UPDATE: In a recent New York Times, the Ukrainians’ zealous divisiveness is acknowledged but erroneously blamed for the failure of the summer 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive mounted with operational leadership and on the back of the military capabilities of the US and NATO: “(T)he partnership yielded triumph upon triumph. Yet at arguably the pivotal moment of the war — in mid-2023, as the Ukrainians mounted a counteroffensive to build victorious momentum after the first year’s successes — the strategy devised in Wiesbaden fell victim to the fractious internal politics of Ukraine: The president, Volodymyr Zelensky, versus his military chief (and potential electoral rival), and the military chief versus his headstrong subordinate commander. When Mr. Zelensky sided with the subordinate, the Ukrainians poured vast complements of men and resources into a finally futile campaign to recapture the devastated city of Bakhmut. Within months, the entire counteroffensive ended in stillborn failure” (https://archive.is/Fdwq3#selection-4505.21-4505.744)
THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE CAN BE READ AT THIS LINK:
ABSTRACT
The West’s, particularly American miscalculations leading to the war are legion. The list is long — from NATO expansion begun in the 1990s to inability to realise that negotiations with Moscow are the only way to salvage some semblance of a Ukrainian state and Western humanity. Another factor is cultural or, more precisely, the failure to understand cultures, even the denial of culture as a factor, except when it provides propaganda support. We were told Russia is not opposed to NATO expansion, but Ukrainian leaders and much documentation, including those regarding the March-April Russo-Ukrainian peace talks scuttled by Washington, demonstrate that this has been a crucial driver of Russia’s alienation from the West and republican rule, its foreign policy, and Russian President Vladimir’s February 2022 decision to begin a ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. We were told Russia is a harsh dictatorship, the Russian people did want to fight, and Putin would lose the war and be overthrown by the Russian people. At the same time, we were told of the Ukrainians’ amazing courage and commitment to fight a ‘national liberation war’ against the hated Russian and that those who fight for democracy ‘know what they are fighting for’ and are thus eminently motivated. The reality is that it has been the Russians who have proved to be most motivated to fight and patriotic, while Ukrainian men in masses continue to emigrate abroad and avoid the draft in order to escape the war.
Ukraine’s weakness is as much cultural as it is militarily and economically rooted. Post-Soviet Ukraine — and there never was a pre-Soviet Ukraine of any duration and consolidated stateness — was a badly divided state ethnically, linguistically, culturally, geographically, socio-economically, and so politically. There was no common bond other than the rejected Soviet proletarian one. However, it was for the most part western Ukraine — never part of Imperial Russia except as part of partition Poland — that firmly rejected the USSR. Its population is not enough to mount a defense against a great military power like Russia, even with NATO’s not insignificant assistance. By sharp contrast, Russia is overall a firmly united society, as a result of culture, media control, and limited political repression of dissenters. All these are outcomes of the briefly dormant security vigilance and solidarity long-learned by Russians as a consequence of both domestic factors and foreign, especially Western antagonism. Today’s Russian motivation in the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War comes from security vigilance and solidarity norms now revived to dominance by NATO expansion and other factors, including the views and leadership of Vladimir Putin. The motivation gap can be seen by comparing the Russian and Ukrainian efforts to mobilise personnel for the armed force in order to carry on the war.
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INTRODUCTION
We Westerners often hear about the power of democracy, the natural human desire to be free, and the capacity of those fighting for freedom and democracy to seize the bridge too far. This may be true in cultures where both the values of republicanism (‘democracy’) and freedom are deep-rooted and firmly held. On the other hand, some Westerners, including NATO proponents of continuing the war ad infinitum as vital to ‘defend democracy’, have suggested how “difficult it is to convince people of liberal democracy” (www.eurointegration.com.ua/news/2024/03/21/7182147/). We sometimes hear that soldiers fighting in armies of non-republics, i.e., authoritarian regimes, have little to no motivation and low morale and but a few missed meals or tough battle days away from turning their guns on their superiors and fomenting revolt in the rear. Russia is still not a republican regime and thanks to Western policies is unlikely to become one for several decades. Nevertheless, Russia’s relatively soft authoritarian, but still more authoritarian than republican system, has been able to marshal society to support and fight in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ‘special military operation’. How can all this be?
The issue is not a question of democracy versus autocracy or authoritarianism. It is a question of far more fundamental importance: Culture. Western elites have lost track of the centrality of culture. The neither value their own, nor understand foreign ones. Higher education in elite institutions and the fields of political science have been hijacked not just by a ‘cultural Marxist’ cabal propagating propaganda rather than learning; they have been captured by false teaching resulting from the dominance of rational choice theory and and a republican eschatology called ‘transition theory. Under the former, human beings in their social behaviour, political behaviour, voting behaviour, and collective, national behaviours are driven solely by calculating assessments of what actions or policies are ion their self-interest. Under the latter, the American revolution was the harbinger of a coming republican world and democratic peace. The French Revolution, despite its devolution into authoritarianism, terror, and imperial conquest remained for many evidence of the general American-born trend of freedom and brotherhood. Succeeding demonstrations waged wars, financed coups, fomented revolutions, and told unfathomable lies to defend and expand — ‘make the world safe for’ — democracy. Right allows the use of might. The ends justifies the means. The very predominance of a theory based on self-interest is perhaps a function of Western societies’ individualism, which is fine put to a point. Similarly, the belief that democracy is ordained and is so because of human rationality is a product of culture, history, and faith as it is logical reasoning. The belief that American ‘democracy’ was the first wave of a democratic revolution that would sweep the world bringing only freedom and peace is a function of the founding fathers’ and their immediate successors’ particular American reading of history, their English heritage, and religio-political utopian and messianic faith. Westerners, in particular Americans, think they are enacting History’s predetermined republican outcome, but in reality they are viewing History through their own cultural and ideational lenses. The ‘failure’ of societies to adopt republicanism in accordance with the model and schedule defined by the West means a society is ‘irrational’ and ultimately ‘evil’.
In fact, democracies (republics) and authoritarian regimes are almost always in great part the products of a nations’ and states’ cultures as they are related to politics—that is, political culture. A united culture and a culture that supports cultural, political, and other forms of unity and thus comity is more likely to survive periods of stress and rally together in pursuit of survival. Ukrainian culture is not such a culture; it has no united national culture if one defines Ukraine beyond western Ukraine, in fact. By contrast, Russian culture is whole, countrywide, for the overwhelming part, and it highly values unity, integrality, and wholeness, sometimes to a fault. Therefore, Ukrainian society is not united; Russian society largely is. The latter is true in part because of Russia’s cultural values of communality and solidarity and in part a result of the surgical repressions and media hegemony (not monopoly) exercised by Putin’s soft authoritarian regime. All this renders the ‘sistema‘ largely representative of the Russian people at this stage. In short, Ukrainians are neither united nor sure for what they should be fighting in the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War; Russians are. Of course, no nation, state, or society is entirely united, and other factors can support unity, including freedom and repression. The issue is whether there is a broadly held value of, belief in, or aspiration to unity and thus relative comity or whether there is not and whether there is a more or less united entity that can be jointly motivated to pursue certain social and/or state goals.
The pivotal point driving events in Ukraine today is that Kiev’s policies since turning West have been divisive, exacerbating the schisms that history and the rather accidental formation of the present Ukrainian state have fostered. As important is that under President Vladimir Putin, Russia has experienced a revival of traditional Russian ideas, beliefs, values, norms, and aspirations supporting Russian unity. As a result, when Putin decided to escalate his coercive diplomacy by invading Ukraine on 24 February 2022 in his ‘special military operation’, Kiev was in a poor position to sustain the prolonged stress test of war; Moscow was in a far better position to do so. This makes the Western and Ukrainian decisions such as the rejections of the 2015-2022 Minsk process and the March-April 2022 Istanbul peace process even more tragic than is otherwise sometimes acknowledged. A close look at Ukrainian fractious culture and society and Russia’s culture of solidarism or solidarist tselsostnost’ (wholeness) makes this clear.
Ukrainian Disunity
It seems to me that Ukraine has a very weak national identity, except perhaps in western Ukraine. When talking of 1991 Ukraine, we are talking about a badly divided state. One in which western Ukraine, on the one hand, and eastern and southern Ukraine, particularly, are vastly different culturally, socioeconomically, politically, and so on. The former is culturally more Western, but not Western. It is predominantly ethnic and linguistically Ukrainian but has Romanian and Hungarian enclaves on its southwestern borders. Religiously, Uniate Catholicism — under which Eastern Orthodox rites and sacraments maintain alongside with loyalty to the Vatican in Rome — reigns in the west, where Russian Orthodoxy does in the east. Western Ukraine produces little in terms of agriculture or natural resources but is richer than the east. The grandparents of many in the east supported the Nazi-allied neofascist Ukrainian National Organisation (UNO) and the Ukrainian Partisan Army (UPA) and fought against the Red Army. Therefore, they were anti-Soviet in the 20th century and anti-Russian to some extent in pre-Soviet Imperial Russia and increasingly so in the post-Soviet era.
By contrast, Eastern Ukraine is predominantly Orthodox religiously and Russian-speaking, with large ethnic Russian minorities and sometimes majorities, depending on the region. Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk are predominantly Russophone, and Crimea is predominantly ethnically Russian, Donetsk and Luhansk nearly so. Culturally, they are either Soviet nostalgic and Russian Orthodox. Rather than being shopkeepers, eastern Ukraine is the world’s bread basket in its western lands and the source of massive coal production, iron ore, metallurgy, as well as large natural gas deposits. Yet it is far more poor than the west. In the east, particularly in Donbas and Crimea, residents’ grandparents fought in there Red Army or as partisans against the Nazis. Therefore, the east is Soviet nostalgic in many ways and very pro-Russian. The irony is that 1991 Ukraine, successor to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukr SSR), is Soviet-Russian-made. Eastern Ukraine was designed territorially by Lenin. The anti-Soviet, anti-Russian west was married to the pro-Soviet, traditionally Russian east or pre-war Ukr SSR, in a shotgun marriage arranged after the Soviet conquests at the end of the Great Patriotic War. Post-war, post-Stalin Ukrainian SSR then received Crimea from the Russian Socialist Federation of Soviet Republics (RSFSR) in 1954.
All the above helps one to understand, why voting patterns in the east and west so varied throughout the post-Soviet era, why pro-autonomy and pro-independence movements appeared in the post-Soviet east, and why revolts broke out in Crimea and Donbas after the February 2014 ultranationalist pro-Western Maidan revolt. Post-Soviet Ukraine was never a homogeneous, no less a united society, and the ethnic, linguistic, religious, socioeconomic, and political-ideological differences made Ukraine a weak state having a severe case of what political scientists call a ‘stateness problem.’ Some call Ukraine a cusp or ‘cleft’ state divided between east and west locally and in the civilizational sense between East and West. The famous Burns Memorandum noted what some experts, including myself, argued for years, even decades: the grave risk of NATO expansion provoking a civil war that would force Russia against its will to decide whether to intervene militarily.
Finally, one must add that in addition to being a fragile, unconsolidated state and society, Ukraine is a young, poorly institutionalized one. Ukraine’s state institutions have little heritage to inspire the multifarious and divided Ukrainian population. How many even in the east can remember the pre-Soviet, revolutionary era Rada? Where does a Ukrainian presidency or constitution court find its roots in a very nascent Ukrainian political culture? Why would Donbass coal miners and Lvov (Lviv) shopkeepers hold allegiance to the same flag? The only thing that ever united them before 1991 is the bitterly hated, but rather defunct USSR.
Ukraine’s Failed Rallying Effect
The Ukrainian war effort stands in sharp contrast to Russia’s experience of the overwhelming majority of the population rallying around the war effort, even as many would prefer an end to a war being fought against fraternal Ukraine. Ukraine itself has been unable to maintain the initial ‘rallying around the flag’ effect imparted by the war even under the motivational pressure of mounting military invasion, as Western and Ukrainian media have noted (https://ctrana.news/news/462511-v-ukraine-net-zhelajushchikh-dobrovolno-sluzhit-v-armii.html). Whether one is talking about volunteering to fight, submitting to the military draft, or deploying financial and productive resources for the war, Ukraine is failing and ever miserably so.
With the coming and intensification of the war, Ukrainians have proven far less willing to fight than Russians. Before the war, Ukraine’s army exceeded that of Russia’s in size, but great attrition, mounting as Russian intensifies its war machine, has whittled the Ukrainian army down to size, producing a severe shortage of capable and motivated fighters. Yet Ukrainians, rather than rallying to save their country, are draft-dodging in large numbers and resisting, often physically, the efforts of aggressive recruitment officers to take them into the army and send them to the front. Even the hawkish Wall Street Journal has acknowledged the gravity of Ukrainians’ unwillingness to fight in numbers necessary to sustain the war effort. “Efforts to draft young men are hampered by politics, demographics and Ukrainians’ increasing reluctance to join the military.” The controversy over a new mobilization law, discussed below, was acute, with soldiers’ families desperate for its passage hoping that it would afford their loved opes a respite in the form of a leave from the front, while as a whole the law, especially proposals to lower the draft age to 23 or 21 were extremely unpopular, it wrote several months ago. Specifically:
“Ukraine was able to rely on volunteers who flooded into recruitment offices. Those waves have ebbed. And Zelensky has also acknowledged the need to give soldiers who have been fighting for two years a rest. …
Hundreds of thousands of men continue to avoid registering for the draft. Recruiters often set up checkpoints in the street, stopping fighting-age men and sending them east to the trenches.
Some men say they were beaten or detained for days until they signed enlistment papers. Still, hundreds of thousands of men have avoided registering at the local draft office. Videos circulate online showing young men running from military recruiters in cities across the country.
‘I can’t say I feel like a draft dodger,’ said Oleh Sinelchenko, 24. Both his brothers joined the military early in the war, but they have warned him against even registering for the draft, telling him that once he is enlisted, there is no way out. I didn’t receive any call,’ Sinelchenko said. ‘Most of the country is sitting at home pretending that nothing is happening.’
Groups from all parts of society are appealing to the Rada for exemptions under the new law. Businesses have proposed paying a tax to keep their workers off the front line.
Students say they should be allowed to finish their studies before serving” (http://www.wsj.com/world/europe/ukraines-battered-army-grapples-with-growing-troop-shortage-6d695eba).
Two years into the war around 9,000 draft-evasion cases have been opened, according to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, for draft-dodging and the evasion of draft registration so enlistment notices cannot be delivered. Despite the ban on men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country since the outset of the invasion, the EU’s official statistics department, EvroStat, reported that by fall last year, before Russia’s rout of Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive and Russia’s recently begun offensive, 650,000 Ukrainian men of fighting age had already fled the country, most crossing borders with Poland and Slovakia, some with false exemption papers (www.bbc.com/ukrainian/articles/cd1px4z922wo and http://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-faces-an-acute-manpower-shortage-with-young-men-dodging-the-draft/). This suggests, as Ottawa University Professor Ivan Katchanovski noted at the time, that more than 1,000,000 men in Ukraine are on wanted lists of police for draft dodging even before the drastic April 2024 mobilization law comes into force (see below) (https://x.com/i_katchanovski/status/1773375307380031706?s=51&t=n5DkcqsvQXNd3DfCRCwexQ). This, in turn, suggests that the number could now – a half year later – exceed 1.5 million. Regional figures support such conclusions. For example, in relatively low-populated Poltava region, about 30,000 people had not shown up at mobilization departments by autumn 2023 (https://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2024/03/28/7448594/). Oddly, it has been some of the most supposedly nationalist-oriented western regions of Ukraine that have demonstrated an unwillingness to fight. Thus, deputy head of the Ivano-Frankivsk region’s mobilization and defense work department, Colonel Roman Bodnar, said in autumn 2023 that about 40,000 men are officially wanted for failing to register at the military commissariat (https://if.depo.ua/ukr/prykarpattya/na-prikarpatti-za-neyavku-do-ttsk-rozshukuyut-mayzhe-40-tisyach-cholovikiv-202403271458097).
During the political battle of drafting the new mobilization law the Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KMIS) conducted research and a survey along with the pro-Maidan newspaper Ukrainskaya pravda, which found the share of Ukrainians willing to take arms is roughly 8% across all categories, matching pre-war KMIS research data (www.rt.com/russia/595279-ukrainians-willing-fight-pollster/ and https://www.ekhokavkaza.com/a/32913584.html?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR36DL6YAuo3bkP2cpjXSK_2E0cf9j9epSQi36pLYGSlYfSPVe6cs-3GTPk_aem_AfUweMDbMzqbgd90FphG6mN-Ddan7buEYvJ0Po1DCeWRVfPpFUHf3jY4iBjpn3xRWmJkLeOy0tJ6sgSqm862folI). This is 8 percent of a population that has shrunk by perhaps 75 percent, from some 40 million pre-war to some 30 million post February 2022. This provides little more than a million recruits, especially when confined to draft-age men 25-60. Moreover, it is one thing to say this in a survey and quite another to act on such words. Paniotto also noted that the Ukrainian people tend to “wish for conflicting things” such as capitalist liberalization alongside robust social support by the state, or democracy as well as the “strong arm” of the government. This is a sign of a divided society. While an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians still believe in Ukraine’s victory in the war, “they are mostly willing to send donations or work as volunteers,” Paniotto said (www.rt.com/russia/595279-ukrainians-willing-fight-pollster/). This rift and opposition to the mobilization, if not to the war itself, are further reflected in the massive truckers’ protests sparked by there adoption of the new mobilization law. This largely halted truck transport between Ukraine and the EU. Border crossing points saw a massive decline in truck crossings, from 1,107, 763 and 598 on May 17th (the mobilization law went into force on May 18th) to 224, 332, and 241 on May 21, respectively. At other crossing points, only 11 and 1 truck were reported (https://ctrana.news/news/465049-iz-za-zakona-o-mobilizatsii-voditeli-massovo-otkazyvajutsja-rabotat.html). No such demonstrations or other kinds of any significance occurred against Russia’s first and so far only mobilization.
In contrast to the mass return of Russians, many men of draft age, in the midst of a still on-going war, Ukraine’s exodus has proven resistant to reversal. By early 2024, a survey by the Ukrainian polling institute, KMIS, found that half of the Ukrainian refugees currently living in Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic are willing to return home if conditions such as security, efficient critical infrastructure, broad housing availability, and the end of a full-scale invasion are guaranteed (https://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2024/05/14/7455709/). Under present conditions, very few will want to return.
Massive emigration and draft evasion forced Kiev’s Maidan regime to resort to a series of drastic measures to rebuild the army’s dwindling numbers beyond the mass mobilization noted above. Military commissars search out and physically forcing draft evaders into the army and to the front. There are literally hundreds of such videos on the Ukrainian internet of these coercive mobilizations. Many of these incidents show violent resistance to these official abductions into military service, and the process threatens to spark revolts, particularly in ethnic regions like Hungarian and Romanian enclaves along its western border (https://ctrana.news/news/463774-zhiteli-zaporozhja-sobralis-vozle-ttsk-i-trebujut-vernut-muzhchinu.html; https://ctrana.news/news/463775-politsija-opublikovala-podrobnosti-konflikta-vozle-ttsk-v-zakarpatskoj-oblasti.html; https://ctrana.news/news/463494-vo-lvove-voenokmy-zaderzhali-dvukh-medikov-onkotsentra.html; https://ctrana.news/news/463942-video-silovoj-mobilizatsii-vo-lvove-politsejskie-skrutili-muzhchinu-dlja-ttsk.html; https://ctrana.news/news/464567-video-kak-zhenshchiny-otbili-u-voenkomov-mobilizovannoho-muzhchinu.html; and https://t.me/SolovievLive/249365).
When the war began, the Maidan regime prohibited men aged 18-60 from leaving the country. This reflects the limited will to fight in this now ‘rump Ukraine, whittled down by Russia’s creeping conquest in the east and south of theoretically the most patriotic regions of Ukraine. Ukrainian opinion polls — though obviously hampered by a mass emigration of several million citizens because of the war, by lack of access to residents in areas annexed by Russia or occupied by Russian forces, and by a generally repressive atmosphere in Ukraine — demonstrate the level of disunity in areas one would expect would be a bulwark for the country. Even in surveys conducted among citizens remaining in Kiev-controlled areas — the most loyal and patriotic citizens of all — one in seven (14 percent) supports territorial concessions to Russia in order to secure peace (https://www.kiis.com.ua/?lang=rus&cat=news&id=1342 ). This is in Ukraine’s most nationalist and loyal regions in its western and central territories. Russian annexed territories of Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk have always been autonomy- or independence-minded, as noted earlier, and also annexed Zaporozhia and Kherson are also somewhat so inclined. But again these five regions plus additional areas occupied but not annexed by Russia were not included in the surveys, so one in seven in the pro-Ukrainian areas are prepared to give up territory that the Kiev Maidan regime refuses to relinquish, preferring to fight on. This attitude if publicly articulated is a violation of Ukrainian law, amounting to near treason.
Thus, despite the ban on draft age men from leaving the country, the exodus continues. The failure or at least difficulties of mobilization have forced Kiev to ask European countries to return home draft evaders, but EU countries are proving reluctant to comply. In order to force the issue, especially for Ukraine’s emigres, Kiev announced in May that consular services abroad would not be carried out for Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60, whom the new mobilization law requires register or re-register at military commissariats. This law effects not only 1,000,0000 draft-dodging emigrants who left after the war began but also several million Ukrainian men who are permanent residents or dual citizens of foreign countries. Such men cannot travel to Ukraine or renew their Ukrainian passports and driving licenses, obtain marriage and birth certificates, or receive notarial services such as power of attorney certificates, inheritance, wills, certification of the authenticity of copies of documents, criminal records check, etc. This is an illegal measure implemented by a president, Zelenskiy, who, reportedly, avoided the draft during the ‘anti-terrorist operatyion’ against Donbas from 2014 until 2019 when he was elected president (https://x.com/i_katchanovski/status/1782947709051118050?s=51&t=n5DkcqsvQXNd3DfCRCwexQ; https://ctrana.news/articles/analysis/463048-vlijanie-zapreta-na-konsulskie-usluhi-na-khod-vojny-i-mobilizatsii-v-ukraine.html; and https://ctrana.news/news/462315-itohi-781-dnja-vojny-v-ukraine.html). This hypocrisy is bound to further split society and demoralize it and the army. Indeed, Ukrainian emigrants in Europe have been reported to be outraged by the measure (https://ctrana.news/news/463712-muzhchiny-iz-ukrainy-za-hranitsej-vozmushcheny-ohranichenijami-zakona-o-mobilizatsii.html).
Another measure that is further dividing society is the new, rather draconian military mobilization law signed into law on April 2nd and goes into effect on May 18th. The law was made necessary by the unwillingness of Ukrainian men any longer to submit to the draft, no less volunteer for service at the same time that it is well-known, despite state censorship, that the Ukrainian armed forces are in dire straits and official media claims Moscow seeks full conquest of Ukraine. With the goal of mobilising 400,000 men, the new mobilisation law stipulates that all men aged 18-60 must register either at a commissariat or online on a universal electronic register within six months or be subject to fines, refusal of all state services, loss of rights to a drivers’ license, home purchase, et., expropriation of property, and finally imprisonment (https://ctrana.news/news/462458-kohda-vstupajut-v-silu-normy-zakona-ob-uzhestochenii-mobilizatsii.html and https://ctrana.news/articles/464372-kakaja-otvetstvennost-hrozit-uklonistam-po-novomu-zakonu-o-mobilizatsii.html). The new mobilisation laws eliminate numerous exemptions from the draft and requires all draft age men who previously received an exemption from being drafted to re-submit to medical examination within nine months (https://sud.ua/ru/news/publication/296245-verkhovnaya-rada-prinyala-zakon-o-povtornom-meditsinskom-osmotre-ogranichenno-prigodnykh-muzhchin; https://ctrana.news/news/461485-vladimir-zelenskij-podpisal-zakon-otmenjajushchij-normu-ob-ohranichenno-hodnykh-voennoobjazannykh.html; https://ctrana.news/news/463790-kriterii-prihodnosti-k-sluzhbe-v-armii-po-novomu-zakonu-o-mobilizatsii-v-ukraine.html; and https://ctrana.news/news/460603-chto-skazano-v-novom-zakone-ob-ohranichenno-hodnykh-k-sluzhbe-ukraintsakh.html.This) is a sphere of massive corruption, where the right payment can get one the needed exemption.
Because under the new law the category ‘partially suitable for service’ has been removed and all draft age men, including those with various diseases will be categorised according level of functionality terminated exemptions include everything from alcoholism and drug addiction to cancer and heart/lung disease. The issue for those deemed ‘suitable for service’ will be the degree of functionality determined by medical commissions and thus type of service one can perform. For example, How those with tuberculosis, who are at the active stage of the disease with the release of bacteria and disintegration of lung tissue, are removed from military register, but if one does not emit bacteria or suffer tissue disintegration, then he will need to come back for a medical examination every six months. People who have clinically cured tuberculosis can serve in the recruitment commissariats and military support units. If one has “residual effects” after tuberculosis has been cured, then he is fully fit. Only hose who have HIV that is progressing will be considered unsuitable for service. Others with HIV can either serve in the rear units and commissariats, or, if asymptomatic, at the front. Cancer patients will be removed from the register only if they are inoperable, have metastases, or a tumor are progressing rapidly. Those who have had a primary tumor operated on or have one “slowly progressing” will be deemed suitable for service in the rear. The same is true if they have skin cancer or lower lip cancer. All those with cancer in stable remission are recognized as fully suitable. People with mild mental disorders can be called to serve in the rear, with addiction syndromes and behavior disorders with rare attacks. Those with mild mental retardation can also serve in the rear (https://ctrana.news/news/463706-perechen-zabolevanij-opredeljajushchikh-neprihodnost-k-sluzhbe.html; https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/z0616-24#Text; and https://ctrana.news/news/463801-pravozashchitnik-aleksandr-pavlichenko-raskritikoval-mobilizatsiju-ljudej-s-zavisimostjami.html).
All draft age men must have their draft registration card on themselves at all times and present it to mobilisation commissars or police upon demand (https://ctrana.news/articles/464372-kakaja-otvetstvennost-hrozit-uklonistam-po-novomu-zakonu-o-mobilizatsii.html). In addition, all firms are required to report draft age men on their payrolls or be fined, and Kiev is also turning to the recruitment of prison inmates. Zelensky described the new mobilisation regime’s goal to be to “strengthen monitoring of draft-dodgers” (https://ctrana.news/news/462121-vladimir-zelenskij-novyj-zakon-o-mobilizatsii-pomozhet-usilit-kontrol.html). Thus, men in Ukraine can no longer leave the country and, with few exceptions, required to join the military and fight the far more powerful Russian military. The need too coerce Ukrainians to the front and the ‘senstivity’ of drafting the new law and lowering the draft age to 25 underscores just how much Ukrainian society is unwilling to fight and split over any patriotic duty to do so. Moreover, the law itself is further dividing Ukrainians. It is extremely unpopular in society, and may demoralise the army anyway, as it does not provide for automatic leave or rotation, as had been expected initially and lobbied for by soldiers’ families.
Just as corruption has complicated Ukraine’s mobilization efforts — Zelenskiy had to dismiss all the regional military commissariat heads as a result of a series of corruption scandals — so too have Kiev’s efforts to deploy financial and productive resources, whether homegrown or lent by the West, have been marred by corruption. Indeed, Ukraine’s traditionally rampant corruption rather than being mitigated by the patriotic needs of war has been intensified to disastrous effects. Corruption is rampant in the military-industrial complex. The oft-noted TIME article consisting of interviews with Zelenskiy and other Bankovaya officials after Russia’s defeat of Ukraine’s summer 2023 counteroffensive acknowledged that corruption was increasing. In Time magazine’s October 2023 expose` on the Zelenskiy regime based on interviews with the president and members of his administration, “a top presidential adviser” asked the interviewer, Simon Shuster, who thought corruption in the country was on the decline, to turn off his recorder so he could speak more freely. “Simon, you’re mistaken,” he says. “People are stealing like there’s no tomorrow.” “Even the firing of the Defense Minister did not make officials ‘feel any fear,’ he adds, because the purge took too long to materialize. The President was warned in February that corruption had grown rife inside the ministry, but he dithered for more than six months” (https://time.com/6329188/ukraine-volodymyr-zelensky-interview/). Thus, even under the threats of wartime and a cutoff of military assistance, which also has been massively stolen for resale, Zelenskiy and some Ukrainians persist in their horrendously corrupt behaviors undermining the efforts of others fighting the war. U.S. officials originally rejected the idea of massive Ukrainian corruption tied to military and other assistance to Ukraine, but after several high profile arrests, it was forced to set up an accounting mechanism to monitor the use of assistance. Still, one billion dollars in U.S. aid for building defense fortifications shows no results in the Kharkiv or Sumy directions. Yet there is no inquiry into why this is so and where the money went. To be sure, corruption in the U.S. defense sector is substantial and there have been recent arrests of two high-ranking Russian generals for corruption and treason, but there appears to be nothing on the scale evident in Ukraine—a country on the verge of military defeat if not occupation. Such limited willingness to fight alongside large-scale undermining of the war effort among Ukrainians is in good part a consequence of Ukraine’s divided and unconsolidated culture and society. The lack of a state heritage, around which Ukrainians could have been united, exacerbated this dynamic. Moreover, as I have discussed elsewhere, Ukrainian state — under the Maidan regime especially — did almost everything possible to divide society into antagonistic ethnic, linguistic, religious, and political camps.
Why Russia Fights: Russian Security Vigilance and Tselostnost’
Russia is not a work of such contrasts; rather, it is a work standing in contrast, stark contrast to Ukraine’s schisms. In the post-Soviet era it had a useable past — centuries of tradition — upon which it could draw identity and unity in order to replace the failed and disgraced Soviet legacy.
In the late perestroika and early post-perestroika years, there was an opportunity and then slow and lackadaisical efforts, respectively, aimed at the development of new political and security cultures that would be pro-Western and harken back to Russia’s relatively thin republican heritage. Invoking the 1906-1917 quasi-republican reform, a Russian President instituted a constitution and a ‘State Duma’ to replace the USSR’s pseudo-legislative Soviets and the perestroika era Congress of People’s Deputies. The 18th-19th century republican philosopher Aleksandr Radishchev, 19th-20th century legal scholar Boris Chicherin, and early 20th century Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin were rehabilitated and held up as ideological and political models. Unfortunately, NATO expansion, the West’s refusal to help Russian economically after the Soviet collapse and 1990s depression, and the Russian revolution from above’s failure to fully dismantle and replace Soviet political, economic, and social bureaucracies and their apparatchiks led to a predictable ‘thermidor’ or reaction against republicanism and the free market and a search for different, more familiar traditional signposts to light the way. Signposts with deep roots in pre-communist Russian history and culture were found by a new traditionalist Russian intelligentsia and promoted by Vladimir Putin. One can choose to believe that Russians live, work, and fight under the crack of the whip. In reality, they are driven by their ideas on history, culture, and relations with the West. Those ideas are held by a strong majority of the Russian elite and public in part due to history’s lessons, present day developments, and political leadership and, yes, some repression.
Russian strategic culture — political beliefs, attitudes, values, and ideas related to Russian foreign policy and Russia’s geopolitical place in the world — usually has been dominated by a security vigilance norm or value. This traditional vigilance has been long-learned and focused most of all on the West. Eight centuries or at least half a millennium of Western designs on Russia, various Western often destabilizing influences, political interference, military-political interventions, and outright military invasions have placed the West at the center of the Russian geostrategic mind, its trepidations and fears as well as its aspirations and goals. Although Russia often aspired to be Western or European, that aspiration has almost always been spurned, subverted and/or disappointed wittingly and unwittingly. In scholarly terms, the West has been Russia’s constituent ‘Other’ — an alternate civilization and identity that Russia has had an intimate, self-defining love-hate relationship. While Russian ‘love’ has rarely been requited, its fears have repeatedly been reinforced by Western imperial and colonial actions targeting Russia.
Russia’s security culture and its central vigilance norm began to form and embed itself in Russian political and strategic culture after the fall of Kievan Rus as Muscovite Russian state formed during the struggle for supremacy among the Russian principalities after Moscow prince Dmitrii Donskii defeated the Mongols in the 14th century and began to gather in the Russian principalities into a united kingdom. During Moscow’s struggle with Novgorod, Vladimir, Tver, even Poland-Lithuania at that time, the first in a series of heresies – religious dissents – stretching through the 16th century threatened to redirect the formation of Russia’s national identity and culture – Orthodox Christianity – in the particular form that had developed across ‘all the Russias’ since IX century baptism of Kievan prince Vladimir I or the Great. Each of the dissident medieval heresies — the ‘strigolniki’ (defrocked ones), the Judaizers, and the non-possessors or ‘nestazhateli’ — all had ties with the western and somewhat westernized Russian principalities of Novogorod and Pskov. These principalities were part of the Hanseatic League, had avoided the stultifying effects of the Mongol yoke, and in the case of Novgorod especially were competitors with rising Muscovy for the leadership and unification of the Russian principalities. Moreover, Novgorod had signed treaties with the powerful Western Polish-Lithuanian Union, the military power and Catholic identity of which posed both security and ontological threats to Moscow and other principalities. Moreover still, Poland-Lithuania also contended to unite the eastern Slavs and Russian principalities under its wing and Catholicize its own and any incorporated Orthodox Christians. The fall of Kiev to the Mongols was a prelude to all this, and the fall of Constantinople to the Muslim Turks in 1453 was an omen combining the threats posed by internal dissension extant in Kiev before the fall and external invasion reinforced the sense of mounting military and ontological danger to Orthodoxy and still young Muscovy posed by Islamic expansionism.
Moving forward, this pattern repeated in one form or another. A partial list would include the following:
- the Vatican’s crusades to Catholicize Orthodox Russia, Russians and other Slavs in the 15th and 16th centuries;
- Catholic Poland’s competition and aggressions against Russia (most notably the Warsaw-hatched and Vatican-backed False Dmitrii plot to seize the Russian throne in the early 17th century, leading to a period of nearly two decades of what was perhaps Russia’s greatest tribulation, the Time of Troubles or, in Russian, Smuta);
- European political meddling by Great Britain, France, and, to a lesser extent, Sweden in Russian palace intrigues throughout the 18th century to support the overthrow of Russian emperors Anna Ioannova, Peter III and Paul I and accessions of particular candidates such as Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, and Alexander I to Russian throne;
- the invasion of Russia by the European Grande Armee of Napoleon Bonaparte, resulting in, among other things, the subversion of Emperor’s Aleksandr I’s plans to institute a constitution in Russia;
- the Germans’ financing of revolutionary parties in Russia during Wolrld War I, including the Socialist Revolutionary Party, with its terrorist ‘Combat Organization’, and the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin, who Berlin helped return to Russia and financed both before and after the February Revolution, facilitating the October 1917 Bolshevik putsch—a ‘color revolution’, if you will;
- the Western intervention in the subsequent Russian civil war;
- and the invasion of the USSR by Nazi Germany and its various European allies in World War II, which Russian call the Great Patriotic War invoking the Patriotic War against Napoleon’s invasion.
This historical experience has made the West the main focus of Russian national security concerns both in respect to external and internal threats fomented by the West. It is this historical experience refashioned in the form of NATO expansion and Western refusal to provide economic assistance to post-Soviet Russia in the wake of the communist and Soviet collapses that revived Russia’s security vigilance norm to dominance from the recessive state it had fallen into during the perestroika era and early to mid-1990s. The continuation of NATO expansion, the plotting of color revolutions in Russia-friendly (Serbia, Syria), Russia’s neighboring states (Georgia, Ukraine) in the 2000s consolidated the security vigilance norm in Russian strategic culture. Simultaneously, all this reshaped Russia’s overall political culture, returning it to its tradition of authoritarianism, albeit relatively soft, under Putin.
The security vigilance norm’s dominance can be seen in Russian Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet discourses of all kinds, from the arts to the sciences. A few examples will suffice. In the Imperial era, we see antagonism towards Western encroachments in artistic discourse from Aleksandr Pushkin’s poetry to Lev Tolstoy’a War and Peace to Dostoevskii’s 1880 Pushkin commemoration speech to Mikhail Glinka’s opera ‘A Life for the Tsar’. Russia’s national bard supported the country’s territorial integrity after Nicholai I provoked a Polish uprising in 1830. The emperor attempted to recreate “Poland as an integral part of the empire” by eliminating the autonomy his father, Alexander I, had granted Warsaw as part of his early reign’s push for a post-Napoleonic, liberal, constitutional-monarchical Russian and European order. The geopolitics of the uprising and harsh European criticism of Nicholas’s action sparked a unifying patriotism across Russia society, and Pushkin joined in defending both Nicholas and ‘Russia’s territorial integrity.’ In his 1831 poems “To the Slanderers of Russia” and “On the Anniversary of Borodino”, the poet condemned European criticism of Russia’s suppression of the Poles as outside interference in “a family quarrel” and warned that surrender to the Poles would place in doubt Russia’s territorial integrity in other parts of the empire: “Would Lithuania be torn from Russia, would Kiev?” [Pushkin quoted in Wortman, The Power of Language and Rhetoric in Russian Political History (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), p. 164.] Pushkin’s To the Slanderers of Russia is frequently cited today in the context of NATO-Russia Ukrainian War. Pushkin’s own historical study Boris Godunov (1825) was a study of the tragic consequences of political disunity leading to the Smuta. His research drama about the Smuta would become the ‘screenplay’ for Russia’s most famous tragic opera ‘Boris Godunov.’ It is the fear of political disunity and Western manipulation of such disunity that drives Russians’ aspiration for political unity or ‘solidarism’ (see below) and so much of the traditional authoritarianism in Russian political culture.
For Russians, Napoleon was perhaps the first great symbolic archetype of the external military threat posed by the wilful efforts of Russia’s constitutive Other to remake her in the Western image. The Napoleonic image in Russia’s cultural sediment was first set by Pushkin’s 1821 poem Napoleon, but most deeply and broadly in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Pushkin’s Napoleon left on Russia and Europe a “bloody memory” of “maiming wounds,” “depredations,” “blights and horrors” spread by his “fabled victories” [A. S. Pushkin, “Napoleon,” Sobranie sochinenii v desyati tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literature, 1959-1962), Vol. 1, pp. 160-3, at pp. 160 and 162-3.] For the great dictator of democracy, peace was a “tedious” and leisure “torpid” peace, galling his “insatiable soul” (Pushkin, “Napoleon,” Sobranie sochinenii v desyati tomakh, p. 162). Thus, Napoleon “poured” the “drug of conquest” into the “veins” of the French and Western European peoples and “would shower destruction” and “yoke after yoke of ruthless power” on “the tribes of earth.” “On Europe, brought to crashing ruin, (n)ow fell the silence of the tomb” (Pushkin, “Napoleon,” Sobranie sochinenii v desyati tomakh, pp. 160-1).
Russia’s other great writers of classical literature struck similar themes. In Fyodor Dostoevskii’s famous speech on the significance of Pushkin to the Society of the Lovers of Russian Letters in June 1880, he addressed yet again Russian-Western relations: “For what has Russia done in its policy in these entire two centuries other than serve Europe, perhaps much more than itself?” He proclaimed Russia’s mission was to serve Europe in a different way: “(F)uture, coming Russians will understand…that to become a true Russian will mean precisely to endeavor to introduce a resolution into the European contradictions once and for all, to show the denouement of the European anguish in the Russian soul, universal and unifying, to include within her (our) fraternal love of all our brothers, and, in the final account, perhaps, to utter a concluding word of the great, common harmony and fraternal final accord of all the tribes in Christ and laws of the Gospel” [Fyodor Dostoevskii, Dnevnik pisatelya, (Saint Petersburg: Lenizdat, 2001), p. 677]. The magnum opus of Russia’s other great late 19th century writer, the iconoclastic lone wolf Leo Tolstoy, was set during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the eventual defeat of the Grande Army and thus pursued Russia’s relationship with its constitutive Other. Although Tolstoy would become the leading opponent of the regime and of traditionalist Orthodox Slavophiles like Danilevskii and Dosteoveskii by century’s end, his War and Peace depicts Russia, as represented by Kutuzov and Natasha, as the simple and innocent. Napoleon, on the other hand, is filled with an inhuman calculating hubris driven by his sense as a European that he has the moral obligation to bring the Enlightenment to unwashed Russia.
Glinka’s opera Life for the Tsar or Ivan Susanin set in the Smuta, remains a tour de force of Russian security vigilance sentiment vis-a-vis the West. It relates the story of Susanin’s leading Poles on a wild goose chase in order to allow the tsar to escape their clutches. The Polish mazurka danced in the scene of the Kremlin wedding of False Dmitrii and Marina Mniszech, daughter of the Polish noble who organized the initial invasion force, remains a representation of arrogant intrusion into Russian affairs undertaken by decadent Westerners. Mniszech has been a Russian synonym for “witch” for centuries and one of many long-standing symbols in Russian culture invoking the ontological and military security threat from the West.
In the USSR, all art served the totalitarian state’s anti-capitalist but equally anti-Western propaganda efforts, reinforcing the security vigilance culture both respect to internal dissent and the military threat in hypertrophied form with new Marxist-Leninist content. This is better known than what I have discussed above and need not be detailed here. Suffice it to say that the annual May 9th Victory Day parade and celebrations became a constant reinforcing message of memory, reminding Russians and other Soviets of the great trial and tribulation that was the Great Patriotic War in defense against Hitler’s hordes who killed 27 million Soviets. Hitler’s fascism was not seen in the USSR as an abnormal phenomenon for Western development, since fascism was seen as the last gasp and final stage of decaying capitalism, which was destined to collapse, according to the Marxist-Leninist eschatology.
In Post-Soviet Russia, Victory Day has remained a fixture of historical memory and security vigilance reinforcement. Indeed, the holiday has been ‘democratized’ under the new Immortal Regiments ritual in which the general public also marches, with marchers displaying portraits of ancestors who fought or died in the war to defeat Nazi fascism. The Putin era security vigilance norm’s revival can be seen in literature, film, television, and music. For example, the extent to which even the ancient Smuta has left an indelible imprint shaping Russia’s political and strategic cultures has become even more evident under Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2006 when Russian president moved to fill the vacuum in Russian self-identity caused by the collapse of communism and the Soviet state by officially celebrating the 1611-12 Russian national uprising against the Poles during the Smuta. In place of the abandoned November 7th holiday commemorating the Bolsheviks’ 1917 October coup, Putin inaugurated National Unity Day on November 4th. The new national holiday reinforces the value of security vigilance by at least inference from Western threats and Russian collusion with them.
All of the above helps to explain the Russian response in the Putin era to creeping Western expansionism to Russia’s borders throughout the post-Cold War: the August 2008 Five-Day Georgian War, military reforms, the narrowing of openness for political exprtession and competition, military reforms, the Crimean and Donbas interventions and annexations, and the February 2022 ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. For Russians, NATO expansion is another re-run of a well-known film. The ending and the way towards it are all too familiar. The lessons of the Smuta and other cases of internal dissension capitalized upon by the West to Russia’s detriment has in turn generated a cultural inclination towards unity of various kinds related to political unity—what I call ‘Russian solidarism.’
Solidarism in Russian Culture
Russian solidarism is one reason why Russia is winning the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War, despite massive NATO assistance to Ukraine and robust, if somewhat indirect involvement in Kiev’s war effort. In my most recent book, Russian Tselostnost’, I argued that there are at least four types of tselostnost’ or wholeness highly valued in Russian culture: monism, universalism, communalism, and solidarism [Gordon M. Hahn, Russian Tselostnost: Wholeness in Russian Culture, Thought, History, and Politics (London: Europe Books, 2021)]. More recently, I wrote on the evidence of an ideal, value, or aspiration that can be called Russian historical tselostnost’ as well as on the influence of tselostnost’, particularly solidarism, on Russians’ attitudes towards Ukraine and by implication the war in Ukraine (https://gordonhahn.com/2023/04/13/working-paper-russian-historical-tselostnost-parts-1-3-conclusion/ and https://gordonhahn.com/2023/10/27/working-paper-russian-tselostnost-wholeness-and-ukraine-parts-1-5-complete-version/). Although all are interrelated and can be related to Russian attitudes towards, and support for the Ukrainian war to one degree or another, one stands out as especially salient in regard to the present question: Russian solidarism. Solidarism is the idea, value or aspiration to unity at the national level; it is communalism — ideas, values, and aspiration s to unity at the sub-national level — directed on the nation-wide level and can be expressed in terms of national cultural unity, linguistic, unity, confessional unity, political unity, territorial unity, state-society unity, social unity, and even economic unity. It is Russia’s inclination to communalism applied to the national level. Russia’s emphasis on solidarism is the product of centuries of development which taught Russian to value unity at the national level. Beginning with the formation of the Muscovite, if not Kievan Russian state, Russians learned lessons about the threat to a united Russian state posed by disunity within the state and nation regarding religion, culture, language, politics, territorial administration, and so on. It is part and parcel of the security vigilance norm in Russian strategic and political culture; the domestic and opposite ‘positive’ (asserting) side of the coin from the ‘negative’ (negating, rejecting) value of trepidation about interference, particularly Western interference, in Russian state, politics, society, culture, and even the economy. Of course, to a considerable degree full solidarity is an aspiration, not one often achieved, and one traditionally encouraged by the state, especially in the face of deviations from unity. Repression is one instrument for strengthening solidarity. Propaganda and in periods a state ideology have reinforced the belief in the need for or existence of solidarity. Artistic culture – art, literature, film, and music – is a key instrument. To the extent, solidarism has been inculcated for centuries, it is always present in the culture to one degree or another either as a dominant or recessive strand. Indeed, I can discern only three relatively brief periods in history when pluralism became a central norm and practice in Russian culture: (1) between the 1905 ‘October Manifesto’ to the Bolsheviks’ consolidation of one-party rule in the mid-1920s; (2) the perestroika era in the last years of Soviet rule; and (3) in post-Soviet Russia, with a gradual reduction of pluralism beginning in 2003.For a detailed discussion of solidarism across Russian history, see my Russian Tselostnost’ (pp. 647-804). Here, the discussion will be limited to the mention of a few recent, Putin era articulations.
The chaos and disunion of perestroika and the post-perestroika 1990s in mind, prompted Putin to restore Russia to some semblance of its former solidarity and position himself at the center of a united Russia. It is no accident but rather the result of history, identity, and culture that Putin’s ruling party came to be named ‘United Russia’ (Yedinaya Rossiya). Putin’s has endeavored to limit democracy, restore institutional unity, and unify the polity, society and economy each and with the state. In course, solidarity has returned as a central norm in Russian culture and discourse (as have monism, communalism, and, to a lesser extent, universalism). Although early Putin tended to reject ideology and nationalism, portraying himself as a pro-democratic politician if a dispassionate one, he immediately began to call for a new national unity as a response to the chaos of the 1990s’ economic depression, criminal arbitrariness, and political infighting. He is gradually moving towards an ideology for Russia, and increasingly he is engineering a political cultural norm of national solidarity.
In his Millennium Memorandum published in December 1999 for the presidential campaign a day before his appointment as acting president, Putin added under the subheading “The Russian Idea” a philosophical orientation for uniting the country, arguing the traditionalist vein of Russian political culture: “The absence of civil accord and unity is one of the reasons why our reforms are so slow and painful. Most of the strength is spent on political squabbling, instead of the handling of the concrete tasks of Russia’s renewal.” In order to achieve solidarity he proposed combining the values of “freedom of expression, freedom to travel abroad and other fundamental political rights and human liberties,” private property, and “free enterprise” with “the traditional Russian values” of “patriotism,” aspiring to Great Power status (Derzhavnost’), “statism” (Gosudarstvennost’), and social solidarity. Putin’s Millennium article also included a call for Russians to “unify” around the task of strengthening Russia so that it remained a great power. In a February 2001 interview with a Vietnamese newspaper on the eve of a trip to Asia, Putin emphasized the centrality of state and societal solidarity: “In the political sphere we managed to get all the main political forces in society to unite (ob’yedinilis’) around the idea of restoring a normal and viable state. I think that has been the basis of our success. It was precisely lack of unity (fragmentation, razobshchennost’) that hindered us throughout the 1990s.”
In his 2016 address, in the wake of the 2014 Ukrainian crisis and Russian intervention in the civil war, Putin began with a salute to national solidarity and patriotism that he claimed existed and reiterated the point several times:
Russia’s people have once again convincingly proved that they are capable of responding to difficult challenges, upholding and defending the country’s national interest, sovereignty and independent course…
I have already said it publicly several times but would like to repeat it.
Citizens have united – and we can see this, and I must say thank you to our citizens for this – around patriotic values, not because everyone is happy, that everything suits them. No, there are enough difficulties and problems now. But there is an understanding of their reasons, and most importantly, the confidence that together we will surely overcome them. Willingness to work for Russia’s sake, heartfelt, sincere concern for her – that is what lies at the heart of this unification. …
(T)he importance of mutual support, cohesion, unity is highly valued.
We are not talking, of course, about any dogmas, about ostentatious, false unity, all the more about the compulsion to a certain worldview – all this was in our history, as you well know, and we are not going to go back to the past. …
I repeat, when we talk about solidarity and unity, we mean the conscious, natural consolidation of citizens for the sake of the successful development of Russia.
Can meaningful strategic goals be achieved in a fragmented society? Is it possible to solve these problems with a parliament, where instead of productive work there are contests of ambitions and fruitless bickering?
Is it possible to develop with dignity on the shaky soil of a weak state and a weak-willed government controlled from the outside, which has lost the trust of its citizens? The answer is obvious: of course not” (“Poslanie Prezidenta Federal’nomu Assembleyu,” Kremlin.ru, 1 December 2016, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/53379, last accessed on 3 June 2021).
The already mentioned National Unity Day is one way of promoting the norm of solidarity in Russian political culture, and solidarism is also being articulated across much of the general culture and political discourse. Russia’s official National Security Strategy now puts maintaining solidarism near the top of the national security agenda. The need to strengthen “the internal unity and political stability” of the country appears on the second line of Russia’s July 2021 Strategy immediately after the strategy’s first policy aim—strengthening Russia’s “defense capacity.” Indeed, internal solidarity is paired with security vigilance throughout the new Strategy (Strategiya natsional’noi bezopasnosti Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Kremlin.ru, 2 July 2021, p. 1, http://static.kremlin.ru/media/events/files/ru/QZw6hSk5z9gWq0plD1ZzmR5cER0g5tZC.pdf).
The norm of and aspiration to solidarity are expressed by a host of individual and organizational actors in politics, arts, and sciences from across a large part of Russia’s political spectrum. The ROC, which commands influence over a large portion of the Russian public and is a key ally of Putin and the state, remains an indispensable proselytizer of solidarism as it has been throughout Russian history. ROC Patriarch Kirill noted in an April 2021 sermon: “The unity of the people depends on the correct understanding by the authorities. God grant that unity continuously strengthens in our people” (Andrei Mel’nikov, “Patriarkh Kirill proiznes propoved’ pro ‘raba na galerakh,” Nezavisimya gazeta, 19 April 2021, http://www.ng.ru/kartblansh/2021-04-19/3_8132_kartblansh.html, last accessed on 31 May 2021). The Patriarch views the Church’s VRNS or, as he refers to it, ‘the Sobor’ (even equating it with the ancient zemskie sobory), as an instrument for unifying Russians. In his publication “About Meanings”, he hailed the institution as “a unique platform for nationwide discussion,” conducting “research on developing a united or “solidary society” [Patriarkh Moskovskii i vsey Rusi Kirill, O Smyslakh (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskoi Patriarkhii, 2018), p. 62].
In scholarly fields such as philosophy, history, and the social sciences there are also ample articulations of the aspiration to, or assertion of the existence of Russian solidarity. The Eurasianist Panarin, like the 19th century’s Slavophiles, looked back to the Muscovite period as the historical height of Russian solidarity. Ivan III and the founders of the Muscovite state were “harsh realists” who understood the need for unified power – a state – to protect the lower-class elements from the boyars’ arbitrariness. Without this coerced solidarity through centralized authority, there would have reigned “the cruelest boyar arbitrary rule, internal wars, times of troubles, and, in the end, conquest and slavery” [A. S. Panarin, Pravoslavnaya tsivilizatsiya v global’nom mire (Moscow: Algoritm, 2003), p. 252]. In the 21st century, Panarin sees Russia and its capacity to construct civlizations as the potential for a “great alternative” to a Westernized world. In order to exercise its “capacity to form large interethnic syntheses,” Russia’s people and intelligentsia must be “welded together” to form a united, whole society and culture [A. S. Panarin, Revansh Istorii: Rossiiskaya strategicheskaya initsiativa v XXI veke (Moscow: Logos, 1998), pp. 16 and 362]. Aleksandr Dugin, in his ‘fourth political theory’ of “Dassein” or “being”, Aleksandr proposes a return to a hyper-centralized, even mono-organizational state-society encompassing all of society and social, cultural, religious, and political activity. In his “global holy Empire of the End” – a “Platopolis” and “existential State” – there would be no political parties, no democracy, no bourgeoisie, no private property, no nations (“a subjective, bourgeois and historically unnecessary reality”), no nationalism, and no “contemporary State,” which are “bourgeois abberations subject to destruction” [Aleksandr Dugin, Chetvertyi put’: Vvedienie v chetvertuyu politicheskuyu teoriyu (Moscow: Academicheskii proekt, 2014), pp. 62-4].
Almost on cue in the early 2000s Russian literature changed over from themes of chaos, dystopia and disunity to those of national solidarity, in particular on the communist and national wings of political spectrum and in pro-Putin circles. This is where the norm of national political, cultural, and ontological unity is held most dear. The most prominent fiction writers of the communo-nationalist, ‘red-brown’ mix combining the far ends of the ideological spectrum are Alexander Prokhanov and Zakhar Prilepin.
For the national Stalinist Prokhanov, pluralism becomes dystopia and solidarity of the people under the state is utopia. He noted in a television interview that the state is the highest value, and in it “the people accumulates its capacity for historical creativity” (“03 Marta 2013 goda v programme ‘Pozner’ Aleksandr Prokhanov,” VladimirPozner.ru, http://vladimirpozner.ru/?m=201303&paged=2, last accessed on 1 June 2021). Drawing on a primordial kind of solidarity and rejecting pluralism is dissolution and hell, Prokhanov’s dystopian novels of the 1990s are filled with multiple sub-worlds and political ideologies (Il’ya Kukulin, “Reaktsiya dissotsiatsii: Legitimatsiya ul’trapravogo diskursa v sovremennoi rossiisjoi literature,” in Laryuel’, ed., Russkii natsionalizm: sotsial’nyi i kul’turnyi kontekst, pp. 257-338, at pp. 329-30). Writer and literary critic Lev Danilkin, reviewing Prokhanov’s novel Inscription (Nadpis’) notes his location of heroism not in the lonely battle of survival against the all-encompassing state, as in Pushkin’s ‘Bronze Horseman’, but in serving the leviathan because it is the only salvation from disunity (“secure the low temperature in the refrigerator”) and the only guarantor of “the country’s territorial tselostnost’, protection of the ethnos, and resurrection of the fathers” (Kukulin, “Reaktsiya dissotsiatsii: Legitimatsiya ul’trapravogo diskursa v sovremennoi rossiisjoi literature,” p. 327, citing L. Danilkin, Prokhanov A. Nadpis’, Afisha, http://msk.afisha.ru, 2 June 2005).
Zakhar Prilepin, one of the most prolific and popular writers in Russia over the last decade (along with Pelevin are Prokhanov, Boris Akunin, and Darya Dontsovaya), has also struck notes of national solidarity. Prilepin is a writer, poet, philologist, publicist, and political figure, who has also dabbled in music, film, and theater and won numerous state and private awards for his writing. His best best-selling novel, The Abode (Obitel’), was put on screen as an eight-part series by the state television channel ‘Rossiya-1’ in 2021. The novel resurrects the dystopian despair of the 1990s through the prism of the Soviet wards and Cheka police wardens at a Stalinist labor camp on the far north island of the Solovetskii Monastery, where Father Florenskii and thousands of others served time. Russia’s difficulty in healing the wounds of the Soviet meatgrinder, according to Prilepin, are not so much the result of division, contrary to the polarization expressed in Anna Akhmatova’s famous words regarding two Russias – the oppressed and oppressors – looking at each other face-to-face ready to pounce. Prilepin proposes the commonality and uniformity rather than difference between communism’s perpetrators and victims: “The executioner and the victim are indistinguishable from each other, equally cruel and equally disgusting” (Alexander Kuz’menkov, “Tufta, grazhdanin nachal’nik…,” Literaturnaya gazeta, No. 32, 5 August 2015, https://lgz.ru/article/-32-6520-5-08-2015/tufta-grazhdanin-nachalnik/, last accessed on 4 June 2021). They are the same, they are one, and they made the revolution and its consequences together. Russia remains whole and impenetrable. The Bolshevik experience is just another Smuta, after which little changes. It “is like a Solovetsky boulder: you can’t get inside it” [Zakhar’ Prilepin, Obitel’ (Moscow: AST, 2014), p. 390]. The Abode tells us that Russia’s history demonstrates her metaphysical tselostnost’. Russia is complete, though not pretty, and not even God can change it.
Russian cinematography, which is semi-autonomous by virtue of receiving significant state funding, has also made contributions to support the idea of national solidarity. Obviously, the call for national unity is used by the state often as a political message designed to stigmatize those who deviate from the Kremlin’s policy line or are in more general opposition to the present order. A nod to solidarism is director Vladimir Khotinenko’s 2007 historical film, 1612, dedicated to the Russian national uprising against the Poles during the Smuta. 1612 was released with great fanfare to coincide with Russia’s third annual National Unity Day. The film’s implicit but obvious theme of national unity is supplemented by a message of interethnic solidarity for contemporary political purposes; its two main heroes are an ethnic Russian and his sidekick, an ethnic Tatar.
National solidarity is an even more explicit message in the 2019 blockbuster about the Decembrist revolt, Union of Salvation (Soyuz spaseniya). The film’s opening scene is a subtle invocation of Russia’s ontological security, reinforcing the view that Russian identity and culture differ from and reject Western ones represented by Napoleon. As the film opens, the French emperor hails the benefits of freedom and the greatness of the French nation to a Russian gymnasium student in France, the future Decembrist Nikita Muravev. Muravev responds that he agrees but adds: “But I am Russian.” This represents rejection not just of the foreign element of Western values but of a divisive alternative to the identity and cultural choice made by the whole of Russia. The film’s final scene is a homage to national political solidarity. During his execution by hanging, Muravev has a vision. He and the other conspirators are shown joining with Tsar Nicholas I (who refused to commute their sentences) in revelry, drinking, toasting each other, clinking their glasses, and laughing together. The bitter, sanguine message could not be clearer. This kind of solidarity was and is possible in Russia, but cultural diffusion bequeaths ideological confusion, political opposition, revolt and tragedy to all, but most of all to those very liberals who break from the whole destroying solidarity. Indeed, today’s Russian liberals have reacted negatively to the film. A leading member of the liberal Yabloko party’s St. Petersburg branch labeled the film “okhranitel’skoe” – a word which can be translated as ‘vigilant’, ‘security-vigilant’, ‘state security-oriented’ and the like – and made for “okhranitel’skie motives” (Boris Vyshnevskii, Facebook, 6 January 2020, 10:08PM, www.facebook.com/visboris/posts/2645685765509585).
Today a flood of new works express the revived Russian tselostnost’ in all its types — monist, universalist, communalist, historical, and, of course, our solidarism or solidarist tselostnost’. A striking example is Aleksandr Bokhanov’s 2023 The Russian Idea, a title modelled on the classic work by Nikolai Berdyaev of the same name. Bokhanov’s solidarism is most often articulated through a historical lens, examples of which he draws upon precisely because he adheres to the idea of Russian solidarism, which he on occasion states directly as his own. Thus, Russian culture derives from ancient Eastern Orthodoxy, while Bokhanov himself proposes a “cosmological approach” and “Christ-centric perspective” for understanding this [Aleksandr Bokhanov, Russkaya ideaya (Moscow: Prospekt, 2023), pp. 7-8 and 12-13]. An example of the former, historical perspective is his quotation from Bishop of Kherson and Odessa Nikanor (Brovkovich) (1827-1890). Bokhanov’s basic point is that Eastern Orthodoxy is the foundation stone of all Russian culture. Russian national identity emerged not so much from a common ethnicity but as a “church nationality, Christian land, and Orthodox unity, reinforced and inspired by the ideal of faith and the promise of Christian godliness as the highest aspiration of earthly existence” (Bokhanov, Russkaya ideaya, p. 29). Thus, as I argue, Russian tselostnost’ is rooted in the monism of Christianity, in particular Russian Orthodoxy, and evidence of this comes from Bokhanov’s point that Russian distinctiveness from Western culture and religion is rooted in Byzantine Orthodoxy’s defense of the unity of God the Father and God the Son (Christ) and the idea of filolique in which the Holy Spirit is seen as flowing from both. Thus, “(i)n its genesis phase Russian-Orthodox consciousness demonstrated tselostnost’ of principles and concepts” as well as that comprehensiveness of representations and norms that in future deepened and spread” (Bokhanov, Russkaya ideya, p. 103).
Solidarism in the political and politically related realms emerges from this tselostnost’ or integrality of thinking. The following quote from Bokhanov’s work touches both on political-state solidarity and cultural-ontological solidarity: “The Orthodox Church brought from Orthodox Byzantium to Rus’ the idea of a great prince as a ruler placed by God, a governor and supreme arbiter of the peoples under his authority, and the idea of the state. The Church еstablished the unity of the people’s self-awareness, having connected the people by unity of faith” (Bokhanov, Russkaya ideya, p. 103, see also p. 524). There is a clear rejection of the West in such works. Thus, for Bokhanov, New York’s Statue of Liberty is “an ugly cyclops of a structure,” an artificial image of freedom which pales in the face of the Russian idea of freedom “in the image of Christ, imparting the highest spiritual content to earthly existence of mankind” (Bokhanov, Russkaya ideya, p. 103). Russians have always defended their freedom and been vigilant about their unity, rebuffing outsiders’ efforts to impose their values on Russians: “Russians never forced others to accept Orthodoxy, but always reacted very painfully to any attempts to tempt compatriots with foreign and alien customs and rituals” (Bokhanov, Russkaya ideya, p. 210). Reality becomes myth, as Russian Orthodoxy’s 17th century schism was provoked by foreigners—the ‘Greek party’ of clerics from abroad (Bokhanov, Russkaya ideya, p. 291 and Hahn, Russia’s Western Dilemma, pp. 102-13). Russia’s great writer and thinker, Lev Tolstoy, was unable to see that the Russian people and authorities “existed in a united space of meaning.” “The liturgical unity in Christ of the ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ created and held for the great ethnocultural phenomenon — Russia — for many centuries” (Bokhanov, Russkaya ideya, p. 524).
When one adds to Russia’s revived traditions of Western-focused security vigilance and internal solidarism the rallying effect of an external threat such as a war, the result is cemented national cohesion and hyper-mobilization against the enemy. Evidence since February 2022 abound. Despite the initial exodus of some draft age Russian men with their families in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion in February 2024, the ‘special military operation’ has fuelled a massive volunteer movement that amounts to some 30,000 volunteers per month. Moreover, the exodus has ended, and a mass return of more than half and as many as three-quarters of those who exited has occurred. Many are reportedly embittered by their experience in the West.
As of March 2024, 87 percent remained nearly unanimous in their approval of Putin at 87 percent, while 73 percent approved of the direction in which Russia is moving (https://www.levada.ru ). Although 51 percent of the population support beginning peace negotiations (that Putin has repeatedly stated he is ready to begin) versus 39 percent supporting continuation of the ‘special military operation’ as of April 2024, Russians also strongly support the war today (April 2024) at a level of 75 percent, with only 8 percent firmly opposed (9 percent are somewhat opposed and 9 percent are undecided) (www.levada.ru/2024/05/16/konflikt-s-ukrainoj-massovye-otsenki-aprelya-2024-goda/). Moreover, the willingness to fight in Ukraine is fuelled not by some Ukrainian solidarism or any ubiquitous feeling of solidarity but rather an individual calculus of one’s family being in danger as a result of the Russian invasion. KMIS surveys suggest that in western Ukrainian regions, where the physical threat is much reduced, only 25 percent want the war to continue, while 55 percent of those in regions near the front want this (https://www.ekhokavkaza.com/a/32913584.html?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR36DL6YAuo3bkP2cpjXSK_2E0cf9j9epSQi36pLYGSlYfSPVe6cs-3GTPk_aem_AfUweMDbMzqbgd90FphG6mN-Ddan7buEYvJ0Po1DCeWRVfPpFUHf3jY4iBjpn3xRWmJkLeOy0tJ6sgSqm862fol). Russians are under much less direct threat from the war’s violence, and yet they are as willing to continue the fight and more willing to volunteer or submit to the draft to fight.
There also is evidenced nearly national unanimity — solidarity — in regard to the importance of patriotism, and it is driven in good part by events in Ukraine. Russians, almost to a person, 94 percent, consider themselves patriots, reflecting Russian solidarity in action. Much of this new Russian patriotism and even solidarism is directly related to the Ukrainian crisis. The results of a March 2024 survey by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) showed: “The level of patriotism among Russians is higher than ever: today, 94% of our fellow citizens consider themselves patriots, including 62% who are absolute patriots (plus 10 percentage points over the last year), an all-time high since data began to be collected. In general, the trend towards complete patriotism started in the fall of 2014, when the share of ‘absolute’ patriots for the first time in a long time significantly exceeded the share of [people claiming to be] ‘somewhat’ patriots (48% vs. 36%)… Respondents believe that loving your homeland means taking pride in Russia, defending it, helping it grow and knowing its history and culture. According to Russians, you know someone loves their country if they try to be a decent, responsible, honest and loyal person” (https://tass.com/society/1767861).
CONCLUSION
Putting aside issues such as a strong industrial base and defense budgets, a long history of military traditions, and even run-of-the-mill patriotism, other key reasons Russia is performing well in and likely to win the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War are its political culture’s value of solidarism, which comes in many forms, and its strategic culture’s value of security vigilance, one mostly focused on Western threats historically. Ukraine is and, despite its new configuration, remains a divided, contentious society. Culturally, Ukrainians pride themselves for being the successors of the rather anarchic Cossacks, a legacy they have appropriated with limited historical justification. The base of Ukrainian nationalism and origins of its rise — in all its various, often dark neofascist colors — is located in western Ukraine. What do Lvov, Volyn, or Ternopol’, not to mention Transcarpathia have to do with Cossackdom? The present war can only but intensify the stresses on Ukraine’s far from united society. The timing of the mobilization law’s coming into force and the termination of Zelensky’s presidential term creates an unhappy dynamic for Ukraine’s stability, especially as Russia’s mounting offensive gains steam.
There once was a mutual solidarity involving both Russia and Ukraine. I have discussed Russians’ historical feeling of solidarity with Ukraine and its sources elsewhere (https://gordonhahn.com/2023/10/27/working-paper-russian-tselostnost-wholeness-and-ukraine-parts-1-5-complete-version/). Regarding the reverse relation, according to Vladimir Paniotto of Ukraine’s KMIS, “before 2013 there was a general unrequited love towards Russia.” He specified that KMIS conducted a survey with the Russian polling agency, the Levada Center, on Ukrainian and Russian attitudes towards each other and found 90 percent of Ukrainians had a positive attitude towards Russia and that Putin was the most popular political figure in Ukraine —more popular than any Ukrainian politician. Falling during the Crimean incursion and annexation, Ukrainian attraction towards Russia revived to 60 percent in 2017. As a whole, “(u)ntil 2014 Ukraine self-defined between Russia and Europe, and there constant vicissitudes, but as a whole we were more inclined towards Russia” (https://www.ekhokavkaza.com/a/32913584.html?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR36DL6YAuo3bkP2cpjXSK_2E0cf9j9epSQi36pLYGSlYfSPVe6cs-3GTPk_aem_AfUweMDbMzqbgd90FphG6mN-Ddan7buEYvJ0Po1DCeWRVfPpFUHf3jY4iBjpn3xRWmJkLeOy0tJ6sgSqm862fol).
Something intervened to break the remnants of Russo-Ukrainian eastern Slavic solidarity. Before and since then Ukraine’s leaders and its Western allies did much to undermine further Ukraine’s political, cultural, and ontological (identity) unity than to. Moscow’s policies played but a supporting role in this tragedy. Provoked into intensifying the Ukrainian civil war into a NATO-Russian Ukrainian War, Moscow has divided Ukraine territorially. At the same time, it has revived pre-Soviet traditional Russian political and strategic cultural values of domestic solidarism and security vigilance against external threats. Making war against the ultranationalist and neofascist-infused Maidan regime, Russia will need to extend these cultural values to Russia’s new citizens. It remains an open question how far Russian can go in incorporating Ukrainian territories and populations, secure solidarity, and inculcate solidarism and security vigilance vis-a-vis the West not just for Russia proper but among its new additions in so-called Novorossiya (New Russia). Moreover, solidarism is in good part an aspiration in Russian culture, as much as it is a reality. Russian history knows periods of great dissension, schism, internecine conflict, and civil war. So Russia must tread carefully in extending its security, power, self-identity, and ambition. As History teaches, overextending one’s ambitions beyond sufficient security and imagining exaggerated visions of one’s self and mission in the world can lead to illusions and temptations leading to quite grave unintended outcomes.
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NEW BOOK
EUROPE BOOKS, 2022
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RECENT BOOKS
MCFARLAND BOOKS, 2021
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MCFARLAND BOOKS, 2018
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About the Author –
Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu
Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021); Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018); The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.
Dr. Hahn taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group.