It is so difficult to depart from the stock Anglo media take on Russia without risking being damned as a Putin apologist. Yes the truth about Russia/Putin is often ugly. It is also complicated. And isn't the crude 'Russia-as-the-ultimate-enemy' a bit of a Western political-and-media pathological fixation? There are surely better candidates for this label....Russia - Iran - Afghanistan?....I know which place I'd rather be exiled to.
Russia's huge historical contribution to European culture just gets airbrushed out....Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Tchaikovsky, Solzhenitsyn......etc. Where else on the planet is there a culture with such links to our own. Much of Russian behavior historically can be viewed as a kind of sulk at being rejected by the West. In the 19th c. Russia wanted desperately to be part of the European fold. And again in 1990 there was a great opportunity to embrace Russia; which opportunity was foolishly wasted (especially by the Americans and Brits). Russia's geopolitical perspective (and every country has one of those) was casually trampled on. The naive thinking went something like this: either you instantly re-invent yourselves as a full-on liberal democracy from day one or you go straight back to the world's naughty corner as enemy number one.
Finally, Putin may be a dangerous paranoid autocrat but when he talks about people in the West who want to "destroy [its]traditional values and impose their pseudo-values... which would corrode [it] from within" you surely have to ask yourself if does have a point?: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
“Precisely at the time when the Western imperial articulation ultimately disintegrated, when Western society rearticulated itself into the nations and the plurality of churches, Russia entered on her career as the heir of Rome. From her very beginnings Russia was not a nation in the Western sense but a civilizational area, dominated ethnically by the Great Russians and formed into a political society by the symbolism of Roman continuation.”
“An imperial mentality was as characteristic of inhabitants of Poltava and Zhitomir, Nezhin, Chernigov, Gomel and Polotsk as it was for those of Tver or Vyatka. That is, from the earliest days of empire, from the days of Peter the Great, this mentality has counted Kiev and Belarus part of the metropolis. And how could it be otherwise for people who had learned from first grade that ‘Kiev is the Mother of Russian cities’?”
If Ukraine were indeed integrally part of a political order founded on a common history and culture, on what authority did the people of Ukraine get to choose to throw that over to become a nation state in the Western sense?
Are we to assume that a state founded on “the nation” is intrinsically superior to one that had been historically forged through a common culture and civilization? If so, why?
You may want to watch....echoes your piece.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3lWNeQXKHcU9xcSTfQ5Bgf?si=ckkK_j9rQKKwshfZ8VQR7A&nd=1&dlsi=cf4e12c4c3914dd3
Also extremely informative on a range of related issues.
Totally unimportant but...
You wrote:. "...that Yanukovych not been violently..."
Prolly meant to write "...that [had] Yanukovych not been violently..."
You are correct, I just fixed it, thanks.
It is so difficult to depart from the stock Anglo media take on Russia without risking being damned as a Putin apologist. Yes the truth about Russia/Putin is often ugly. It is also complicated. And isn't the crude 'Russia-as-the-ultimate-enemy' a bit of a Western political-and-media pathological fixation? There are surely better candidates for this label....Russia - Iran - Afghanistan?....I know which place I'd rather be exiled to.
Russia's huge historical contribution to European culture just gets airbrushed out....Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Tchaikovsky, Solzhenitsyn......etc. Where else on the planet is there a culture with such links to our own. Much of Russian behavior historically can be viewed as a kind of sulk at being rejected by the West. In the 19th c. Russia wanted desperately to be part of the European fold. And again in 1990 there was a great opportunity to embrace Russia; which opportunity was foolishly wasted (especially by the Americans and Brits). Russia's geopolitical perspective (and every country has one of those) was casually trampled on. The naive thinking went something like this: either you instantly re-invent yourselves as a full-on liberal democracy from day one or you go straight back to the world's naughty corner as enemy number one.
Finally, Putin may be a dangerous paranoid autocrat but when he talks about people in the West who want to "destroy [its]traditional values and impose their pseudo-values... which would corrode [it] from within" you surely have to ask yourself if does have a point?: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
“Precisely at the time when the Western imperial articulation ultimately disintegrated, when Western society rearticulated itself into the nations and the plurality of churches, Russia entered on her career as the heir of Rome. From her very beginnings Russia was not a nation in the Western sense but a civilizational area, dominated ethnically by the Great Russians and formed into a political society by the symbolism of Roman continuation.”
“An imperial mentality was as characteristic of inhabitants of Poltava and Zhitomir, Nezhin, Chernigov, Gomel and Polotsk as it was for those of Tver or Vyatka. That is, from the earliest days of empire, from the days of Peter the Great, this mentality has counted Kiev and Belarus part of the metropolis. And how could it be otherwise for people who had learned from first grade that ‘Kiev is the Mother of Russian cities’?”
If Ukraine were indeed integrally part of a political order founded on a common history and culture, on what authority did the people of Ukraine get to choose to throw that over to become a nation state in the Western sense?
Are we to assume that a state founded on “the nation” is intrinsically superior to one that had been historically forged through a common culture and civilization? If so, why?