The Russian War against Ukraine: Cyclic History vs Fatal Geography

Abstract

History seems to be repeating itself, not as farce but as yet another tragedy. It reveals many of its driving forces at turning points. Those who manage to notice them, get the opportunity to rethink the past from a different perspective. The Russian-Ukrainian ongoing war of 2022 is one such fateful event. I am confident it will start a new chapter not only in history but also in the historiography of Ukrainian-Russian relations. Historians are usually more comfortable when they keep a distance from the object of their studies. I have no such distance; I am a deeply involved observer. When this essay is published, a reader will be better informed than the author about the course of events in Ukraine. However, although many details and aspects of the war remain in the shadow, I have a strong feeling of déjà vu, in particular when it comes to Russia. Tibor Szamuely once stressed: “Of all the burdens Russia has had to bear, heaviest and most relentless of all has been the weight of her past” (qtd. in Hedlund 267). The burden is heavy indeed because Russian history is cyclical. Over and over, Russia reproduces similar patterns of political, social, and cultural life that grew from the old Byzantine matrix. The persistence of geopolitical and imperial-religious foundations in Russian identity is truly impressive. During upheavals, a thin layer of Western polish peels off the Russian face, and she turns to Europe her “ugly Asian mug,” as Aleksandr Blok put it in 1918 (Blok 79).1 This is when the real, inner (glubinnaia) Russia reveals herself in the gloomy carcass of the Muscovite Tsardom. The “inner” Russia never was and never will be part of Europe. It always was a “garrison state,” a citadel of Orthodoxy, which remained in a state of permanent war both at its borders and beyond. It is to this Russia that Putin appeals when he calls his subjects to unmask “national traitors” who are guilty of looking to the West. Such xenophobic rhetoric at the highest political level has not been heard since Stalin’s campaign against the “rootless cosmopolites.” However, it is not difficult to find similar antiWestern paroxysms of hatred in each epoch of Russian history. The structure of Russian history has not changed since the Middle Ages. The same may be