I am traveling on a train between two stations (the Kiev central station and the Lviv central station, in western Ukraine), which today seem to come out of one of those novels about the harrowing flight of the European civilian population in the face of the advance of Hitler’s troops . It is the night from Friday to Saturday and people with suitcases and bundles sleeping in the corridors are the backdrop for a reflection on the process that has culminated in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
On the train, the person in charge of the car that serves us tea worries about her brother who has recently joined the ranks; the teacher Tatiana, for her son who remains in Kiev; and my bunk neighbor claims to comply with the order to seek refuge, given by her superiors to policewomen, unlike her male colleagues who, in a traditional division of roles, have been sent to the front. The train often stops and on it alone I continue a reflection begun in Kiev with a historian friend while we heard the wail of the sirens.
It’s time to review naivety. Putin, the magician of provocation, has combined and merged into a single concept diverse episodes that have happened over many years and has developed existing ideas about history, which could have become marginal, if he had not nurtured them. I am referring to the thesis according to which “the Russians have suffered more than anyone else”. Whatever the cultural origin and its justification in the past, this idea (implicit or explicit) facilitates the justification of the war against Ukraine because it vaccinates and immunizes the Russians against the suffering they inflict on others, because if we assume that the Russians they are the ones who have suffered the most, any other suffering will always be less.
This reasoning was already expressed after in 2014 a Malaysian plane with 300 people on board was shot down over separatist territory by a Russian anti-aircraft missile. In relation to the pain for the death of those passengers, this journalist could hear in Donetsk explanations of the type, “our children have suffered for many years and nobody has paid attention to them and now look how (in the West) they suffer for their own”. This line of thinking now continues on social media with messages coming from the separatist territories stating that “we have suffered for more than seven years and now they (Ukrainians) will see what it is to suffer.” On many occasions I have heard that the Russians are the ones who suffered the most during the Second World War, which, assuming that true pain were quantifiable, would be uncertain because the palm of “suffering per capita”, so to speak, surely It would correspond to Belarusians and Ukrainians who, due to their geographical location, were the first to succumb to the invasion of the USSR by Hitler’s troops in 1941.
Propaganda
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The theory of the “greatest suffering of the Russians” can now act as a kind of vaccine that, if properly assimilated, has the effect of immunizing (to varying degrees) those vaccinated against the sufferings of others. In order to obtain mobilizing suffering, the Kremlin propaganda organized a few days ago the evacuation of the civilian population from the so-called people’s “republics”. The evacuation was abruptly called off after images of buses loaded with elderly people, women and children bound for Rostov and other Russian regions were obtained. In that case, the Russians were shown a suffering that they can live as their own because the evacuees are people of Russian culture and now mostly bearers of Russian passports, thanks to a Putin decree.
The Kremlin leader has turned the history of relations between Russia and the West after the end of the USSR into a list of grievances that acts as fuel for military action. Due to its magnitude, his action is disproportionate in relation to the immediate specific events (Ukraine’s vaunted massive attack on the rebels, for example, did not happen in the weeks that preceded its recognition by Russia). The Russian attack is actually based on a larger idea about the suffering that Ukraine inflicts or may inflict on Russia (by abandoning it or becoming independent like a son who leaves or a wife who divorces to go with another) and the Russian leader adds this suffering to others, which in their eyes, the West inflicted or may inflict on Russia.
The suffering of others that Moscow can recognize and assume as such is that which the regime’s ideology is capable of recycling as its own suffering. With it, he increases the “capital of suffering” carefully cultivated as a stimulus for the standard-bearer mission against the “evil empire” that Putin attributes to himself. From this point of view, the cult of suffering during the Second World War (attributable to external factors) and also the lack of a thorough reflection on Stalinism, which could question the State itself, are understandable. The prevailing ideology in Russia today cultivates death and pain rather than joy and the pursuit of happiness.
When Putin presented his security demands to the West, many of us thought that the military element (the deployment of troops on the borders with Ukraine) was part of a strategy where the negotiation was the substance and the military the accessory factor of pressure. It was the other way around, the military was the basics and the discussion was the cover. Putin proceeded with the script he had outlined, despite acknowledging that NATO’s response, with its errors, partially accepted Russian interests and despite the fact that the Ukrainian president’s dignified attitude did not fit the role (aggressive fascist) that he attributes.
As the train moves west, the militarily vastly superior Russians are gaining ground in the Ukraine, but they do so slowly and at great cost, because the Ukrainians put up a fierce and heroic resistance and fight to the end (as the garrison of the island of Zmeini, exterminated for not wanting to surrender).
On Saturday afternoon, Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov reported that more than 3,000 invaders have perished, 200 have been captured and 100 tanks and seven helicopters have been destroyed. Judging by the comments on the train, respect for President Volodymyr Zelensky is growing, and he remains in his position and informs his fellow citizens in a simple way, without hiding the difficulty, loneliness and pain that the people are experiencing today Ukrainian. Solidarity is felt in citizens who abandon life projects and jobs abroad to enlist, it is felt in adults who repeat their resistance to Russia in Donbas and Crimea. All this contrasts with the apathy of Russian society, where, according to historian Vladimir Dolin (Russian citizen living in Ukraine), there is a “huge potential for protest capable of stopping the war, but that protest has no political expression.” Why is another story.
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