Constantine Pleshakov: The Crimean Nexus

But Russians did see a contradiction, and to them it smelled of opportunism. Washington seemed willing to support any dissent in Russia—pro-church under Communism, anti-church under Putin—so long as it undermined existing authority. If the Western campaign of solidarity with the women of Pussy Riot had any practical effect at all, it was to compromise the opposition in the eyes of the pro-Putin Russian majority.

Obama’s ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul, certainly did not see it that way. He had come up with the concept of a “dual track” in Russia: dealing simultaneously with the government and the opposition. Arriving to Moscow in January 2012, he cheerfully introduced himself to the Russian media as a “specialist on democracy and revolution.” The timing could not have been worse: Moscow was going through the strongest anti-Putin protests ever. McFaul apparently thought he had arrived just in time for the start of the Russian Spring.

The Kremlin did not hesitate to make its displeasure clear. Harassed by government TV crews, who seemed to know the ambassador’s schedule better than his assistants did and shadowed his every move, McFaul eventually lost his cool, publicly called Russia a “barbaric, uncivilized country,” and in February 2014 angrily submitted his resignation—in the midst of the crisis his “dual track” diplomacy had facilitated.

Twenty years earlier, the then “pro-Western” Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev told Clinton’s Russia hand Strobe Talbott: “It’s bad enough having you people tell us what you’re going to do whether we like it or not. Don’t add insult to injury by also telling us that it’s in our interests to obey your orders.” Talbott’s assistant at the time, Victoria Nuland, good-naturedly commented: “That’s what happens when you try to get the Russians to eat their spinach. The more you tell them it’s good for them, the more they gag.” In his memoir, Talbott smirks: “Among those of us working on Russia policy, ‘administering the spinach treatment’ became shorthand for one of our principal activities in the years that followed.” [36] Talbott, The Russia Hand , 76.

When, at the end of the spinach years, Russia handed a landslide electoral victory to the xenophobic strongman Vladimir Putin, Talbott and Clinton acted surprised. Nuland, meanwhile, moved up in the world, making a name for herself in December 2013 on the streets of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.

Every person who has ever crossed from Russia into Ukraine on land—and until recently that was how most travelers did it—must have noticed a gradual change in the scenery occurring in the borderland. No natural boundary separates Ukraine from Russia, no mountain range or river, and the terrain the traveler negotiates stays the same—a treeless plain, occasionally made unattractive by overdevelopment—yet something changes, and at some point, still in Russia or already in Ukraine, the traveler is aware of having entered a different culture. The front yards have flowers, if not exactly flower gardens. Logs and brick give way to whitewashed walls. Streets are cleaner, the people louder and more cheery.

From a junction in central Ukraine—say Kharkiv, or Zaporizhia—you have a choice of continuing south or west. If you go west, aiming at Galicia with Lviv its capital city, you will encounter yet another cultural metamorphosis, perhaps best represented by the presence of Catholic churches, which the locals still call by their Polish name, kostyol . Continue west, and you arrive at one of the border crossings—into Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, or Romania. This would be Europe’s edge.

But if you have chosen the southern route, toward the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, instead of the Occident you would be traveling toward the Orient, its approach announced by the Turkic names of hamlets, creeks, and junctions. When translated, these names speak of abandonment, war, and drought. You are on what used to be called the Wild Fields. The Crimean Peninsula dangles from their underbelly.

When Moscow and the European powers clashed in Ukraine in the twenty-first century, the catastrophe continued a historical pattern. Theoretically, Ukraine’s sheer size should have prevented such a staggering loss of agency, but paradoxically, one could argue that for Ukraine, its size was its worst enemy: too much diversity, and too little time to bind it all together. Western Lviv thought of itself as Europe, eastern Donbass identified with Russia, and the rest of the country struggled between these extremes. Centuries of imperial rule by Austria, Poland, Russia, and Turkey left it in fragments.

The underlying reason for the Ukraine-Russia conflict is that both are offshoots of the same long-dead state: siblings with very different fortunes. One became an empire, another a borderland. It is hard to find another example of this kind of connection: Russia and Ukraine are joined more tightly than England and Scotland or the United States and Canada.

The first state of the eastern Slavs developed on the upper Dnieper River in the 880s. It is remembered as Kievan Rus’. A millennium later, Kiev is the capital of Ukraine; in Russian tradition, it remains the “Mother of All Russian Cities.” Ivan the Terrible of Russia claimed to be a direct descendant of the Kievan dynasty. [1] Ronald Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4.

Seeking unity for the loosely connected assembly of tribes and princelings, the princes of Kiev implemented a cultural revolution by borrowing Eastern Orthodox Christianity from Byzantium and then enforcing it as a state religion. The Cyrillic alphabet came from Byzantium as well. The idea was brilliant: the enforcement of borrowed memes put all subjects of the Kievan prince in an equal position. In the ecclesiastical writings and folklore of Rus’, this Kievan revolution is a focal point—not a mere episode in the nation’s history but its beginning. With their common language, alphabet, faith, early statehood, and the pantheon of saints and heroes, Russians and Ukrainians share a national creation myth. [2] “The Tale of Bygone Years” quoted in Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales , ed. Serge A. Zenkovsky (New York: Meridian, 1974), 65–71.

Not unlike other early states, Rus’ quickly disintegrated. The hundred years from 1146 to 1246 saw forty-seven changes of head of state, involving twenty-four different princes. The Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century hit Rus’ at the height of disunity, making the Mongols’ victory instantaneous and its consequences lasting. As a Russian chronicle stated in 1224, “for our sins, there came unknown tribes. No one knew who they were or what was their origin, faith, or tongue,” but they had already “conquered many lands.” [3] Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 38; “The Battle on the River Kalka” quoted in Medieval Russia’s Epics , ed. Zenkovsky, 193.

The southern principalities of Rus’ sitting at the edge of the steppe (a natural avenue for Mongol cavalry)—Kiev, Galich, Chernigov—were devastated, but the northern Russians hung on in the dense boreal forests of Vladimir and Novgorod. By 1300, the surviving Kievan elites, including the leaders of the Orthodox Church, had moved north. The south entered seven centuries of statelessness; the north eventually grew into what is nowadays known as Russia. [4] Subtelny, Ukraine , 70.

The name “Ukraine,” meaning “borderland,” initially meant the periphery of Kiev but gradually became the name for all the southern territories of the former Rus’. That was what the area had become geopolitically—contested land for Ottomans, Russians, and Poles. [5] Ibid., 3, 23.