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By Vitalii Holich
Before Putin started the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he tried to create a historical framework, in which this action would be justified. Although his arguments contained nothing constructive for the professional historians outside Russia, they still sound persuasive enough for its brainwashed society. In this sense, the use of deformed history has a special place in Russian propaganda: compared to the fairytale fakes like American bio laboratories in Ukraine, historical misinterpretations claim to operate with the wide-known facts, which makes them even more dangerous.
The ideological reasoning of the aggression against Ukraine was embodied already after the Russian occupation of Crimea. Although distinct features of Crimea are associated with the Crimean Tatar culture, Russia presented it as the «cradle of Orthodoxy», referring to the story of the baptism of Kyivan Prince Volodymyr in 988 in Chersonesus, located on the place of today’s Sevastopol. The next step is obviously Kyiv, which is presented as the very basis of the state of Rus’ (882-1240), without which the concept of Russia cannot exist.
The closest analogy in history is the Byzantine empire. This state with the centre in Constantinople emerged in the place of the Eastern Roman Empire, and its citizens called themselves «Romanoi», namely the citizens of Rome. Hence, Rome was important to justify the very existence of the Byzantine empire. This was the reason that in the VI century, emperor Justinian I conducted the expansion toward the West and succeeded to conquer the Italian peninsula with Rome for some short time. The Russian case is strikingly similar: its very concept is dependent on Rus’ – the ancient Slavic state centred in Kyiv, which later disintegrated, and a marginal Moscow state started strengthening.
Nevertheless, all empires come to an end in the same way: if they do not expand, they stagnate and die, being not able to offer their citizens anything else but expansion – neither social welfare nor freedoms and enough possibilities for development. The Byzantium fell in the XV century, after a long period of shrinking and lost battles against Seljuks, who later created the Ottoman Empire in its place.
It would be historically right if today’s aggressor state meets a similar fate, though the conditions are more complex, as Russia has nuclear potential and no one claims to conquer its territory. It became clear that until the concept of Russia exists, it will gradually return to its old ambitions and continue efforts to target Kyiv, then turn to later stages of history and try to restore the Russian Empire (which included Baltics and Finnland), the Soviet Union with Eastern Bloc, and probably go even further. Still, the «Russian world» hasn’t given anything progressive neither to the global community nor to the population that lives in its frames, without human rights and social welfare. Probably, the best scenario for Russians as humans would be if Russia disappears as a concept and focus on its own Moscow, not the foreign Kyiv.
By Vitalii Holich
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Lviv Now is an English-language website for Lviv, Ukraine’s «tech-friendly cultural hub.» It is produced by Tvoe Misto («Your City») media-hub, which also hosts regular problem-solving public forums to benefit the city and its people.
