It is time for the West to change its image of Eastern Europe: seeing Russia as the cradle of culture does not do justice to that country’s centuries-long colonial raid. A young generation of Ukrainians, including Yulia Tymoshenko, denounces the naivety: ‘I am amazed at your lack of knowledge.’
‘Many Western ideas about Eastern Europe that I encountered during my education abroad were influenced by Russia. This is the result of years of ‘soft’ propaganda from the Soviet Union and Russia. But few of you seem to be aware of that.’
23-year-old Yulia Tymoshenko (no relation to the Ukrainian former prime minister of the same name) pronounces the words calmly, but firmly. Moreover, in flawless English.
Tymoshenko is one of the young, internationally oriented Ukrainians who have been stirring up social media in recent months. They are interpreters of a sharp, new sound from the land at war. A sound of young people who are both cosmopolitan and very proudly Ukrainian, who are increasingly annoyed by how Americans and Western Europeans view their country.
Tymoshenko is a typical example of this young generation: she grew up in a small village east of the capital Kyiv, received a scholarship and studied sociology abroad (in Abu Dhabi, New York and Madrid), she tells in a co-working space in Lviv with her laptop on the table. When Russia stationed troops at the border, she posted a series of slides on her Instagram account refuting Putin’s historic claims and calling for solidarity with the Ukrainians. After the Russian invasion forced Tymoshenko to flee to western Ukraine, she continued to post about the war: about life in the bomb shelter, about the need to donate money to local initiatives and about Ukrainian books you should read.
After four weeks of occupation, her native village was liberated and Tymoshenko visited her family there. She captioned a photo of a shattered wall: “This is not news, this is my life.” She had noticed that people ‘abroad’ saw the war in Ukraine as something abstract. That can be explained historically, says Tymoshenko.
What Do You Mean By That?
‘The fact that Russia is known to you as the cradle of culture is the result of centuries of cultural appropriation policies, including culture from neighboring countries. Numerous writers, poets and artists are called Russian in Russia because they were born in Soviet times, when in fact they were born and raised in other countries. This applies to Ukrainian writers, such as Gogol, but also to writers from Belarus, the Baltic States and Uzbekistan.
‘Everyone in the West can name Russian writers, but that is mainly due to the fact that over the past centuries the Russians systematically trampled cultures of other peoples: they persecuted writers, prohibited teaching in their own language and deported and massacred entire peoples.
‘In Ukraine there is even a term, Executed Renaissance, to all Ukrainian writers and artists murdered by the Soviets in the 1920s and 1930s (a term coined in a Polish anti-communist magazine in Paris in the 1960s, and which has become increasingly common in Ukraine since independence, red.† But that doesn’t stand alone. My ancestors had to submit to the Tsar. My great-grandmother had to walk forty kilometers every day in the 1930s to buy bread to keep her children from starving because Stalin wanted to punish Ukrainian peasants. My parents were obliged to learn Russian.’
The academic term for what Tymoshenko describes is Russification: the policy of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union for centuries of promoting the Russian language and culture at the expense of the language and culture of non-Russian communities. This started in the 18th century under Czarina Catherine the Great and became more structural in the 19th century, when her successors tried to quell the growing nationalism of Poles and Ukrainians, among others, by banning education and publications in their own language.
After the founding of the Soviet Union, Lenin briefly abandoned Russification, but under Stalin it came back again. He introduced the Cyrillic alphabet for all languages, and made Russian the official language in administration, communication and education. This language policy was reinforced with forced migrations and the persecution and imprisonment of nationalists and writers. According to historians, the Holodomor, the famine caused by Stalin that killed three million Ukrainians, can be seen as an attempt to bring the rebellious Ukrainians into line.
But there was not just coercion. Speaking other languages was not prohibited, their own culture was allowed to remain and many Soviet citizens were free to choose their own ethnicity in their passport. But because it was so much easier to make a career if you chose Russian, many people – from scientists to writers – decided to pass for Russian from now on and raise their children in Russian.
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, many former Soviet republics have embarked on a process of de-Russification. More and more, the past is viewed in imperialist terms, a process that has accelerated further since the wars in Georgia and Ukraine. Russia was not a brother state, but a colonizer, is the increasingly common belief in Ukraine.
Tymoshenko: ‘When I went to study in the West, I was surprised at the lack of knowledge about this. It happened to me so many times that I mentioned that I was from Ukraine and that people immediately started saying that they had been to Russia. And that they had eaten Russian soup, borsj, when in reality that is Ukrainian soup. That’s understandable, of course, but sometimes I also got the idea that people are too lazy to look beyond what they know about Russia.
‘My jaw dropped when I saw how many educational institutions exist in the West that offer Russian and Slavic studies. And that while these are mainly about Russia and hardly pay any attention to the rich cultures of other countries. When I tell about this in Ukraine, to relatives who have never been to the West, it shocks them. So they have entire institutes that deal with the Russian language and culture, they ask me. And what do they learn about us there?’
She shakes her head. ‘I read a twitter thread from a professor who was twenty years old Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History had analysed, which is an academic publication. And he hadn’t found a single paper in all those volumes that dealt with Russian colonialism. It was all about colonialism from countries like America, England and Spain. Shocking that no one has thought about this until now. And telling.’
Do you also see this reflected in reports about the war in Ukraine?
‘Yes, of course. You can see it in the use of certain terms that are taken from Russia. The term brother state, for example. Or how it is written about ‘Russians in Ukraine.’ Then I think: yes there are a lot of people with a mixed ethnicity, with a Russian grandmother for example. But they don’t see themselves as Russians. And if you call this group, or the Ukrainians who speak Russian, ‘ethnic Russians’, you’re going into Putin’s frame that he started this war to protect Russians and Russian-speakers in Ukraine.”
Term is coming on social media lately westsplaining more and more often. A variation on mansplaining, where individuals from the West – the countries that have never experienced communism – lecture people from countries like Ukraine about their history and current events. Do you recognize this?
laughs. ‘That’s such a good term. I have had many experiences with Westerners – often men – who would occasionally tell me about the situation in my country. You see it a lot on Western television, but also in the academic world. Take an average event about the war. The panelists are often all white men who were born in the West, and who have all their knowledge about Ukraine from a study or a trip to Russia. Sometimes they haven’t even set foot in my country. Let someone from Eastern Europe do the talking.’
Besides the fact that what they say is often wrong, Tymoshenko finds it insensitive to lecture Ukrainians at the moment. Especially in a private conversation: “I’m so tired of some random foreign guy telling me what’s going on in my country and sitting down and predicting how the war will develop. Spare me, and all Ukrainians, your analysis. Even if you consider yourself a military expert, please go talk to your friends about it in the cafe and leave us alone.’
What’s going well?
‘It has improved slightly since the invasion this year. You notice in everything that the scales are slowly falling from the eyes, that the discussion is getting underway and that Eastern Europeans are being listened better. That is one of the positive consequences of this war. Sometimes I am optimistic.
“But there is still a long way to go. Because I still see so many articles about ‘solutions to the war in Ukraine’ giving the option that we should give up half our territory. It’s so insulting. How can you think we can accept a peace without it being a Ukrainian victory? And without demanding reparations from Russia, when Russia has done so much damage for centuries? Buildings can be rebuilt, but lives cannot be taken back. The trauma of the people who have been raped cannot be easily repaired.
‘Calling for reunification is in fact a form of victimblaming. We have been violated and yet we have to give up our land. In the West, they don’t seem to understand how naive and hurtful this so-called pacifism is. Take the example of the Pope who made Russian and Ukrainian women bear a cross together during Easter Mass. We were not happy about that in Ukraine at all. Eastern European countries have been asking for recognition of all the crimes committed against us for years, but we never got it. And now we must reconcile while the Russians destroy our villages?’