Be like everyone else. Don’t go against the current. Follow the general line.
Conformity as a model of behavior knows no national and temporal boundaries. It passes through eras and countries, and today’s Ukraine is no exception.
But the big war opens up new facets of conformism for us – and helps us to consider this phenomenon in all its diversity.
At the height of the war, in January 2023, Hero of Ukraine Dmitry Pavlychko passed away. On the occasion of his death, many touching speeches and warm words were heard, including at the highest state level.
And almost no one blamed the poet for the conformist work of the Soviet years.
Meanwhile, the late classic had to sing the praises of the Bolshevik leaders (“What in life warms me? Lenin’s thoughts are clear, Lenin’s wise words”).
They will praise the northern neighbor (“How good that the world has Moscow, my land, capital and hope”).
Stamps the national symbols (“So the disgusting bastards failed to poison you with yellow-blue pus”).
They accuse the OUN and the UPA (“But it seemed to me that it was not crows, but Bandera’s predatory executioners who flew to the abandoned countries to hide their bloody tracks”).
And they will even glorify the participants of the Afghan war (“For Ukraine, for the Caucasus, and for Russia, and for the new Afghanistan, those guys fell”).
Let’s be honest: a non-Ukrainian author with such a background would not have had any chances to be rehabilitated in our eyes. But Pavlychko was his own, and for his own there are other standards.
The conformism displayed by one of the aliens is a story of cowardice and opportunism. This is a guilty verdict, not subject to appeal. Arguments like “He didn’t have a choice” or “That was the time” don’t count.
But the conformism demonstrated by their own is a story about dramatic life circumstances and difficult human destinies. About understanding and sympathy. About forced decisions and compromises that no one has the right to condemn.
Gorky, Sholokhov, Fadeev, Tolstoy, Ehrenburg and even Bulgakov with his loyal play “Batum”: they are all perceived as servants of the cannibalistic totalitarian regime. Like the troubadours of the bloody tyrant Stalin, bearing their share of responsibility for his crimes.
Opportunistic works cover them with an indelible shame, and there can be no indulgence towards conformist writers. Because they are outsiders.
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Another thing is the chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR Tychyna, the deputy head of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR Bazhan or the winner of two Stalin Prizes Rylsky. They are not afraid of decommunization. Nobody is calling for their Kyiv museums to be closed. Contrary to the thesis about the Soviet occupation of Ukraine, no one considers them to be collaborator traitors.
They are theirs. And therefore they are seen as talented people who had to cooperate with the regime in order to survive. Although in the post-Stalin era, it was no longer about physical survival, but only about a comfortable existence.
The same ambivalent approach works when it comes to our contemporaries – not only public figures, but also ordinary people.
The Russian opposition is ready to find a lot of excuses for conformist Russians who do not oppose Putin and the invasion of Ukraine. Like, you need to enter into their position: people are held back by a powerful repressive machine, people depend on the authorities, people need to feed and raise children, and so on.
All these arguments are convincing only insofar as for the Russian opposition compatriots-conformists remain their own.
But for Ukrainians they are strangers. Accordingly, any attempt to justify non-resistance to the Kremlin regime is unacceptable to us.
A conformist Belarusian who does not protest against the use of his country as a Russian military foothold is scorned and disgusted.
But the Ukrainian conformist, who did not go out to protest in 2008, when Russian sailors used Ukrainian territory as a springboard for aggression against Georgia, did not and does not cause much indignation. He is his. And you can’t blame him for being the same as the others.
Moreover, when it comes to one’s own, conformism can look not only as a venial sin, but also as a laudable civic virtue.
After 02/24/22, wartime opinion polls delight Ukraine. Dry figures show how many of our fellow citizens have switched to the Ukrainian language; how many of them support decolonization; how many are ready to fight to the bitter end, etc.
But logic dictates that these patriotic impulses do not always come from the heart. In a number of cases, our compatriots are driven by the same conformism. Unwillingness to go against the current. Fear of being a black sheep. The desire to be in trend.
Sometimes conformists lack tact, resulting in out-of-place things like Heroes Don’t Die beer or Heroic Butcha Kombucha.
However, in general, conformist patriotism is perceived positively.
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Thanks to conformism, unprincipled townsfolk become situational allies of Ukrainian passionaries.
Thanks to conformism, a picture of national unity is created, which would hardly have been achieved only through sincere patriotic feelings.
But such conformity on the territory of the aggressor state turns into an absolute evil.
If in Kyiv the conformists unanimously switch to Ukrainian and renounce Pushkin, in Moscow people of the same psychological make-up speak out in support of the SVO and approve of missile attacks on Ukrainian cities.
Not because they wholeheartedly yearn for the destruction of Ukraine, but because they do not want to deviate from the general line and fall out of the trend. And from the point of view of Ukrainians, this spinelessness looks even worse than the sincere fanaticism of some Girkin.
Trying to measure conformists with one standard is pointless – especially now. During the war, double standards are as inevitable as the division of the surrounding world into friends and foes.
It is more important to decide who exactly to consider as one’s own, and who as a stranger.
Today, a consensus has been reached in our society on restoring the territorial integrity of Ukraine within the 1991 borders. But along with the liberated Donbass and Crimea, hundreds of thousands of conformists who have been loyal to the Russian government all these years will return.
Unlike the ideological supporters of Moscow, most of them will not leave their cities with the Russian army. As a rule, conformists are generally hard to lift. And after the de-occupation, the question will inevitably arise about who they are for Ukraine – their own or others?
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Conformist inhabitants in the occupied territories can be regarded as outsiders, as a light version of the Russians. Then their whole life after 2014 turns into an indelible brand.
They are to blame for going with the flow all this time. They are to blame for going to work and getting paid in rubles. They are to blame for not participating in the resistance and not sabotaging.
And you can see them as your own – compatriots who found themselves in difficult life circumstances and were forced to adapt to the Russian order.
And in this case, they deserve no less indulgence and understanding than the late Dmitry Pavlychko with his “yellow-blue pus.”
Although it is unlikely that any of them will claim the title of Hero of Ukraine.
Mikhail Dubinyansky
