Former Canadian politician Michael Ignatieff writes that in a Ukrainian churchyard an elderly woman’s memories, which span from pre-revolutionary Russia to Stalin’s Holodomor and Nazi occupation, reveal why Ukrainians today are fighting for a free future from imperial control.
Thirty-five years ago, on a Ukrainian graveyard where my Russian ancestors were buried, I kneeled beside an old woman who was leaning against a stick with her hair wrapped in a black kerchief. The Russian church, which my great-grandfather had built on his estate, was behind us. This is where he is buried.
The old woman was probably the last villager who remembered when our family lived in the village. She was a girl of about six or seven years old, running to the kitchen of the big house with blueberries in her apron and receiving a spoonful hot blackberry jam from my grandfather’s older sister. After the Bolshevik Revolution, my family fled. The church was closed. Soviet agents from the town confiscated the grain and took away the kulaks. Everyone starved. The Holodomor – the famine Stalin brought on Ukraine – reduced people who had cultivated the richest soils in Europe to eating only grass.
Then came war, and the Nazis burned the village’s thatch and massacred its Jewish population. The old woman told me her story in the church. At the end, she leant her thin body on mine and began to cry.
I will never forget the sound. Every time I hear it in my memory, I can understand the Ukrainian struggle. The Ukrainian struggle is understood when I hear it again in memory.
We don’t understand this. The public in the West is becoming increasingly disengaged. It seems impossible that half a million Russians, and perhaps as many Ukrainians, have been killed or injured since the war began on February 20, 2022. Too many people believe that the deaths could be taking place on another planet. Our politicians’ assertions that our security is dependent on a Ukrainian win sound abstract, thin and less than credible.
If the Ukrainians truly fight for us, then it is because they’re fighting the last battle to stop European imperialism. Every other European empire has abandoned its colonies and begun to reckon with the harm its empire caused to its colonial subject and its own people. With empire came racial hierarchy, racially-justified domination, violence and cruelty.
The poisons are still with us, and nostalgia of imperial greatness that has long since vanished is just as harmful. Donald Trump’s campaign, even in America, a country that had no empire, but a global hegemony that was immensely profitable, stokes this atavistic feeling with its call to make America great again.
You can’t build a democracy at home until you let go of empire and the nostalgia for its lost. Your politics will be dominated by delusional dreams until you do.
Spanish historians told me that the end of the Spanish Empire with the loss Cuba and the Philippines around the turn of the 20th century fueled the authoritarian turn which led to Franco’s victory in Spain and delayed the transition from fascism to democracy by two generations. The empire in Africa prevented Portugal from achieving democracy until 1974. Marine Le Pen’s right wing movement in France was born out of her father’s anger at the loss Algeria and his contempt towards the democratic institutions Charles de Gaulle set up after he retreated France from North Africa.
When societies confront their past, they can create a political system based on the truth, not fantasy. The Labour government in Britain of 1945 understood it would be impossible to build democracy in Britain unless they gave up India and Palestine. Germany had to be defeated unconditionally before it would give up its fantasy of a vast empire across Europe and Asia.
Russia is the only European society that has not faced its imperial past honestly. In refusing the acknowledgement of Stalin’s legacy, in failing face up to his crime in Ukraine, the other “captive nation” and in Russia, Russia closed any path to its democratic future. Its people have opened themselves up to the tyranny that can only turn their children into cannon-fodder.
Ukraine is fighting this lethal pathology in our name. When Ukrainians say they want Europe, they are really saying that they want the empire ripped out of their souls, and to live as free people.
Even benign imperial nostalgia, like mine and hers, should be put to rest in favor of the sweet days of ancien régime, when my Russian ancestors opened the kitchen door for peasant girl and gave them dollops blackberry jam. The free Ukraine must make peace with the remnants from old Russia like the churchyard in which my ancestors were buried.
Now, Ukrainians are removing Tolstoy from their shelves and knocking Catherine the Great off her plinth in Odesa. Later, a much more complex reckoning is due. You must own your entire history, not only the parts that fit into your mythologies.
Once Ukrainians have achieved a peace that they can live with and are free, a free Ukraine must own the imprints of the Russian past in its soul. Then it will have to wrestle to be free of this past. Only then can it begin a new history that is free of terror, violence, or fear.
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