I separately want to applaud the Swedes for their timing. The announcement came a day after Vladimir Putin’s 63rd birthday – which was a coincidence, of course – and less than two weeks after his speech at the UN General Assembly, in which he declared that the collapse of the Soviet Union left 25 million ethnic Russians living outside Russia’s borders, making it the largest divided nation on earth.
This was, characteristically for Putin, an ignorant statement or a lie. Arabs are divided into a dozen North African and the Middle Eastern states, Indians form four separate nations, the Chinese have a couple of states, etc. – but that was not Putin’s point. He was proclaiming Russia as the imperial center of the “Russian World” and laying claim to the Russian language as a connecting link in that world.
In other words, if you speak Russian, you need to be a citizen of the Russian national state – evidently, for the purpose of giving your wholehearted support to Vladimir Putin’s policies and suffering economic privations for his geopolitical ambitions.
But here comes the Swedish Academy deftly pricking Putin’s bubble by denying him his ownership of the Russian language.
The pro-Putin nationalist opinion in Russia was both outraged and confused by the Academy’s choice of a Ukrainian-born daughter of a Ukrainian mother and a Belarusian father who holds Belarus citizenship and writes in Russian. Writing in “Izvestia”, nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin, the follower of another writer and political activist Eduard Limonov, summed up this confusion perfectly: “they” – meaning the mythical collective West – gave the Nobel Prize to Alexievich because, on the one hand, they were scared of the Russia’s resurgent military might and yet wanted to sucker punch Russia by selecting a critic of the Soviet experience and of the current neo-Soviet revival.
One of the legacies of European colonialism has been the emergence of a handful of languages that are used by millions of people around the world along with their native tongues. Leaving aside English, which is a kind of esperanto of the modern world, such transnational languages are French, Spanish, Russian and, until World War II, German. In the post-Soviet era, Russian became the language of communication across the former Soviet Union and, if it weren’t for Putin’s truculence and stupidity, it would have stayed this way in the future.
Since the start of Putin’s Russian Spring, however, things have changed dramatically. In many countries Russian has once again become, as in the Soviet times, the language of oppression and aggression, associated with the kind of treasonous Fifth Column that staged bloody pro-Russian rallies and joined an armed insurrection in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, calling on Putin to invade their country.
This is precisely what Putin wants: to make Russian speakers suspect across the former Soviet Union and, hopefully, hated and discriminated against, to keep them from becoming patriots of their countries.
On the other hand, the sane portion of the Russian intelligentsia has greeted Alexievich’s Nobel Prize with great enthusiasm. She represents an alternative Russian World, a voluntary association across new national borders based mutual respect, cultural affinity and shared history, both tragic and uplifting. It is the Russian World of the mind, not the Moscow-centric Russian World of Putin’s imperialism.
The question is whether the decision in Stockholm would be enough to reverse the damage already done to the reputation of the Russian language.
It is a particularly important question for Ukraine, and not only because it has been the victim of the most sustained Russian aggression of the post-Soviet period, losing a large chunk of territory and suffering the largest number of casualties fighting Russian troops. Equally important, Ukraine has also been subjected to an attack on its language and national identity. Plenty of people in Russia claim that Ukrainian is an artificial language invented by the Austrians and, by implication, that there is no separate Ukrainian nation. Putin has stated that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people.”
For many Ukrainians, this makes for a tricky relationship with the Russian language. There have been calls from Ukrainian nationalists to get rid of the “Muscovy tongue” altogether – and it’s hard to blame them, given the situation. And yet, most Ukrainians outside western regions are fluent in Russian and for a substantial proportion of the Ukrainian population it is a mother tongue. Some are only vaguely familiar with Ukrainian.
Even some of the most ardent Ukrainian nationalists don’t speak it, such as Crimean Tatars.
The Russian language and culture are fundamental to the Ukrainian heritage. Starting with Nikolai Gogol, a Ukrainian writing poetically about Ukraine in Russian, there have been hundreds of Russian writers and artists of Ukrainians origin. This means that there is a huge part of the Ukrainian culture that was produced and created in Russian. All Odessa literature, from Babel to Katayev and from Ilf to Petrov, is written in Russian but is nevertheless Ukrainian – and contemporary poet Boris Khersonsky is part of the same tradition. Even Chekhov was born in Taganrog, a town that was part of Ukraine at the time.
It is impossible to deprive Ukraine of its literature written in Russian, just as it is impossible to divide Russian literature into purely Russian and Russian-Ukrainian. In a similar way, it is sometimes hard to position writers such as W.B. Yeates and James Joyce as purely Irish or British. Even Ukraine-phobic Russian nationalist Limonov (aka Savenko), having grown up in Kharkiv, a center of Soviet avant-garde culture in the 1960s, may be considered a Ukrainian writer.
It’s a huge post-colonial mess, and Ukraine will need to find a way to deal with it. Other nations have grappled with the same problem, too. For example, after the Revolutionary War, the United States was extremely suspicious of its former colonial masters and briefly considered junking the English language in favor of German in order to break off all ties to the past.
Ukrainians will similarly have to forge a Ukrainian nation not based on a genetic or language principle proposed by Putin but out of a fairly diverse group of inhabitants and a plethora of languages, which will inevitably have to include Russian.
