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The Last Tears of Nikolai Gogol: Note on Ukraine and Russia

The article has been published in The Jakarta Post 23 April 2022 https://www.thejakartapost.com/paper/2022/04/22/the-last-tears-of-nikolai-gogol-a-note-on-ukraine-and-russia.html Kyiv, the legend has it, was a great capital,...

Written by Aboeprijadi Santoso · 3 min read >
M. Chaggal 1940s

The article has been published in The Jakarta Post 23 April 2022
https://www.thejakartapost.com/paper/2022/04/22/the-last-tears-of-nikolai-gogol-a-note-on-ukraine-and-russia.html

Kyiv, the legend has it, was a great capital, the center of ancient Slavia civilization at a time when Moscow was just a simple village. It changed as Moscow developed into the power center of the Tsar imperium.

What followed was Moscow becoming the very center of a vast Eurasian country as Ukraine, or parts of it, were encroached, annexed or occupied by Poland, Nazi German and the Soviet Union. During the 1917-1921 war of independence from the Soviet Union, Slava Ukraini (Glory to Ukraine) became its patriotic expression. In 1991 it became an independent state — the greatest landmass in Europe and Russia’s closest neighbor.

The country has been on a very long journey through great tragedies — a victim of Stalin’s forced agrarian cultivation, the Holodomor (great famine), that resulted in millions of deaths in the Soviet Union, including Ukraine and then being occupied and remolded by the Nazi German under the leadership of Stepan Bandera, who led the pogrom against the Jews and various minorities. In 2019 it arrived at a democracy under a corrupt regime led by the present elected president Volodymyr Zelensky.

At this juncture, the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s placed the country in a sensitive security zone as the West’s Atlantic alliance NATO started to expand while the Warsaw Pact was dissolved. “Not one [more] inch”, then-United States state secretary James Baker promised the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev as the Soviets accepted that the Western alliance would include the newly unified Germany.

NATO did expand, however, to cover almost all former communist states in Europe. There had been a war of words on the significance of the Budapest 2008 Memorandum that included Russia, which was supposed to guarantee Ukraine’s security. Yet in 2017 NATO confirmed its “partnership” with Ukraine.

As it turned out, Ukraine’s predicament was to become the arena of a proxy war of the two hegemonies. The legacy of the Tsar autocracy, but especially the prewar period of 2014-2019, left the country with ultra-nationalist, communist and fascist discourses, or their remnants, that had to deal with the new democracy.

Then, however, NATO and the European Union became involved, performing as the carriers of democratic and liberal values as the society was in search, as it were, of itself.

In such a context not only the Azov Battalion, a Nazi-like militia that became Ukraine’s National Guard, but the ultra-nationalists, the leftists and the liberals all played a role. Some US senators and European politicians too were active amid the political elite and local groupings – some presumably dealing with the ex-Soviet nuclear arsenal problem.

Such was the crucial 2014-2019 period that ended, amid the resurgence of Slava Ukraini, with a coup d’état, Russian annexation of the Crimea and the massacre of thousands of Russians in the Donbas region. Thus, the war came not unprovoked.

“I understand Russia’s worries,” the western media quoted Ukrainian president Zelensky as saying in early April indicating his readiness to have a “neutral Ukraine”. It was all reportedly due to Vladimir Putin’s pathetic ambitions to restore his country’s greatness – leaving one to seriously wonder why diplomacy was little attempted to evade the war.

No grand theory – The End of history or Clash of civilizations, perhaps— would explain Russia’s war against Ukraine without researching what really happened during 2014-2019.

Two proud nations, two languages, two traditions. None has exemplified them so sharp as Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), a renowned literary giant, a Russian, born and raised in Ukraine, who wrote in both languages. Many Ukrainians speak and write fluently in Russian.

The two nations that had many things in common had become victims of power and greed – with one leaving the other under the orbit of the greater power: the Tsar, Germany, the Soviet Union and now Russia. Any invasion – like the Suharto regime did to Timor Leste, in a different geopolitical configuration – is a great violation of a nation’s sovereignty. It should be condemned.

It reminds us a bit, though, of Aceh and Indonesia. Aceh, too, is a proud nation with its own state history.

Throughout my coverage of Aceh during the conflict for Radio Netherlands (1999-2007), I never found any Acehnese – be they pro-Free Aceh Movement (GAM) rebels, human rights activists or otherwise – who were unaware of Aceh’s history. After all, Aceh was the pioneer of independent Indonesia.

Remember Acehnese rebelliousness against the Dutch colonizers. Remember how its religious leaders, led by Daud Beureu’eh, organized in Persatuan Ulama Seluruh Aceh (All-Aceh Ulema Union or PUSA), were able to motivate society to rise in order to maintain its dignity, as the anthropologist James Siegel has beautifully described in his 1969 book The Rope of God.

Please note the languages, passion and slogans civil society activists used in Jakarta and in Banda Aceh in the early 2000s to protest the war and demand peace. The separatism that drove the Acehnese almost immediately after the fall of Suharto served as a symbol of new freedom, especially for the new generation, as well as an expression of the dream of a successor-state.

However, when this ended with the Helsinki peace accord (2005), it was not because of the devastating tsunami, but to save the Acehnese identity and dignity and the unity of Indonesia.

Aceh, in short, was a pioneer and few Indonesians would be able to imagine Indonesia without Aceh. The two are mutually symbiotic. They had had difficult relations sometimes but remain one and united.

Ukraine and Russia, by contrast, is a tragic example of different sorts of changing states that failed. Even 157 years after Gogol’s death, the two nations are still in rivalry to claim his legacy.

Now Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has disrupted their remaining ties. The aggression and bombardments have destroyed the cities and killed hundreds of innocent citizens. According to a United Nations source, 5 million Ukrainians have fled the country, leaving 3 million hiding underground. Mass killings, even genocide – not proven as yet – are reported. All unacceptable.

Ukrainians are now reportedly calling Russian “the language of the aggressor”. That would surely make Gogol rising from his graveyard with his last tears.

*** The author is a journalist residing in Amsterdam

Written by Aboeprijadi Santoso
Independent Journalist in the Fields of Anthropology, Political History, Political Science and Social History. Formerly with Radio Netherlands. Profile