Ukrainians are removing Tolstoy from their shelves and knocking Catherine the Great off her plinth. Once Ukraine has achieved a peace that it can live with it will need to face the Russian imprint on its soul and wrestle free from it.
A Soviet-era T-34 tanks rolls across Red Square in Moscow, Russia on May 9, 2024. (Alexander Nemenov / AFP through Getty Images).
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 the only villager who could remember 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 about giving their children and themselves a different story than that of that old woman who cried.
We don’t understand this. The public in Western Europe and America is becoming increasingly disengaged with their struggle. Is it possible that half a million Russians, and perhaps as many Ukrainians, have been killed or injured since the full-scale conflict began in February 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.
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