The Institute for the Study of War reported little change on the ground in its daily update, so I’ll leave that to the end and instead call attention to some observations by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died fourteen years ago but had a sense of the divorce between Russia and Ukraine over the course of the last century. Here is what he wrote on the subject in volume three of The Gulag Archipelago:
Why are we so exasperated by Ukrainian nationalism, by the desire of our brothers to speak, educate their children, and write their shop signs in their own language? Even Mikhail Bulgakov (in The White Guard [see note 1]) let himself be misled on this subject. Given that we have not succeeded in fusing completely; that we are still different in some respects (and it is sufficient that they, the smaller nation, feel the difference); that however sad it may be, we have missed chance after chance, especially in the thirties and forties; that the problem became most acute not under the Tsar, but after the Tsar – why does their desire to secede annoy us so much? Can’t we part with the Odessa beaches? Or the fruit of Circassia?
For me this is a painful subject. Russia and the Ukraine are united in my blood, my heart, my thoughts. But from friendly contact with Ukrainians in the camps over a long period I have learned how sore they feel. Our generation cannot avoid paying for the mistakes of generations before it.
Nothing is easier than stamping your foot and shouting: “That’s mine!” It is immeasurably harder to proclaim: “You may live as you please.” We cannot, in the latter end of the twentieth century, live in the imaginary world in which our last, not very bright Emperor came to grief. Surprising though it may be, the prophecy of our Vanguard Doctrine [see note 2] that nationalism would fade has not come true. In the age of the atom and of cybernetics, it has for some reason blossomed afresh.
Like it or not, the time is at hand when we must pay out on all our promissory notes guaranteeing self-determination and independence – pay up of our own accord, and not wait to be burned at the stake, drowned in rivers, or beheaded. We must prove our greatness as a nation not by the vastness of our territory, not by the number of peoples under our tutelage, but by the grandeur of our actions. And by the depth of our tilth in the lands that remain when those who do not wish to live with us are gone.
The Ukraine will be an extremely painful problem. But we must realize that the feelings of the whole people are now at white heat. Since the two peoples have not succeeded over the centuries in living harmoniously, it is up to us to show sense. We must leave the decision to the Ukrainians themselves – let federalists and separatists try their persuasions.
Not to give way would be fool- hardy and cruel. And the gentler, the more tolerant, the more careful to explain ourselves we are now, the more hope there will be of restoring unity in the future.
Let them live their own lives, let them see how it works. They will soon find that not all problems are solved by secession.
(The quotation is courtesy of FlaglerLive.com, which appears to be a rather leftish site; it refers to Solzhenitsyn as a “reactionary”, a word as useless as “fascist” but popular among progressives in search of dismissive insults that have not worn quite so threadbare through overuse.)
Note 1: The White Guard, the debut novel of Mikhail Bulgakov (best known in the West for The Master and Margarita) is the story of the Turbin family, upper class Russians living in Kiev during the Civil War. Symon Petlyura’s nationalist insurgency plays a large role in the book. The author views it very unfavorably.
Note 2: The “Vanguard Doctrine” is Marxism-Leninism. “Surprising though it may be” is, of course, sarcastic.
In 1990, as the Soviet Union was breaking up, Solzhenitsyn published a long essay, Rebuilding Russia, in which he addressed the Ukrainian question at greater length. Joseph Pearce has written an enlightening summary of the great author’s views, which would not please either Tsar Putin or the Westerners who now demonstrate their virtue by pouring bottles of (Latvian) vodka into sewers and banning Russian felines from cat shows.
And now for the state of the ground war:
The military situation on the ground has not changed significantly in the past 24 hours. Russian forces continue to mass for renewed offensive operations east and west of Kyiv, west of Kharkiv, and toward Mykolayiv-Odesa but have not yet initiated new large-scale ground attacks. Russia has increased aerial and artillery/rocket attacks on civilian positions and infrastructure, including known evacuation corridors. Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted a second counter-attack in two days, this time near Mariupol. The Ukrainian air force and air defense forces continue to operate, inflicting damage on Russian ground forces and disrupting Russian air and missile operations.
It is hard to believe that nothing will continue to happen.
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