Curate, connect, and discover
ukraine is incompatible with russian national myth that enjoys the exclusive claim to the history of rus and the city of kyiv. so it's about history then, you may think. well, no, in truth it has nothing to do with history. what happened in the early medieval past is completely irrelevant. the existence of ukraine today, with her culture, language, identity and the city of kyiv as her capital, neatly situated in the heartland of ukrainian classicism, populated with visual and conceptual ukrainian archetypes, is what incompatible with russian national myth. the real history of kyiv is largely irrelevant to how both ukrainians and russians see it, but if for us, it's just our capital, for russians, real or not real, it's where conceptually their state began, where orthodoxy came from, where writing came from. all roads lead to rome, first, second or third, but before that, they lead to kyiv. and yet it is occupied by a different ethnicity. how come? it prevents them from exploiting this land for the legitimisation of the russian empire as they constructed it
they have tried to accommodate it. in the empire, ukrainians did not exist. everyone knew we did. yet we didn't. we were russians with an asterisk leading to the bottom of the page where you could read *little so we could be distinguished on the census from the russians we already were. our language did not exist, and it was banned dozens of times precisely for not existing. ukraine, which was not a real place, was the most integral russian land, full of exotic cossack artifacts, southern landscapes and dark-haired native women, who, peculiarly, even pronounced the vowels differently
soviet union was the time when russians learned to say that ukrainians were a different people, but not to think it. "an unbreakable union of free republics, the great rus' has sealed forever". ukraine had to be contained, by historiographic concepts of three intrinsically connected eastern slavic peoples through ancient russian state, culture and language, that came to change imperial doctrine of the triune nation; by our modern borders to which the borders of our identity receded shortly after 1926 census, to cut some edges and undo the results of widespread settlerism across eurasia for which russians used us in the time when we did not exist; by russification for which, unlike the empire, soviet union had actual capabilities
they could never leave us alone. and all that came with no respect, but with the sense of entitlement to everything we possess. there has never been a moment, since at least the 18th century, when russians looked at ukraine and saw anything other than a glorified province, an exotic appendage, an amusement park full of stock characters who perform their small-town culture "for" or "in spite of" russians, but never to themselves. it is so ingrained into their ideology, that it is almost uncanny to meet a russian who consistently uses "ukrainian" instead of a slur. to mention any sense of equality would be laughable
but even that is not enough. a provincialised, firmly colonised in the past and the present ukraine is not a solution to russian nationalism, it's a palliative. because the fantasy of ukraine being a safe russia's subaltern will always be overpowered by the reality of ukraine being fundamentally different. they can't make us russian. even when they succeed, they fail. they have to exterminate us. the times when russians were truly honest about us being foreign to them, calling us, maybe in awe, maybe in fear, "cherkassy", that is circassians, are long behind us, but maybe recoverable in the new context of russian colonisation of caucasus and new solidarities it created
i want to believe that this is the last russo-ukrainian war, but while we are fighting, i implore people to remember about one article, published by a russian state-owned news agency on april 3, 2022, "what russia should do with ukraine", one of the most lucid statement of the russian ideology. to you, of course, to us, it's a daily experience. it tells in no uncertain terms that ukrainians are nazis not because they exhibit nazi ideology, but because they are ukrainian. it calls for complete destruction of ukraine, the name "ukraine" itself, because the existence of it "inevitably leads to nazism". it says that ukrainians, who must become russian, must also experience war "to atone their historical guilt". even in their wildest genocide dreams, they still can't help but realise that we are not actually russian. they're not stupid, as soothing as this thought can be, they know what they're doing very well. and yet they can't see the main and only flaw
and i want to add, that none of it was inevitable. it only seems inevitable if you believe that russian imperialism is natural and not manufactured, something people bleat about as the pinnacle of russophobia, unable to simply say that it's stupid. russia could have not been an empire, russia could have changed, russia still can change. will it? the answer is as irrelevant as the real history russia cannibalised to become the monstrosity it is today and destroy my life. no matter. i know what ukraine should do with russia. defeat it, for the sake of ourselves and all before us who could not