Historian Ronald Suny says the first victims of war are more than just facts. "Usually, it's something that's left out," he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin began an all-out assault on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and many people around the world are now taking a crash course on the complex and intertwined history of the two countries and their peoples.
Much of what the public heard, however, upset Suny. This is because some of them are incomplete, some of them are wrong, and some of them are obscured or refracted by self-interest or the limited perspective of who is telling it.
Suny, a professor at the University of Michigan, responded to several popular historical claims about the two countries.
Putin's views on Russian-Ukrainian history have been widely criticized in the West. What do you think inspired his view of history?
Putin believes that Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians are a people, bound by a common history and culture. But he also realized that they had become independent states recognized by international law and the Russian government. At the same time, he questioned the historical formation of the modern Ukrainian state, which he said was a tragic product of the decisions of former Russian leaders Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev. He also questioned Ukraine's sovereignty and unique national character. While he promoted national identity in Russia, he denigrated Ukraine's growing national consciousness.
Russian President Vladimir Putin met with the President of Azerbaijan in Moscow on February 22, 2022
Putin said Ukraine should be friendly in nature, not hostile to Russia. But he sees the current government as illegitimate, radical nationalists, and even fascists. He has repeatedly stated that peaceful relations between States are conditional on the fact that they do not threaten the security of other States. However, it is clear from the invasion that he poses the greatest threat to Ukraine.
Putin sees Ukraine as an existential threat to Russia, arguing that if it joins NATO, offensive weapons will be placed closer to Russia's borders, as Romania and Poland have already done.
Putin's statement about the historical origins of ukraine's state can be interpreted as a selfish history, as well as a statement, "We created them, we can bring them back." But I think he may have been making a strong appeal to Ukraine and the West to recognize Russia's security interests and to pledge that NATO will not take any further action against Russia and Ukraine. Ironically, his recent actions have brought Ukrainians closer to the embrace of the West.
The Western position is that the separatist regions Donetsk and Luhansk, which Putin recognizes, are an integral part of Ukraine. Russia claims that the Donbass region, including these two provinces, is historically and correctly part of Russia. What does history tell us?
During the Soviet period, the two provinces officially became part of Ukraine. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the borders of the former Soviet republics became the legal boundaries of post-Soviet countries under international law. Russia has repeatedly recognized these borders, despite reluctance in the case of Crimea.
But when people raised the worrisome question of what land belonged to whom, an entire jar of worms was opened. The History of Donbas has been inhabited by Russians, Ukrainians, Jews and others. In the Soviet and post-Soviet era, it was mainly Russians in terms of race and language. In 2014, when the Maidan Revolution in Kiev pushed the country to the West and Ukrainian nationalists threatened to restrict the use of Russian in parts of Ukraine, rebels in Donbass violently resisted Ukraine's central government.
Since the conflict broke out in March 2014, the war in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine has killed at least 10,000 people and displaced 1.4 million people.
After months of fighting between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian rebels in Donbas in 2014, russian regular troops moved in from Russia and an eight-year war began, killing and wounding thousands.
Historical claims to land have always been controversial — think Israelis and Palestinians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis — who have been refuted by historical claims that the majority of people living in the land now take precedence over the past. Russia can claim Donbass with its own ethnically based arguments, but Ukrainians can also claim Donbass based on arguments of historical appropriation. Such arguments go nowhere and often lead to bloody conflicts, as seen today.
Why does Russia recognize donetsk and the Luhansk People's Republic as independence, which is so important in conflict?
When Putin recognized the Donbass Republic as an independent state, he seriously escalated the conflict, which proved to be a prelude to a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The invasion sent a difficult and stern signal to the West that Russia would not back down and accept further arming and deployment in Ukraine, Poland and Romania. The Russian president is now leading his country into a dangerous preventive war — a war based on anxiety that his country will be attacked at some point in the future — the outcome of which is unpredictable.
A New York Times report on Putin's Ukrainian history said: "Under Lenin's leadership, the newly formed Soviet government drew Putin's contempt on Monday and will eventually crush the nascent independent Ukrainian state." In soviet times, the Ukrainian language was expelled from school, and its culture was allowed to exist only as cartoon cartoons, in which Cossacks danced in fluffy pants. Is this history of Soviet repression accurate?
Lenin's government won the Ukrainian Civil War of 1918-1921 and expelled foreign interventionists, thus consolidating and recognizing the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. But Putin was basically right that it was Lenin's policy that promoted Ukraine's statehood within the Soviet Union, within the Soviet Empire, formally granting it and other Soviet republics the constitutional right to secede from the Union unconditionally. Putin angrily asserted that this right was a landmine that eventually blew up the Soviet Union.
Ukrainian was never banned in the SOVIET Union and taught in schools. In the 1920s, The Leninist national policy actively promoted Ukrainian culture.
But under Stalin's leadership, Ukraine's language and culture began to be powerfully damaged. This began in the early 1930s, when Ukrainian nationalists were suppressed, the terrible "death famine" killed millions of Ukrainians, and Russification – a process that promoted The Russian language and culture – accelerated in the Republic.
Within the strict confines of the Soviet system, Ukraine, like many other peoples of the SOVIET Union, became a modern state, aware of its own history, literate in the language, and even dressed in fluffy pants, allowed to celebrate its national culture. However, the contradictory policies of the Soviet Union in Ukraine both promoted the development of the Ukrainian cultural state and limited its expression of freedom, sovereignty, and nationalism.
History is both a controversial and a subversive social science. It is used and abused by governments, experts and propagandists. But for historians, it's also a way to understand what happened in the past and why. As a quest for truth, it subverts the convenient, comfortable, but inaccurate view of where we came from and where we might go.