Also NRC was cautiously optimistic on the eve of the attack on Ukraine. “Russians don’t believe there will be war. […] the aggressive propaganda plate seems to have turned gray,” the newspaper informed its readers on Wednesday, February 23. Within 24 hours, the Russian troops invaded the sovereign neighboring country and rose the Popularity figures of President Putin again to 80 percent†
Since the beginning of this second phase of the war against Ukraine – the first started eight years ago – analysts, including in the Netherlands, have been busy with geopolitical questions. Why did the Kremlin lose its strategic patience? Shouldn’t the West also put a little hand in its own bosom? What honorable retreat or even reward may we hold out for if Russia retraces its steps? And how far can our solidarity with Ukraine go without a Third World War breaking out?
The premise of many of these reflections is that we are witnessing Putin’s war and not Russia’s war. Just look at those thousands of protesters who do protest or those hundreds of thousands of intellectuals who have fled. After all, that is the highly cultural Russia that we love to know and embrace. I too follow that line with some eagerness. There must be some hope left, isn’t it?
However, that rosy picture is not correct, the experienced Russian sociologist Alexei Levinson of the Levada Centrum research institute wrote in the second week of the war. In the Soviet-Russian cliché ‘we are peaceful people, but…’ the emphasis is increasingly on that ‘but…’ according to Levinson† Whether opinion polls in an authoritarian war society are accurate to the point is impossible to determine, but the trend is undeniable, he says.
As an explanation, the defense often sounds that after 22 years the Russian bourgeoisie has been knocked down. But on closer inspection, such condoning is a form of paternalism. As if the highly educated Russian people are even too dull to dance for the devil.
In any case, in Ukraine they are dying of this kind of empathy, in which great nineteenth-century writers and composers are repeatedly brought in to illustrate the cultural nation that Russia aspires to be.
According to Ukrainian theologian Oleksiy Panich – a native Russian-speaking academic from Donetsk who had to flee to Kiev in 2014 and to Lviv a few weeks ago – this admired Russian culture is not at all like that. hors competition as is thought in the European salons. Pushkin hailed the tsarist empire. Dostoevsky was fanatically anti-Polish. Other greats, such as Chekhov, indeed gave the little man a voice, but according to Panich this was often the voice of the Russian who knows well that his state commits all kinds of crimes, but above all does not want to be held accountable. This ‘escapism’ is now followed by the fleeing Russian intelligentsia, according to Panitchi†
Precisely because today’s Russia is rich not just by one Putin, but by many Putins, the aggressive-imperialist Kremlin cannot be brought to a standstill with “pseudo-pacifist political correctness”, dominant in Western Europe, wrote the young Kiev sociologist Volodymyr Sheluchinin. earlier this month in the Ukrainian magazine Krytyka†
These arguments of Sheluchinin and Panich find no response in the Netherlands. That’s curious. After 1945, many Dutch people have used the German excuse for decades ‘I’m not aware of it‘ did not want to accept and ridiculed, even if they had knowledge of the oeuvre of Goethe and Schiller. With the violence of war raging, why should Ukrainians feel compassion for Tolstoy’s land now?
Hubert Smeets is a journalist and historian. He writes a column here every other week.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of March 24, 2022