Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, photo Falin, Wikimedia Commons

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1.5 Million Ukrainians Haven’t Died for NATO

by Phil Hall

While NATO has undoubtedly used Ukraine as a geopolitical proxy, and far-right elements have played disproportionate roles in the military, these facts cannot negate Ukraine’s fundamental right to self-determination.

When I went to Kyiv to study in the mid-80s, I had absolutely no idea where I was going. I had studied the Russian Revolution, read many books, and some Russian literature. I knew about Bulgakov, but I knew very little about Ukrainian culture and identity.

I went to Ukraine during the Soviet era and immediately fell in love with Kyiv. It is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. There are huge cliffs by the Dnieper, and on top of one of them stands a cathedral, on top of another the Pechersk Lavra; an astoundingly beautiful monastery with white stucco, and green-and-gold domes.

Ukrainians told me the story of the Vidbitsi, the pagan gods. They told me about ancient Kyiv’s glories, about its foundation by the brothers Kyi, Shchek and Khoryv, about Prince Igor, and the destruction of the city in 1240 by the Golden Horde. If you look at reconstructions of ancient Kyiv, it was largely made of wood—a massive palisade surrounding a timbered city. I’m not sure how many people lived there, perhaps a hundred thousand—but it was an impressive city.

Many of the people I met in Kyiv spoke Russian, though certainly not all. It was almost a class distinction: Russian was the lingua franca, but ordinary people, workers, shopkeepers, farmers, often spoke Ukrainian (though people moved relatively freely about the USSR). Still, as you move east, more people speak Russian than Ukrainian. This linguistic divide mirrored class distinctions: generally speaking, Russian was the language of bureaucracy and urban elites and the factories of the Donbas, while Ukrainian remained tied to the countryside. This is a legacy of both Tsarist and Soviet Russification policies.

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Putting to one side discussions about the civil war, collectivisation and WW2 for one moment (a tall order, I know), the roots of the current conflict stretch back to the 18th century when the Russian Empire began to systematically settle ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. Catherine the Great’s conquest of Crimea in 1783 marked the start of deliberate demographic engineering. The Donbas region’s industrialization under Alexander II brought waves of Russian workers.

But Kyiv was unmistakably a Ukrainian city—and, in a sense, an occupied one. I say this advisedly, given the history of World War II. Because of Stalin and his continuation of the Russian Empire’s legacy, there was a sense in which Russian culture had been imposed. Most of the people from the former eastern European countries which were inside the Soviet Block could explain what this actually meant in great detail. Ask a Czech a Pole, or a Hungarian.

In a sense, the transformation from the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union relied on the ancient relationships of domination and dependency between the centre and periphery built up over centuries. Ukraine’s fertile “black earth,” up to 10 meters thick, has long attracted Russian settlers moving west and south, often backed by imperial force and expanding under the advantage of their Russian identity.

Stalin’s Russification campaigns deliberately settled Russians in eastern Ukraine. By 1989, Russians comprised 22% of Ukraine’s population, concentrated in Donbas. Today’s the people of the Donbas and the Crimea have voted to join the Russian Federation, but the people voting are the descendants of this colonial policy.

Russia’s militarism and the emphasis on the Russian language and Orthodoxy reconstitute 19th-century Pan-Slavism

According to E.H. Carr, when the Bolsheviks took power under the slogan of “Land, Bread, and Peace” backed by the army workers and poor peasants, many Russians in places like Georgia, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan became Bolsheviks because they saw Soviet power as an extension of Russian dominance. Carr noted that many Bolsheviks in non-Russian republics viewed Soviet rule as a means of preserving Russian hegemony (The Bolshevik Revolution, 1950). Carr documents how former Tsarist administrators, military officers, and even Okhrana (secret police) officials became Soviet officials.

At the same time, though Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) was speaking of nations’ right to self-determination, the spirit of empire lived on within Bolshevism. Provincial governors became Soviet commissars. Tsarist land surveyors implemented collectivisation. Imperial railway managers kept the trains running.

Critics accused the Bolsheviks of inheriting the Tsarist bureaucracy’s autocratic style. The USSR replicated Tsarist governance rather than reinventing it. Chekhov’s critiques of Tsarist officialdom could just as easily describe Soviet functionaries. If you read Chekhov’s depictions of bureaucrats, those same traits appeared in the Soviet Union. The lack of accountability and democracy under the empire persisted under Soviet rule despite the excuses the USSR’s apologists make for it.

As Africans and South Africans of British and European descent, part of the revolutionary anti-Apartheid ANC, we were grateful for Soviet support to the ANC while the U.S. and Britain backed our enemies. We were predisposed to think of the USSR as a union of equals. The same understanding was true of many other people around the world involved in anti colonial and anti imperial struggles who received help from the Soviet Union, some of whom have now transferred their sympathy and allegiance over to the Russian Federation.

In the USSR itself the Bolsheviks—mindful of Lenin’s rhetoric on self-determination—tolerated local traditions, and encouraged the celebration of Ukrainians like Taras Shevchenko, but ruthlessly suppressed any form of Ukrainian nationalist movement or Ukrainian identity that threatened centralised power.

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Being in Ukraine in the early-to-mid-80s and returning in the 90s, visitors could easily perceive that the overweening dominance of Russianness was disguised as Sovietness. Russian and an emphasis on a shared Russian identity was the glue that held together the so-called “fraternal union.”

Opposition to Bolshevism as empire-building was, unsurprisingly, nationalist, and, logically, often right-wing given the upheavals: ideological impositions, economic restructuring, and the dismantling of traditional farming, including smallholdings. Communism was just a name for what those resisting it rejected.

When you read Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude on Mexican identity, or see how Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Cornwall crafted Celtic legends to forge national identities, you understand that even if these stories aren’t strictly factual, they reveal something about the people who tell them. It is no coincidence that it is the first instinct of anyone from a small European nation like Latvia or Ireland is to side with Ukraine rather than with The Russian Federation. The stories I heard in Ukraine claimed the Rus tribe as Ukrainian, their civilization centered in Kyiv.

Ukrainians take pride in Kyiv as the cradle of their Christianity, their city, their heritage. Putin’s so called “historical lesson” for Tucker Carlson was the same story Russian imperialists told themselves before the coming of the USSR. Ukrainians accuse Russians of cultural appropriation. They call Russians “Muscovites,” asserting that the Rus legacy is theirs, not Moscow’s—despite Russia’s use of the name.

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Ernest Gellner argued that a nation is defined by shared land, language, religion, and collective identity. In western Ukraine, lands once Polish-held and religiously distinct, became part of the polity of Ukraine. But obviously a nation can contain a variety of different identities. The lands of the former East Galicia are not “Polish”.

I recall the Soviet-era “Brotherly Nations” monument, which Ukrainians despised and tore down in 2022. It depicted Russia as the “big brother” and Ukraine as the “little brother,” implying subordination. Ukrainians rejected this hierarchy, seeing Bolshevism as the Russian Empire’s continuation—compounded by the theft of their name and culture. You might argue this narrative is fabricated or historically inaccurate. But consider this war: 1.5 million Ukrainian men have died fighting for their country.

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It doesn’t matter that it’s a proxy war or that far-right elements play a role. Clearly, Ukrainians possess a national identity strong enough to inspire such sacrifice—with countless more wounded. The channels of Russian state media mock Ukrainian nationhood and identity, claiming it is fictional and do so as a prelude to their government conquering another 5 or 9 regions of Ukraine. But Ukrainian national identity was real enough for those 1.5 million who died fighting for it. Did they fight for Mark Rutte, Macron, Scholz, or Biden? Of course not!

The troubling reality is that Ukrainian nationalism has long been led by neo-Nazis. Historically, opposition to Bolshevism was bound to be right-wing—not anarchist or socialist, but decisively anti-communist and now anti-Russian.

While we should understand Russia’s need to secure its borders against Western imperial hegemony and expansionism, and understand the offense the Russian Federation takes at having to face down Banderites (like other WWII collaborators in Eastern Europe) who persecute Russian speakers and have acted ruthlessly towards the people of the Donbas, Moscow’s denial of Ukrainian nationhood is hypocritical at a time when the Russian Federation, while invoking Soviet legacy, has become a hyper-nationalist empire denying others’ nationalism.

This rhetoric veers into Great Russian chauvinism, not ‘multipolarity’ or the struggle against imperialism and fascism. Sergei Lavrov doesn’t receive the Order of Lenin but the Order of Saint Andrew—a Tsarist emblem. And Saint Andrew, far from being a Russian saint, came to Kiev in AD 60, not Moscow. On the shores of the Dnieper he prophesied that a great city would be built there: Kiev! Despite framing its war as anti-fascist, Russia’s actions and language is a form of reconstituted 19th-century Pan-Slavism. Come what may, Ukraine, the original Rus, has the right to self determination.

References:

Carr, E.H. (1950). The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923. Macmillan.

Gellner, E. (2009) Nations and Nationalism 2nd edn. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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