In 2018, Serhii Plokhy, Professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard, published Lost Kingdom, an intellectual and cultural history of Russian nationalism. The book was written, Plokhy states, in part as a response to the events of 2014, to help explain why Russia annexed Crimea and started an undeclared war over Ukraine’s eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. After all, why would Vladmir Putin, Russia’s president, do such things?
Reading the Lost Kingdom this summer, I was certainly hoping for answers, but not about 2014.
Instead, I needed to know what caused Europe’s largest land war since WWII. Why were armies of tens of thousands clashing in a time and place where such evils had long since been overcome? Why was a stable and modern country brought near the brink of de facto annexation? And most importantly, how could we have let all this happen?
In the immediate aftermath of February 24th, commentators rushed to answer these questions. One particular sticking point in their commentary was the role of the West in Putin’s calculus. Was he provoked? Many argued that NATO’s gradual expansion into post-Soviet lands, coupled with similar movements by the EU, had pushed Moscow into a corner, forcing a decisive counter. Others argued that this was just the latest step in Putin’s nefarious plan to weaken the West; he’s been playing a long game, you see, and now he hits us when we’re weakened by COVID-19 and political infighting.
For several months I felt pushed and pulled between various competing rationalizations. All of them, however, felt detached from any intimate understanding of Ukrainian or Russian history. All of them were therefore ultimately unsatisfying.
In this context, Plokhy’s work has been a revelation. Despite coming four years before Putin’s invasion, Lost Kingdom has provided me with convincing answers. It does not sympathize with or condone the Russian president’s actions, but it helps explain the mindset that drives his choices.
What’s more, I think the book carries broader significance – potentially helping us understand much more than just the geopolitics of the post-Soviet sphere. But we’ll get to that a little later.
The book
To cut a very long and complicated story short, the basic thrust of the book is that the history of Russian nationalism has long been driven by an evolving desire to reclaim the sacred lands of the Medieval Kyivan Rus during the rule of Grand Prince Yaroslav the Wise (r. 1019-1054).
What happened to these lands? Well, be ready for a long march through Russian history (it will be worth it).
Following Yaroslav’s death the Rus was fragmented into many smaller principalities, leaving the nation vulnerable to foreign intervention. One of these principalities, the Grand Duchy of Moscow, managed to survive, slowly accumulating power and territory over the centuries. And starting around 1450, Muscovite rulers and intellectuals began to think of Moscow not only as the inheritor of the legendary Kyivan legacy, but as the successor of the Roman Empire itself.
This might seem strange, but it’s important, so bear with me.
After Rome fell to barbarian invasion in 476, Constantinople became the capital of a newly reconstituted Eastern, and Orthodox Christian, Roman Empire. When Constantinople itself fell to the Turks in 1453, Moscow was the last remaining major power that followed the Orthodox rather than the Catholic faith. Moreover, the Grand Prince of Moscow Ivan the Great married a Constantinople Princess in 1472, who could supposedly trace her lineage all the way back to the early days of the Roman Caesars. This union cemented the idea that Rome and Russia were connected by an unbroken line of continuity that ran through Constantinople. Moscow was, in this sense, the “Third Rome.” That’s why the rulers of Russia were called ‘Tsar’ – it is the Russified version of ‘Caesar.’
And this is just one example of how the Russian nation redefined itself over the course of its history, one of many times when new symbols and sources of legitimacy were incorporated as part of the never-ending quest to reclaim the Kyivan lands.
Another crucial moment came in the late 1600s, when The Grand Duchy Moscow (now called Russia) actually did take Kyiv back, as well as most of its surrounding lands. Job done, hurray for Russia, right? Not so fast. As you might expect, in the intervening centuries the former Kyivan Rus had changed quite a bit. It no longer spoke exactly the same language as Moscow, nor did it have the same culture or political traditions. And the same thing kept happening as Russia retook other parts of its ‘lost kingdom,’ including the area that would eventually become Belarus. The people in these places had an identity that was closely related to but still distinct from the Russia that had formed around Moscow.
The tension between the ‘original’ Russians of Moscow and the newly incorporated Russians from the territory around Kyiv and Minsk – known as ‘Great,’ ‘Little,’ and ‘White’ Russians, respectively – posed a question that successive generations would struggle to answer: where does ‘Russia’ begin and end, and what does it mean to be ‘Russian’? Is it a matter of language, of religion, of political citizenship, of geography?
Despite radical social and political changes brought on first by the 1905 Revolution and then more dramatically with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, these basic questions on Russian nationality remained unresolved. And no issue was more stubborn or emotionally charged than that of Ukraine – all Russians could agree, after all, that one way or another Russia began in Kyiv.
Putin has often repeated the fact that the Bolshevik founder and revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin ‘created’ Ukraine by granting it nominal independence from Great Russia. But the only reason that Lenin did this was because he recognized that there were important differences between ‘Little Russians’ (i.e., Ukrainians) and ‘Great Russians’ (i.e., those we would now just call Russians), and he worried about one group of Russians forcibly controlling another. As Lenin saw it, Great Russians had oppressed smaller people groups for centuries, creating an imperial apparatus that allowed them to dominate politically and culturally.
Throughout the Soviet period, however, and largely because of the policies of Joseph Stalin, Great Russian dominance within the Soviet Union only increased. In this environment, many took it for granted that the ‘Russian world’ extended far beyond the actual political borders of the Russian federation – indeed there were tens of millions of Great Russians living in places like Ukraine, Belarus, or the Baltic States. The most extreme Russian nationalists began to adopt an almost prophetic belief in the destiny of the Russian nation. For example, Plokhy quotes Ivan Ilin, an interwar Russian intellectual, in one of the most unsettling sections of his book:
Russia will not perish as a result of dismemberment, but will begin to repeat the whole course of her history: like a great ‘organism,’ she will again set about collecting her ‘members,’ proceeding along the rivers to the seas, to the mountains, to coal, to grain, to oil, to uranium. (327)
Putin is apparently a big fan of Mr. Ilin.
By 1991, Plokhy argues, most Russians could not conceive of their nation without including all the land that been acquired through centuries of imperial or communist conquest. Most especially, this meant the ancient lands of Ukraine. Such views were neither monolithic nor simplistic, of course, but on the verge of its collapse most people living in the Soviet Union (Russians and non-Russians alike) wanted the Union to endure.
But collapse it did, and it didn’t help things that the Soviet Union collapsed haphazardly and chaotically, driven mostly by back-room political intrigue than organic democratic processes. Indeed, the collapse of the Soviet Union threw the entire region into sharp economic and social distress for the rest of the decade. It is therefore unsurprising that, as they emerged from the Soviet rubble of the 1990s, most Russians had “enormous difficulty in reconciling the mental maps of Russian ethnicity, culture, and identity with the political map of the [post-1991] Russian Federation.” (x)
This dislocation produced a new geopolitical problem: “what should be the relation of the new Russian state to its former imperial possessions – now independent post-Soviet republics – and to the Russian and Russian-speaking enclaves in those republics?” (347).
At the dawn of the new millennium, President Putin took hold of the Russian state determined to resolve this problem.
Explaining February 24th
So, how does all this help us understand February 24th, and everything that has happened since? Indeed, to some the above history might seem positively irrelevant; how on earth could Yaroslav the Wise have anything to do with geopolitics in 2022?
Clearly, Medieval history and the Kyivan Rus alone do not explain why Ukraine and Russia are at war. But the long-term history of Russian nationalism presented by Plokhy does offer three critical insights.
1. Putin’s war is not about the West. Although he claims legitimacy for his actions by portraying the West, specifically NATO, as a great enemy and aggressor, in reality recent Russia-Ukraine tensions have very little to do with this. Indeed, we flatter ourselves if we think we caused this. And the idea that a territorially limited NATO would have prevented conflict over Ukraine is a delusion. Such thinking falsely presumes that policymakers in Washington, London, or Berlin could have influenced Putin’s mindset and ultimate ambitions.
One might alternatively argue that had the West better handled the collapse of the Soviet Union – perhaps by funneling money into the former communist states and by fostering democratic movements – then democratic Russia would not have descended into autocracy. Maybe. We’ll never know for sure. But the core geopolitical problem that emerged from the collapse – where does Russia begin and end – was unrelated to any Western measures or lack thereof.
If anything, the West should’ve stood up to Putin’s machinations a long time ago. Germany is the big offender here, having hitched its economy to Russian oil and gas for decades while ignoring the pleas of allies to diversify.
2. This war is fundamentally ideological, not about materialism. True there are major strategic and material interests in play, most notably tied to Ukraine’s grain markets, Black Sea access, and geographic position between Europe and Asia. But if Putin was playing a purely realist game, carefully calculating his moves to maximize Russia’s geopolitical position, he would have never thrown away fifteen years of Russian economic progress and alienated the last remaining NATO holdouts (Finland and Sweden in particular). We should therefore stop trying to make his actions seem more rational or calculated than they actually are. Such efforts dangerously misjudge and underestimate the dictator running this war – a man who feels the history of Russia (as he perceives it) strongly, embraces Great Russian unity uncritically, and believes in Russia’s sacred right to ‘collect’ surrounding lands.
Accordingly, any negotiation with Putin’s government to end the war must attempt to tackle these basic ideological conceptions. The trouble, however, is that you usually can’t reason with someone over ideology. And we definitely cannot reason with Putin about Ukraine – that is, not without jeopardizing the basic human rights and self-determination of the Ukrainian people.
The only alternative, then, is to try and deny him his prize and wait till his hopeless crusade topples his regime.
3. Starting around fifteen years ago, this conflict probably became inevitable. Specifically, we can assert two facts with strong confidence: a) given its long and oppressive history under the Soviet Union and the inherent economic advantage of the Western sphere, Ukraine was going to drift towards EU and NATO membership, and b) given Putin’s nationalist mindset and tendency for conspiratorial paranoia, as well as the broader themes of Russian nationalism, Moscow was never going to let Ukraine just drift away.
Indeed, despite many people who never believed Putin would actually launch a large-scale invasion (myself included), some observers connected the dots long ago, predicting the outbreak of war almost exactly as it occurred. And while I really don’t like using the word ‘inevitable’ when it comes to history, I do think the ghosts of Russian nationalism were inevitably going to come back to haunt Europe and the world – if perhaps not in this exact form and at this exact moment.
So while February 24th isn't the West's 'fault,' Western leaders should have been more vigilant and taken the threat of Putin more seriously.
Where do we go from here?
Unfortunately, Plokhy’s analysis suggests that the war is likely to drag on, potentially for years. But he gives some reason to be optimistic, at least in the long-term. Specifically, he portrays Putin’s nationalistic project as ultimately doomed: “the imperial construct of a big Russian nation is gone, and no restoration project can bring it back to life, no matter how much blood and treasure may be expended in the effort to revive a conservative utopia” (346).
In this sense, Ukraine might eventually resemble Vietnam or Afghanistan, countries where drawn out struggles with invading superpowers ultimately led to expulsion and (for the superpower) catastrophe. There’s actually a very interesting parallel between the current war and the U.S.’s own debacle in Vietnam.
In Vietnam, the United States believed that the enemy were only communist front men, fighting as part of a wider malevolent attempt to expand the USSR’s sphere of influence and operating with a narrow base of local support. In Ukraine, Putin thinks that the government in Kyiv is part of some malevolent conspiracy to fragment Russian lands, while the common people yearn for a return of mother Russia.
In both cases, the invader profoundly misunderstands why the other side is fighting. The Ukrainian people, like the Vietnamese back in the 1960s, don’t really care about conspiracies or titanic global struggles. They just want a country, even if that place is imperfect. Everything else is secondary. Putin doesn’t get that, and that’s why he will ultimately lose.
Broader significances
I said at the beginning that Lost Kingdom has broader significance outside of the immediate situation currently unfolding in Ukraine. I’ll end this essay by briefly outlining why.
If Russia’s current aggression is principally due to a dislocation of identity tracing back to the 1990s, we need to ask ourselves what other such dislocations have occurred or are likely to occur. Until now, this task has been largely neglected, as Western diplomatic systems have approached international politics as a series of game theory interactions, where the right balance of incentives and threats will keep yielding success.
In foreign policy, the West has projected its own assumptions and mindsets, forged in relative comfort and broadly guaranteed security, onto societies and governments with fundamentally different trajectories. For too long, Western policymakers have underestimated national identity, including Medieval legends about lost kingdoms, as a powerful force in geopolitics. Perhaps buoyed by Fukuyama-esque optimism and ‘End of history’ thinking, many leaders have acted as if history is linear, where the ghosts of the past stay in the past.
Plokhy’s book underscores this folly. He explains the reasons why the former-Soviet sphere was a powder keg, why an unresolved identity crisis pushed events towards war with a seemingly inevitable inertia.
This has me thinking a lot about where other powder kegs might lay hidden. And while it would be easy to point to China or India or Brazil or Turkey and fret about all the ways these countries keep us up at night, I think it’s equally important that we look inwards and think hard about what identity dislocations have been left to fester in our own socio-political systems.
Take the United States. The U.S. has no real territorial grievances to speak of, and no ‘lost kingdom’ to reclaim. But during the past thirty years Americans have struggled reconciling a different set of national mental maps. Namely, Americans have struggled to reconcile their perception of America as a fundamentally ‘good’ country, one unified in purpose if not in politics, with the realities of its past and present.
Indeed, as dialogue and controversy surrounding American realities – including the legacies of slavery, Indigenous genocide, foreign imperialism, and the questionable equity of American capitalism – has increased, the country has been confronted with a stark and disturbing question: is the United States a fundamentally moral and righteous nation? This question has helped drive the public into two fiercely opposed groups. Politics has reached new heights of rancor and bad blood, both sides feeling that the very soul of America hangs in the balance. This has led to fears of civil war and disunion, although its too soon to say whether such extreme outcomes are even remotely possible.
Like a fire bell in the night, Lost Kingdom warns us what happens when crises of national identity remain unaddressed and unresolved for too long.