COMMENTS
100 years ago, Ukraine was also attacked from all sides, and fell like a house of cards after external pressure and internal strife. A lot has changed, writes Morten Strand.
TIRED, BUT NOT EXCLUDED: The course of the war in the most devastated city in Ukraine, Mariupol. Photo: REUTERS / NTB
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Internal comments: This is a comment. The commentary expresses the writer’s attitude.
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After almost eight weeks with war, is no longer the question of whether Putin manages to take the capital Kyiv. But if he manages to take all of the Donetsk and Luhansk counties, the counties he declared “independent” before starting the Great War. Because the Ukrainians defend themselves like lions.
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So, why burst Putin’s project so loud that it is heard all over the world? Because the Russian president has attacked something completely different than what he thought he was going to attack. He believed that he was attacking Ukraine, as it has been for much of history, as geographically vulnerable, culturally and politically divided, and most often at war with himself. But instead, in his war, Putin met a nation that he himself has largely helped to unite.
100 years ago parts of Ukraine’s elites were ready to become independent when World War I left the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman kingdoms in ruins. The age of the nation-states had come to Europe. From Finland to Albania, a dozen new states saw the light of day. Ukraine was not one of them. Instead, Ukraine became the battlefield before anyone before World War I, and saw the Russian Revolution and the civil wars that followed in its wake. A total of 1.5 million Ukrainians were killed during World War II, the Revolution, and the Civil Wars. The border country was the same, Ukraine was crossed from east to west, and from the north, which “everyone” rolled over. And there was no talk of any dancing.
It was a wild chaos. When it was not foreigners who attacked and took political control of a stacked stunt, as Austrians, Poles, Russian monarchists, and the Bolsheviks did, it was the Ukrainians who fought among themselves. There were fascist and socialist-inspired regimes, and there were agrarian-inspired and anarchist armies, fighting against each other and all the others. The only historical case of something as anachronistic as anarchist territorial power or control was in Ukraine. The poor boy Nestor Makhno became an anarchist warlord, with machine guns on horse-drawn carriages, as an effective weapon. But the onslaught of Ukrainian nation-building fell like a house of cards. If the anarchists did not have the power, then it was anarchy that prevailed.
Now it can work as if the chaos has to some extent resurfaced, but this time with a positive dispute. Improvisation, and not organization, has been Ukraine’s strength since the time of the Cossacks. They are in many ways also the national role models of modern Ukraine. They did not need many days to saddle the horse and sharpen the sword, if needed. Now it is again the ability to improvise that seems to give the Ukrainians an advantage in the military confrontations with the Russian forces. The guerrilla war has been a success.
The Ukrainians have with good reason a deep skepticism of authorities. In the 1930s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin killed three million Ukrainians with hunger because he wanted to forcibly collectivize peasant land, while two million were killed by state terror. During World War II, eight million Ukrainians were killed. In one generation, more than 17 million Ukrainians had been killed.
After Ukraine finally got their national freedom as a gift, in 1991, it was the oligarchs who stole the people’s property during the privatization after the communist era. The Ukrainians therefore have a long tradition of managing themselves, without any state, which in any case does not do much good, on the contrary. There is one reason why President Volodymyr Zelensky’s party is called the Servant of the People, and why the President during his inaugural address asked the country’s bureaucrats not to have pictures of the president in his office, but of their own children, to remind themselves who they should be. serve.
The war in Ukraine seems to have released some of these spontaneous self-organizing forces that the Ukrainians have actually cultivated since the time of the Cossacks. Trust is between family, neighbors and friends, rather than government structures and hierarchies. But unlike 100 years ago, when these forces went in all directions, they are now going in the same direction.
The perfect hit that shakes Moscow
Putin wanted to play on the historical contradictions between east and west of Ukraine. But instead of being met with flowers by the Russian-cultural in the east and south of Ukraine, it is precisely these who now offer the most both military and civilian resistance to the Russian occupiers. In this war, both Zelensky and the people mysteriously seem to come to their senses. For the experience of the war shows that it is not so much Zelensky who rules the country, but the country that rules itself. It seems to be a fruitful principle in Ukraine.
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