Jade McGlynn’s book Russia’s War draws on her extensive research on Russian legacy media and social media discussions of the Ukraine War are processed by Russians. The title of her book is a reflection of its focus, which is the ways in which Russian citizens express and understand their support of Russia’s war in Ukraine. As she explains:
[T]his book is not about [Russian opponents of the war], nor is it about the true believers, the soldiers committing atrocities- neither are representative groups. Instead, it is about the Russians who acquiesce to the war, the ordinary people, the majority. I have zero hope of solving the Russia 'enigma' with a neat label but I do want to probe the complexities of the context through which these same Russians understand their war.In his 1992 book The Culture of Contentment, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith adopts a sardonic “anthropological” perspective of Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), the founder of the “institutional economics” trend of which Galbraith was a part. Galbraith was a sharp critic of militaristic attitudes and decisions of the US from the Vietnam War on. In Contentment, he explains:
Almost any military venture receives strong popular approval in the short run; the citizenry rallies to the flag and to the forces engaged in combat. The strategy and technology of the new war evoke admiration and applause. This reaction is related not to economics or politics but more deeply to anthropology. As in ancient times, when the drums sound in the distant forest, there is an assured tribal response. It is the rallying beat of the drums, not the virtue of the cause, that is the vital mobilizing force. (2)He continues directly:
But this does not last. It did not as regards the minor adventures in Grenada [1983] and Panama [1989], nor as regards the war with Iraq and Saddam Hussein [First Gulf War, 1991]. The effect of more widespread wars has been almost uniformly adverse. World War I, although it evoked the most powerful of patriotic responses at the time, has passed into history largely as a mindless and pointless slaughter. The party victoriously in power at the time, the Democrats, was rewarded in 1920 with a stern defeat at the polls. World War II, made inescapable by Japanese and German initiation or declaration of war, has survived with better reputation.I wouldn’t want to generalize this too much. But the is a great deal of evidence that most people in most countries would really prefer not to have wars. So, mobilizing the public and trying to keep them motivated to support or at least tolerate the war is a challenge for the governments at war. The basic techniques are largely the same, whether the cause is just in some objective sense or not. Although a legitimate cause tends to be an easier sale than other kinds.
However, the Korean and Vietnam wars, both greatly celebrated in their early months, ended with eventual rejection of the wars themselves and of the administrations responsible. In the longer run, it cannot be doubted, serious war deeply disturbs the political economy of contentment.
Jade McGlynn’s book looks at the specific kinds of popular mobilization that occurred in Russia in 2022 for the Ukraine War and the ways in which it is founded in patriotically-coded narratives of Russian history. Which also makes her book a good example of a trend not at all unique to Russia of how people use their understandings of their country’s past to make sense of events in the present.
Putinist ideology
Western audiences and particularly American ones are tempted to assume Russia is a conformist state with a more-or-less common view dictated by the authorities, whether it was the Czarist Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, or the post-1991 Russia. Obviously, under the Czar there were movements aiming at reforms, democratization, and even anti-capitalist revolution. The Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991 (3) was always undergoing debates over politics, as the Trotskyist split and the various party purges illustrated. The official Marxist ideology meant in practice that the doctrinal debates that had always been present in European Marxism were sometimes elevated to a high level of intensity, even fatal intensity. But there were always debates and divisions even in the USSR, though they were conducted largely within the confines of the broad official doctrine.
Briefly stated, official present-day Russian identity is not as sharply identified in official texts is the same doctrinaire way common during the Soviet period. And while the Russian leaders cultivate groups they hope to influence in other countries, that also is not done in the manner of the Soviet-aligned international Communist Parties of the Soviet era. Sometimes there may be echoes of it, as in the various agreements and informal alliances that Putin’s United Russia party concluded over the last decade. Including a five-year “cooperation accord” with H.C. Strache’s Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) in 2016. Putin has also encouraged in various ways the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, the pro-Brexit Leave movement in Britain, Marine Le Pen’s party in France National Rally (RN), and Matteo Salvini’s League party in Italy. (4)
However, the dominant ideological outlook among Putin and the current ruling oligarchy in Russia is nationalistic, while the Communist ideology of the USSR was “internationalist.” For an internationalist movement, it made at least superficial logical sense for foreign Communist Parties to recognize the Soviet Communist Party as the leading force in what they understood as an unfolding world revolution. In that perspective, what was good for the Soviet Union as a country was also best for the Communist movement elsewhere. (5)
A Russian nationalist ideology can hardly claim that particular perspective. But that doesn’t prevent Putin from encouraging nationalist movements like Brexit or the Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz Party in Hungary. A rightwing Nationalist International sounds like a conceptually schizophrenic term. But the fascist movement of the 1920s and 1930s was also very much a international phenomenon, with cooperation between fascist movements in various countries.
Russia and the “Little Patriotic War” (against Ukraine)
The nationalist perspective promoted by Putin’s government internally isn’t a strictly doctrinaire one. Glynn quotes from an interview “with an official working for the Ministry of Culture” about how the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany (better known in the West as the Second World War) is a central historical symbol used to inspire and justify Russian patriotism. He told her:
[T]he obsession with streamlining history is so all-encompassing because [the authorities] worry there is nothing there. Ever since Yeltsin there has been this struggle to articulate: why does Russia exist, why should it exist? And against the backdrop of separatism, which are issues that could flare up, this is an essential question. After the USSR collapsed, we could not cohere our people around rejecting the Soviet experience, people didn't buy that it was something done to them, not by them. And so we didn't have an idea, because we have so many different nations and languages and time zones - how do you bring that together? Those in power had no idea but we couldn't go on that way. Russia is not Canada - we need something to justify our existence. So they turned to history to ignite patriotism, to the Great Patriotic War in particular but also to some imperial paradigms, particularly around Ukraine, Novorossiya and so on. (p. 146)The Great Patriotic War was also a central theme in postwar Soviet politics and historiography and a key part of the historical narrative justifying the Soviet regime in general.
As it is for Britain and the US and other countries in the anti-Axis alliance. For the US, it still functions as the Good War that justifies America’s various military adventures around the world. At least to American citizens at the beginning of a new conflict.
She also explains why this perspective encourages the narrative of Ukrainians as Nazis, and the Russia War goal as seeking to oust such Nazis.
The notion of Ukrainians as Nazis is really a support act to a description of the war in Ukraine as a Little Patriotic War, or rerun of the Great Patriotic War (Soviet war against Nazi Germany 1941-1945). … Looking at my data, the intensity of this analogy has waxed and waned since 2014, with a relatively flat use of the narrative between late 2015 and 2018, and a marked lull from 2019 to early 2021. However, there was a sharp increase around February 2021 and into April 2021 when Russia began massing troops on the border with Ukraine before returning most of them to base. As discussed, references to Nazis, banderovtsy and the Great Patriotic War again increased with Russia's February 2022 invasion. (p.62)Banderovtsy is a term referring people acting in the tradition of Stefan Bandera (1909-1959), a Ukrainian nationalist who was anti-Soviet in his orientation. He was eventually assassinated in Munich. He was an activist and leader in the part of Ukraine held by Poland in the interwar period in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). After Nazi Germany seized that territory in 1939. As KaI Struve writes:
The OUN had supported the German attack on Poland in September 1939 because it hoped to be able to establish a Ukrainian state in the predominantly Ukrainian territories in southeastern Poland with German help. But these hopes were bitterly disappointed by the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23, 1939, under which the Ukrainian territories of Poland were occupied by the Soviet Union. From the point of view of the OUN, the Soviet Union was the most threatening enemy of the Ukrainians. The memory of the Holodomor [Ukrainian famine] and the repressions of the 1930s played a role in this. As did the fear that Soviet rule would eventually be accompanied by a renewed linguistic and cultural Russification. (6)So, yes, Bandera and the OUN were pro-Nazi in that sense, though the OUN was not a part of the Nazi Party. Also pro-Nazi in the following sense. While the old leadership of the OUN under Andrij Melnyk operated in the German-occupied part of Poland (the General Government), the majority of the organization led by Bandera pushed for active nationalist resistance against the Soviets:
The Abwehr, the German Wehrmacht’s military intelligence service did not start cooperation with the Bandera-OUN until the spring of 1941, in the months before the German attack on the Soviet Union. It alone had strong underground structures in the Soviet territories. The Wehrmacht's interest in this cooperation was, for one thing, that the OUN would provide information from the Soviet territories, but above all that it should prepare an uprising in the Soviet rear for the time of the German attack. Only the Bandera-OUN was able to do both, but not the Melnyk Group.In other words, Bandera’s OUP was pro-Nazi in the hope of getting a Ukrainian state out of it, and they supported the German invasion of the USSR until Hitler made it clear that there would be no state of Ukrainians who the Nazis considered Untermenschen. Struve also notes whether we could classify the OUP as “fascist” would depend on the specific definition applied, but it certainly comes close. (7)
Both parts of the OUN and other Ukrainian exile groups supported the German attack on the Soviet Union, as they once again hoped to be able to found a Ukrainian state with German support. Immediately after the occupation of the western Ukrainian capital Lviv, Bandera's deputy Yaroslav Stetsko declared the establishment of the Ukrainian state and the installation of a Ukrainian government here on June 30, 1941. Simultaneously, the OUN initiated Ukrainian administrations and local militias in many places, which it viewed as the basis for the formation of a Ukrainian state. The Germans, however, rejected the founding of the state. When Bandera and Stezko refused to disband them, they were arrested on July 5 and 9 respectively, taken to Berlin, and later imprisoned in a special section of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp until the fall of 1944. In the weeks following their arrest, Bandera and Stetsko continued to try to convince the Germans to change their policy towards Ukraine. However, Hitler had already decided on July 16, 1941, that there should be no Ukrainian state, but that the Ukrainian territories should be placed under direct German rule and subjected to a brutal regime of oppression and exploitation.
The current Russian government picked up the Soviet tradition of blending Banderovtsy and Nazis into the enemies of Russia. McGlynn notes this habit began as early as Ukraine’s formal independent in 1991:
The Kremlin only intensified its accusations following the Revolution of Dignity [aka, the Euromaidan of 2014] and annexation of Crimea, which Putin justified by claiming that Ukrainians intended to ethnically cleanse the peninsula and country of all Russians: 'Everyone can already teil exactly what they will do next, these Ukrainian heirs to the Bandera ideology, to a man who collaborated with Hitler during WWII [ ... ] they will try to create an ethnically pure Ukrainian state.’ (p. 63)She writes of the various and even conflicting accusations the Russian government and media make about Nazis and Hitler and the aggressive goals of Ukraine and the West:
[T]he use of historical analogies simultaneously adds a sense of predictability, covers up logical inconsistencies (by providing a temporal consistency) and reinforces the hero/victim dynamic. Russian audiences are led to believe that history will repeat itself, either as triumph or as tragedy. For example, before the 2022 summer, United Russia MPs received instructions from the party leadership to stress the following analogies: Stalingrad and Poltava, basically symbols or bywords for existential and bloody conflict fought against the West. For many watching, such analogies will frighten them into defensive loyalty, while for others the knowledge that Russia won then, so it will win now, calms them into ritual support.Basing themselves on the perspective of historian Timothy Snyder, Lothar Gorris and Tobias Rapp write:
The Soviet Union under Stalin had never had a clear position on fascism [?!?], it even made itself Hitler's ally in the Hitler-Stalin Pact and thus made the Second World War possible in the first place. After the war, however, the Soviet Union declared not only the attackers fascists, but also all those by whom the leadership felt threatened or whom it did not particularly like. "Fascist" was just another word for enemy. Putin's regime thrives on Soviet legacy: Russia's enemies are always fascists. ... Anyone who argues with "fascism" and "Nazism" justifies a war and crimes against humanity. Nazi means: Someone is not a human being. [He is] someone Russians are allowed to kill." (8)While that is a good clarification of how the current Soviet leadership uses the word, the brief historical sketch is inevitably fuzzy. The Non-Aggression Treaty between the USSR and Germany of 1939-1941 (aka, Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Hitler-Stalin Pact) did not involve the Soviet Union declaring itself to be “fascist” during that period. And while the Soviets were willing to extend the fascist label at times to rivals in the international socialist and Communist worlds (Social Democrats, Yugoslavia, China), they actually did have a definition of fascism. The Comintern (Communist International) defined it as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” (9)
But it gives added perspective to why the Russians today still call their opponents in Ukraine fascists. To muddy the waters a bit more, Timothy Snyder argues that Putin’s regime is actually fascist. But even Trump calls his opponents both Communists and fascists. Well-known insult words get used in many different ways.
Glynn’s account is not only interesting in the current context of the Russia-Ukraine War. It’s also a reminder that people’s understanding of the past and present are not independent of each other. And that there is no strict wall separating fact from fiction and reflection from drama in how a broad public understands issues of current concern. Especially when it comes to wars.
And her larger discussion of the public information flow on the war inside Russia is a good contextual reminder that the point of propaganda and “public information” campaigns does not have to be true or even convincing to the effective.
Next: How can we understand public discontent with the war among Russians.
Notes:
(1) McGlynn, Jade (2023): Russia’s War, 190. Cambridge UK & Hoboken USA: Polity Press.
(2) Galbraith, John Kenneth (1992): The Culture of Contentment, 166-7.
(3) The Soviet Union was formally founded in 1922, after the Civil War had been mostly resolved, but its origin was the 1917 October Revolution. It was formally dissolved in 1991.
(4) Reimon, Michel & Zelechowkski, Eva (2017): Putins rechte Freunde. Wie Europas Populisten ihre Nationen verkaufen. Wien: Falter Verlag.
(5) This position at times proved quite embarrassing for the affiliated Communist parties. Particularly during the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939-41. There are good reasons to argue that from the view of immediate Soviet interests, it was a coldly pragmatic decision given the options that Britain and France were giving them at the moment. Defending it on leftwing anti-imperialist grounds was a particularly awkward task for those who took that position.
On that agreement, see: Der Hitler-Stalin-Pakt. Der Krieg und die europäische Erinnerung. Osteuropa 59:7-8 (2009).
(6) Struve, Kai (2022): Stepan Bandera: Geschichte, Erinnerung und Propaganda, Ukraine-Analyse Nr. 270. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (bpb) 22.06.2022. <https://www.bpb.de/themen/europa/ukraine-analysen/nr-270/509748/analyse-stepan-bandera-geschichte-erinnerung-und-propaganda/> (Accessed: 2024-13-08). My translation from German.
(7) Ibid.
(8) Gorris, Lothar & Rapp, Tobias (2024): Die Heimlichen Hitler. Der Spiegel 17.08.2024, 12. My translation from German.
(9) For an elaboration of the Comintern positions as it stood in 1935, see: Dimitrov, Georgi (1935): The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism 08/02/1935. Marxists.org <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm> (Accessed: 2024-20-08).
No comments:
Post a Comment