Mukul Kesavan: Ukraine - a conflict between two transnational entities / Vladimir Sorokin: Putin sits atop a crumbling pyramid of power
Vladimir Putin anticipated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by writing screeds about the essential one-ness of Russians and Ukrainians, united as they were, in his view, by a common origin in the medieval principalities of Kievan Rus. Putin insisted that Ukraine had no real tradition of independent statehood and blamed Lenin and the Bolsheviks for inventing a Ukrainian nation by designating eastern Ukraine as one of the fifteen republics that constituted the USSR after the 1917 revolution.
Before the revolution,
Lenin’s fellow revolutionary, Joseph Stalin, had written an essay in 1913 in
which he defined the nation state and tried to distinguish it from other kinds
of States and solidarities. Stalin was keen to emphasize that nations weren’t
based on racial or religious communities. He argued that “A nation is a
historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a
common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested
in a common culture.”
Stalin’s definition is
important not on account of its accuracy (many modern nations, including India,
don’t fit every term of this definition) but because it captures the way in
which most people think a nation should be defined: serial
commonalities consolidated by an independent State into a political community
of citizens….
Vladimir Sorokin: Putin sits atop a crumbling pyramid of power
When Putin was put on
the throne of Russian power by an ailing Boris Yeltsin in 1999, his face was
rather sympathetic, attractive even – and his rhetoric was entirely sound. It
seemed to many that the man ascending the heights of the Russian pyramid of
power was an intelligent official devoid of pride and arrogance and a modern
individual who understood that post-Soviet Russia had only one
possible path into the future: democracy. He talked about democracy quite a bit
in his interviews back then, promising the citizens of the Russian Federation
continued reforms, free elections, freedom of speech, the observance of human
rights by the authorities, cooperation with the west, and, most importantly, a
constant rotation of those in power.
“I have no intention
of holding onto this chair!” he said.
In Russia, power is a pyramid. This pyramid
was built by Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century – an ambitious, brutal tsar
overrun by paranoia and a great many other vices. With the help of his personal
army – the oprichnina – he cruelly and bloodily divided the
Russian state into power and people, friend and foe, and the gap between them
became the deepest of moats. His friendship with the Golden Horde convinced him
that the only way to rule the hugeness of Russia was by becoming an occupier of
this enormous zone.'''...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/27/vladimir-putin-russia-ukraine-power
Ukraine:
India refuses to take a clear position on the Russian invasion
