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Zur Zeit | Gespräche

War and Peace. The Past and Future of Ukraine

June 13, 2022

Kateryna Mishchenko and Andrii Portnov in discussion with Martin Schulze Wessel

Excerpts from the Evening Colloquium of 13 June 2022

MSW: Ukraine is not far away, and yet what is happening in the war, the horrors of the war – for example as we see in Bucha or in the Asov steelworks in Mariupol or now also in Severodonetsk – are incalculable for us. But imagining that we have a 17-year-old son who is being sent to the war is enough for us to understand how inadequate we are in the current situation. The Russian army is currently attacking Ukraine with multiple supremacy – ten or twelve times as much artillery. And the Western states, certainly not least Germany, have lost a great deal of time in providing effective help. That is the depressing background of our talk, which aims primarily at analyzing and understanding what’s happening. In particular, I want to raise questions about the historical and societal contexts. But moral questions connected with them should not be excluded.

I begin with a question that may not impose itself as the first: that Ukraine’s army has been successful surely has a lot to do with its political leadership, with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In the meantime, we know many facets of the Ukrainian President. As an actor, he once played the role of a president – in the series “Servant of the People”. What is the actual connection between the role of President in the film and the remarkable becoming of a president in wartime?

KM: I recently heard a joke from a Ukrainian comedian who said, “Imagine a country that is attacked and its commander in chief is a comedian.” Well… but it worked. I can’t exactly imagine how Zelenskyy carries out the military management. But what our President at any rate manages is communication with societies and political elites around the world. He has found his own method to directly address people everywhere in Europe via television and computer screens. This is his mode of diplomacy, and it achieves very decisive political results. It functioned similarly in domestic politics back during the presidential election. Zelenskyy spoke directly to the voters, and many were able to identify with his person. It’s a paradox that a person who takes a role as an actor can be more credible in a political function than those who have long had a professional political career, but who no longer enjoy trust.

AP: I think Zelenskyy first found or invented himself as a politician during the war – more precisely on February 24, 2022. Before the war, he always had problems, partly because of the tensions between the comedian and the president. But since February 24, since his decision to remain in Kyiv, he really has found his own political role. But I suspect that in the current phase of the war, Zelenskyy’s presidential role is much more difficult than it was at the start of the war. Now behind the scenes, the issue is compromises and diplomatic games. The public knows very little about these things. Only later will we historians be able to judge whether he played a skillful game.

MSW: You emphasized that the war has changed the Ukrainian President. But how has the war changed Ukrainian society? In the West, Ukraine was perceived as a divided nation, even after Russia annexed the Crimea. Today it appears, at least superficially, to be a united nation. How do you see that?

KM: It’s really hard to say right now. But maybe it will help answer this question if we look again at Zelenskyy and the actions of the military leadership since the Russian attempt at a blitzkrieg. It’s so important to understand how the Ukrainian army fights. There is an almost anarchistic approach, a productive chaos, because power in Ukraine has never been vertical, at least not to the degree that it is in Russia. In this war, that has helped us in that many units did not wait for orders from above, but acted independently on site. This lack of vertical power transmission created pressure to decide for oneself and to take responsibility for these decisions. That is also something that Zelinsky embodies: “let them do it”. Timothy Snyder has described this as a decolonial practice.

MSW: I think what you said at the beginning is very interesting, namely the contrasting developments of Ukraine and Russia, which, by the way, we also see in a comparison between Zelenskyy and Putin. Zelenskyy suddenly left Putin cutting a very poor figure. Putin has always emphasized his masculinity and strength, but compared with Zelenskyy he simply looks pathetic. In the military field, there are similar contrasts: the difference between imperial command structures and the national type of an army. Do these kinds of type formations, such dissociations from Russia in one’s conception of oneself, play a strong role? And how does this relate to the question of a divided or united nation?

AP: It plays a big role, I think also for Zelenskyy himself. As a comedian, Zelenskyy has made a great many films in Russia or with Russian colleagues. That means that this war is a story of detachment from his own past, which was also Russian- and Soviet-molded. It’s not easy to move from this idea to the more general question of the wartime changes in the Ukrainian or Russian society. The situation is too dynamic and too complex for that. I also think, and not just since the beginning of the war, that we need a different analytical language to understand the Ukrainian society. Here in Germany, and actually everywhere in the West, we very often use these old concepts or categories to describe Ukraine, for example, as a “divided country”. Is that really helpful? I wonder how the Ukrainian political mentality could be better described in German, English, or French. But not all those Ukrainians who speak primarily Russian stand on the side of Russia or share its imperial ideology. Viewed historically, the Russian language plays an important role even for Ukrainian nationalism.

I can name examples of successful Ukrainian politicians who speak only Russian – for example Arsen Avakov, a former Minister and reformer of the police force and Ukraine’s internal system. He described himself as a “Russian-speaking Ukrainian nationalist”. He comes from the region near Kharkiv and the Russian border, from the Sloboda Ukraine region. And he later specified: “Russian-speaking is not enough; I am a Sloboshanske-speaking Ukrainian nationalist.” How do we think of someone like that? I always ask my students if it would be possible in Germany to have a Minister of the Interior who spoke no German — in our supposedly postnational Germany? Hard to imagine! But in Ukraine, where Ukrainian is the only official language, it’s possible.

It’s also very important to understand the phenomenon that I call “situational bilingualism”. Many people in Ukraine are fluent in two languages and use Russian or Ukrainian depending on the respective social context. That means one has to know the context to understand why even Zelenskyy sometimes uses Russian in his video addresses. Why is that so? If we think intently about it and we describe and analyze more deeply the issue of languages, it can be hoped that we will ultimately better understand Ukraine as a whole society.

MSW: That’s an important point! It’s well known that many Ukrainians, and not just the ethnic Russian minority, speak Russian. At the same time, there is a law on language that aims to bring Ukrainian to the forefront. Now, in war, Russian is the language of the enemy, but at the same time it is the country’s second language. What’s happening here?

KM: Concerning the language, we don’t know yet where we’ll finally end up. Today there are already refugees who were originally Russian-speaking and who now no longer want to speak Russian. For them, Russian is now a “triggering language”, and so they want to shift to Ukrainian, even though no one has asked them to do so.

I agree with Andrii Portnov that, with the concept of the “divided society”, we are moving in difficult terrain. Because on the one hand, since the times of the Maidan demonstrations, people have repeatedly spoken of the fissure, the inner conflict in Ukraine, as if that were a justification for annexation and intervention. Some people say there were also Ukrainians who were in favor of President Yanukovych and against the revolution, and that the war is thus actually a civil war. It’s not clear to me why such reasons should make Ukraine a divided country. Why aren’t other countries whose population divides into Leftists and Rightists or who have fundamentally disparate ideas of how to deal with the COVID pandemic considered “divided”? Why are we the only ones regarded as divided, and all the others as united?

Of course there are individuals and groups in Ukraine that do not agree with the development of the country since the Maidan and who do not feel that they are adequately represented. But that doesn’t mean that they are automatically pro-Russian, as is often asserted. That also goes for the Left: if you question neoliberal reforms in Ukraine, then you are a socialist, some say, and if you are a socialist then you are paid by Russia. Differences of opinion can’t be depicted in terms of language.

AP: When I try to describe the Ukrainian complexity to the Germans, I often say that we could also call the “division” “diversity” or “pluralism” — or even better, “post-Soviet pluralism”. Historically seen, after all, this pluralism has a Soviet core or Soviet roots. Pluralism and a rift are two very different things. The coexistence and competition between the languages is one aspect; another is the diversity of religious denominations: Ukraine has at least four or five Orthodox Churches, and not just two, always more than two! That’s what I mean by pluralism. In Belarus, there is only one Orthodox Church, and in Russia, too, there is only one.

Schulze Wessel: In conclusion, one more question: what are your observations about German politics and the German public sphere?

KM: I’ll try to give a diplomatic answer, in the form of a story: a few years ago, I published a book, an anthology with texts and works, some by Josef Beuys, but also some by Ukrainian intellectuals and artists. While preparing it, I had a discussion with a translator who said Beuys was reactionary. There was a text by him in which he said the German language was not only the language of the Nazis, but also the language of philosophy, and so it could also be the language of liberation. I think Beuys asked the right question. In a certain way, we have arrived once more in configurations of World War II. Today, the Russians are behaving like the Nazis at that time. While they scold the Ukrainians as fascists, their own behavior is based on the idea of Ukraine as colonial space and of the Ukrainians as subhumans.

I think that, precisely in this configuration, Germany, which has so much to do with its own history, has to fill its concept of “coming to terms with the past” with new content. The German past, after all, should be a call to fight against new fascisms. The war against Ukraine offers the possibility for Germany to grow beyond itself and to draw conclusions from the Nazi era other than simply feeling guilty or swearing weapons off forever. Today there is a new, terrible war, new perpetrators, and they must be stopped. For Germany, this is a chance to come to terms with its past, which is recurring now in such terrible form.

AP: As a historian, I understand why the German reaction to the Russian assault comes so late and so carefully. But, to be frank, most people in Ukraine do not understand it.


Kateryna Mishchenko is a writer, translator, and publisher from Kyiv, where she founded the Medusa publishing company. She is currently a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Andrii Portnov comes from Dnipro. He is Professor for the Entangled History of Ukraine at the Viadrina European University in Frankfurt am Oder and the Director of PRISMA UKRAЇNA at the Forum Transregional Studies Berlin. In 2012/13, he was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg.

Martin Schulze Wessel is Professor for the History of Eastern and Southeastern Europe at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University. He is the Director of the Collegium Carolinum, where research is conducted on the history of Czechia and Slovakia, and he is the Chairman of the German-Ukrainian Historians Commission.

Transcription by Vera Kempa, Translation by Mitch Cohen.

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