KRAKOW, Poland — This Tuesday a year ago, Putin recognition of the independence of the Russian-backed breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk – effectively the kick-off for a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began three days later. For us Ukrainians, the world will never be the same. However, it was another act of recognition in 2022, one largely neglected, that made my heart beat faster. ABOVE October 18The Ukrainian parliament declared that the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria was “temporarily occupied by the Russian Federation”.
I should explain. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Chechnya was one of the two autonomous republics of the newly formed Russian Federation that declared independence. (The other was Tatarstan.) But the world leaders at the time were quite fed up with the discovery that all the federal republics they had had for decades were considered simply units. The administrative names of Russia – Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan and others, still harder to pronounce – seem to be real things. The shock of the West to this new geography meant that independent Ichkeria had no slimmest chance of being recognized.
The division of the Soviet empire was legally halted at the border of the Russian Federation – at the cost of two devastating Chechen wars, in which the Kremlin was given full authority both domestically and internationally. As a result, Chechnya-Ichkeria became a experimental ground for the military strategy currently applied against Ukraine: the state war on terror.
What if, I keep asking myself, Russia’s new totalitarianism wasn’t so scorned by the rest of the world in the 1990s? Back then, in order to spare humanity from the rise of a new Hitler, it was enough for Russia to continue to shrink peacefully under appropriate international control. Alas, the West agreed to blame communism alone for all the crimes of the Soviet regime. Russian imperialism has never been seen as a problem.
Could this be – as my war-honed anti-colonial acumen leads me to believe – a potential case of imperial unity? Is guilty pleasure that for decades made the elites of the old Western empires smile tolerantly instead of shuddering in the face of the brazen colonial authority with which Moscow is treating its subjects not his Russian? I don’t see any other plausible explanation for why so many people in the West cling to the irrational belief that a democratic transition in Russia is imminent.
However, Russia will not become a democracy until it collapses. That’s because Russia is not really a nation-state but rather the same pre-modern multi-ethnic empire that lived off geographical expansion and plundered resources as it did 300 years ago – and thus will doomed to reproduce, over and over, under whatever ideological guise, the same like a prison The only political structure that holds it together.
A lingering intellectual from the 19th century of imperialism is the idea that preserving the Russian empire would be less dire, in terms of humanitarian consequences, than recognizing the right to life of dozens of peoples without The part under Moscow’s rule was never anything but survival. under the threat of extinction. This prejudice helped the empire survive twice in the 20th century, in 1921 and in 1991. It’s time to rethink it.
I vividly remember how the specter of extinction stalked Ukraine throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, until the Chernobyl disaster finally broke our social paralysis and forced Ukrainians to Take our own security. During those police years, those who dared to speak Ukrainian in public could be humiliated at any time with the Russian colonial phrase “Govorite po-chelovecheski!” (“Speak human!”) If you have heard it once and cannot respond – any grievances about the superiority of all things Russian is considered Ukrainian nationalism, a crime worst politics of the time – you’ll never forget the experience.
On close scrutiny, this war on Moscow’s side is a gruesomely expanded version of the 1970s Ukraine purge (Operation Block, as known in KGB files): same language, same technique. The only difference is the scale. Those purges were selective and unobtrusive, while today each of the thousands of Russian missiles that have hit our cities so far howls the same. message – “Speak human language!” – at the highest possible altitude. Ukraine reacts to glorious phrase from the guardians of Snake Island. We will survive in the Russian Federation, just as we survived in the Soviet Union.
But not every country that has been in Moscow’s hands has been so lucky. That is why our Parliament, 30 years later, recognized Ichkeria. We’ve been there: We know what it’s like to be convicted of disappearing as a country that the rest of the world doesn’t even notice.
And the same story is repeating itself. The disproportionately large enlistment of Russia’s ethnic minorities in 2022, a form of ethnic cleansing in potentially rebellious areas, is not as widely discussed as half the plight of Russia. Moscow office workers flee abroad. Women’s protests against mobilization in Dagestan and Yakutia also made headlines. world media like the protests in Russia.
With a sigh, I recall that was how Chernobyl was discussed in 1986, as a nuclear disaster in Russia. Thanks, but no. Never again, please; The era of imperialism is over. If any positive outcome can be found in 12 months of this terrible war – in the tens of thousands of people murdered, raped and mutilated, in the millions of lives destroyed, in the black land the best on a land littered with landmines, among the countless treasures of our cultural heritage that have become crumbling — we Ukrainians should have come together, in a united protest, to demonstrate that the Non-Russian lives are important.
That’s good news, because that wasn’t the case before, certainly not in the last century. It gives all human speakers, without quotes, hope for the future.
