The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

CHAPTER FOUR NOVELTY OR ETERNITY (2014)

Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom.

—HANNAH ARENDT, 1951

The Russian politics of eternity reached back a thousand years to find a mythical moment of innocence. Vladimir Putin claimed that his millennial vision of the baptism of Volodymyr/Valdemar of Kyiv made Russia and Ukraine a single people. While visiting Kyiv in July 2013, Putin read souls and spoke of God’s geopolitics: “Our spiritual unity began with the Baptism of Holy Rus 1025 years ago. Since then, much has happened in the lives of our peoples, but our spiritual unity is so strong that it is not subject to any action by any authority: neither government authorities nor, I would even go so far as to say, church authorities. Because regardless of any existing authority over the people, there can be none that is stronger than the authority of the Lord—nothing can be stronger than that. And this is the most solid foundation for our unity in the souls of our people.”

In September 2013 at Valdai, his official presidential summit on foreign policy, Putin expressed his vision in secular terms. He cited Ilyin’s “organic model” of Russian statehood, in which Ukraine was an inseparable organ of the virginal Russian body. “We have common traditions, a common mentality, a common history and a common culture,” said Putin. “We have very similar languages. In that respect, I want to repeat again, we are one people.” The association agreement between the EU and Ukraine was to be signed two months later. Russia would attempt to halt this process on the grounds that nothing new can happen within its spiritual sphere of influence—“the Russian world,” as Putin began to say. His attempt to apply a Russian politics of eternity beyond Russia’s borders had unintended consequences. Ukrainians responded by creating new kinds of politics.

Nations are new things that refer to old things. It matters how they do so. It is possible, as Russian leaders have done, to issue ritual incantations designed to reinforce the status quo at home and justify empire abroad. To say that “Rus” is “Russia,” or that Volodymyr/Valdemar of Rus in the 980s is Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation in the 2010s, is to remove the centuries of interpretable material that permits historical thought and political judgment.

It is also possible to see in the thousand years since the baptism of Volodymyr/Valdemar of Kyiv a history rather than a story of eternity. To think historically is not to trade one national myth for another, to say that Ukraine rather than Russia is the inheritor of Rus, that Volodymyr/Valdemar was a Ukrainian and not a Russian. To make such a claim is merely to replace a Russian politics of eternity with a Ukrainian one. To think historically is to see how something like Ukraine might be possible, just as something like Russia might be possible. To think historically is to see the limits of structures, the spaces of indeterminacy, the possibilities for freedom.

The configurations that make Ukraine possible today are visible in the medieval and early modern periods. The Rus of Volodymyr/Valdemar was fractured long before the defeat of its warlords by the Mongols in the early 1240s. After the Mongol invasions, most of the territory of Rus was absorbed by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Christian warlords of Rus then became leading figures of pagan Lithuania.

The Grand Duchy of Lithuania adopted the political language of Rus for its laws and courts. From 1386, the Lithuanian grand dukes generally ruled Poland as well.

The idea of a “Ukraine” to designate part of the lands of ancient Rus emerged after 1569, when the political relationship between Lithuania and Poland changed. In that year, the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania formed a commonwealth, a constitutional union of the two realms. During the bargaining, most of the territory of present-day Ukraine was shifted from the Lithuanian to the Polish part of the new common entity. This set off conflicts that created the political idea of Ukraine.

After 1569 on the territory of today’s Ukraine, the eastern Christian traditions of Rus were challenged by western Christianity, which was in the midst of fertile transformations. Polish Catholic and Protestant thinkers, aided by the printing press, challenged the hold of eastern Christianity on the lands of Rus. Some of the Orthodox warlords of Rus converted to Protestantism or Catholicism and adopted the Polish language for communication among themselves. Following Polish models (and the example of Polish nobles who moved east), these local magnates began to transform the fertile Ukrainian steppe into great plantations. This meant binding the local population to the land as serfs in order to exploit their labor. Ukrainian peasants who tried to flee serfdom often found another form of bondage, since they could be sold into slavery by neighboring Muslims, in the extreme south of what is today Ukraine. These Muslims, known as Tatars, were under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire.

Serfs sought refuge with the Cossacks, free men who lived by raiding, hunting, and fishing at the southeastern edge of the steppe, in the no-man’s-land between Polish and Ottoman power. They built their fortress, or Sich, on an island in the middle of the Dnipro River, not far from the present-day city that bears the river’s name. In wartime, thousands of Cossacks fought as contract soldiers in the Polish army. When Cossacks fought as infantry and the Polish nobility as cavalry, the Polish army rarely lost. In the early seventeenth century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was the largest state in Europe, and even briefly took Moscow. It was a republic of nobles, in which every nobleman was represented in parliament. In practice, of course, some noblemen were more powerful than others, and the wealthy magnates of Ukraine were among the most important citizens of the commonwealth. Cossacks wanted to be ennobled, or at least to have fixed legal rights within the commonwealth. This was not granted them.

In 1648, these tensions brought rebellion. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was about to undertake a campaign against the Ottoman Empire. The Cossacks who were preparing to take the field against the Ottomans instead found a leader, Bohdan Khmelnyts’kyi, who persuaded them to rebel against local polonized landlords. Knowing that he needed allies, Khmelnyts’kyi recruited the Tatars, to whom he offered local Ukrainian Christians as slaves. When the Tatars deserted him, he needed a new ally, and Moscow was the only one he could find. There was nothing fated about this alliance. The Cossacks and the Muscovites both saw themselves as inheritors of Rus, but they had no common language and needed translators to communicate. Though a rebel, Khmelnyts’kyi was a child of the Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation, whose languages were Ukrainian, Polish, and Latin (but not Russian). The Cossacks were accustomed to legal contracts binding on both parties. They saw as a temporary arrangement what the Muscovite side regarded as permanent subjugation to the tsar. In 1654, Muscovy invaded the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1667, the lands that are now Ukraine were split along the Dnipro River, with the Cossack strongholds falling to Muscovy. The status of Kyiv was at first uncertain, but it too was ceded to Muscovy.

Muscovy now turned westward after its long Asian career. The city of Kyiv had existed for about eight hundred years without a political connection to Moscow. Kyiv had passed through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Baroque, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, as a European metropolis. Once joined to Muscovy, its academy became the major institution of higher learning in the realm, which after 1721 was known as the Russian Empire. Kyiv’s educated men filled the professional classes of Moscow and then St. Petersburg. The Cossacks were assimilated into the Russian imperial armed forces. Empress Catherine took a Cossack lover and deployed the Cossacks to conquer the Crimean Peninsula. At the end of the eighteenth century, the Russian Empire partitioned the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth out of existence, with the help of Prussia and the Habsburg monarchy. In this way, almost all of the ancient lands of Rus became part of the new Russian Empire.

In the nineteenth century, Russian imperial integration called forth a Ukrainian patriotic reaction. The Russian imperial university in Kharkiv was the first center of a Romantic tendency to idealize the local peasant and his culture. In mid-century Kyiv, a few members of ancient noble families began to identify with the Ukrainian-speaking peasantry rather than with Russian or Polish power. At first, Russian rulers saw in these tendencies a laudable interest in “south Russian” or “little Russian” culture. After Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War of 1853–1856 and a Polish uprising of 1863–1864, Russian imperial authorities defined Ukrainian culture as a political danger, and banned publications in the Ukrainian language. The Statutes of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, with their echoes of the ancient law of Rus, lost their force. The traditional place of Kyiv as the center of eastern Orthodoxy was assumed by Moscow. The Uniate Church, formed in 1596 with an eastern liturgy but a western hierarchy, was abolished.

The one land of Rus that remained outside the Russian Empire was Galicia. When the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been partitioned out of existence at the end of the eighteenth century, Habsburg rulers ended up with these territories. As a Habsburg crownland, Galicia preserved certain features of Rus civilization, such as the Uniate Church. The Habsburg monarchy renamed it “Greek Catholic” and educated its priests in Vienna. Children and grandchildren of these men became Ukrainian national activists, editors of newspapers, and candidates to parliament. When the Russian Empire restricted Ukrainian culture, Ukrainian writers and activists moved to Galicia. After 1867, the Habsburg monarchy had a liberal constitution and a free press, so these political immigrants had the freedom to continue Ukrainian work. Austria held democratic elections, so party politics became national politics throughout the monarchy. Refugees from the Russian Empire defined Ukrainian politics and history as a matter of a continuous culture and language rather than imperial power. As for the peasants themselves, the vast bulk of the population that spoke the Ukrainian language was mainly concerned with owning land.

After the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, a Ukrainian government declared independence. Yet unlike other east European peoples, Ukrainians were unable to form a state. No Ukrainian claim was recognized by the powers that won the First World War. Kyiv changed hands a dozen times among the Red Army, its White Russian opponents, a Ukrainian army, and the Polish army. Beleaguered Ukrainian authorities made an alliance with newly independent Poland, and together the Polish and Ukrainian armies took Kyiv in May 1920. When the Red Army counterattacked, Ukrainian soldiers fought alongside Poles all the way back to Warsaw. But when Poland and Bolshevik Russia signed their peace treaty at Riga in 1921, the lands that Ukrainian activists saw as theirs were divided: almost all of what had been in the Russian Empire fell to the emerging Soviet Union, whereas Galicia and another western district, Volhynia, fell to Poland. This was not exceptional but hypertypical. A Ukrainian nation-state lasted months, whereas its western neighbors lasted years, but the lesson was the same, and best learned from the Ukrainian example: the nation-state was difficult and in most cases untenable.

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Ukrainian history brings into focus a central question of modern European history: After empire, what? According to the fable of the wise nation, European nation-states learned a lesson from war and began to integrate. For this myth to make sense, nation-states must be imagined into periods when in fact they did not exist. The fundamental event of the middle of the European twentieth century has to be removed: the attempts by Europeans to establish empires within Europe itself. The crucial case is the failed German attempt to colonize Ukraine in 1941. The rich black earth of Ukraine was at the center of the two major European neoimperial projects of the twentieth centry, the Soviet and then the Nazi. In this respect as well, Ukrainian history is hypertypical and therefore indispensible. No other land attracted as much colonial attention within Europe. This reveals the rule: European history turns on colonization and decolonization.

Joseph Stalin understood the Soviet project as self-colonization. Since the Soviet Union had no overseas possessions, it had to exploit its hinterlands. Ukraine was therefore to yield its agricultural bounty to Soviet central planners in the First Five-Year Plan of 1928–1933. State control of agriculture killed between three and four million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine by starvation. Adolf Hitler saw Ukraine as the fertile territory that would transform Germany into a world power. Control of its black earth was his war aim. As a result of the German occupation that began in 1941, more than three million more inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine were killed, including about 1.6 million Jews murdered by the Germans and local policemen and militias. In addition to those losses, some three million more inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine died in combat as Red Army soldiers. Taken together, some ten million people were killed in a decade as a result of two rival colonizations of the same Ukrainian territory.

After the Red Army defeated the Wehrmacht in 1945, the borders of Soviet Ukraine were extended westward to include districts taken from Poland, as well as minor territories from Czechoslovakia and Romania. In 1954, the Crimean Peninsula was removed from the Russian Soviet Federative Republic of the Soviet Union and added to Soviet Ukraine. This was the last of a series of border adjustments between the two Soviet republics. Since Crimea is connected to Ukraine by land (and an island from the perspective of Russia), the point was to connect the peninsula to the Ukrainian water supplies and electricity grids. The Soviet leadership took the opportunity to explain that Ukraine and Russia were unified by fate. Because the year 1954 was the three hundredth anniversary of the agreement that had united the Cossacks and Muscovy against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Soviet factories produced cigarette packs and nightgowns with the logo 300 YEARS. This was an early example of the Soviet politics of eternity: legitimating rule not by present achievement or future promise but by the nostalgic loop of a round number.

Soviet Ukraine was the second most populous republic of the USSR, after Soviet Russia. In Soviet Ukraine’s western districts, which had been part of Poland before the Second World War, Ukrainian nationalists resisted the imposition of Soviet rule. In a series of deportations in the late 1940s and early 1950s, they and their families were sent by the hundreds of thousands to the Soviet concentration camp system, the Gulag. In just a few days in October 1947, for example, 76,192 Ukrainians were transported to the Gulag in what was known as Operation West. Most of those who were still alive at the time of Stalin’s death in 1953 were released by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev. In the 1960s and 1970s, Ukrainian communists joined their Russian comrades in governing the largest country in the world. During the cold war, southeastern Ukraine was a Soviet military heartland. Rockets were built in Dnipropetrovsk, not far from where the Cossacks once had their fortress.

Though Soviet policy had been lethal to Ukrainians, Soviet leaders never denied that Ukraine was a nation. The governing idea was that nations would achieve their full potential under Soviet rule, and then dissolve once communism was achieved. In the early decades of the Soviet Union, the existence of a Ukrainian nation was taken for granted, from the journalism of Joseph Roth to the statistics of the League of Nations. The famine of 1932–1933 was also a war against the Ukrainian nation, in that it wrecked the social cohesion of villages and coincided with a bloody purge of Ukrainian national activists. Yet the vague idea remained that a Ukrainian nation would have a socialist future. It was really only in the 1970s, under Brezhnev, that Soviet policy officially dropped this pretense. In his myth of the “Great Fatherland War,” Russians and Ukrainians were merged as soldiers against fascism. When Brezhnev abandoned utopia for “really existing socialism,” he implied that the development of non-Russian nations was complete. Brezhnev urged that Russian become the language of communication for all Soviet elites, and a client of his ran Ukrainian affairs. Schools were russified, and universities were to follow. In the 1970s, Ukrainian opponents of the Soviet regime risked prison and the psychiatric hospital to protest on behalf of Ukrainian culture.

To be sure, Ukrainian communists joined wholeheartedly and in great numbers in the Soviet project, helping Russian communists to govern Asian regions of the USSR. After 1985, Gorbachev’s attempt to bypass the communist party alienated such people, while his policy of glasnost, or open discussion, encouraged Soviet citizens to air national grievances. In 1986, his silence after the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl discredited him among many Ukrainians. Millions of inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine were needlessly exposed to high doses of radiation. It was hard to forgive his specific order that a May Day parade go forward under a deadly cloud. The senseless poisoning of 1986 prompted Ukrainians to begin to speak of the senseless mass starvation of 1933.

In summer 1991, the failed coup against Gorbachev opened the way for Boris Yeltsin to lead Russia from the Soviet Union. Ukrainian communists and oppositionists alike agreed that Ukraine should follow suit. In a referendum, 92% of the inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine, including a majority in every Ukrainian region, voted for independence.

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As in the new Russia, the 1990s in the new Ukraine were marked by takeovers of Soviet assets and clever arbitrage schemes. Unlike in Russia, in Ukraine the new class of oligarchs formed themselves into durable clans, none of which dominated the state for more than a few years at a time. And unlike in Russia, in Ukraine power changed hands through democratic elections. Both Russia and Ukraine missed an opportunity for economic reform in the relatively good years before the world financial crisis of 2008. Unlike in Russia, in Ukraine the European Union was seen as a cure for the corruption that hindered social advancement and a more equitable distribution of wealth. EU membership was consistently promoted, at least rhetorically, by Ukrainian leaders. The Ukrainian president from 2010, Viktor Yanukovych, promoted the idea of a European future, even as he pursued policies that made such a future less likely.

Yanukovych’s career demonstrates the difference between Ukrainian oligarchical pluralism and Russian kleptocratic centralism. He had run for president for the first time in 2004. The final count had been manipulated in his favor by his patron, the outgoing president Leonid Kuchma. Russian foreign policy was also to support his candidacy and declare his victory. After three weeks of protests on Kyiv’s Independence Square (known as the Maidan), a ruling of the Ukrainian supreme court, and new elections, Yanukovych accepted defeat. This was an important moment in Ukrainian history; it confirmed democracy as a succession principle. So long as the rule of law functioned at the heights of politics, there was always hope that it might one day extend to everyday life.

After his defeat, Yanukovych hired the American political consultant Paul Manafort to improve his image. Although Manafort maintained a residence in Trump Tower in New York, he spent a great deal of time in Ukraine. Under Manafort’s tutelage, Yanukovych got a better haircut and better suits, and began to talk with his hands. Manafort helped him to pursue a “Southern strategy” for Ukraine reminiscent of the one that his Republican Party had used in the United States: emphasizing cultural differences, making politics about being rather than doing. In the United States, this meant playing to the grievances of whites even though they were a majority whose members held almost all the wealth; in Ukraine it meant exaggerating the difficulties of people who spoke Russian, even though it was a major language of politics and economics of the country, and the first language of those who controlled the country’s resources. Like Manafort’s next client, Donald Trump, Yanukovych rose to power on a campaign of cultural grievance mixed with the hope that an oligarch might defend the people against an oligarchy.

After winning the presidential election of 2010, Yanukovych concentrated on his own personal wealth. He seemed to be importing Russian practices by creating a permanent kleptocratic elite rather than allowing the rotation of oligarchical clans. His dentist son became one of the richest men in Ukraine. Yanukovych undermined the checks and balances among the branches of the Ukrainian government, for example by making the judge who had misplaced his criminal record the chief justice of the Ukrainian supreme court. Yanukovych also tried to manage democracy in the Russian style. He put one of his two major opponents in prison, and had a law passed that disqualified the other from running for president. This left him running for a second term against a handpicked nationalist opponent. Yanukovych was certain to win, after which he could tell Europeans and Americans that he had saved Ukraine from nationalism.

As a new state, Ukraine had enormous problems, most obviously corruption. An association agreement with the EU, which Yanukovych promised to sign, would be an instrument to support the rule of law within Ukraine. The historical function of the EU was precisely the rescue of the European state after empire. Yanukovych might not have understood this, but many Ukrainian citizens did. For them, only the prospect of an association agreement made his regime tolerable. So when Yanukovych suddenly declared, on November 21, 2013, that Ukraine would not sign the association agreement, he became intolerable. Yanukovych had made his decision after speaking with Putin. The Russian politics of eternity, ignored by most Ukrainians until then, was suddenly at the doorstep.

It is the investigative journalists who bring oligarchy and inequality into view. As chroniclers of the contemporary, they react first to the politics of eternity. In the oligarchical Ukraine of the twenty-first century, reporters gave their fellow citizens a chance at self-defense. Mustafa Nayyem was one of these investigative journalists, and on November 21, he had had enough. Writing on his Facebook page, Nayyem urged his friends to go out to protest. “Likes don’t count,” he wrote. People would have to take their bodies to the streets. And so they did: in the beginning, students and young people, thousands of them from Kyiv and around the country, the citizens with the most to lose from a frozen future.

They came to the Maidan, and they stayed. And in so doing they took part in the creation of a new thing: a nation.

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Whatever the flaws of the Ukrainian political system, Ukrainians after 1991 had come to take for granted that political disputes would be settled without violence. Exceptions, such as the murder of the popular investigative reporter Georgiy Gongadze in 2000, brought protests. In a country that had seen more violence in the twentieth century than any other, the civic peace of the twenty-first was a proud achievement. Alongside the regularity of elections and the absence of war, the right to peaceful assembly was one way that Ukrainians themselves distinguished their country from Russia. So it came as a shock when riot police attacked the protestors on the Maidan on November 30. News that “our children” had been beaten spread through Kyiv. The spilling of “the first drop of blood” stirred people to action.

Ukrainian citizens came to Kyiv to help the students because they were troubled by violence. One of them was Sergei Nihoyan, a Russian-speaking ethnic Armenian from the southeastern district of Ukraine known as the Donbas. A worker himself, he expressed solidarity with “students, citizens of Ukraine.” The reflex of protecting the future, triggered in the minds of students by the fear of losing Europe, was triggered in others by the fear of losing the one generation raised in an independent Ukraine. Among the representatives of older generations who came to the Maidan to protect the students were the “Afghans”—veterans of the Red Army’s invasion of Afghanistan. The protests of December 2013 were less about Europe and more about the proper form of politics in Ukraine, about “decency” or “dignity.”

On December 10, 2013, the riot police were sent in a second time to clear the Maidan of protestors. Once again the word went out, and Kyivans of all walks of life decided to put their bodies in front of batons. A young businesswoman recalled that her friends “were shaving and putting on clean clothes in case they should die that night.” A middle-aged literary historian ventured forth with an elderly couple, a publisher and a physician: “My friends were an invalid who is well over 60, and his wife of about the same age—next to them I seemed rather young, strong and healthy (I am a 53-year-old woman, and of course at my age it is difficult to think of physically overcoming armed men). My friends are both Jews and I am a Polish citizen, but we walked together, as Ukrainian patriots, convinced that our lives would be of no value if the protests were crushed now. We made it to the Maidan, not without some difficulties. My friend Lena, a doctor, the gentlest being in the world, is only a meter and a half tall—I had to keep her at a distance from the riot police, because I knew that she would tell them exactly what she thought of them and the whole situation.” On December 10, the riot police could not move the crowd.

On January 16, 2014, Yanukovych retroactively criminalized the protests and legalized his own use of force. The official parliamentary record included a raft of legislation which the protestors called “dictatorship laws.” These measures severely limited freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, banning undefined “extremism,” and requiring nongovernmental organizations that received money from abroad to register as “foreign agents.” The laws were introduced by deputies with ties to Russia and were copies of Russian legislation. There were no public hearings, no parliamentary debate, and indeed no actual vote: a show of hands was improperly used instead of an electronic count, and the number of hands raised was short of a majority. The laws were nevertheless entered into the books. Protestors recognized that they would be treated as criminals if apprehended.

Six days later, two protestors were shot dead. From the perspective, say, of either the United States or Russia, both much more violent societies, it is hard to appreciate the weight of these two deaths for Ukrainians. The mass killings by sniper fire four weeks later would overshadow these first two deaths. The Russian invasion of Ukraine that began five weeks later brought so much more bloodshed that it can seem impossible to recall how the killing began. And yet to the society actually concerned, there were specific moments that seemed intolerable breaches of common decency. In the final week of January, Ukrainian citizens who had not previously supported the Maidan protests began to arrive, in large numbers, from all over the country. Because it seemed that Yanukovych had now bloodied his hands, his further rule was inconceivable to many Ukrainians.

Protestors experienced this moment as the warping of their own political society. A demonstration that had begun in defense of a European future had become a defense of the few tenuous gains in the Ukrainian present. By February the Maidan was a desperate stand against Eurasia. Until then, few Ukrainians had given any thought to the Russian politics of eternity. But protestors did not want what they saw on offer: violence leading to a futureless life amid wisps of what might have been.

As February began, Yanukovych was still the president, and Washington and Moscow had ideas about how he might remain in power. A telephone call between an American assistant secretary of state and the American ambassador in Kyiv, apparently recorded by a Russian secret service and leaked on February 4, revealed that American policy was to support the formation of a new government under Yanukovych. This proposal was out of line with the demands of the Maidan and, indeed, completely out of touch. Yanukovych’s rule was already over, at least in the minds of those who chose to risk their lives on the Maidan after the killings of January 22, 2014. A survey showed that only 1% of protestors would accept a political compromise that left Yanukovych in office. On February 18, parliamentary discussions began, with hope that some compromise could be found. Instead, the next day saw a bloody confrontation that made the continuation of Yanukovych’s regime even less likely.

The history of the Maidan between November 2013 and February 2014, the work of more than a million people presenting their bodies to the cold stone, is not the same thing as the history of the failed attempts to put it down. Bloodshed had been unthinkable for protestors within Ukraine; only bloodshed made Americans and Europeans notice the country; bloodshed served Moscow as an argument to send the Russian army to bring much more. And so the temptation is strong to recall Ukraine as it was seen from the outside, the arc of narrative following the arc of bullets.

For those who took part in the Maidan, their protest was about defending what was still thought to be possible: a decent future for their own country. The violence mattered to them as a marker of the intolerable. It came in bursts of a few moments or a few hours. But people came to the Maidan not for moments or hours but for days, weeks, and months, their own fortitude suggesting a new sense of time, and new forms of politics. Those who remained on the Maidan could do so only because they found new ways to organize themselves.

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The Maidan brought four forms of politics: the civil society, the economy of gift, the voluntary welfare state, and the Maidan friendship.

Kyiv is a bilingual capital, something unusual in Europe and unthinkable in Russia and the United States. Europeans, Russians, and Americans rarely considered that everyday bilingualism might bespeak political maturity, and imagined instead that a Ukraine that spoke two languages must be divided into two groups and two halves. “Ethnic Ukrainians” must be a group that acts in one way, and “ethnic Russians” in another. This is about as true as to say that “ethnic Americans” vote Republican. It is more a summary of a politics that defines people by ethnicity, proposing to them an eternity of grievance rather than a politics of the future. In Ukraine, language is a spectrum rather than a line. Or, if it is a line, it is one that runs inside of people rather than between them.

Ukrainian citizens on the Maidan spoke as they did in everyday life, using Ukrainian and Russian as it suited them. The revolution was begun by a journalist who used Russian to tell people where to put the camera, and Ukrainian when he spoke in front of it. His famous Facebook post (“Likes don’t count”) was in Russian. On the Maidan, the question of who spoke what language was irrelevant. As the protestor Ivan Surenko remembered, writing in Russian: “The Maidan crowd is tolerant on the language question. I never heard any discussions about the matter.” In one survey, 59% of the people on the Maidan defined themselves as Ukrainian speakers, 16% as Russian speakers, and 25% as both. People switched languages as the situation seemed to demand. People spoke Ukrainian from the stage erected at the Maidan, since Ukrainian is the language of politics. But then the speaker might return to the crowd and speak to friends in Russian. This was the everyday behavior of a new political nation.

The politics of this nation were about the rule of law: first the hope that an association agreement with the European Union could reduce corruption, then the determination to prevent the rule of law from disappearing entirely under the waves of state violence. In surveys, protestors most often selected “the defense of the rule of law” as their major goal. The political theory was simple: the state needed civil society to lead it toward Europe, and the state needed Europe to lead it away from corruption. Once the violence began, this political theory expressed itself in more poetic forms. The philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko wrote, “Europe is also a light at the end of a tunnel. When do you need a light like that? When it is pitch dark all around.”

In the meantime, civil society had to work in darkness. Ukrainians did so by forming horizontal networks with no relationship to political parties. As the protestor Ihor Bihun recalled: “There was no fixed membership. There was no hierarchy either.” The political and social activity of the Maidan from December 2013 through February 2014 arose from temporary associations based upon will and skill. The essential idea was that freedom was responsibility. There was thus pedagogy (libraries and schools), security (Samoobrona, or self-defense), external affairs (the council of Maidan), aid for victims of violence and people seeking missing loved ones (Euromaidan SOS), and anti-propaganda (InfoResist). As the protestor Andrij Bondar remembered, self-organization was a challenge to the dysfunctional Ukrainian state: “On the Maidan a Ukrainian civil society of incredible self-organization and solidarity is thriving. On the one hand, this society is internally differentiated: by ideology, language, culture, religion and class, but on the other hand it is united by certain elementary sentiments. We do not need your permission! We are not going to ask you for something! We are not afraid of you! We will do everything ourselves.”

The economy of the Maidan was one of gift. In its first few days, as Natalya Stelmakh recalled, the people of Kyiv gave with extraordinary generosity: “Within two days other volunteers and I were able to collect in hryvnia the equivalent of about $40,000 in cash from simple residents of Kyiv.” She remembered trying and failing to prevent an elderly pensioner from donating half of a monthly check. Aside from donations in cash, people provided food, clothes, wood, medications, barbed wire, and helmets. A visitor would be surprised to find deep order amidst apparent chaos, and realize that what seemed at first like extraordinary hospitality was in fact a spontaneous welfare state. The Polish political activist Sławomir Sierakowski was duly impressed: “You walked through the Maidan and you are presented with food, clothing, a place to sleep, and medical care.”

In early 2014, the vast majority of the protestors, some 88% of the hundreds of thousands of people who appeared, were from beyond Kyiv. Only 3% came as representatives of political parties, and only 13% as members of nongovernmental organizations. According to surveys taken at the time, almost all of the protestors—about 86%—made up their own minds to come, and came as individuals or families or groups of friends. They were taking part in what the art curator Vasyl Cherepanyn called “corporeal politics”: getting their faces away from screens and their bodies among other bodies.

Patient protest amidst increasing risks generated the idea of the “Maidan friend,” the person you trusted because of common trials. The historian Yaroslav Hrytsak described one way that new acquaintances were made: “On the Maidan, you are a pixel, and pixels always work in groups. Groups were mostly formed spontaneously: you or your friend bumped into somebody you or your friend know; and the person whom you met did not walk alone—he or she would be also accompanied by his or her friends. And thus you start to walk together. One night I walked with an unlikely group of ‘soldiers of fortune’: my friend the philosopher and a businessman whom I know. He was accompanied by a tiny man with sad eyes. He looked like a sad clown, and I found out that he was indeed a professional clown who organized a charitable group that worked with children who had cancer.”

Having come as individuals, Ukrainian citizens on the Maidan joined new institutions. In practicing corporeal politics they were placing their bodies at risk. As the philosopher Yermolenko put it: “We are dealing with revolutions in which people make a gift of themselves.” People often expressed this as a kind of personal transformation, a choice unlike other choices. Hrytsak and others recalled the French philosopher Albert Camus and his idea of a revolt as the moment when death is chosen over submission. Posters on the Maidan quoted a 1755 letter by the American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up Essential Liberty, to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

A group of Ukrainian lawyers waited on the Maidan, day after day, holding a sign reading LAWYERS OF THE MAIDAN. People who had been beaten or otherwise abused by the state could report the wrongdoing and begin a legal case. Lawyers and others on the Maidan were not thinking of the enduring problem of Russian political philosophy: how to generate a spirit of law in an autocratic system. And yet, by their actions on behalf of a vision of law, they were addressing the very problem that had haunted Ilyin.

A hundred years before, in the waning years of the Russian Empire, Ilyin had wished for a Russia ruled by law, but could not see how its spirit would ever reach the people. After the Bolshevik Revolution, he accepted that lawlessness from the far Left must be met by lawlessness from the far Right. At the very moment that Putin was applying Ilyin’s notion of law to Russia, Ukrainians were demonstrating that the authoritarian shortcut could be resisted. Ukrainians demonstrated their attachment to law by cooperating with others and by risking themselves.

If Ukrainians could solve Ilyin’s riddle of law by invoking Europe and solidarity, surely Russians could too? That was a thought that Russian leaders could not permit their citizens to entertain. And so, two years after the protests in Moscow, Russian leaders applied the same tactics to Kyiv: the homosexualization of protest to evoke a sense of eternal civilization, and then the application of violence to make change seem impossible.

—

In late 2011, when Russians protested faked elections, their leaders associated the protestors with homosexuality. In late 2013, confronted with the Maidan in Ukraine, the men of the Kremlin made the same move. After two years of anti-gay propaganda in the Russian Federation, the ideologues and entertainers were sure of themselves. Their starting point was that the European Union was homosexual, and so the Ukrainian movement towards Europe must be as well. The Izborsk Club claimed that the EU “groans under the weight of the LGBT lobby’s domination.”

In November and December 2013, the Russian media covering the Maidan introduced the irrelevant theme of gay sex at every turn. When covering the very first day of protests by Ukrainian students in favor of the association agreement, the Russian media sought to fascinate its readers by conflating Ukrainian politics with handsome men and gay sex. A social media page of Vitali Klitschko, a heavyweight boxer who led a Ukrainian political party, was hacked and gay material introduced. Then this was presented as a news story for millions of Russians on a major television station, NTV. Before Russians could apprehend that pro-European protests were underway in a neighboring country, they were invited to contemplate taboo sex.

Right after students began their protests on the Maidan, the Russian television channel NTV warned of “homodictatorship” in Ukraine. Viktor Shestakov, writing for Odna Rodina, claimed that “a specter is haunting the Maidan, the specter of homosexuality. The fact that the first and the most zealous integrators in Ukraine are local sexual perverts has long been known.”

Dmitry Kiselev, the leading figure in Russian television media, warmed to the theme. In December 2013 he was appointed the director of a new media conglomerate known as Rossiia Segodnia, or Russia Today. Its aim was to dissolve the Russian state media’s pursuit of news as such into a new pursuit: of useful fiction. He greeted his new staff with the words “objectivity is a myth” and set the new editorial line as “love for Russia.”

On December 1, 2013, the world press reported the beating of students by Ukrainian riot police the previous night. As Ukrainian students huddled in a church tending their wounds, Kiselev found a way to formulate their protests as sexual geopolitics. That evening on Vesti Nedeli, recalling to his viewers the Great Northern War of the early eighteenth century, he described the European Union as a new alliance turned against Russia. This time, however, Kiselev claimed, the Swedish, Polish, and Lithuanian enemies were warriors of sexual perversion. Poland and Lithuania were not in fact enemies of Russia in the Great Northern War. Getting one’s own history wrong is essential to eternity politics.

In another episode, Kiselev expressed his delight to have discovered a magazine with a nude photo shoot of Klitschko from a decade earlier. On the set, Kiselev stroked the black riot gear worn by the Ukrainian police as the camera zoomed in. Meanwhile, the newspaper Segodnia breathlessly praised itself for publishing a photograph that framed Klitschko together with a gay Ukrainian writer. In the Ukrainian context, these were two activists at a press conference. In the Russian press, the sexual orientation of the one and the male beauty of the other was the story.

European integration was interpreted by Russian politicians to mean the legalization of same-sex partnerships (which was not an element of Ukraine’s association agreement with the EU) and thus the spread of homosexuality. When the German foreign minister visited Kyiv on December 4, the newspaper Komsomol’skaia Pravda headlined the meeting as “Gay firewood on the Maidan fire.”

—

While the Putin regime had crushed protests at home in 2011 and 2012, it sought to redefine politics as innocence rather than action. Rather than asking how past experience might instruct reformers of the present about possibilities for the future, Russians were meant to adapt their minds to a news cycle which instructed them on their own innocence. One eternal verity of Russian civilization turned out to be sexual anxiety. If Russia were indeed a virginal organism threatened by the world’s uncomprehending malice, as Ilyin had suggested, then Russian violence was a righteous defense against penetration. For Putin as for Ilyin, Ukraine was part of that national body. For Eurasia to come into being, Ukrainian domestic politics would have to become more like Russian domestic politics.

When Yanukovych announced that he would not sign the EU association agreement in November 2013, this was celebrated by the Russian government as a victory. But Yanukovych had not actually agreed to join Eurasia, a move that would have been even more unpopular among Ukrainians. In December 2013 and January 2014, the Kremlin tried to help Yanukovych crush protest and thereby make it possible for him to complete his turn from the EU towards Eurasia. Yanukovych claimed that both Europe and Russia wanted Ukraine, and each needed to pay him off. While the EU refused, Putin was ready to offer Yanukovych money.

On December 17, 2013, Putin offered Yanukovych a package of $15 billion in bond purchases and reduced prices for natural gas. The aid seemed to be conditional: it was offered along with Russian requests that the streets of Kyiv be cleared of protestors. By then the Ukrainian riot police had already failed twice in this mission, on November 30 and December 10. They had also been abducting individual protestors thought to be leaders and beating them. None of this was working, so Russians came to help. A group of twenty-seven Russian specialists in the suppression of protests, officers of the FSB and instructors from the ministry of internal affairs, arrived in Kyiv. On January 9, 2014, the Russian ambassador to Ukraine informed Yanukovych that Ukrainian riot policemen would be given Russian citizenship after the coming operation to crush the Maidan. This was a very important assurance, since it meant that these policemen did not need to fear the consequences of their actions. If the opposition won in the end, they would still be safe.

Moscow apparently calculated in January 2014 that a more competent application of violence would break the protests and transform Yanukovych into a puppet. It did not enter into Russian calculations that Ukrainian citizens were on the Maidan for patriotic reasons of their own. When the Yanukovych regime introduced the Russian-style dictatorship laws of January 16, 2014, this suggested massive violence to come. Russian-style laws did not have the same consequences in Ukraine as in Russia. Ukrainian protestors saw them as offensive foreign implants. When those two protestors were killed on January 22, the Maidan grew as never before. Remote-control counterrevolution had failed. Moscow was unable to move Ukraine into Eurasia by helping Yanukovych to repress the opposition. It was time for a shift in strategy. By early February 2014, it appeared Moscow no longer aimed to maneuver Yanukovych and Ukraine into Eurasia. Instead, Yanukovych would be sacrificed in a campaign to provoke chaos throughout the country.

—

A major actor in the new policy was Igor Girkin, a colonel in Russian military intelligence (GRU) who was employed by Konstantin Malofeev. Known in Russia as the “Orthodox oligarch,” Malofeev was an anti-sodomy activist and an outspoken Russian imperialist. In his view, “Ukraine is part of Russia. I can’t consider the Ukrainian people as non-Russian.” Ukraine had to be saved by Russia from Europe because otherwise Ukrainian citizens “would have had to spread sodomy as a norm in traditional Ukrainian society.” This was not true in any factual sense. Malofeev was expressing the orientation of Russian policy: to present Europe as a civilizational enemy, homosexuality as the war, and Ukraine as the battleground.

Malofeev’s employee Girkin was experienced in irregular warfare. He had fought as a Russian volunteer on the Serbian side in the Yugoslav Wars, taking part in engagements in Bosnian towns and UN-declared “safe areas” where ethnic cleansing and mass rape took place. He had also fought in Russia’s wars in Transnistria and Chechnya, and had written about these experiences for media edited by the fascist Alexander Prokhanov. Girkin spent the days between January 22 and February 4, 2014, in Kyiv, and then, it seems, recommended to the Kremlin that Ukraine be invaded and dismembered.

A memorandum that circulated in the Russian presidential administration in early February 2014, apparently based on the work of Girkin, anticipated the change in the course of Russian policy. It began from the premise that “the Yanukovych regime is utterly bankrupt. Its diplomatic, financial, and propaganda support by the Russian state no longer makes any sense.” Russian interests in Ukraine were defined as the military-industrial complex of Ukraine’s southeast and “control over the gas transport system” in the entire country. Russia’s main goal should be “the disintegration of the Ukrainian state.” The proposed tactic was to discredit both Yanukovych and the opposition by violence, while invading southern Ukraine and destabilizing the Ukrainian state. The memorandum included three propaganda strategies meant to provide cover for such a Russian intervention: (1) to demand that Ukraine federalize itself in the interests of a supposedly oppressed Russian minority, (2) to define opponents of the Russian invasion as fascists, and (3) to characterize the invasion as a civil war stoked by the West.

In a policy paper of February 13, 2014, the Izborsk Club repeated the contents of the confidential Kremlin memorandum. The Maidan might inspire Russians to act and was therefore intolerable; Yanukovych was finished; therefore Russia should invade Ukraine and take what it could. As with the presidential memorandum, the guiding concept of the Izborsk policy paper was that Russia should seize some Ukrainian territory and then wait for the state to collapse. The Izborsk Club also proposed that Russian television channels justify the intervention in Ukraine by the deliberate, premeditated fiction that “a fascist coup is coming”; this would indeed be a major line of Russian propaganda once war began.

On the day that the Izborsk Club was propagating this general idea, Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s propaganda genius, arrived in the south Ukrainian province of Crimea. The next day, Surkov flew from Crimea to Kyiv. Foreign Minister Lavrov chose that very day (February 14, 2014) to formalize the idea that Russian civilization was an innocent body defending itself from Western perversion. In the newspaper Kommersant, Lavrov repeated Ilyin’s idea that “society is a living organism” that had to be protected from Europe’s hedonistic “refusal of traditional values.” Lavrov presented the Ukrainians who were struggling, and by that point dying, for European ideas of law as the prey of European sexual politics. Even as Russian troops were mobilizing to invade Ukraine and overturn its government, Lavrov presented Russia as the victim. The true aggressors, according to Lavrov, were the international gay lobbyists who “propagated with missionary insistence both inside their own countries and in relations with neighbors.” Surkov left Kyiv on February 15. Live ammunition was distributed to the Ukrainian riot police on February 16. On February 18, Ukrainians waited while parliamentary deputies discussed a constitutional compromise. Instead, protestors on the Maidan were surprised by massive and lethal violence.

Now European actors finally began to move. Although the protests had been pro-European from the beginning, they had not been meaningfully supported by the European Union, its member states, or any Western actor. European public opinion took little notice of the Maidan before the violence began. Politicians issued bland and interchangeable calls for both sides to avoid violence. Once the violence began, diplomats expressed official concern. Diplomatic discourse became a cause for mockery on the Maidan, as people who risked their lives found themselves alone and isolated. As violence increased, the mockery turned to pathos. Ukrainian protestors on the Maidan flew flags of an imagined “United States of Russia” to express their view that the great powers shared a common indifference or hostility.

The most significant initiative came from a European diplomat. Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski persuaded his French and German colleagues to join him in Kyiv for talks with Yanukovych on February 20. A Russian diplomat joined the group. Over the course of a long and difficult day of negotiations, Yanukovych agreed to leave office at the end of 2014, before his term was over. As impressive as this diplomatic resolution might have seemed, it was outdated before it was signed. Russian authorities had already concluded that Yanukovych was doomed, and the Russian invasion force was already on the move. Signing the agreement allowed Russia to blame others for failing to fulfill its terms, even as the Russian invasion that followed four days later drastically changed the conditions under which it had been signed.

The moment had passed when Ukrainian protestors might have accepted Yanukovych as president. Had there been any doubt that he had to resign on the morning of February 20, it had dissipated by the end of the day. On February 20, there was another Russian delegation in Kyiv, led by Vladislav Surkov, and including Sergei Beseda, a general of the FSB. These Russians were not there to negotiate. As others did so, snipers hidden near the Maidan shot and killed about a hundred people, most of them protestors, a few of them Ukrainian riot policemen. It was unclear what (if any) part of the Ukrainian government was involved in these shootings.

After the mass killing, Yanukovych was abandoned by the parliamentary deputies who had supported him and the policemen who had protected him. He fled his garish residence, leaving behind a trove of documents—including records of large cash payments to his advisor Paul Manafort, who two years later surfaced as the campaign manager of Donald Trump.

—

The sniper massacre and the flight of Yanukovych marked the shift from Russia’s first Eurasian plan to its second. Russian leaders had accepted that Yanukovych was useless. His bloody downfall, foreseen in Moscow, created the chaos that served as cover for the second strategy: military intervention designed to make the state as a whole disintegrate. In the few days between the sniper massacre of February 20 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, shocking but fictitious reports appeared about Ukrainian atrocities in Crimea, and about refugees from the peninsula who needed urgent assistance. Russian military intelligence created fictitious personae on the internet to spread these stories. A group of internet trolls in St. Petersburg, known as the Internet Research Agency, was at work to confuse Ukrainian and international opinion. This was by now a signature of Russian foreign policy: the cyber campaign that would accompany a real war.

By the time Yanukovych surfaced in Russia, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was under way. It began from Crimea, the southern peninsula of Ukraine, where by treaty Russia had naval bases. Some 2,000 naval infantry were permanently stationed in Sevastopol alone. These troops had been reinforced since the previous December by soldiers arriving from the Russian Federation. Russian army units 27777, 73612, 74268, and 54607 were among the 22,000 troops brought from Russia. Girkin had visited Crimea in January. In February he was accompanied by his friend Alexander Borodai: a Eurasianist, an admirer of Gumilev, a writer for Prokhanov’s media, and the head of public relations for Malofeev.

Beginning on February 24, 2014, some ten thousand Russian special forces, in uniform but without insignia, moved northward through the Crimean peninsula. The moment they left their bases they were engaged in an illegal invasion of Ukraine. Kyiv was caught by surprise at a moment when chains of command were uncertain and the main concern was to avoid further violence. Provisional Ukrainian authorities ordered Ukrainian forces on the peninsula not to resist. By the night of February 26, Russian soldiers had seized the regional parliament building in the city of Simferopol and raised the Russian flag. According to Girkin, he was in command of the concurrent operation to seize the Simferopol airport. On February 27, Putin’s Eurasia advisor Sergei Glazyev placed a telephone call to Crimea to arrange the new government. A businessman associated with organized crime, Sergi Aksionov, was proclaimed prime minister of Crimea; Borodai was his media advisor. On February 28, the Russian parliament endorsed the incorporation of Ukrainian territory into the Russian Federation. On that day, the president of the United States said that he was “deeply concerned by reports of military movements taken by the Russian Federation inside of Ukraine.” This was Barack Obama’s first public statement about the crisis.

The public spectacle of the Russian invasion was provided by the Night Wolves, a Russian biker gang that served as a paramilitary and propaganda arm of the Putin regime. On February 28, the day that the Russian parliament voted for annexation, the Night Wolves were dispatched to Crimea. The bikers had been organizing rallies in Crimea for years, accompanied personally by Putin in 2012. (Putin cannot ride a motorcycle, so he was given a trike). Now the Night Wolves provided the face that Russia chose to show of itself. A few months earlier, one of the Night Wolves had described their worldview: “You have to learn to see the holy war underneath the everyday. Democracy is a fallen state. To split ‘left’ and ‘right’ is to divide. In the kingdom of God there is only above and below. All is one. Which is why the Russian soul is holy. It can unite everything. Like in an icon. Stalin and God.” Here was Ilyin’s philosophy, Surkov’s geopolitics, and Putin’s civilization expressed in a few words.

The Night Wolves found concise ways to translate sexual anxiety into geopolitics and back again. As a male-only club devoted to black leather, the Night Wolves naturally had a strong position on homosexuality, which they defined as an attack by Europe and the United States. A year later, celebrating the Russian invasion, their supreme leader Alexander Zaldostanov remembered their proud parade around Crimea in this way: “For the first time we showed resistance to the global Satanism, the growing savagery of Western Europe, the rush to consumerism that denies all spirituality, the destruction of traditional values, all this homosexual talk, this American democracy.” According to Zaldostanov, the slogan of the Russian war against Ukraine should be “death to faggots.” The association of democracy with gay Satan was a way to make law and reform foreign and unthinkable.

Having invaded Ukraine, Russian leaders took the position that their neighbor was not a sovereign state. This was the language of empire. On March 4, Putin explained that Ukraine’s problem had been democratic elections that led to changes in power. Such functional elections, he suggested, were an alien American implant. He said that the situation in Ukraine was like that of Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Russia could go back in time and correct the mistakes of the past. “Logically,” said Alexander Dugin on March 8, “Ukraine as it was during twenty-three years of its history has ceased to exist.” Russian international lawyers, who during those previous twenty-three years had paid obsessive attention to the need to respect territorial boundaries and state sovereignty, argued that invasion and annexation were justified by the disappearance of the Ukrainian state—in other words, by the chaos caused by the Russian invasion. In Dugin’s mind, the war to demolish the Ukrainian state was a war against the European Union: “we must take over and destroy Europe.”

On March 16, some of the Ukrainian citizens of Crimea took part in an electoral farce that the Russian occupiers called a referendum. Prior to the vote, all public propaganda pushed in the same direction. Posters proclaimed that the choice was between Russia and Nazism. Voters had no access to international or Ukrainian media. On the ballots were two options, both of which affirmed the annexation of Crimea by Russia. The first option was to vote for the annexation of Crimea by Russia. The second was to restore the autonomy of the Crimean authorities, who had just been installed by Russia and requested annexation by Russia. According to internal information of the Russian presidential administration, the turnout was about 30% and the vote split between the two options. According to the official results, participation was about 90%, with almost all voters choosing the variant that led most directly to annexation. In Sevastopol, official turnout was 123%. Qualified observers were absent, although Moscow did invite a few European politicians of the extreme Right to endorse the official results. The Front National sent Aymeric Chauprade to Crimea, and Marine Le Pen personally endorsed the results. Within the Russian presidential administration, people were reminded to “thank the French.”

In a grand ceremony in Moscow, Putin accepted what he called the “wishes” of the Crimean people and extended the boundaries of the Russian Federation. This violated basic consensual principles of international law, the United Nations Charter, every treaty signed between independent Ukraine and independent Russia, as well as a number of assurances that Russia had offered Ukraine about the protection of its frontiers. One of these was the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which the Russian Federation (along with the United Kingdom and the United States) had guaranteed Ukrainian borders when Ukraine agreed to give up all nuclear weapons. In what was perhaps the greatest act of nuclear disarmament in history, Ukraine handed over some 1,300 intercontinental ballistic missiles. By invading a country that had engaged in complete nuclear disarmament, Russia offered the world the lesson that nuclear arms should be pursued.

In March and April, Russian media conveyed the propaganda themes that had been discussed by the presidental administration and the Izborsk Club in February. There was a burst of enthusiasm for the “federalization” of Ukraine, on the logic that the “voluntary” separation of Crimea required Kyiv to give its other regions similar freedom of action. The Russian foreign ministry was careful to specify that “federalization” meant a specific Russian proposal to dismember the Ukrainian state, not any general principle that might apply to Russia. On March 17, the Russian foreign ministry declared that in view of “the deep crisis of the Ukrainian state,” Russia had the right to define Ukraine as a “multinational people” and propose “a new federal constitution” for the country. The word “federalization” appeared in major Russian television media 1,412 times in April. Even in a mood of national euphoria, however, Russian leaders soon saw the risk of “federalization.” The name of the Russian state was the “Russian Federation” and it was divided into units; but these had limited legal meaning and were ruled by appointees of the president. Within three months, the word “federalization” all but disappeared from the Russian public sphere.

Vladimir Putin presented the annexation of Crimea as a mystical personal transformation, an exultant passage into eternity. Crimea had to be part of Russia, explained Putin, because the leader of ancient Rus, Volodymyr/Valdemar, whom Putin called Vladimir, had been baptized there a thousand years before. That act by his namesake was recalled by Putin as the powerful gesture of a timeless superhero who “predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilization, and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus” (concepts that did not exist at the time). If the events of our time are “predetermined” by a millennial myth, then no knowledge of the past is necessary and no human choices matter. Vladimir is Volodymyr and Russia is Rus and politics is the eternal pleasure of the wealthy few—and there is nothing more to be said or done.

The parliamentary deputy Tatiana Saenko cited Ilyin to claim that the annexation of Crimea meant the “resurrection and rebirth” of Russia. She claimed that Western objections to the Russian invasion of Ukraine were a matter of “double standards.” This common Russian argument made of law not a general principle but a cultural artifact located among non-Russian peoples. Because Western states do not always follow every law, it ran, law had no validity. Russia, too, might violate laws; but since Russia did not accept the rule of law, this was not hypocritical. Since Russia was not hypocritical, it was innocent. If there are no standards, went the reasoning, then there are no double standards. If Europeans or Americans mention international law during a time of such Russian innocence as the invasion of Ukraine, this makes them a spiritual threat. And so references to international law only demonstrated Western perfidy.

This was Ilyin’s politics of eternity: a cycle back to the past replaces the forward movement of time; law means what Russia’s leader says it means; Russia is repairing God’s failed world with violence. Putin was the redeemer from beyond history who emerged to alter time. Putin himself took up this theme on April 17, characterizing the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a spiritual defense against a permanent Western attack: “The intention to split Russia and Ukraine, to separate what is essentially a single nation in many ways, has been an issue of international politics for centuries.” For Malofeev, the Russian invasion was a war against eternal evil: “for those who do battle there, the war looks like a war against hordes fighting under the banner of the anti-Christ with Satanic slogans.” What could be more eternal than the campaign against Sodom?

The fall of Crimea encouraged Russian leaders to repeat the same scenario throughout southern and eastern Ukraine. On March 1, Glazyev telephoned confederates in the regional capitals of Ukraine’s southern and southeastern districts to help plan coups d’état. Putin’s Eurasia advisor ordered that the scenario of Crimea be repeated in other regions of Ukraine: a crowd would “storm the regional state administration building,” then some new assembly would be coerced to declare independence and ask for Russian help. In Kharkiv, a crowd of locals and Russian citizens (brought by bus from Russia) did indeed break into the regional state administration building, after first storming the opera house by mistake. These people beat and humiliated Ukrainian citizens who were seeking to protect the building. The Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan refused to kneel and had his skull broken.

In April, Putin publicly recited the goals of Russian policy as outlined in the February memorandum. The idea was still the “disintegration” of the Ukrainian state in the interests of Russia. Dozens of Ukrainian state institutions and companies suddenly faced cyberattacks, as did the most important institutions of the EU. In the southeastern Ukrainian district of Donetsk, a Russian neo-Nazi named Pavel Gubarev proclaimed himself “people’s governor” on May 1, on the logic that “Ukraine never existed.” The duo of Malofeev employees sent to Crimea, Igor Girkin and Alexander Borodai, returned to Ukraine in April. Borodai would name himself prime minister of an imagined new people’s republic in southeastern Ukraine. His justification was similar: “There is no longer any Ukraine.” His friend Girkin proclaimed himself the minister of war, and asked Russia to invade the Donbas and establish military bases.

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The Russian intervention in the Donbas was called the “Russian Spring.” It was certainly springtime for Russian fascism. On March 7, 2014, Alexander Dugin rejoiced in “the expansion of liberational (from Americans) ideology into Europe. It is the goal of full Eurasianism—Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” The fascist commonwealth was coming into view, boasted the fascist. A few days later, Dugin proclaimed that history had been undone: “Modernity was always essentially wrong, and we are now at the terminal point of modernity. For those who rendered modernity and their own destiny synonymous, or who let that occur unconsciously, this will mean the end.” The coming struggle would mean “real liberation from the open society and its beneficiaries.” According to Dugin, an American diplomat of Jewish origin was “a dirty pig,” and a Ukrainian politician of Jewish origin a “ghoul” and a “bastard.” Chaos in Ukraine was the work of “Mossad.” In the same spirit, Alexander Prokhanov, speaking with Evelina Zakamskaia on Russian television on March 24, blamed Ukrainian Jews for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—and for the Holocaust.

This was a new variety of fascism, which could be called schizofascism: actual fascists calling their opponents “fascists,” blaming the Holocaust on the Jews, treating the Second World War as an argument for more violence. It was a natural next step in a Russian politics of eternity, in which Russia was innocent and thus no Russian could ever be a fascist. During the Second World War, Soviet propaganda identified the enemy as the “fascists.” According to Soviet ideology, fascism arose from capitalism. During the war against Nazi Germany, Russians could imagine that Soviet victory was part of a larger historical shift in which capitalism would disappear, and all men would become brothers. After the war, Stalin celebrated a national triumph, not so much of the Soviet Union as of Russia. This suggested that the “fascist” enemy was the outsider rather than the capitalist, and thus a more permanent conflict. In the 1970s, Stalin’s heir, Brezhnev, located the meaning of Soviet (and Russian) history in the victory of the Red Army in the Second World War. In so doing, Brezhnev definitively changed the sense of the word “fascism.” It no longer suggested a stage of capitalism that might be overcome, since history was no longer expected to bring change. “Fascism” meant the eternal threat from the West, of which the Second World War was an example.

Thus Russians educated in the 1970s, including the leaders and war propagandists of the 2010s, were instructed that “fascist” meant “anti-Russian.” In the Russian language it is practically a grammatical error to imagine that a Russian could be a fascist. In contemporary Russian discourse, it is easier for an actual Russian fascist to call a non-fascist a “fascist” than it is for a non-fascist to call a Russian fascist a “fascist.” Thus a fascist like Dugin could celebrate the victory of fascism in fascist language while condemning as “fascist” his opponents. Ukrainians defending their country were “junta mercenaries from the ranks of the Ukrainian swine-fascists.” Similarly, a fascist like Prokhanov could describe fascism as a physical substance that spilled in from the West to threaten Russian virginity. In June, Prokhanov wrote of fascism as “black sperm” that threatened “the golden goddesses of Eurasia.” His lapidary expression of racial and sexual anxiety was a perfect fascist text. Glazyev also followed the schizofascist protocol. While endorsing Nazi geopolitics, he set a standard for calling Russia’s enemies “fascist.” Writing in September 2014 for the Izborsk Club, Glazyev called Ukraine “a fascist state, with all the signs of fascism known to science.”

Schizofascism was one of many contradictions on display in spring 2014. According to Russian propaganda, Ukrainian society was full of nationalists but not a nation; the Ukrainian state was repressive but did not exist; Russians were forced to speak Ukrainian though there was no such language. Glazyev overcame contradiction by invoking the West. The Americans, he averred, wanted a third world war because of high national debt. Ukraine should have collapsed when Glazyev made a few phone calls. When it did not, this only showed that its government was an American projection, “the Nazi junta that the Americans had installed in Kyiv.” To defeat what he characterized as an American occupation, Glazyev maintained that it was “necessary to terminate all its driving forces: the American ruling elite, European bureaucracy and Ukrainian Nazis. The first one is the main aspect, the two others—secondary.” Putin’s Eurasia advisor was saying that Eurasia required the destruction of American politics. The war for Ukraine and Europe would be won, Glazyev thought, in Washington.

Like his advisor Glazyev, Putin defined Ukrainians who resisted Russian invasion as fascists. Speaking of the chaos that Russia had brought about by invading its neighbor, Putin claimed on March 18 that “nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and antisemites executed this coup. They continue to set the tone to this day.” This claim had a certain schizofascist ring. Russian foreign policy in 2014 bore more than a passing resemblance to certain of the more notorious moments of the 1930s. The replacement of laws, borders, and states with innocence, righteousness, and great spaces was fascist geopolitics. Foreign Minister Lavrov’s Foreign Policy Concept, invoked to justify the invasion of Ukraine, repeated the principle that a state might intervene to protect anyone that it defines as a member of its own culture. This was the argument that Hitler had used in annexing Austria, partitioning Czechoslovakia, and invading Poland in 1938 and 1939, and the argument Stalin had used when invading Poland in 1939 and annexing Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 1940.

On March 14, 2014, when a Ukrainian was killed by Russians in Donetsk, Lavrov claimed this as a justification for Russian intervention in a neighboring sovereign state: “Russia is aware of its responsibility for the lives of its compatriots and nationals in Ukraine and reserves the right to defend those people.” Putin said the same on April 17: “The essential issue is how to ensure the legitimate rights and interests of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in the southeast of Ukraine.” The fact that Ukrainian citizens enjoyed greater rights of expression than Russian citizens went unmentioned. Putin later promised to use “the entire arsenal” of available means to protect Russia’s “compatriots.”

This language of “compatriots” in what Putin called the “Russian world” made citizens of Ukraine hostage to the whims of a foreign ruler. A person disappears into a notional community, defined from a great distance, in the capital of another country. In the rhetoric of a Russian civilization or “Russian world,” Ukrainian citizens lost their individuality and became a collective whose culture, as defined by Russians, justified a Russian invasion of Ukraine. The individual disappears into eternity.

—

In a war that was supposed to be against fascism, many of Russia’s allies were fascists. American white supremacists Richard Spencer, Matthew Heimbach, and David Duke celebrated Putin and defended his war, and Russia repaid them by using an approximation of the Confederate battle flag as the emblem of its occupied territories in southeastern Ukraine. The European far Right also applauded Russia’s war. The Polish fascist Konrad Rękas endorsed Putin’s Eurasia concept in general and a Russian invasion of Ukraine in particular. In September 2013, he anticipated that Russia would invade Ukraine, and dreamed of leading a Russian-backed government in Poland. Robert Luśnia was a onetime collaborator with the Polish communist secret police and a financial supporter of Antoni Macierewicz, a major figure in the Polish Right. Together with Rękas, he tried to spread the Russian propaganda line that Ukraine was dominated by Jews.

Confederate battle flag (left) and Novorossiia flag (right)

The leader of the Hungarian fascist party Jobbik, invited by Dugin to Moscow, praised Eurasia. The leader of Bulgaria’s fascist party launched an electoral campaign in Moscow. The neo-Nazis of Greece’s Golden Dawn praised Russia for defending Ukraine from “the ravens of international usury,” by which they meant the Jewish international conspiracy. The Italian Fronte Nazionale lauded Putin’s “courageous position against the powerful gay lobby.” America’s leading white supremacist, Richard Spencer, tried (but failed) to organize a meeting of the European far Right in Budapest. Among the invitees were Dugin and the German neo-Nazi Manuel Ochsenreiter, a defender of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Russian media.

A few dozen French far-Right activists came to fight in Ukraine on the Russian side. They were screened by the Russian army and then sent into the field. About a hundred German citizens also came to fight in the company of the Russian army and Russian paramilitaries, as did citizens of a number of other European countries. Russia’s war in Ukraine created training grounds for terrorism. In fall 2016, a Serbian nationalist was arrested for planning an armed coup in Montenegro. He had fought on the Russian side in Ukraine, and said that he had been recruited for the plot by Russian nationalists. In January 2017, Swedish Nazis trained by Russian paramilitaries in Russia bombed an asylum center for refugees in Gothenburg.

In 2014, institutions and individuals close to the Kremlin organized Russia’s fascist friends. In April 2014, a branch of the Rodina party founded a “World National-Conservative Movement.” It cited Ilyin in referring to the EU as part of the “global cabal,” in other words the international Jewish conspiracy. Alyaksandr Usovsky, a Belarusian citizen and the author of the book God Save Stalin! Tsar of the U.S.S.R. Joseph the Great, helped Malofeev coordinate the actions of European fascists. Usovsky paid Poles who were willing to stage anti-Ukrainian protests at the moment when Ukraine was invaded by Russia.

Malofeev personally invited the leaders of the European far Right to a palace in Vienna on May 31, 2014. At this gathering, France was represented by Aymeric Chauprade and Marion Maréchal–Le Pen, the niece of Marine Le Pen. Dugin stole the show with his passionate case that only a united far Right could save Europe from gay Satan.

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The schizofascist lies displaced the events in Ukraine and the experiences of Ukrainians. Under the weight of all of the contradictory concepts and hallucinatory visions of spring 2014, who would see or remember the individual on the Maidan, with his or her facts and passions, his or her desire to be in history and make history?

Russians, Europeans, and Americans were meant to forget the students who were beaten on a cold November night because they wanted a future. And the mothers and fathers and grandparents and veterans and workers who then came to the streets in defense of “our children.” And the lawyers and consultants who found themselves throwing Molotov cocktails. The hundreds of thousands of people who broke themselves away from television and internet and who journeyed to Kyiv to put their bodies at risk. The Ukrainian citizens who were not thinking of Russia or geopolitics or ideology but of the next generation. The young historian of the Holocaust, the sole supporter of his family, who went back to the Maidan during the sniper massacre to rescue a wounded man, or the university lecturer who took a sniper’s bullet to the skull that day.

One can record that these people were not fascists or Nazis or members of a gay international conspiracy or Jewish international conspiracy or a gay Nazi Jewish international conspiracy, as Russian propaganda suggested to various target audiences. One can mark the fictions and contradictions. This is not enough. These utterances were not logical arguments or factual assessments, but a calculated effort to undo logic and factuality. Once the intellectual moorings were loosed, it was easy for Russians (and Europeans, and Americans) to latch on to well-funded narratives provided by television, but it was impossible to work one’s way towards an understanding of people in their own setting: to grasp where they were coming from, what they thought they were doing, what sort of future they imagined for themselves.

Ukrainians who began by defending a European future found themselves, once the propaganda and the violence began, fighting for a sense that there could be a past, a present, and a future. The Maidan began as Ukrainian citizens sought to find a solution for Ukrainian problems. It ended with Ukrainians trying to remind Europeans and Americans that moments of high emotion require sober thought. Distant observers jumped at the shadows of the story, only to tumble into a void darker than ignorance. It was tempting, amidst the whirl of Russian accusations in 2014, to make some kind of compromise, as many Europeans and Americans did, and accept the Russian claim that the Maidan was a “right-wing coup.”

The “coup” in the story of the Ukrainian revolution took place earlier, and in Russia: in 2011 and 2012, when Putin returned to the office of president with a parliamentary majority in violation of the laws of his own country. The leader who came to power by such means had to divert attention, blame, and responsibility to external enemies. For Putin, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was the latest episode of Russian self-defense from a Europe whose sin was its existence. The Russian claim of a “coup” in Ukraine was among the most cynical of the Kremlin’s formulations, since the very Russians who made it had expected Yanukovych to be removed by force, and organized (failed or successful) coups d’état in nine Ukrainian districts.

The issue in Ukraine was the weakness of the rule of law and the associated inequality of wealth and ubiquity of corruption. It was obvious to protesting Ukrainians that the rule of law was the only way to distribute resources collected by oligarchs more equitably through the society, and to allow others to succeed in the economy. Throughout the entire period of the Maidan, social advance in predictable and just conditions was the central goal. The first protestors, in November 2013, were concerned with improving the rule of law by the Europeanization of Ukraine. Those who followed were concerned with protecting the rule of law, such as it was, from a corrupt oligarchical leader who had fallen under the sway of Moscow. In January and February 2014, protestors used the language of human rights.

There were certainly representatives of right-wing and indeed extreme-Right groups on the Maidan, and they were important in the Maidan’s self-defense when the government began to torture and kill. The right-wing party Svoboda, however, lost much of its support during the Maidan. Right Sector, a new group, could only put about three hundred people on the Maidan. New right-wing groups came to the surface after Russia invaded Ukraine, fighting the Russian army and separatists in the east. On balance, though, the extraordinary thing was how little the war swung popular opinion towards radical nationalism, far less than in the invading country. The far Right did not begin the movement on the Maidan, were never anything like a majority, and did not decide how power changed hands at the end.

Although of course different people took different views, the protests were generally supported by the largest Jewish communities of Ukraine, in Kyiv and Dnipro. Among those who organized self-defense battalions on the Maidan was a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces, who would remember that his men in Kyiv called him “brother.” The first two mortal casualties on the Maidan, in January, were the ethnic Armenian Sergei Nihoyan and the Belarusian citizen Mikhail Zhiznevsky. Those killed in the sniper massacre of February represented the diversity of Ukraine and of the protest. Among them was Yevhen Kotlyev, a Russian-speaking environmentalist from Kharkiv, in the extreme northeast of Ukraine. Three unarmed Ukrainian Jews were killed in the massacre, one of them a Red Army veteran. People of Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian, Armenian, Polish, and Jewish cultures died in a revolution in the name of Europe that was started by a multilingual young man from a Muslim refugee family.

A coup involves the military or the police or some combination of the two. The Ukrainian military stayed in its barracks, and the riot police fought the protestors to the very end. Even when President Yanukovych fled, no one from the military, police, or power ministries sought to take power, as would have been the case during a coup. Yanukovych’s flight to Russia placed Ukrainian citizens and lawmakers in an unusual situation: a head of state, during an invasion of his country, sought permanent refuge in the invading country. This was a situation without legal precedent. The agent of transition was a legally elected parliament.

The acting president and the members of the provisional government, far from being right-wing Ukrainian nationalists, were generally Russian speakers from eastern Ukraine. The speaker of parliament, chosen to act as president, was a Baptist minister from southeastern Ukraine. The ministries of defense, internal affairs, and state security were taken over, during the transition period, by Russian speakers. The acting minister of defense was of Roma origin. The minister of internal affairs was half Armenian and half Russian by birth. Of the two deputy prime ministers, one was Jewish. The regional governor of Dnipropetrovsk, a southeastern region threatened by Russian invasion, was also Jewish. Although three of the eighteen cabinet positions of the provisional government of spring 2014 were held by the nationalist Svoboda party, this was not a government of the Right in any meaningful sense.

People who carry out coups do not call for a reduction in power of the executive branch, but that is what happened in Ukraine. People who carry out coups do not call elections in order to cede power, but this is what happened in Ukraine. The presidential elections held on May 25, 2014, were won by Petro Poroshenko, a centrist Russian speaker from southern Ukraine who was best known as a chocolatier. If there was anything like a coup attempt at that moment, it was Russia’s attempt to hack Ukraine’s Central Election Commission in order to proclaim that a far-Right politician had won, and the announcement on Russian television that he had done so.

In May 2014, two far-Right politicians presented themselves as candidates for the Ukrainian presidency; each of them received less than 1% of the vote. Both of them received fewer votes than a Jewish candidate running on a Jewish platform. The victor Poroshenko then called for parliamentary elections, which were held in September. Again, this is the opposite of what would have been expected during a coup, and again the popularity of the far Right in Ukraine was very limited. Neither of Ukraine’s right-wing parties, Svoboda and a new one that grew from the paramilitary group Right Sector, cleared the 5% threshold required for participation in parliament. Svoboda lost its three ministerial portfolios, and a new government was formed without the Right. The speaker of the new parliament was Jewish; he later became prime minister.

The association agreement with Europe was signed in June 2014. It went into force in September 2017. History went on.

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It makes a difference whether young people go to the streets to defend a future or arrive in tanks to suppress one.

For many Ukrainians, the future could not come fast enough. If the Maidan was possible, then political nations, civil societies, economies of gift, and individual sacrifice were possible—and might appear again. Since Ukrainian civil society had defended itself and the Ukrainian state persisted, Ukrainian political history continued. Because Ukraine did not fall apart with the first blow, the Russian politicians of eternity had to keep coming.

The Russian officers sent to command the war in Crimea, and then in other parts of Ukraine, were people who inhabited a timescape of eternal Russian innocence. According to Borodai, Ukraine and Russia belonged to a “common civilization,” which he described as “a giant Russian world that was formed over a millennium.” The existence of a Ukrainian state was thus conceived as a form of aggression against Russia, since outsiders “want to remove Ukraine from our Russian world.” Borodai read Gumilev and worked for Malofeev; similar ideas, though, were held by Russians and Ukrainians who did not read fascist thinkers or work for sodomy-obsessed investment bankers.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine coincided with a spike in popularity of the literature of the “accidental time traveler,” a Russian genre of science fiction. In these stories, individuals, groups, weapons, and armies loop back and forth through time in order to correct the overall picture. As in the politics of eternity, facts and continuities disappear, replaced by jumps from point to point. At the crucial junctures, an innocent Russia is always repelling a sinful West. Thus Stalin contacts Putin to help him declare martial law in Russia and war on the United States. Or Russians travel back to 1941 to help the Soviet Union defeat the German invasion.

It became official Russian policy, as it had been official Soviet policy, to recall the Second World War as having begun in 1941 rather than in 1939. The year 1941 is a moment of Russian innocence only if it is forgotten that the Soviet Union had begun the war in 1939 as Germany’s ally, and that between 1939 and 1941 had undertaken policies in occupied lands that were not so very different from Germany’s own. As recently as 2010, Putin had been willing to speak to the Polish prime minister about the Katyn massacre, the most notorious Soviet crime of the period. By 2014, this attitude had been completely reversed. Putin incorrectly defended the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 as merely a nonaggression agreement, which was a throwback to Soviet tradition. If “the Soviet Union did not want to fight,” as Putin said in 2014, then why had the Soviet army invaded Poland in 1939 and taken Polish officers prisoner, and why had the Soviet secret police murdered thousands of them at Katyn in 1940? In 2014, Russian law made it a criminal act to suggest that the Soviet Union had invaded Poland, occupied the Baltic States, or committed war crimes between 1939 and 1941. The Russian supreme court later confirmed that a Russian citizen could be convicted of a crime for a re-posting of elementary facts about Russian history on social media.

The axiom of perfect Russian innocence permitted endless Russian imagination. Igor Girkin, who collaborated with Borodai in Crimea and in the subsequent Russian intervention in southeastern Ukraine, was also an inveterate traveler through timescapes. Though an officer of Russian military intelligence and an employee of Malofeev, he found time to write science fiction for children. Before the invasion of Ukraine, Girkin was also a reenactor—someone who likes to dress up in uniforms and act out the battles of the past. In Ukraine, Girkin commented on a real war on a blog devoted to antiques. As an aficionado of the First World War and the Russian Civil War, he hoped to decorate the Russian soldiers of 2014 with medals from that epoch. As someone who reenacted the Second World War as a Red officer, Girkin cited orders given by Stalin in 1941 when he executed actual people during the actual Russian invasion of 2014.

For many young Russian men, the intervention in Ukraine took place in an imagined 1941, amidst the remembered glory of their great-grandfathers’ defense of the USSR from Nazi Germany. Television enforced this perspective by its constant invocation of terms associated with the Great Fatherland War. Pervyi Kanal used the phrase “punitive operations” in reference to Ukrainian soldiers more than five hundred times. A reference to German actions during the Second World War, this phrase set the calendar back to 1941 and cast the Ukrainians as the Nazis. Russian soldiers in Crimea, when asked about their actions, changed the subject to the Second World War. After subsequent interventions in southeastern Ukraine, Russians made their prisoners of war march in public, imitating the humiliation parades of German soldiers Stalin had organized. Ukrainian citizens who chose to fight on the Russian side stole a World War Two–era tank from a monument. (Its motor was in working order because it had been repaired for a parade the previous year.) One such partisan said that she could not imagine a Ukrainian victory, which would mean “1942.” So long as battle was raging, it was always and forever 1941. During a major incursion in summer 2014, young Russians painted the words FOR STALIN! on their tanks.

In Russia, Stalin’s (not Putin’s, Stalin’s) approval rating rose to 52%, the highest recorded figure. The approval rating of Leonid Brezhnev also reached a historical high. It was long-dead Brezhnev who had created the cult of even-longer-dead Stalin as the leader who had rescued Russia in the Great Fatherland War. Stalin and Brezhnev not only grew in popularity among the living, but also in resonance in their world. As time passed, ever more Russians expressed an opinion about their dead leaders. Stalin and Brezhnev were not receding into the past, but cycling back into the eternal present. Indeed, the simple fact that Russians in the second decade of the twenty-first century responded to regular political surveys about leaders from the twentieth was strongly suggestive. The politics of eternity has more than a whiff of the undead.

The war in Ukraine was not a contest of historical memories. Rather, the Russian invasion broke what had been a common Soviet myth about a common Russian and Ukrainian past. The name of the official war museum in Kyiv was changed from “Great Fatherland War” to “Second World War” when captured Russian tanks from the war of 2014 were placed on its lawn.

The Russian war against Ukraine was something more profound: a campaign of eternity against novelty. Must any attempt at novelty be met with the cliché of force and the force of cliché? Or was it possible, along with the Ukrainians of the Maidan, to make something new?