Some news about Ukraine
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, August 2, 2024
Among the lies that are repeated as if they were obvious truths, there is one that Russia would have invaded an independent sovereign state, without specifying in any way that it’s only since 1990 that that so-called independent state was such, and that, for centuries until then, it had been an integrant part first of the Russian Empire (since 1764, but already between the 15th and 16th centuries it was included in the Grand Duchy of Moscow) and then of Soviet Russia. On the other hand, an Ukrainian was the perhaps greatest of the Russian-language writers of the 19th century, Gogol, who, in Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, wonderfully described the landscape of the region which was then called “Little Russia” and the customs of the people who lived there. For accuracy’s sake it should be added that, until the end of World War I, a significant part of the territory that we now call Ukraine was, under the name of Galicia, the farthest province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Joseph Roth, one of the greatest German-language writers of the twentieth century, was born in Brody, an Ukrainian city).
It is important not to forget that the borders of what we call, since 1990, Ukrainian Republic, exactly coincide with those of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and do not have any possible prior foundation in the continuous events of partitions between Poles, Russians, Austrians and Ottomans which took place in the region. Thus, as paradoxical as it may appear, an identity of the Ukrainian state exists only thanks to the Soviet Socialist Republic which it replaced. As for the population living in that territory, it was a varied ensemble constituted not only by the descendants of the Cossacks, who had migrated there en masse in the 15th century, but also by Poles, Russians, Jews (in some cities, before extermination, more than half the population), Gypsies, Romanians, Hutsuls (who constituted a short-lived independent republic between 1918 and 1919).
It is, therefore, perfectly legitimate to imagine that, in the eyes of a Russian, the proclamation of independence of Ukraine does not sound too different from the eventual declaration of independence of Sicily for an Italian (this is not a far-fetched hypothesis, since one should not forget that in 1945 the Movement for the Independence of Sicily, headed by Finocchiaro Aprile, defended the independence of the island by engaging in clashes with the Carabinieri which caused dozens of deaths). Not to think about what would happen if an American state declared itself independent from the United States (to which it has belonged for much less time than Ukraine was part of Russia) and entered into alliance with Russia.
As for the democratic legitimacy of the present Ukrainian republic, it is known to everyone that the thirty years of its history have been marked by election frauds, civil wars and more or less hidden coups d’état, to the point that, in March 2016, the President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker got to declare that it would take at least 25 years for Ukraine to satisfy the legitimacy requirements that would allow its entry into the Union.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, August 2, 2024
Among the lies that are repeated as if they were obvious truths, there is one that Russia would have invaded an independent sovereign state, without specifying in any way that it’s only since 1990 that that so-called independent state was such, and that, for centuries until then, it had been an integrant part first of the Russian Empire (since 1764, but already between the 15th and 16th centuries it was included in the Grand Duchy of Moscow) and then of Soviet Russia. On the other hand, an Ukrainian was the perhaps greatest of the Russian-language writers of the 19th century, Gogol, who, in Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, wonderfully described the landscape of the region which was then called “Little Russia” and the customs of the people who lived there. For accuracy’s sake it should be added that, until the end of World War I, a significant part of the territory that we now call Ukraine was, under the name of Galicia, the farthest province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Joseph Roth, one of the greatest German-language writers of the twentieth century, was born in Brody, an Ukrainian city).
It is important not to forget that the borders of what we call, since 1990, Ukrainian Republic, exactly coincide with those of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and do not have any possible prior foundation in the continuous events of partitions between Poles, Russians, Austrians and Ottomans which took place in the region. Thus, as paradoxical as it may appear, an identity of the Ukrainian state exists only thanks to the Soviet Socialist Republic which it replaced. As for the population living in that territory, it was a varied ensemble constituted not only by the descendants of the Cossacks, who had migrated there en masse in the 15th century, but also by Poles, Russians, Jews (in some cities, before extermination, more than half the population), Gypsies, Romanians, Hutsuls (who constituted a short-lived independent republic between 1918 and 1919).
It is, therefore, perfectly legitimate to imagine that, in the eyes of a Russian, the proclamation of independence of Ukraine does not sound too different from the eventual declaration of independence of Sicily for an Italian (this is not a far-fetched hypothesis, since one should not forget that in 1945 the Movement for the Independence of Sicily, headed by Finocchiaro Aprile, defended the independence of the island by engaging in clashes with the Carabinieri which caused dozens of deaths). Not to think about what would happen if an American state declared itself independent from the United States (to which it has belonged for much less time than Ukraine was part of Russia) and entered into alliance with Russia.
As for the democratic legitimacy of the present Ukrainian republic, it is known to everyone that the thirty years of its history have been marked by election frauds, civil wars and more or less hidden coups d’état, to the point that, in March 2016, the President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker got to declare that it would take at least 25 years for Ukraine to satisfy the legitimacy requirements that would allow its entry into the Union.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Oleg Mykolayovych Holosiy, Gogol and Pushkin, 1985. Courtesy of WikiArt. |
No comments:
Post a Comment