Writing in the New York Review of Books, historian Tim Snyder, author of the magisterial Bloodlands, takes a characteristically smart look at what is going on in Ukraine.
It is about whether the country should sign an association agreement with the EU, yes, but, much more than that, it is about what signing such an agreement could mean:
[The agreement] seemed to hold out to Ukraine’s youth and middle classes a symbolic assurance that a future of normal, civilized, European life awaited.
This reminds me a little of a discussion I had with a Moscow-based British diplomat at the time Ukraine was voting on whether to approve the country’s declaration of independence from the USSR. I had thought this might be a tough sell to the substantial Russian minority. The diplomat said (correctly, as it was to turn out) that it would turn out to be easier than I thought. To be sure, a good number of the ethnic Russians had their doubts about an independent Ukraine, but that wasn’t the point, he explained. They would not be voting for Ukraine, but against the Soviet Union.
Direction is everything.
And note that word “normal.” The demand for a ‘normal’ life was also a refrain heard of all over the crumbling Soviet bloc at the end of the Gorbachev era. Seventy years or so after the Bolshevik coup, communism was still seen as an aberration.
Back to Snyder:
[T]he desire of so many to be able to have normal lives in a normal country is opposed by two fantasies, one of them now exhausted and the other extremely dangerous.
The exhausted fantasy is that of Ukraine’s geopolitical significance. Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych seems to believe, and he is not alone, that because Ukraine lies between the European Union and Russia, each side must have an interest in controlling it, and therefore that smart geopolitics involves turning them against each other. What he does not understand is that these are two very different sorts of players. For the EU even to reach the point of offering an association agreement, creative European leaders (Carl Bildt of Sweden and Radek Sikorski of Poland) had to make an insistent push to gain support from member states, and hundreds of constituencies had to be satisfied. Yanukovych seems to have thought he could simply ask the EU for cash, on the logic that Putin was offering him the same. There is a point where cynicism turns into naïveté. The EU will not be offering loans until Ukraine makes the legislative reforms demanded by Brussels. Nor is it really very likely that Putin will come through with large sums unless Yanukovych agrees to join Russia’s Eurasian Union, which would amount to the end of Yanukovych’s power since it would amount to the end of Ukrainian sovereignty. . . .
The dangerous fantasy is the Russian idea that Ukraine is not really a different country, but rather a kind of slavic younger brother. This is a legacy of the late Soviet Union and the russification policies of the 1970s. It has no actual historical basis: east slavic statehood arose in what is now Ukraine and was copied in Moscow, and the early Russian Empire was itself highly dependent upon educated inhabitants of Ukraine.
The politics of memory of course have little to do with the facts of history. Putin unsurprisingly finds it convenient to ignore Russia’s actual regional rival, China, and play upon a Russian sense of superiority in eastern Europe by linking Kiev to Moscow. But this move has its risks, which Putin must now consider. After all, can he be certain which way the influence will travel? If Ukraine can be a democracy, then why can’t Russia? If Ukraine can have mass protests, then why can’t Russia? If Ukraine can be European, then why can’t Russia?
Indeed.
Read the whole thing.
And then read this, again:
The politics of memory of course have little to do with the facts of history.
So true.