“Russification did not start with the Soviet invasion; rather, the Soviet Union perpetuated the legacy of the Russian Empire. During the Tsarist times, Ukrainian language endured a number of prohibitions and restrictions…”
Oksana Lutsyshyna
In an interview published in September 2023 in The New York Review of Books, Jennifer Wilson, a professor of russian literature at Princeton University, discussed various aspects of russian culture and its relevance in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Wilson expressed concern that the war has led to the marginalization of russian literary and cultural production, arguing that this shift represents a form of cultural nationalism. She emphasized the importance of engaging with russian literature, including its classics. She cautioned against the broader dismissal of russian cultural works, suggesting that it might silence important voices from the russian-speaking regions in Ukraine affected by the war.
In response to Wilson’s views, Oksana Lutsyshyna offers a critical analysis that addresses the complexities of russian culture’s role in the current war. Lutsyshyna challenges Wilson’s arguments by highlighting how russian culture has been historically weaponized and suppressed Ukrainian cultural heritage. She provides a detailed examination of the historical and contemporary issues related to russian literature and culture, offering a counter-narrative to Wilson’s perspective.
Oksana Lutsyshyna is a Ukrainian writer, translator, poet, and professor of the Ukrainian language and Eastern European literature at the University of Texas in Austin. Photo courtesy of Valentyna Schneider
The war in Ukraine has shown that military actions are preceded and supported by the events of culture. During the years of imperial and totalitarian domination over Ukraine, Russian literature and art were elevated to the status of the best possible examples of creative expression, overshadowing Ukrainian culture or proclaiming it to be inferior (the most notorious example of this would be the infamous poem by Joseph Brodsky). Yet the “great Russian culture,” as it is known to the world, apparently does not stop the Russian troops from destroying Ukrainian culture – deliberately targeting museums, memorials, schools, historical sites, and libraries. In other words, Ukraine is dealing with the unprecedented destruction and murder of its citizens while also being engaged at the epistemic battlefield, facing a daunting task of exposing Russian narratives of cultural superiority and the claim that “art and culture have nothing to do with war and politics.” But, as a number of scholars (Ewa Thompson, Olha Maiorova, Valeria Sobol, to name a few) have demonstrated in their analysis of Russian literature, this is simply not true. Unfortunately, the idea of Russian culture continues to be weaponized – at times, even in Western academy.
In her interview to Nawal Arjini, published in The New York Review of Books, Dr. Jennifer Wilson expresses her worries that because of the war in Ukraine, Russian literary production, including its celebrated classics, is being marginalized. In her opinion, this is a manifestation of “cultural nationalism,” a conscious denial of Russia’s diversity, ethnically and culturally. Dr. Wilson adds that the indigenous groups that live in Russia “have been fighting Russian imperialism for centuries,” and therefore Russia is especially deserving of the world’s attention. While this argument may seem solid, a deeper look exposes it being based on political mythologies and incorrect analogies. The indigenous groups have been, indeed, fighting against Russian imperialism. They may not necessarily feel all that “at home” within Russia in terms of culture. Many of them have been consistently constructed as the “the Other,” the “not Russian,” “Asiatic,” and overall, racially different. They are not part of the literary or artistic canon on Russia’s cultural map. In other words, no indigenous writer is as important to the Russian imperial canon as Fyodor Dostoyevsky or Leo Tolstoy. Besides, lumping all the indigenous ethnicities together, without concrete examples, may be yet another way to add to the construction of an amorphous (and, consequently, culturally invisible) “Other.”
To further illustrate the point, we can take a look at the life and death of Albert Razin, an Udmurtian scholar and activist, who committed self-immolation in 2019 in the center of his city, Izhevsk, to protest against the indigenous language policies of the Russian Federation. According to Razin, Russian Federation did not support the Udmurtian language, cancelled the majority of the Udmurtian language classes in schools, abolished ethnic festivals, mocked Udmurtian traditions, and instigated rampant Russification instead. The conglomerate the world calls Russia likes to argue this both ways: to suppress those it culturally despises, and to simultaneously evoke them as an integral part of the country (and culture) when needed. Dr. Wilson, by failing to account for these complicated aspects of Russia’s relationship with its indigenous nations, presents an incorrect picture to the western reader. The quest of the indigenous nations of Russia should not be used as an argument in a conversation that, potentially, defends the cultural hegemony of the Russian imperial discourse.
Another issue raised in Dr. Wilson’s interview is the status of the Russian language in Ukraine and the problem of Russification; in my opinion, it also needs clarification and contextualization. Dr. Wilson evokes “the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine” that “have suffered the brunt of Russia’s imperial violence in this war,” and expresses her concern that Ukraine “silences” the Russian-speaking voices of the writers from these regions. She argues that Ukraine is “silencing voices on the basis of nationality and choice of language.” This is yet another statement grounded in deliberate simplification and the propagandist mythology of the day, perpetuated by Russkyi Mir. It is, seemingly, a very straightforward, easy to understand and digest: parts of Ukraine are Russian-speaking; people need to be allowed to use their native tongue; otherwise, important truths will be lost; all is clear. However, Dr. Wilson, by buying into this simple narrative, seems to be unaware of the historical reality. Here I refer to the militant Russification to which Russia subjected the countries it colonized.
What the world needs to see is, first of all, where these Russian-speaking minorities came from, what the history of their emerging is, and what choices they have made as of today in regard to their language of expression. Russification did not start with the Soviet invasion; rather, the Soviet Union perpetuated the legacy of the Russian Empire. During the Tsarist times, Ukrainian language endured a number of prohibitions and restrictions; two most notable cases being the Valuev Circular of 1963 and the Emsk Ukaz of 1876. Publication of Ukrainian books, staging of theatrical performances, or teaching and delivering public lectures in Ukrainian was forbidden. During the Soviet times, Russian was introduced as mandatory at all levels of schooling, with the teachers of Russian being paid 20 per cent higher salaries than the teachers of other subjects. After Ukraine proclaimed its independence, the argument about “defending the speakers of Russian” became a quick favorite with those who longed for the restoration of empire and the colonial regime.
And yet, the very fact of being a Russian-speaking Ukrainian is not a homogenous or stable identity by any means. On the contrary, it is usually a reflection and continuation of a transgenerational trauma. For instance, many survivors from the villages afflicted by the Stalin’s Holodomor (1932-33), when fleeing their villages and coming to the cities, were simply afraid to speak Ukrainian so as not to be refused work and food; these would be great-grandparents or grandparents of the present generations. Almost everyone will have a Ukrainian-speaking grandparent who spoke the language only at home, furtively. Many speakers of Russian, upon having read and studied the history of Ukraine without Soviet or Russian falsifications, reported having realized that they have been robbed of a part of their identity. Meanwhile, after the start of the full-scale invasion, millions of Ukrainians who did not speak fluent Ukrainian started to learn it and switched to speaking it. A number of prominent writers and intellectuals who wrote in Russian started writing in Ukrainian. Two striking examples are Olena Styazhkina, a historian and a writer, and Volodymyr Rafeienko, the writer who used to write in Russian, had publications in Russia, won literary prizes there, and who started writing exclusively in Ukrainian in 2014. His latest novel Mondegreen is about the stolen legacy of language, culture, and community: a crime that Russia has been committing in Ukraine for centuries. Historians already wrote about the issue of the Ukrainian East and its construction as “Russian-speaking”, via violence during the Soviet times, and via aggressive, propagandist use of mass media in the 1990s and 2000s. Some cities didn’t have any Ukrainian bookstores, and though the writers from other parts of Ukraine tried to go to the eastern cities, they were often not given venues for book readings. The same was true for popular culture and entertainment industries. Unfortunately, instead of shedding light on these complex processes and educating the reader, Dr. Wilson chooses to repeat the narratives about “defending” the Russian-speaking writers of Ukraine, without asking these writers whether they want to be “defended.” Olena Styazhkina and Volodymyr Rafeienko would provide a very short and unequivocal answer: no. They are by far not the only ones.
At the beginning of the interview Dr. Wilson contemplates about many readers’ responses to the war “by rethinking their relationship to a literary tradition,” in this case, Russian. She goes as far as to draw a parallel between Russia’s starting the war with Ukraine with Greece not allowing refugees upon its shore. “We saw six hundred migrants drown to their deaths off the coast of Greece this July, a completely preventable tragedy, and there were no calls to stop reading Homer or to boycott the films of Yorgos Lanthimos. …Why then are we seeing that precise response when it comes to Russia?” – she asks, establishing a false analogy quite in the epistemic traditions of propaganda. I don’t believe there is a need to analyze it in detail.
After the start of the war, there was much talking about the policy of what Russian and Russophiles felt was the call to “cancel” Russia, to use the term from social media. The best response to these discourses was offered by Victoria Amelina, a Ukrainian writer mortally wounded by Russian shelling at the end of June of 2023; she died on July 1. She said that the “cancel culture,” no matter how harsh, was no match to the “execute culture,” which has been the politics of Russian empire, in its many forms – as the Tsarist Russia, Soviet Union, and finally, Russian Federation under Putin – towards Ukraine. The whole generation of Ukrainian writers in the 1930s was killed by Stalin, and to this day we call it our “Executed Renaissance.” Victoria Amelina helped find the diary of the Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vakulenko-K., who was shot by the Russian occupying forces and who buried his diary in the garden, in 2022. In her foreword to Volodymyr’s now published diary, she recalls the moment of looking for the diary and fearing that she is “inside the new Executed Renaissance,” because Ukrainian writers are being killed and their works are destroyed. She wrote this mere weeks before her own death, also from Russian weapons.
Propaganda is the genre that thrives on catchy phrasing and simplifications: the simpler, the better. It is not concerned with the truth because truth is uncomfortable, messy, nuanced, and generally complex. History usually cannot be squeezed into two relatively compact and easy to read sentences; propaganda, on the contrary, does exactly this. If the reader has no questions at the end of reading, if everything is clear as day and easy as one two three, this most likely was propaganda. One would imagine that trusting the reader and writing something that does touch upon truth is admirable. And if not, perhaps Dr. Wilson might at least recall a famous Russian proverb, “простота хуже воровства,” which can be roughly translated as “simplification does more harm than robbery.”
Published with permission from the author Oksana Lutsyshyna
1- Use UNWLA’s Ukrainian Culture Decolonization Toolkit to promote Ukrainian artists in the U.S.
2- Use UNWLA’s Library toolkit to build lasting relationships with your local library and bring more books written by Ukrainian authors or about Ukraine on the shelves.
