Why is the world revolutionized? It is striking that conflicts increasingly have their origin beyond economics and politics. Although these will continue to play their role, the cultural issue is getting worse. Now one would have to say, mimicking Clinton: “It’s the culture, stupid!”
We thought that the 20th century was the shortest (1918-1989) and that we had entered the 21st. But it seems that the cold war continues, which would not have ended with the end of the USSR (1991). Culture would be among its causes. Most social fractures have this component, not just the socio-economic one: American Trumpism, British Brexit, French unrest, and now the most serious conflict, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Russia and Ukraine are independent countries, but brothers. Putin is named after Prince Vladimir the Great, who from Kyiv introduced the Orthodox religion to the Slavic lands. In Russia there is talk again of Holy Russia, but Ukraine was before Mother Russia. Because Putin’s country has its origin in medieval Kyiv Rus, the first great gathering of Slavic tribes. Ukraine fell under the yoke of the tsars in the 18th century and then under the Bolsheviks in the 20th. Ukraine has been Russified, although since 1991 it is independent. But Russia was in the middle ages Ukrainized. An anecdote: listen to the spirited Second Symphony by the Russian Tchaikovsky. It is nicknamed Little Russia. But this is Ukraine, where in 1872 the musician, of Ukrainian descent, composed it. Or listen also to the end of Pictures at an exhibition, by Mussorgsky’s contemporary: it’s called The Great Gate of Kyiv. Ukraine, in the best Russian music.
Putin wants to control the plains around the Dnieper. It is the western flank of it, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. He has invaded the Ukraine, but he also wants to punish her. Zelensky speaks Russian, like him. It is not a civil war, but it is a fratricidal war within a great historical community of ethnicity, religion, language and commerce. With his cruelty, Russia is killing fellow warriors.
4
