Despite being born in Saint Petersburg and speaking Russian as his native language, the acclaimed writer and essayist Andrei Kurkov feels completely linked to Ukrainea country in which he has lived since he was 2 years old, and his fight against a neighbor who even questions his right to exist. With these wicks, Kurkov is the ideal person to reflect on what it means to be Ukrainian, to guess the impact that the current war will have on Russian culture, and above all to better understand the state of mind in the attacked country, and the psychology of those who one day in 2022 ordered to invade it.
He recently gave a talk at the French Institute with Professor Carmen Claudín. What message did it convey?
I talked about what is happening in Ukraine and about history, because it is unknown that Ukraine has its own history independent of Russia. The Ukrainian mentality is different from the Russian one, because Ukrainians are individualists, they are independent farmers and politicized people by nature. Since the 17th century, the Ukrainian territory was independent and the Cossacks elected the leader of the Cossack hetmanate. And at that time, for almost 100 years, Ukraine was almost a state. It had no fixed borders, because it was at constant war with Poland and Russia.
There were always intrigues, right?
Yes, and that is why the national character of Ukrainians is practically that of a democrat-anarchist. Because for Ukrainians power was never sacred and there were often attempts to change one ‘ataman’ (Cossack leader) for another. Russia has always been a monarchy, that is, the Russian mentality is a collective mentality of subjects of the monarch, who are loyal, who love their tsar. The Holodomor (famine caused by Stalin) of 1932-1933 was a punishment to Ukrainians for being individualists. That is, it was an attempt to break the national mentality.
Many people say that Russian-speaking Ukrainians always look towards Moscow.
That has never been like that. Not even in Kharkiv (Russian-speaking city next to the border). Putin is destroying it because he was sure that Kharkiv would accept Russia, that Kharkiv is a Russian city. And Kharkiv turned out to be a very tough nut to crack, he resisted Russia very fiercely. There they killed a group of Russian special forces. It was the first very strong blow to Russia’s morale.
Is Donbas different?
Yes. Because there is a small percentage of the population that does not want to live in Ukraine. In addition, the inhabitants of Donbas, the most active, were retirees who were nostalgic for the Soviet Union. And Russia exploited that nostalgia.
What has been the effect of Russia’s invasion on Ukrainians?
At first they were shocked. And half of the country got into cars or trains to go to western Ukraine or abroad. Then, when they liberated the kyiv region, many people from western Ukraine returned to kyiv. To Odessa, to other cities. And those who left and returned became great patriots of Ukraine.
What is the current situation?
People are tired, they want it all to end. But even those without political knowledge understand that as long as Putin is alive, there can be no true peace. People are tired, angry, but they are not willing to sacrifice everything for a mythical peace with Russia.
Do you understand what will happen if Russia wins, full-scale Russification and all the rest?
Yes. This is probably one of the reasons why even Ukrainians think it would be good to stop the war, but when journalists ask them on the street if they are willing to vote in a referendum to give up the occupied territories in exchange for peace, they all say no.
How do you assess the EU’s reaction so far?
For the first time, the EU began to debate its own hypocrisy. At the beginning of the war I spoke to politicians in Austria, and they told me that it was a neutral country, that they could not support Ukraine because its economy would collapse without Russian gas and oil. Now they don’t talk about it anymore. They are still not helping Ukraine, but they are learning to live without Russian gas. There is still a very powerful effect of Russian culture on the European mentality. Because Russia, and also the USSR, have invested a lot of money in promoting the great Russian culture. This has created an inferiority complex in many European intellectuals, who consider Russian culture to be superior to European culture.
Speaking of culture, are Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy serving the Kremlin to justify war?
If you read Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, you can find some ideas that are now used in war. Dostoyevsky consolidated the principle of fatalism, and wrote that man can do practically nothing against destiny. That is why the Russian intelligentsia is so passive. Putin uses Russian culture: the Mariupol theater, which was destroyed by Russian bombing at the beginning of the war, when they closed the ruins, they covered them with huge cloths on which there were portraits of Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Tolstoy and other classics of Russian literature.
Do you think that thanks to the war in Ukraine, Europe is learning how to resist Russia?
Yes, but this also happens thanks to Trump. That is to say, Europe has moved closer to Ukraine because the US has moved away from Europe and Ukraine at the same time. And in this situation, no one knows what the future of NATO will be, which means that we will have to talk about a European Army. If we talk about a pan-European Army, the strongest at the moment is the Ukrainian one, located on the eastern border of the European Union.
If the war stops now, it will be very difficult for the Kremlin to explain this to Russian citizens.
That’s why this war won’t end until Putin leaves, dies, or something happens. This is Putin’s last war, and he can’t lose it because now he thinks about how he will be described in the history books at school. That is, he wants them to write about him that he was the most powerful tsar, the one who made Russia great again. If he signs a peace treaty, regardless of how it is explained, he will have capitulated, and would show that he is weak. He will have accepted that Russia could not fulfill the objectives it promised to the Russian people.
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