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Vladimir Golstein
Monument to Stepan Bandera (in Lviv, his birthplace).
Russia is a country built on tensions and contradictions. East and West, mystical and scientific, kind and cruel, nihilistic and spiritual, empire and strong national core.
Its great political leaders, as well as its visionary writers, learn how to ride the wave of these contradictions. It takes years, and efforts, and vision, but as we know from biology or physics, that’s how you get new energy, new birth. Plus and minus, male and female.
Ukraine, on the other hand, never learned how to deal with it. Its population contains Russians, Jews, Poles and so on. Did they integrate them? Yes, in a Bandera kind of way: by killing people.
Just the other day I read an article by some Ukrainian intellectual: We can’t have Russian in school, but let’s have English instead of Russian. Why instead? Why can’t there be both?
Not only does the country contain already familiar contradictions: Eastern, Russian speaking vs. Western Ukrainian one. Big Soviet enterprises and nimble new ones, Utterly Soviet provincial mentality with modern European one, Orthodoxy, Catholic, Jewish and atheistic.
It has developed plenty of new very profound contradictions. On the one hand, it is nationalistic, xenophobic and intolerant, on the other, it bends over backward to manifest every politically correct trait one can imagine: tolerance of all the liberal values that Europe embraces.
Consequently, we have plenty of African students who study in Ukraine, and who sleep with Ukrainians, and then leave, abandoning their kids, who are then totally mistreated in the country and abandoned by their mothers. There is a nice documentary on the subject, by the way.
Even more disturbing and significant is the failure to come to terms with violence. 1,7 million Jews were killed in Ukraine during the Nazi occupation. They were just killed on the spot, brutally, they didn’t even have a chance to make it to the extermination camps set up by Nazis in Poland. How is the country integrating this awful past? By denying it, and by celebrating perpetrators as national heroes.
This failure to be honest with one’s contradictions goes to the present. Eight years of shelling and bombing Donbass. It is Russian fault. Burning people in Odessa in 2014 – they did it themselves. Killing Daria Dugina in the same way various leaders of Donbass were killed: Zakharchenko, Motorola, Alexei Mozgovoi – oh, we don’t do such sort of thing, declared their propagandists. Really? It looks like that’s the only thing you do! From burning innocents, to sponsoring hit lists, which collect the names and addresses of anyone who dares to question the current policies, to tying Roma people and other “non-Ukrainians” to the poles and pulling their pants down, to the declaration of the Ukrainian Ambassador to Kazakhstan that Ukrainian have to kill as many Russians today as possible, so that Ukrainian children will have less people to kill.
Every culture deals with certain amount of denials, every country commits deliberate obliteration of the past. Every culture prefers to ignore certain aspects of its actions. But as in the case of psychosis, this amount has to be manageable, and there should be mechanisms of integrating opposite impulses. Without it, the collapse is inevitable. Contradictions are like an opening chasm, if you don’t bridge it, you fall down eventually. It is like dealing with a bi-polar person. Now he is nice, now he buys a gun and starts shooting.
That’s the strength of Russian culture, its genotype, if you wish – its fearlessness in the face of contradictions and its willingness to engage them.
Ukraine has none of it, none that I’ve seen, none that had been demonstrated during the last few centuries. Now it embraces Poles, now Russians. Now it has vicious pogroms and brings blood libel against the Jews, now it parades its politicians who claim to be Jewish. Now it wants to learn Russian, now English. Now it follows provincialism of Western Ukraine, now it builds rockets and embraces science in the Eastern cities. Now it is nationalistic, announcing its “Ukraine above all” policy erecting monuments to monsters and butchers of the Jews and Poles, now it courts Israel and the West by articulating the latest politically correct doctrines in good English.
Someone can say: Fine, but let Ukrainians deal with their own contradictions and failures. Yes, if this country is located somewhere in the Pacific, like Australia or New Zealand, let them find their way. But what do you do, when part of its identity has become an aggressive violent unbridled desire to punish Russians and Russian speakers. In Donbass, in Crimea, in Odessa, in Moscow. Do you just sit with your hands folded and do nothing while the maniacs in Kiev get NATO’s know-how and lethal weapons, and shoot at people and nuclear plants alike, and then deny it, declaring that “we don’t do that sort of thing.” But of course.
And neither does NATO. It never bombed Serbia, it never grabbed Kosovo, it never destroyed Iraq or Libya. The west never dropped nukes on civilians or firebombed and erased numerous cities across the globe. Obviously, the West – similar to Ukraine – is pathologically incapable of coming to terms with its own violence, it never integrated it. Or it did so selectively, acknowledging some violence in the past, but persistently refusing to confront it in the present. And because it manifests such a split-personality behavior, it can’t and should not be trusted, it can unleash its violence at any moment, justifying it by some ridiculous excuse which its propagandists never tire to prepare.
This combination of un-integrated, violent, yet violence-denying Ukraine and NATO does constitute an existential threat to Russia. The failure of both Ukrainian and Western leadership to understand it will result only in further escalation, placing the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation. And that would be a rather radical, or should I say, a Ukrainian way, of annihilating contradictions.
Vladimir Golstein, Ph. D., Slavic Languages and Literatures, teaches Russian literature at Brown University in Rhode Island, the US. He is the author of several books and numerous articles on Russian culture, religion, philosophy, and poetry, of the past two centuries, as well as the current foreign policy issues.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vladimir Golstein, Ph. D., Slavic Languages and Literatures, teaches Russian literature at Brown University in Rhode Island, the US. He is the author of several books and numerous articles on Russian culture, religion, philosophy, and poetry, of the past two centuries, as well as the current foreign policy issues. ADDENDUM
ANOTHER TRUTH VOLLEY—
Vladimir Golstein
21st Century Wire
The text below was taken down by FB as not meeting community standards. No appeal was answered.
The readers can judge for themselves, what is so offensive about this parody of Zelensky’s endless requests for money. And this is the banned text:
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