As long as the city of Kyiv remained part of the Russian state
– whether an empire or a communist union of national republics – Russia’s
self-identification with historic Kyiv presented no problems. But once Ukraine
became independent, it was suddenly a very different matter, for Russia was now
deriving its identity from the history of a foreign country.
This is why Russians have a schizophrenic attitude toward
Ukraine. They can talk about brotherhood of their nations and then in the same
breath assert that no Ukrainians exist, that the Ukrainian language was
invented by the Austrian General Staff and the country of Ukraine by Lenin and
his Bolsheviks, that Ukrainians are in reality “little Russians” and that the
whole project of their nationhood has been designed to weaken the great Russian
nation.
As matters now stand, Russia doesn’t have a legitimate claim to
being a successor to Kievan Rus – just the United Kingdom does not derive its
identity from Rome, Copenhagen or Rouen – even though the Romans, the Danes and
the Normans played an important role in forming the British, developing their
language and building their cities.
Nevertheless, Muscovy carries the legacy of Kievan Rus in its
DNA and in one very important aspect Russia remains wedded to this legacy more
than 850 years later – much to its own detriment.
Kievan Rus, founded in late 9th century, was essentially a
Viking state. The Vikings played an important, if not always positive, part in
early medieval Europe. Starting by attacking and plundering richer, more
civilized settlements located on sea shores and along major rivers, they
eventually began settling on some of those territories.
For all their barbaric ways, the Scandinavians proved fairly
flexible, adapting to local conditions as circumstances demanded. In
north-eastern France, for instance, they became French feudal lords, melting
into the Frankish and late Roman populations. whereas in Britain, where they
encountered stiff resistance, Viking settlements continued to exist alongside
Anglo-Saxon ones for a long time.
Viking clans who raided lands to the south-east of Scandinavia
also established local settlements, but there they encountered a different set
of circumstances. Local Slav tribes were even less civilized than the Norsemen,
as well as disorganized and fractious. They had only primitive settlements and
few institutions of statehood. The Vikings probably started their engagement
with the region by prospecting for slaves, gradually becoming interested in
trading and raiding cities along southern and eastern routes. They started to
set up military outposts and establish towns, first around Novgorod in north
and moving south.
Even though Nordic rulers, once they started to live among much
more numerous Slavs quickly assimilated and adopted the local language, the
division between foreign masters and indigenous masses was never overcome.
Worse, this colonial pattern became transplanted to other city-states founded
by Varangian princes, most notably to Moscow.
Ivan the Terrible, the first Russian tsar and the next-to-last
direct descendant of the Varangian chieftain Rurik to sit on the Russian
throne, was the prime example of a Russian ruler treating his own country like
an occupier. In fact, much like one of his ancestors who used to come down from
the North at the head of a raiding party, Ivan formed gangs of oprichniki who laid waste to Russia and
terrorized its population.
The havoc Ivan wreaked was not much different from what a
brutal invasion by a foreign army would have done. His reign prepared the
ground for the devastating Time of Troubles that ensued fourteen years after
his death.
Even though the next ruling dynasty, the Romanovs, was drawn
from the ranks of Russian nobility, they soon began to act much like the
descendants of the Vikings, proving that it was political culture that
determined the style of government, and not blood lines.
In fact, ordinary Russians expect their rulers to be like
foreigners. They see them as an alien presence. The infamous Russian fatalism
with regard to the country’s governance derives from the deeply ingrained sense
that there is an insurmountable chasm between “them” and “us”.
Russians even seem to like their rulers all the more if they
are actually foreign. Look at the two Emperors given the moniker the Great.
Peter I hated things Russian and spent many years abroad. When he returned, he
wanted Russians to emulate the Europeans. Perhaps subconsciously, he himself
ended up emulating the original Scandinavian rulers of Rus, building a fleet
and conquering some of the territories from which the original Varangians had
come to govern Rus.
Catherine the Great, meanwhile, was a German princess.
The Bolshevik Revolution was carried out by Lenin and his
buddies who, like the Vikings, descended upon Russia from abroad. And even
though the claimed to hold power in the name of the masses and promised to make
the life of the people happier and more prosperous, in reality they behaved
very much like barbarian raiders, destroying monuments, robbing churches and
murdering prominent citizens who could have resisted them. There was absolutely
no difference in the way the Soviet government confiscated food and livestock
from peasants, making them starve to death, and the way it had been done by
foreign invaders in the Middle Ages.
Stalin – another non-Russian and another ardently admired ruler
– turned millions of his subjects into slaves and literally waged a war on his
own people. In fact, the losses he inflicted on the country in blood and
treasure – not to mention future prospects – far exceeded anything the real
invader, Hitler, was able to do to the Soviet Union in the course of the bloodiest
military conflict the world has ever known.
On the other hand, rulers who appeared more authentically
“Russian” and refused to act like invaders were often despised. Especially if
they, like Khrushchev and Gorbachev, attempted to alleviate the plight of the
population.
You would expect that over a period of hundreds of years, with
different political systems and a bunch of written and rewritten constitutions,
the Varangian pattern of Russian government would start to wear out. But it
still persists – albeit in a perverse and transmogrified form.
Vladimir Putin had a completely ordinary Russian upbringing on
the mean outskirts of Leningrad, but he has been acting like a classical Viking
ruler since becoming Russia’s president. He brought his clan over from his
native city in the North and has since presided over a historically
unprecedented rape of the country’s resources. Like any occupiers, members of
his elite send their families abroad, which is where they have stashed their
loot, as well.
Putin is even behaving like a medieval warlord. When he
snatched Crimea or sent his thugs to Donbas, he may have thought that he was
restituting Russia’s unfairly lost territories. In reality, he’s been merely
raiding a neighboring country. Two years after the annexation of Crimea, no
economic development has been achieved there and the peninsula remains vitally
reliant on Ukraine; in Donbass, the thugs openly live off the fat of the land,
robbing the local population.
Viktor Yanukovych, a small-time Donetsk gangster, imitated
Putin’s modus operandi, stealing
everything that was not nailed down. Unlike their Russian neighbors, who
characteristically like their Viking ruler, Ukrainians eventually sent him
packing.
But Ukrainian oligarchs and government officials continue to
suck the juices out of the Ukrainian economy very much the way an invader would
do. This is not a way to build a modern nation. While glorying in their
history, Ukrainians need to shake off this part of their Viking legacy, which
they still share with Russia.
