What makes a Russian: War as an exercise in idealism

What are we fighting for, and who are these “we”? That’s what my country has been discussing ever since the war with Ukraine started.

Here I have to refer you to one of my previous columns, where a figure had been mentioned - about 2 million of Ukrainians who had escaped to Russia. Well, it’s 3.4 million of them now, according to Moscow’s official statistics. And they are not only the people of the East of Ukraine, who are being habitually called Russians and whose homes have been destroyed in the course of their civil war. About a half of these 3.4 millions of refugees came from Ukraine’s West.

There is CNN, America’s factory of obligatory truths. CNN has, surprisingly, showed the world a TV story about a veritable caravans of cars, negotiating muddy roads, going from the West and crossing the line where the Russian-controlled territories begin. People carry bags, they take families and pets with them… Russian TV has followed and made several such stories since that time.

So who are these people in the cars – are they Ukrainian Russians? And, anyway, what makes a Russian, especially in Ukraine where they all use Russian language at home and everywhere?

Now, that’s a very good question. Let us not dwell on the complicated subject, like “what makes an American”. But what is an Indian? Here we have a place where there are more than 20 separate languages, not to mention several religions. But nobody is seriously claiming that there is no such thing as one India. Russia is 10 times smaller by population, but we have Muslims and Buddhists and Jews and anything else, same with languages.

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A war, any war, is a perfect catalyst for rethinking such questions. After all, wars are about sacrificing human lives for the sake of something of extreme importance, so it’s only proper that at such times we see a lot of people pondering the mentioned question – what makes a Russian and why anyone would risk one’s only life for, essentially, staying Russian.

The people who debate that subject are ranging from firebrand visionaries to cold sociologists. Speaking about visionaries, there is a venerated writer Alexander Prokhanov. I remember well our first meeting in the early 1980-s, when that man, unable to sit, was moving around the room of his flat with the grace of a dancer, telling me that my first short stories were pure trash, since I was writing about the wrong people. You have to write about real heroes of today, he was saying, shaking his shoulder-long hair in a bout of enthusiasm.

This wonderful man is still around, speaking out and writing, telling us about Russia as a land of a perpetual dream about a city lurking at the bottom of a forgotten lake, to raise one day in total glory from the waves, complete with shining temples and palaces.

Well, maybe that’s too extreme, to ascribe such mystic expectations to the whole nation. So I go on writing my novels about the wrong people, and a lot of these wrong people, in real life, are reading the ideas of sociologists (and poets) like Igor Karaulov, whose idea is that Russia is a team nation. A team is a voluntary gathering of very different people around this or that project.

The showdown between Russia and Ukraine, says Karaulov, is not a fight of two different nations for, say, a piece of land or the correct border. It is a conflict of two different models of societies, each being applied to essentially the same ethnic base. The Ukrainian project was basically about an artificial creation of a national state, a closed society of uniform people, with strict ideological and cultural standards imposed on them. While a Russian project is an opened one, it’s about a mobile society built along the lines of a production (or agricultural) team.

A team is opened for anyone, and anyone joining it becomes a Russian. The rest of the team normally respects the newcomer’s peculiarities. The state is responsible for the steady course of the ship, even when it needs to calm excessive enthusiasm of some folks. While the team is the ship’s driving engine.

Finally, says Karaulov, the project which unites a team around it, may be anything grand, including exploration of space. But initially it was mostly about populating lands, empty and unlivable, where nobody else dared to go. That’s like Siberia or the vast empty steppes of what is East Ukraine today, used to be called The New Russia in the times before the 20^th century.

So, the attraction of people to these territories, including the ex-Ukrainians gladly staying put in the New Russia or moving there, has to be explained by the fact that these are the lands relatively recently settled, so they gravitate to the same good old Russian project.

Well, well. That makes us look very American, but surely that “team version” explains a lot of peculiarities of our national character. In any case, that concept is way better than the idea of a shining city, hidden under the water. Or, at that, a shining city on an American hill.

Any war is a huge exercise in idealism, but then there is no nation without a dream. Here I may, very humbly, add a bit of my observations about some peculiarities of my nation. We are both socialist and conservative, from a Western point of view, and all that because of our very strange relations with a state governing us. On the one hand, the State is mother and father to us, obliged to take care of our well-being. On the other hand, every member of that Russian rag-tag team has a very distinct idea about things personal, where a state (or a neighbour) has no business to meddle. The moment it tries to impose any excessive control on us, we do not protest – we just smile and look down on these doomed attempts, until they fizzle out.

The author is a columnist for the Russian State agency website ria.ru, as well as for other publications.

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