From an historical perspective, the Russian colonization of Eurasia was simply a part of the Age of Exploration of the early capitalist and imperialist time. Russia was caught up in the Age of Modernity; like England, France and Holland, Russia widened the borders of the known world. They conquered foreigners using cold steel, gunpowder and the cross, incorporating new lands and creating one of the largest empires ever known. But here the similarities end. After the fall of the French and British Empires and the turbulent social changes of the 1960s, the discourse of postcolonialism was established in the West. This was linked to Edward Said’s 1979 book Orientalism, in which he describes how the West dreamt up the East as an object of study, to be disciplined and colonized; and with the works of Gayatri Spivak, which in the 1980s posed the radical question, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’
The postcolonial theory has never gained popularity in the academic community in Russia, and is regarded with the same disdain as the Western ideas of tolerance and political correctness. Intellectually, Russia is half a century, if not a century, behind, back in the times of Kipling, with its ignorant sense of pure racism and colonialism and its naive certainty of the superiority of the white man. In reality, Russia always lags behind by about fifty to a hundred years. This was the case with the gunpowder revolution, with socialism, with liberalism… and it is only now that we are reaching the most painful phase of coming to terms with the collapse of our colonialism (Putin described the collapse of the USSR as, ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe’), which the West went through half a century ago.
The popularity of a video about the Russian invader is based on the same dense arrogance – on the myths of the advantages of Soviet civilization and of the superiority of the fictional ‘Russian world’. The annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbass demonstrate the same ‘invader’s syndrome’. From the Belovezha Accords in 1991,[29] which signalled the end of the USSR, Russia had a contemptuous attitude to Ukrainian independence. The very word ‘nezalezhnost’ (Ukrainian for ‘independence’) is spoken by Russians with irony. Russia does not consider Ukraine as a state but as an ethnography, merely a Cossack in his baggy trousers, standing in the doorway of one of the chain of ‘Taras Bulba’ Ukrainian restaurants; for them, Ukraine is simply a sort of lesser Russia. Just as two hundred years ago, at the time of the Monroe Doctrine, the Latin American countries were looked on by the USA as ‘banana republics’, so Ukraine is now regarded by the Russian chauvinist in the same way: it is the ‘pork fat republic’, named after a typical Ukrainian product (and Belarus is the ‘potato republic’), and it does not have the right to political sovereignty.
This is why the first Ukrainian revolution of 2004, and particularly the second of 2013–14, were such a blow to Russian pride. The declaration about their own values and priorities was a clear demonstration that Ukrainians did not want to be simply ‘the little brother’. And Crimea and the Donbass were the ‘Russian world’s’ answer to the Maidan, as the Ukrainian revolution has been called.[30] This was not simply a geopolitical takeover, but a demonstration of the superiority of one civilization over another; the idea that, under Russia, Crimea and Eastern Ukraine will have a happier and richer life.
What happened as a result, though, is well known. Crimea is effectively living in a state of emergency. Water supplies are insufficient, and electricity is constantly being turned off. It is struggling as a holiday resort: in 2013 there were six and a half million tourists; this fell to three and a half million in 2014. Prices have risen by 50 per cent, and there has been a mass seizure of private businesses under the guise of ‘nationalization’. The peninsula has been turned into a huge military base, with the abuse of the rights of civil activists and repression of Crimean Tatars. Dozens of people have been tortured or simply disappeared without trace, and thousands of refugees have fled to mainland Ukraine. The road and rail blockade of Crimea has caused increased chaos on the ferry from the Russian mainland to Kerch, only slightly lessened by the construction of a bridge. Even with this bridge, Crimea is less of a peninsula; rather, it is a besieged island.
And if the ‘little green men’ who invaded Crimea were nicknamed ‘the polite people’ (as the propaganda called the Russian special forces in their unmarked uniforms), the Russian volunteers and full-time soldiers who entered the Donbass in their hastily renumbered military vehicles with the markings scratched out were anything but polite. The result is that up to ten thousand people have been killed and a million refugees have fled. The Donbass has been destroyed and turned into a humanitarian Chernobyl,[31] an open wound of the kind that did not exist even after the collapse of the USSR. One year after the event, the results of the ‘Russian invader’s’ actions in Ukraine have been catastrophic; but this fact does not worry those who created the viral video. The video has had an excellent effect on the internal audience, sowing chauvinism and hatred. By calling itself an ‘invader by birthright’, Russia is most of all occupying itself.
NOUGHTS AND CROSSES
The patriot’s dream has come true: Russian SU-34s are proudly flying over far-off colonial lands and dropping smart bombs on nasty men with beards – just as American F-16s did in the skies over Kosovo and Iraq. In briefings to the General Staff, dashing officers show videos from the optics of the missiles’ homing devices: the ground gets closer and closer in the crosshairs of the sight; you can see buildings, cars and people; then you see the silent cloud of the explosion and all these items have been turned to naught – just like the Americans did in Iraq! Russia is once again in the premier league of geopolitics and it can bomb whomsoever and wheresoever it likes! The country looks on, bewitched by this hi-tech show, which is so strikingly different from the blood, dirt, crying children and incinerated tank crews in the Donbass; even the colours are fashionably calming: the cloudless blue sky and the sandy-coloured desert. A collective anaesthetic is applied to the consciousness of the masses, which has been exhausted by the news from Ukraine.
I remember how it was sixteen years ago, when an ageing NATO, seeking enemies and a purpose in the wake of the Cold War, unleashed the full strength of its air forces against Serbia. The seventy-nine-day air war in Kosovo became one of the more shameful pages in the history of the North Atlantic Alliance: cities, passenger trains and buses, which in just the same way came within the crosshairs of the missile’s sight, all destroyed, leaving more than five hundred civilians dead. And I remember how old Europe forgot about the values of humanity and went completely mad in a militaristic rage: in Britain, the Sky News television channel jealously counted the number of sorties flown by the Royal Air Force; in Germany the Bild newspaper wrote up the bombings as if it were talking about Michael Schumacher’s races: ‘The German Tornados are taking-off in pole-position!’ Now Russia, offended by its apparent geopolitical losses, has decided to get its own back on the West by means of a virtual, telegenic and, it seems, safe postmodern war, answering the principal question of Russian life in the twenty-first century: if the Americans can do it, why can’t we?
29
The Belovezha Accords were so called because, on 8 December 1991, the Presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, meeting in the Belovezha Forest Reserve in Belarus, signed the deal setting up the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The establishment of this organization signalled the end of the USSR, although it was only seventeen days later, on 25 December, that Mikhail Gorbachev formally resigned as Soviet President.
30
The Maidan – Freedom Square – as the main square in Kiev was named after the break-up of the Soviet Union, was the centre of the protest movement that eventually brought about the fall of the regime of the pro-Russian President, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014.
31
In April 1986, an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine caused an ecological disaster in the surrounding areas of Ukraine and Belarus. It remains the world’s worst nuclear disaster.