A long-time scholar of Russia and former BBC correspondent in Moscow whose tenure coincided with my own time there, Martin Sixsmith is well placed to put the war against Ukraine into the historical context of a new cold war.
His title draws on Francis Fukuyama’s famous reference to the fall of communism as the end of history (how he must regret that), predicting that liberal democracy was humanity’s future condition. After seeming to embrace this process, Vladimir Putin has taken Russia back to its historic default of personalised autocracy, and worldwide, democracy is back to 1986 levels. As Sixsmith wryly notes, it is dangerous to make predictions, especially about the future.
During Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost, when the secrets of communist rule were revealed, Russians quipped that the past too was unpredictable. Shocking details were revealed, many by Memorial, an organisation created by historians and democrats to expose the crimes of Stalin. Lev Tolstoy, writing in 1869 about Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, hoped that the “science of history” would provide the answers to why people committed atrocities.
Sixsmith takes as his theme that Tolstoy’s “science of history” might provide the answers to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, by factoring in the conflicting histories of the Slavic world, and the baleful influence of religion, culture, language, aspirations, myths and the prejudices of powerful leaders.
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He sees Putin as a paradox, a former KGB official who began his presidency embracing free market democracy and the prospect of joining Nato, but now compares himself to 18th-century Russian tsar Peter the Great. The latter’s historic quest was to win back “lost” Russian lands, and he once boasted, while modernising Russia, that “We will open up to the west for a decade to take everything they have, then we will show them our arse.”
Sixsmith points out that while Ukraine, like the Baltic countries, has yet to fully acknowledge its role in the Holocaust, the use of Bandera symbols to express defiance does not in any sense make Ukrainians a nation of fascists
To Putin, the former Soviet republics are lost Russian lands, “blatantly robbed” from “their historical motherland”, and his calling is the restoration of a Greater Russia (Such sentiments explain why partly colonised countries such as Estonia rushed to join Nato.) No republic was closer to the motherland than Ukraine, once the heartland of Kievan Rus, the ancient entity that Russian historians claim as the cultural ancestor of a united Russia and Ukraine.
Putin relies on such ancient ties to deny Ukraine, and its language, the right to exist. Pro-Kremlin bloggers refer to Ukraine as “Country 404″, a reference to the error code for a web page not found.
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Drawing on more recent history, Putin accuses Ukrainians of being Nazis or Banderites, followers of Stepan Bandera, leader of radical nationalists who collaborated with invading Germans to oust the Red Army and participated in violent pogroms against the Jewish population. Sixsmith points out that while Ukraine, like the Baltic countries, has yet to fully acknowledge its role in the Holocaust, the use of Bandera symbols to express defiance does not in any sense make Ukrainians a nation of fascists.
In his efforts to subsume Ukraine into Russia, Putin has the support of the Russian Orthodox Church, which claims hegemony over its believers in Ukraine and which views democracy as a threat to a country’s moral resolve. Patriarch Kirill, like Putin a creature of the KGB, blessed the invasion of Ukraine, promptly losing millions of Ukraine followers.
Within Ukraine, “history wars” marked internal political discourse before Volodymyr Zelenskiy became president in 2019. Depending on who was in charge, state media promoted hatred of Russia with horrific accounts of the Stalin-inspired famine of the 1930s or emphasised a nostalgic vision of Ukraine as a cornerstone of a Soviet Union that stood up to Nazi Germany.
Sixsmith also analyses how the West played into Putin’s narrative. During the Maidan protests in late 2013, a senior US State Department official, Victoria Nuland, came to symbolise American interference when she was filmed by Russian TV handing out food to Maidan protesters. “Biscuits from the State Department” became a metaphor for American incentives to undermine Russia.
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Sixsmith suggests that Putin’s fear of losing Ukraine is fuelled by a persistent dread that its pro-democracy revolution will be transferred to Russia. Similarly, it can be said that Ukrainian resistance is strengthened by fear of having to live in a hollowed-out pariah state such as that in Putin’s Russia, where the country’s wealth is siphoned off abroad, media is state-controlled, the gulag again holds political prisoners such as Alexei Navalny, informers are rewarded, and simply advocating peace can land a person in jail.
Sixsmith is aided by his son Daniel, also a Russia expert, and their collaboration makes for a superb, balanced and original “explainer” of what lies behind the biggest war in Europe since 1945. The end of history came in 2021 for Memorial, which had become Russia’s human rights watchdog. It was closed down for, among other offences, distorting history “by creating a false image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state”.
Rewriting history is now a crime in Putin’s Russia, unless, of course, it’s written by the Kremlin.
Conor O’Clery was Irish Times Moscow Correspondent from 1987 to 1991, and is the author of Moscow, December 25, 1991: The Last Day of the Soviet Union
