The Ukrainian-Russian Cultural Conflict
- From: skagra2000@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 16:44:08 -0700 (PDT)
The Ukrainian-Russian Cultural Conflict
Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 6 Issue: 87
May 6, 2009 06:12 PM Age: 2 days
Category: Eurasia Daily Monitor, Home Page, Foreign Policy, Russia,
Ukraine
By: Taras Kuzio
<Scene from the movie "Taras Bulba">
Discussions over the many conflicts between Ukraine and Russia have
focused on the more well known: the status of the Russian language,
unpaid energy bills and gas pipelines, withdrawal of the Black Sea
Fleet, Russia's invasion of Georgia, support for Crimean separatism,
and future NATO membership. What is less widely known is the
undeclared Ukrainian-Russian cultural war that is as bitter as any
other aspect of the poor state of the bilateral relationship between
Ukraine and Russia.
The Ukrainian-Russian cultural war has significant ramifications in
Ukraine and Russia's domestic politics, national identities and
geopolitical orientations. It has long been established that the
language spoken by Ukrainians (Ukrainian or Russian) and their
attitudes towards Russia shaped by their stance on culture and
history, in turn influences the voting patterns of Ukrainians -into
pro-Western and pro-Russian orientations. These orientations then
influence attitudes towards their support for Ukraine's integration
into the CIS, NATO and the EU.
Unlike in the 1990's, Russia under Vladimir Putin has gone on the
offensive in seeking to counter what it sees as the "Ukrainian
nationalist" view of Ukrainian history and culture which has been
propagated by President Viktor Yushchenko since his election in
January 2005. Yushchenko's active and personal involvement in reviving
the Ukrainian national memory has added to the deep-seated antagonism
that Russia's leaders hold towards him.
The Ukrainian-Russian cultural war has become acute as a consequence
of the release in April of a new Russian film about Nikolai Gogol's
fictitious Cossack leader Taras Bulba. The film was sponsored by the
Russian Ministry of Culture at a cost of $20 million and took three
years to produce.
The new Taras Bulba film has obvious ideological and geopolitical
ramifications. Bulba is portrayed as fighting "Western enemies" and
dies for "the Orthodox Russian land." The film's director Vladimir
Bortko openly admitted that his aim was to increase "pro-Russian"
sympathies within Ukraine and to propagate the myth that Ukrainians
and Russians belong to one narod. The film unashamedly propagates a
pan-Slavic line that has won praise from Russian nationalist
politicians such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
Taras Bulba opened on April 3 in Moscow's Kinoteatr Oktyabr to
thunderous applause at Bulba's "Russian soul" speech and scenes where
Cossacks expel Poles from Ukraine. The film has aroused widespread
public interest and criticism and has already grossed $14 million in
Russia and Ukraine (Kyiv Post, April 22). The film has attracted both
older viewers, nostalgic for the USSR, and younger people because of
its abundance of gratuitous violence (www.life.pravda.com.ua, April
3).
It was released for the 200th anniversary of Gogol's birth who,
although born in Ukraine, wrote in the Russian language and has
traditionally been viewed as a "Russian" writer. The Ukrainian-Russian
cultural war has therefore descended into an historical dispute over
Gogol.
On April 1 President Yushchenko visited Gogol's museum in his native
Poltava region (www.president.gov.ua, April 1). At a concert in
Gogol's honor, Yushchenko said, "Gogol wrote in Russian, was a
Ukrainian, and thought and felt himself to be a Ukrainian. I believe
it is ridiculous, and to a certain extent the conflicts surrounding
which country he belongs to are demeaning" (www.president.gov.ua,
April 1). On the same day, Vladimir Putin hailed Gogol as an
"outstanding Russian writer."
The Ukrainian-Russian cultural war had earlier become contested over
Yushchenko's propagation of the 1933 famine as directed against
Ukrainians and as genocide. Russia has gone on the offensive against
both of these Ukrainian claims.
On February 25, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a DVD which will
be followed later this year by 3 volumes of 6,000 historical documents
to counter the Ukrainian claims. The Head of Russia's Federal Archives
Agency Vladimir Kozlov, introduced the DVD at a Moscow press
conference, with the claim that the famine was "the result of
[Stalin's] criminal policy" against the peasantry, rather than against
any specific ethnic group (www.rian.ru, February 25).
Ukraine's debunking of Stalinism and its publicizing of the famine,
has forced Russia under Putin to digress from its full-blown
rehabilitation of Stalinism. While rejecting Ukrainian claims of an
ethnic genocide-famine, Kozlov was forced to admit that a crime
(famine) had indeed taken place against the peasantry, as a result of
Stalin's collectivization policies. Russia's rehabilitation of
Stalinism has propagated the myth that it was the elites who had
suffered the most from Stalin's purges (www.gulag.ipvnews.org,
September 16, 2006).
The Ukrainian-Russian cultural war and differences over national
identity has become acutely important in Ukraine's presidential
elections, which are invariably perceived as deciding the country's
geopolitical future as either lying with Russia and the CIS or with
the West. This was the case in the 1994, 1999 and especially in the
2004 presidential elections, when Russia heavily intervened to halt
the "nationalist" candidate (Yushchenko) and lost. Putin has since
taken this as a personal defeat that requires some form of pay back.
With six months remaining until the elections, Yushchenko has
described himself as a person who does, "not belong to those people
who waver in their patriotism. I am not a little Russian, I am not a
khokhol (derogatory term for little Russians). I am a Ukrainian" (Eko
Moskvy, April 3). Yushchenko continued, ‘I am a Ukrainian president, I
know that this country requires an ideal
president' (www.president.gov.ua, April 3).
Ukrainian opinion polls suggest the "pro-Russian" Party of Regions
leader Viktor Yanukovych and the "treasonous" Prime Minister Yulia
Tymoshenko are the two leading presidential candidates, neither of
whom therefore match Yushchenko's requirements for a "patriotic"
president. On April 24 Ukrayinska Pravda and four days later the pro-
Yushchenko Ukrayina Moloda both ran leading articles on negotiations
already underway for a new "pro-Russian" coalition between the Party
of Regions and the Yulia Tymoshenko bloc (BYuT), facilitated by
Vladyslav Surkov, first deputy head of the Russian presidential
administration.
The Ukrainian-Russian cultural war is part of a wider on-going
undeclared conflict between both countries over their evolving
national identities. Ukraine's "quadruple transition" has focused on
nation and state building, as well as democratic and market economic
transition. Russia, which did not declare independence in August 1991,
became a reluctant independent state and under Boris Yeltsin it never
settled on what nation and state it was building. Under Putin, the
emerging Russian national identity is unwilling to accept a Ukraine in
any guise except one populated by "little Russians."
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