Last month I was on the corner of old Pushkin Street in Kyiv. Following Vladimir Putin’s total invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it was renamed Yevhen Chykalenko Street, after a major figure in the Ukrainian independence movement of the early 20th century. For lovers of literature and opera, the “cancellation” of Alexander Pushkin, poet and author ofEugene Onegin, may seem exaggerated. Putin, yes, but why Pushkin?
By contrast, for Ukrainians, engaged in an existential struggle for independence against Russia’s recolonization war, Pushkin is a symbol of Russian imperialism, which has long denied Ukraine’s right to a separate national existence. Pushkin was a great poet, but also a poet of Russian imperialism, just as Rudyard Kipling was a great poet, but a poet of British imperialism.
The poem Poltava by Pushkin depicts the Ukrainian Cossack hetman Ivan Mazepa as a fickle traitor to the heroic Tsar Peter the Great, who nevertheless triumphed over the Swedes in the Battle of Poltava in 1709, before officially founding the Russian Empire twelve years later. .
Last year, as Russian forces bombed Ukraine, an official video showed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reciting lines from Pushkin’s poem “To the Slanderers of Russia”, a work ranting against supporters western Slavs who rebelled against Russia. Press clippings with photos of US President Joe Biden and the G7 summit helped explain the message. When Russian forces occupied Kherson, billboards depicting Pushkin were displayed as part of a propaganda campaign proclaiming that Russia was “here forever”.
No wonder some Ukrainians are now referring on social media to “Pushkinists” launching missile attacks on their cities. For example: “Pushkinists didn’t allow us to sleep properly – it was very noisy in Kyiv” (after spending a few late hours in an air-raid shelter, I myself didn’t feel very friendly to the pushkinists).
The Russian Empire continued with the Soviet Union
Behind this rejection of Pushkin by Ukrainians lies a much larger story. Looking back, we can see that the decline of the Russian Empire has been one of the main driving forces in European history over the past forty years. And with a little foresight, we should expect it to remain one of Europe’s greatest challenges for at least the next twenty years, if not forty years to come.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Russian Empire was perpetuated in a rather particular form, the Soviet Union. When the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was founded in 1922, Lenin decided that it would be a state where the constituent republics of the Union would theoretically be equal to each other (Stalin, like Putin a hundred years later, wanted that Ukraine is part of the Russian Federation). After World War II, this new version of the empire dominated the countries of Central and Eastern Europe up to the Iron Curtain that ran through central Germany. From Warsaw to Washington, people considered it to be both a Soviet empire and a Russian empire.
In the 1970s, this imperial superpower still seemed to be a formidable rival for the United States, even in parts of Africa and Latin America. But by the 1980s it was already in visible decline. Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts at reform resulted, between 1989 and 1991, in the most spectacular peaceful collapse of an empire in history. This collapse not only dissolved Soviet/Russian control over Central and Eastern Europe, but also the much older imperial ties between Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Unusually, and precisely because of the complex relationship between “Soviet” and “Russian” identities, it was the leader of the central imperial nation, Russian Boris Yeltsin, who provided the final impetus.
The Empire Strikes Back
Wrongly, many Westerners thought that was the end of history, but empires in decline do not give up without a fight. The first signs of a reversal appeared as early as 1992 with the occupation by the Russian army of what is still the secessionist territory of Transnistria, at the eastern end of the new sovereign state of Moldova, then with two brutal wars aimed at subjugating Chechnya within the Russian Federation.
The empire then struck back decisively, across international borders, with the occupation of two large regions of Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war in eastern Georgia. Ukraine in 2014, and the full invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In his speeches and essays, Vladimir Putin makes it clear that his main reference is the Russian Empire. Surprised by his boss’ decision last February, Foreign Minister Lavrov reportedly muttered to a friendly oligarch that Putin only has three advisers: “Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great.”
This story will not end even if Ukraine recovers every square meter of its sovereign territory, including Crimea. There will always be Belarus, a country of more than 9 million people which at the start of this decade saw one of the most sustained efforts of civil resistance in modern history, against the increasingly more autocratic of President Alexander Lukashenko. There are also the post-Soviet independent states of Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, as well as those of Central Asia. Within the Russian Federation, there are republics such as Chechnya, Dagestan and Tatarstan. For now, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov is one of Putin’s most loyal henchmen, but if Russia enters a “time of trouble”, Kadyrov could start making other calculations.
Putin destroyed the “Russian world”
Westerners should not imagine that they can “manage” the decline of this nuclear-armed empire, any more than the European powers could “manage” the decline of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Western democracies have a chronic tendency to overestimate their ability to influence the domestic politics of authoritarian regimes. Our opportunities for direct influence are especially minimal in today’s Russia, a personalized dictatorship in an advanced state of paranoia and repression. After Putin, and perhaps after his immediate successors, there should be a time when we have more opportunities for constructive engagement, and we should prepare for it. But it will be a long time before Russia finally accepts that it has lost an empire and begins to find a new role.
What we can and must do in the meantime is ensure that countries seeking a better future outside of a crumbling Russian empire can do so in peace, security and freedom. Geopolitics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. In the long term, the integration of Ukraine and its smaller neighbors into the European Union and NATO, thus protecting them against any future attempt at recolonization, will also be of service to Russia. The door of the empire being finally closed, it will be able to begin the long march towards the constitution of a nation-state. This march will, however, be particularly difficult because, unlike former European states such as France and Portugal, which gained and then lost overseas empires, Russia has no well-defined historically, geographically or constitutionally defined state to return to. .
Yet another post-imperial future was possible. Russian literature could have been enriched by the works of Ukrainian writers and other postcolonial writers, just as English literature was enriched by the works of writers from South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Trying to restore the “Russian world” by force, Putin destroyed it. In May 2013, 80% of Ukrainians said they had a generally positive attitude towards Russia. Last May, only 2% of Ukrainians pollsters could still reach gave this answer. And Pushkin Street was renamed.
It is only when Ukraine is firmly surrounded by the two strong arms of the geopolitical West, the EU and NATO, that its inhabitants will be able to sleep peacefully in their beds, as the Estonians and Lithuanians do, without be worried by the nocturnal attacks of the “Pushkinians”. Ukrainians might even start reading again Eugene Onegin With pleasure.
*Historian and Professor of European Studies at Oxford University, Timothy Garton Ash recently published Homelands: a personal history of Europe. This column was originally published in English in the FinancialTimes August 19.