The full-scale war that began on 24 February
has been, for many Ukrainians, the first experience of hostilities and
their consequences. What the cities of the Ukrainian region of Donbas
have been experiencing for 8 years, Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv and other cities have now also had to go through.
The greatest tragedy facing the Ukrainian people is the genocidal actions of the Russians,
which we had previously only read about in books about the Soviet
"Great Terror" [the Great Terror, also known as the Great Purge, was a
cruel political campaign by the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to kill
dissenting members of the Communist Party and anyone else he considered a
threat] or the German occupation during the Second World War.
It seems that we have survived everything: shootings, tortures, deportations and sexual violence.
We discussed the crimes committed by Russians in historical
perspective with Dr Larysa Yakubova, a researcher in historical sciences
specialising in the study of the "Russian world".
"Ukraine has been able to elude the state that has been destroying Russia"
- The term "Russian world" is not new for you, and you have
devoted many publications to it. Did you foresee the war, knowing all
that?
- People had feared that something bad would happen, and 24 February was the point when it finally did.
It had already been clear since November that war was coming, and that it was a matter of weeks.
When you are just a scientist who is engaged in studying the "Russian
world" and you know enough about it, then this burden completely
suffocates you and does not allow you to live fully.
- The Russians are trying to use their own historical myths
against Ukraine. Before the full-scale war, we listened to a speech by
Putin in which he denied Ukrainian statehood. Can we say that Ukrainians
already have a certain degree of immunity to this?
- I have been studying Russian propaganda for 8 years - it is quite difficult for an average person to understand it.
In the area they refer to as the "Russian world", people have long
been living in a "virtual world" that can’t be called our history,
Soviet or Russian history - it is an alternative history in which the
same commonly used word forms seem to float around, but they are
combined in such a way that we find ourselves immersed in Orwell's
reality or that of other outstanding fiction writers.
I believe that for 30 years we, as historians, have been doing things
right in Ukraine. Ukraine was able to elude the state that has been
destroying Russia, namely, the state of unwillingness to know anything
about its real past, of forgetting and erasing it from memory, of
refusing to repent of anything and seeing only progress and victories.
As a result, Russian historians ceased to be historians and deprived
the people of Russia of understanding where they are and who they are.
The difference between our countries in this sense is enormous. That
is, Ukrainians today are people with their own true history, whilst
Russians are still wandering through the swamps with their 17th-century
hero, Ivan Susani
- Will the Russians ever be able to get out of this state?
- They will not get out of this dead-end for another 50 years,
because it is impossible to write a new history just from Wikipedia.
There need to be tens of thousands of professional historians, but
they hardly have any left. The current cohort, who were trained in the
past 30 years, are propagandists who do not have the tools for
professional work.
First, it is necessary to train young professional historians,
explain the difference between propaganda and historical science, and
then they all have to go to real archives, which are currently closed to
researchers, to work and think for a couple of dozen years.
The results should then be published, put into mass circulation, and it will take 10-20 years for society to accept it.
"For 30 years, the Russian people were deliberately led by their government into a state of atrocity"
- Why do Russians draw on historical perspective to destroy
Ukrainians? The Holodomor [the great famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933
caused by Soviet policy], repression, destruction of culture and memory,
and now the public denial of Ukrainian statehood and atrocities
committed in the occupied territories.
- It’s all very simple, because the "Russian world" is a virtual
picture of an alternative history. Researchers quite often use the
cliché that Russians are people with a false self-identification.
There are many examples when families have kept silent about their
origins. Russians can go through their whole lives and learn only near
old age that they are the descendants of repressed Greeks, Finns, Jews
or Ukrainians.
That is, we are talking about negative selection, where Great Russian
chauvinism is a necessary prerequisite for being promoted through the
levels of internal hierarchy.
Although Stalin was a Georgian by nationality, he was also a Great
Russian chauvinist. So was Lenin. Not to mention the tsars, who could
not have become imperialists simply by the fact of their birth - they
were brought up in the tradition of Russian imperial historiography.
-Were the Bolsheviks also brought up on imperial historiography?
- They also shared an imperial historiography. It could not have been otherwise, from a historical point of view.
The main task of Ukraine at the current stage is to ensure that
Russians leave us alone; to separate this two-unit matrix on which the
basic historical reflection on the question of origins is based. And
where are the origins of historical reflections on Russia?
- Since the time of Kyivan Rus...
- Here's the answer to why they pick on us: because the internal
system of coordinates in the personality structure of every Russian
dictator takes its starting point in Kyiv.
However, a common starting point and the present-day community are not the same thing.
If that were the logic, then Kyiv could claim that Moscow should
become a region of Ukraine. But no - because at some stage, Vasily
Klyuchevsky [a 19th-century Russian historian] de facto transferred the
emphasis on continuity from the "mother of Russian cities" [Kyiv] to the
"dynasty". Thus, the focus switched to the notion that, for some
reason, Kyiv should be a province, not Moscow.
Until the Russians accept their true history as part of their
mentality, until then there will be a terrible mess that will bring
death and war everywhere.
- Most Ukrainians were shocked by the scale of torture and
abuse in Bucha and Irpin, but if we open a textbook on the history or
study of Soviet terror, we will see that this behaviour is typical of
Russians...
- The Russian people have been deliberately brought to a state of
brutality by the authorities over the past 30 years. This is a side
effect of a totalitarian society as such.
They were deliberately pushed into a totalitarian matrix, although it
should be noted that they have never actually left it behind. There was
a period that saw a degree of easing, sometime before the First Chechen
War.
Russia is moving in the direction of a large Gulag [the government
agency that administered the prison camps in the Soviet Union, and also
refers to the network of those prison camps] covering the entire
territory of the state. And the totalitarian matrix dehumanises every
person at every level.
We consider their leaders, we look at Putin: he stands completely
stone-faced and proclaims the genocide of the Ukrainian people. Not a
single muscle on his face moves, although he must understand that he is
condemning an entire nation before the eyes of the whole world.
And with a similar stone face, 70-80% of 140 million [Russian] people say "okay, that's how it should be."
Atrocities are their reaction to the fact that they are nobody in
their own country. This is no longer an army, but an armed bunch of
scumbags who will do whatever it takes to follow their orders.
- Can this behaviour of Russians be considered the norm for them?
- The civilisation praised by the "Russian world" [mentioned earlier]
was brought to such a state by 30 years of work on the mass
consciousness of people by the Russian authorities. This was done on
purpose, because only in this way can there be a totalitarian state and
power that does not change and is cemented. This is a country where
historical time and social development have stopped.
But we should understand that this side effect is the norm in
totalitarian regimes; the same thing happened in Nazi Germany, fascist
Italy, and in post-war China.
When totalitarianism wins as a form of social organisation, mass
brutality is its direct consequence. And every war is an atrocity,
regardless of who wages it. The exception is the country that defends
itself.
Why do Europeans repeat "Never again"? Because they understand that
any nation can be brought to such a state, and everyone can turn out to
be a victim or an "animal".
We have something to be proud of in this situation: we are holding
our ground, and the Russians will have to live with it. Our task is not
to lose our humanity. And once we persevere and win, we must ensure that
in the end, all the guilty parties are punished. But Russia is playing
around with history in order to avoid this.
"The tools of interaction with society are all the same: basements, tortures, mutilations, camps, interrogations"
- If we compare what the Russians are doing now to the Soviet
terror of the 1930s and the German occupation during the Second World
War, can we say that they have increased the atrocities to a new level?
- Such comparisons are not correct from a historical point of view,
because people were different 70 years ago, even if we are talking about
your grandfather. The majority of Russians at that time had not
completed 4 years of education - we are not talking about the
intelligentsia or elites here.
The mass of individuals who lived under the Nazi regime at the time
were burghers who had gone bankrupt after the First World War. Moreover,
they were people who did not have an average, full-fledged Western
European primary education. They were told that a Jew is not a person,
and that a physically disabled person can be killed without remorse in
order to "purify the race".
It was explained to the Germans that Ukrainian lands are their living
space. The Nazis came to Ukraine to get a large piece of land, where
they planned to start farms, create a colony where their children and
great-grandchildren would rule, and drive Ukrainians into slavery.
And today we see a Russian man, allegedly an educated person, with access to the Internet, raping a girl.
It is possible to compare them, but in making a comparison one should
not forget about the internal structures of the countries which commit
crimes against the population.
NKVD [The People's Commissariat for
Internal Affairs, abbreviated NKVD, was the secret police agency of the
Soviet Union 1934-46, subsequently renamed the KGB]
After all, if we consider that every Russian is capable of doing
this, then we will come to a dead end. That's how they think about us,
and genocidal practices grow out of such assumptions: when an entire
nation is denied every right to remain human.
- Have the working methods of the Russian special services changed since Soviet times?
- The tools of interaction with society are all the same: basements,
tortures, mutilations, camps, interrogations. If you look at a study of
what was done during the "Great Terror" of 1937-38, you will see that
the same thing has been done for 8 years in the basements of the "DPR"
[self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic] and "LPR" [self-proclaimed
Luhansk People’s Republic].
The only difference is the scale. The only thing is that mass war
crimes are the crimes of another structure, the so-called Russian army.
It is now not an army, but basically a terrorist organisation.
And it [the Russian army] is doing the same thing to Ukraine as to
Syria. That is, it is technically possible to turn every Ukrainian city
into Aleppo. There are orders, there is no honour, there is no dignity,
there are no human values.
After all, the Nazis did the same thing. Our catastrophe is that we
will have to live with this terrible neighbour for a long time, because I
do not see the leaders of Russia radically changing its internal
settings in the near future.
The next 30 years will be very difficult for all of us, and in this situation it is very important to be down-to-earth.
- Sexual violence is one of the types of terror in Russia
today. How common were such cases during the Soviet terror in the 1930s?
- From a purely scientific point of view, sexual violence is a
reflection of barbarism. We have to understand that it is present in
every war, because all the violent attitudes, the dehumanisation of the
enemy are the archetype of the behaviour of a barbarian warrior who
comes to the land he has captured.
The first thing a barbarian does before a defeated enemy is to rape
women, daughters and sons, kill the master and begin to rule over all
those who have been humiliated. After enduring such stress, one must
have a very strong inner core not to break down and to continue the
struggle, and even to continue to live.
This topic is studied on the basis of what happened in the Second
World War, during Soviet occupation, and from Western European material.
Let's consider what happened after the capture of Berlin, where wives
and daughters were raped in front of the captured officers, after which
those officers committed suicide.
Rape in public places is an act of humiliation and moral murder. When
all the information is available, we will talk about what we are
dealing with today.
Fortunately, now the Ukrainian army is working quite well, and it
will be difficult for them [Russian soldiers] to reach the boys, men,
and women, and this may hold them back. In the first stage of the war,
when they marched in in full uniform, they had a sense that it was open
season.
- You have done a great deal of research on the history of
Donbas. Is it now symbolic that the fate of Ukraine is being determined
there?
- If our border with Russia was in Ternopil Oblast or Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, then the symbolism would lie there.
We recaptured Kyiv Oblast, Chernihiv Oblast, and Sumy Oblast not
because there is less support for the "Russian world" there than in
Donbas. The problem is that Donbas has been a stepping-stone for the
past 8 years.
Donbas was chosen as the zone that was easiest to "sway". At that
time [in 2014], the fugitive president Yanukovych was "the leader of the
common man from Donbas", just as the average Russian now identifies
with Putin. That is, these slogans worked there because of a high level
of social tension, not because of "pure love" for Russia.
Secondly, it was a zone of chronic social depression, and this
weakened Kyiv's position. Similar zones of social disaster in Russia are
now zones of support for Putin's "special operation". Their residents
thus strive to "establish order" in Ukraine, when they have no influence
on anything and live on the edge of survival [within their own
territory].
We have taken a huge step forward in these 8 years. I don't like it
when they write that if it weren't for Putin and the war, there would be
no Ukrainian nation.
The symbolism of Donbas is that in 2014, the Russians wanted to
"revive" Novorossiya ["New Russia", the historical term for a region
that was part of the Russian Empire and included part of present-day
Ukraine], but they failed.
After that, they would state, on various platforms, look: Putin's
Russia is a nightmare, and we will build a "new, beautiful Russia" in
Donbas. So what happened? It turned into a festering cesspool of
terrible degradation: intellectual, moral, economic, and social.
These pseudo-republics, like metastases, spread to the mental body of
Russia itself. And now we see that the insignificant "LPR/DPR"
[self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics] have turned out
to be a projection of the totalitarian future of Russia itself.
But we have different projections: we will retake Ukrainian Donbas
and we will "live our own lives", building a future of peace and
freedom.
Mykhailo Zahorodnii, Ukrainska Pravda. Zhyttia