‘Will the Slavic streams flow into the Russian sea? Or will it dry out? This is the question,’ wrote Alexander Pushkin in 1831. The road is from ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’, a triumphal ‘ode’ to Russia’s crushing of the Polish rebellion of 1830–1831. The poem is a defiant assertion of a tenet of Russian geopolitical pondering that continues to dominate the best way Russians – each politicians and atypical individuals – view their nation’s function within the lands that border it to the west: that of pure hegemon whose proper to rule relies on the pure ‘fraternity’ of Slavic nations, whose sources (cultural or in any other case) should be channelled in the direction of the imperial centre.
Pushkin refers within the poem to the bloody suppression of the Polish rebellion as a ‘family quarrel’. The identical concepts underpin Russia’s battle towards Ukraine. Putin is especially keen on the ‘brotherly nations’ motif and made some extent of underlining it in his latest go to to Alaska to fulfill Donald Trump. But such a view just isn’t the protect of aggressive militarists like Putin: main oppositionists equivalent to Aleksei Navalny or, extra lately, Vladimir Kara-Murza have additionally used the ‘brotherly nations’ rhetoric.
The picture on the coronary heart of Pushkin’s poem posits a necessary unity of Slavs that centres on Russia. The goal of the poem’s polemic was, after all, Poland, which solely a long time beforehand had been a formidable drive in east-central Europe and a serious geopolitical rival of Russia. Poland, in Russian pondering, was a treacherous member of the Slavic household that had bought itself to the Catholic Latin west, however which may very well be ‘persuaded’ that its pure allegiance must be to Russia.
However Russia’s oceanic capability goes properly past Poland. It encompasses the entire Slavic world and extra. As Putin likes to say, Russia’s borders don’t have any finish. In accordance with this view, the nations to the west of Russia, which primarily converse Slavic languages, are merely ‘streams’ that should ‘flow into’ Russia in order that the latter doesn’t ‘dry up’. In different phrases, imperial dominance over neighbouring lands and peoples is a precondition for Russia’s existence.
Pushkin’s Full Works, 1905. Picture M. Ruscio / Supply: Wikimedia Commons
‘To the Slanderers of Russia’ was one among Pushkin’s most generally learn and influential works in its day, and one among which he was immensely proud. At this time, too, it’s often cited in Russian public discourse. But it’s oddly uncared for in western Pushkin research, as a result of discomfort brought on by its imperialistic jingoism. Many western college students of Russian won’t ever come throughout this significant a part of the nationwide poet’s oeuvre, nor perceive fairly how central the concepts it expresses have been to Russian geopolitical pondering for the previous two centuries.
The imperial reflex
The concept of Russia’s imperial sea may not be central to the western Russian literature syllabus, nevertheless it does present itself in different methods: it’s basic to how data about Russia and east-central Europe is structured in academia and past.
If one research japanese European languages equivalent to Polish, Czech or Ukrainian at a western college, one will normally achieve this as a part of a Russian research programme. These ‘smaller’ languages are usually supplied as a complement to the examine of Russian, generally within the context of ‘Slavic’ or ‘Slavonic’ research. These language choices is not going to essentially be closed off to college students of different topics, however they are going to be meant primarily for these finding out Russia and might be institutionally sure to Russian research. The truth that they might not be supplied to diploma stage in the identical manner as Russian displays this supplementary standing.
The sample just isn’t restricted to language examine. It applies throughout disciplines from literature and historical past to political science and economics. Political science programmes centered on Russia will typically, for instance, educate the politics of ‘Eastern Europe’ or ‘Eurasia’ by way of their relationships with Russia, quite than in their very own proper. One solely want take a look at the names of programmes to see that these areas are considered as peripheries from which so many political, cultural, financial streams movement into the understanding of the central object of curiosity: Russia.
Formulations like ‘Russian and Eastern European’ or ‘Russian and Eurasian’ append particular person programs, BA and MA programmes, monographs and textbooks, analysis centres and entire establishments. ‘Russia’ is positioned on the centre, and the ‘tributary’ nations/cultures/languages are grouped collectively beneath a regional designation that primarily mirrors the historical past of these locations’ imperial subjugation.
This isn’t to say that every one those that run and educate these programmes (for higher or worse, I’m one among them) share the view of pure Russian hegemony over this broad river basin. The constructions of data manufacturing are sometimes of an inadvertent acquiescence to real-world energy hierarchies and the results of years of institutional bias and inertia, quite than a direct reflection of worldview. The loud and the highly effective entice consideration, and cash flows to those that purport to know the world’s necessary gamers. The huge swathes of the earth that lie within the flood plain of those unpredictable geopolitical rivers are much less worthy of our consideration. They typically sink unnoticed beneath the flood.
I studied on an MA in Russian and East European Literature and Tradition at College Faculty London’s College of Slavonic and East European Research. I took just one module on Russia (the others had been on Poland and translation research, and my dissertation was on Ukraine). I may have taken no programs on Russia in any respect, but Russia would nonetheless be named on my MA certificates. At this time, I educate on that very same programme; I’ve registered my dissatisfaction with the state of affairs greater than as soon as, and I hope, alongside like-minded colleagues, to vary it.
The constructions described above turn out to be much more questionable in contrast with the examine of different massive European international locations. We don’t discover the formulation ‘German and Central European’ within the title of programmes and centres throughout the English-speaking world, regardless of the traditionally dominant, and infrequently aggressive function of Germany on this area. Admittedly, colonial pasts do, now, typically form the best way we examine the tradition, historical past, politics of former imperial European powers. College students of French could properly find out about Algeria or Senegal, for instance, in relation to France; they could examine the colonial historical past and the postcolonial Francophone writing of those locations, and so forth.
There’s a essential distinction, nevertheless, between this and the best way Russia is taught: college students and students will encounter the relations between France and its former colonies by way of a predominantly postcolonial (or decolonial) method. The concept of making use of post- and decolonial pondering to Russia has existed for a while, for certain, however it’s nowhere close to as central and well-developed as it’s within the examine of different former European empires. If it had been, Russian literature programs would place Pushkin’s ‘Slanderers of Russia’ entrance and centre, not someplace hidden away within the footnotes.
Watery geopolitical metaphors weren’t the protect of Pushkin. His Ukrainian counterpart, Taras Shevchenko, additionally used them. In Shevchenko’s poem ‘The Dream,’ the unnamed narrator encounters, by the riverside monument to Peter I in St Petersburg, the ghost of a Cossack, who laments:
However my coronary heart is unhappy
To hover above Neva!
Ukraina, distant,
Maybe doesn’t exist…
I’d fly and gaze on her,
However God is not going to allow.
Perhaps Moscow burned her down,
And drained away the Dnipro
Into the blue sea.
For Shevchenko, the good Ukrainian river draining into the Russian sea just isn’t a matter of pure mutual enrichment, however of synthetic extinction. And this isn’t the one echo of Pushkin in Shevchenko’s work. His ‘The Caucasus’ is a savage satire on Russian imperial hubris within the area that’s the setting for Pushkin’s ‘Prisoner of the Caucasus’. Shevchenko’s poem encapsulates Russian concepts of ‘fraternity’: ‘From the Moldovan to the Finn/Silence is kept in every tongue’. There’s an echo right here of Pushkin’s risk to the West that, if it challenges Russia, then ‘from Perm to Tauris’ fountains/From the new Colchian steppes to Finland’s icy mountains’ the Russian troopers will rise.
Pushkin’s 1831 poem was necessary to his profitable rehabilitation with the Tsar after his youthful dalliances with progressive politics. It helped safe him wealth and standing and cemented his legacy amongst patriotic Russians. Shevchenko’s political satires, circulating solely in manuscript amongst trusted pals, had been used to condemn him to 10 years pressured navy service 1000’s of miles away in as we speak’s Russian-Kazakh borderlands, with a prohibition on writing and portray.
These poems’ name to return the voice to the unvoiced within the imperial encounter really feel much more in tune with the decolonizing spirit of the humanities as we speak. Certainly, the easy act of studying them subsequent to Pushkin’s ‘Slanderers…’ will help break the imperial bind that constricts not solely the examine of the nations that had the misfortune to exist subsequent to Russia, but additionally of Russia itself. But that is nearly by no means accomplished in our school rooms.
In direction of a brand new ecology of data
How may the structural voicelessness of the cultures subjugated by Russia to be confronted institutionally? Actually, one necessary step can be to root out the Pushkinian modes of pondering from how we construction our data of the world. We should cease pondering of Russia as a sea into which the examine of ‘peripheral’ cultures and international locations ought to movement. With a purpose to rectify historic imbalances we must always train ‘positive discrimination’ and provides these cultures additional house in our programmes. If we don’t acknowledge the violent inequality of the imperial encounter, or the legacy of invisibility that it brings to the colonized, how can we declare to really perceive it?
Can the constructions and establishments of ‘Slavic studies’ or ‘Russian/East European/Eurasian’ space research rise to this problem? Right here I flip to the central downside with Pushkin’s aquatic metaphor: it ascribes a pure inevitability to a really synthetic, engineered state of affairs. The streams of Slavic cultures (or, certainly, non-Slavic – one would possibly discover the Hungarian, Romanian or Baltic languages caught up in all this) don’t naturally movement into the Russian sea. Reasonably, they had been redirected in the direction of that sea by a brutal means of engineering – the digging of canals, the constructing of dams, by catastrophic floodings and drainings. We all know from Kakhovka {that a} dam might be constructed within the service of an empire’s financial improvement, after which bombed, and an ecocide engineered, within the service of that very same empire. None of it, neither the development nor the destruction, is pure, and none of it may possibly simply be undone. The identical goes for the methods by which we have now channelled and reservoired data.
A very good first step in addressing these issues can be to begin globally. Like environmental points, points of data manufacturing aren’t remoted and self-contained: what we do in our school rooms spills out into media discourse, coverage making and public perceptions. Establishments which are constructed across the concept of ‘Russia and Eastern Europe’, and even Slavic Research, are one thing akin to the fossil gasoline industries. If we wish to discover a sustainable and moral manner ahead, they’re not tenable. They functioned for a very long time, and we who made careers in them lived off them; however in fact they had been harming us (and folks in ‘the region’) all alongside. So, what would the tutorial equal of a inexperienced agenda in relation to the shatter zone of Russia’s varied empires?
We have to assume by way of extra complicated ecologies of data and search insights and truths within the world ‘peripheries’, simply as we would when researching local weather change. Societies on the sharp finish of the consequences of world warming, largely within the World South, could by way of their expertise and data educate us one thing about these results, in addition to find out how to mitigate them in methods that don’t reproduce constructions of historic domination.
In the identical manner, maybe we may contemplate world processes – cultural, political, financial – not by way of the examine of the ‘main protagonists’ of historical past, however quite of these cultures which have needed to dwell in and adapt to the devastating shifts in political climates. Can the geopolitical catastrophes of our day greatest be understood by solely finding out, say, the US and Russia? Or do Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan have one thing to show us about our world? And what sort of understanding outcomes from the selection of the previous over the latter?
For an institutional reform
If I imagined my preferrred image of the place Ukraine can be within the constructions of data manufacturing, I think about it one thing like this:
Ukrainian tradition is studied in a multivectored manner alongside the cultures with which it has interacted traditionally. Its tradition just isn’t a footnote to Russian tradition, it isn’t an possibility you would possibly throw in to a programme on Russia. The connection with Russian tradition should be studied, after all, however so should the connection with Polish, Turkish, Crimean Tatar and Jewish cultures. On the similar time, we should perceive Ukraine as a part of the European cultural ecosystem, plugged in to developments in Vienna, Berlin and Paris, in addition to in Kraków, Budapest and Prague. After which we should perceive hidden connections and parallels with extra geographically distant contexts – with Mexico, Taiwan, Eire.
To this finish, I consider comparative literature (or comparative approaches to politics, historical past and economics) as a greener, extra eco-friendly place for the examine of Ukraine and all these different locations we have to pull from the swamp of ‘Russia and Eastern Europe’. I don’t take into consideration the type of denationalised, depoliticised mannequin of comparative literature convincingly refuted by students like Pascale Casanova and David Damrosch. What I suggest, quite, is comparative research that recognise the truth and worth of the nation, of the distinct tradition that should be studied in depth in addition to compared, alongside the bounds, shortcomings and risks of the nationwide as a paradigm, and the significance of recognising broader connections, parallels and interactions.
I can think about programmes, publications and establishments that examine the world on this manner – the place being a specialist in Ukraine can be a bonus, an indication that you simply perceive necessary concepts and ideas from priceless views. It will not be a ticket to educational obscurity, forcing one to promote one’s data for its use in understanding Russia (I converse from expertise).
But when we fold the examine of Ukraine (or different international locations of central, japanese, southeastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia) into larger departments with broad disciplinary remits (Politics, Historical past, Tradition, Comparative Literature, and so on.), isn’t this simply condemning them to larger obscurity? Would they not turn out to be, to make use of one other aquatic metaphor, even smaller fish in a good larger pond? It is a real hazard in as we speak’s educational local weather, which is so oriented in the direction of simplification, rationalisation and revenue maximalization that it’s keen to sacrifice not simply ‘obscure’ European languages, however fashionable languages tout courtroom.
Even on the most pragmatic stage, that is short-sighted: in a world that’s more and more unstable, isn’t it necessary to have the ability to perceive the social, political, financial and, sure, cultural dynamics of the world’s hotspots? Shouldn’t politicians, coverage makers, NGOs and companies be inquisitive about how societies at battle exist? In how resistance works? In how statelessness and shifting borders form migration, identification, socioeconomic processes? Isn’t the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the marginalised of worth? If you’re bored with poetry, take into consideration drones…
My very own College has a dedication to ‘critical area studies’, which recognises hierarchies and world interconnectedness. It’s a nice basis on which to construct. However just like the obscure area of east-central European/Central Asian and so on. research as entire, we’re nonetheless too separate from different geographical contexts, nonetheless too inward wanting – and the centre to which we’re too typically turned is Russia. Bridges are wanted to assist us cross the speeding streams of geopolitical contingency and converse in regards to the intricate waterways of our respective areas.
Students of japanese Europe must face outwards, away from Russia, and look to different contexts; we have to begin seeing ‘our’ periphery as related in complicated methods to different elements of the world. We want extra programmes and modules the place college students are studying Taras Shevchenko, Lesia Ukrainka and Vasyl Stus subsequent not solely to Byron, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, but additionally subsequent to Tagore, Derek Walcott, Zora Neale Hurston, Najwan Darwish. And the identical goes for historical past, politics, social sciences and economics. We have to see our areas of examine not as confined to some imagined geopolitical river basin, however as perched on the watershed between many such basins.
I do know that any such factor occurs, often, right here and there. I do know colleagues who’re doing fabulous work exactly on this spirit. However it isn’t programmed into our universities, and it isn’t programmed into Slavic Research in its varied guises, which frequently appears to withstand exactly the approaches I’m describing. Right here, we proceed to be swept alongside down previous waterways, alongside Pushkin’s forcibly redirected streams, alongside previous canals that had been hewn in a special world. For that purpose, we’re blind to the methods by which water truly needs to movement.
