James Meek reports from Ukraine
London Review of Books - 7 March 2014
The Russians and Ukrainians of the 1990s
were able to temper regret at the collapse of the USSR with their own
knowledge of the dismembered country’s shortcomings. A generation later,
this is less and less the case. Many of the most articulate and
thoughtful Russians and Ukrainians, those of middle age who knew the
realities of Soviet life and later prospered in the post-Soviet world,
have moved abroad, gone into a small business or been intimidated: in
any case they have been taken out of the political arena. In Russia and
Russophone Ukraine the stage is left to neo-Soviet populists who
propagate the false notion of the USSR as a paradisiac Russian-speaking
commonwealth, benignly ruled from Moscow, a natural continuum of the
tsarist empire, disturbed only by Nazi invaders to whom ‘the west’ are
heirs and the only obstacle to its re-creation. If you were born after
1985 you have no remembered reality to measure against this false
vision, just as you have no way to situate those charming Soviet musical
comedies of the 1960s and 1970s, idyllic portrayals of an idealised
Russophone socialism, brightly coloured and fun, propaganda now in a way
they weren’t when they were made. This is the context that has made it
possible for Vladimir Putin and his government to sell Russia’s
opportunistic invasion of Ukraine to his own people and to Ukrainian
neo-Soviets: the idea that it undoes what should never have been done,
an artificial division of Russian-speaking Eurasia by fascists/the
West/America/rabid Ukrainian nationalists – in neo-Soviet discourse,
avatars of a single anti-Russian monster.
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