolute actions against the knife- and baseball bat-wielding people, but they were expressing their protest with their looks, gestures, and words. I do not think the 100-year-old Russian concept will break the will of these elderly and young modern-day Ukrainians to live in the current century.
The separatists suddenly vanished, carrying away the elderly women with icons in hands, who were to be used the way Putin had said before. The planned local clash remained a nonstarter, for a global difference canceled it.
