Was Ukraine ‘invented’ by Lenin’s Bolsheviks? - by Ed West
(extract from the speech) > ‘Let’s start with the fact that modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia, more precisely, Bolshevik, communist Russia,’ Putin said: ‘This process began immediately after the revolution of 1917. As a result of Bolshevik policy, Soviet Ukraine arose, which even today can with good reason be called “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Ukraine”. He is its author and architect. This is fully confirmed by archive documents … And now grateful descendants have demolished monuments to Lenin in Ukraine. This is what they call decommunisation. Do you want decommunisation? Well, that suits us just fine. But it is unnecessary, as they say, to stop halfway. We are ready to show you what real decommunisation means for Ukraine.’
Nationalism is in part a product of urbanisation, and in particular the development of telegraph, railway and newspapers which enabled national identities to grow between connected towns united by language (and usually religion). But most Ukrainians were rural and the towns were then dominated by Russians, Jews and Poles. Figes notes that the Ukrainian word for citizen —_ hromadjanyn_ — comes from village whereas in most European languages it derives from city. They were the country people.
Lenin saw the connection between socialism and national struggle, concluding that the way to bring minorities along with the revolution was to grow their national identity. Under the Ukrainian Bolshevik Party and its state apparatus, the country’s cities became majority Ukrainian, so ‘between 1923 and 1926 the proportion of Kiev’s population which was Ukrainian increased from 27 per cent to 42 per cent’. There was also a flourishing of Ukrainian culture, and ‘the Ukrainian language, which the tsarist rulers had dismissed as a farmyard dialect, was now recognised as an essential tool for effective propaganda in the countryside and the recruitment of a native elite.’
‘More Ukrainian children learned to read their native language in the 1920s than in the whole of the nineteenth century.’
Lenin believed ‘nationalism was a uniquely dangerous mobilizing ideology because it had the potential to forge an above-class alliance in pursuit of national goals. Lenin called nationalism a “bourgeoise trick” but recognised that, like the hedgehogs, it was a good one.’
Lenin was that very modern phenomenon, an intellectual who detested his countrymen; he would often refer to ‘Russian idiots’ and it was this personal sense of hatred for the majority that drove an inconsistent and illogical distinction between different types of nationalisms, legitimate and illegitimate struggles.
All nations develop from fictions, often crudely-fabricated tales invented by bored urban intellectuals looking for a romantic past. They have in many cases been used for violent ends. But the idea that people’s contemporary aspirations for independence are illegitimate because their nation is not eternal, and that their culture has some recent elements, is no more convincing coming from a latter-day tsar than from a middling Twitter celeb flattering his internationalist fanbase. Ukraine is a real nation if Ukrainians believe it is, just as Russia is, or Germany, France or the United States — whatever the background story or the historical architects who once built it.
