Special issue. “Shared history, divided memories”: this could be summed up the relationship between Russia and Ukraine, from its origins to the present day, the epicenter from which we are building this summer special issue. “Shared history” does not mean common history, and even less unique history. On the contrary, Russians and Ukrainians have followed sometimes identical routes over the long term, often parallel, and in opposition since 2014, if not since 1991. As for the expression “divided memories”, it rather refers to confrontation, to misunderstanding and the inevitable tearing between two identities, two nations, two conceptions of the State, which we mirror throughout this issue rich in lessons, characters and angles of observation and analysis.
The ambition of this special issue is simple: to try to dispassionate the debates around this very thorny question of the relations between the heirs of the Rus’ of kyiv, to try to get out of a thick layer of emotion. This is certainly legitimate – since the war of aggression that Russia is waging against Ukraine, if not since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, at least since the offensive of February 24, 2022 in the morning – , but it does not decipher its complexity.
Imperial software
The rift between Ukraine and Russia does not date from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, even less from the fall of the Tsarist Empire in 1917. Its first symptoms date back to the Middle Ages, when the empire of kyiv, common to both peoples, gave way to the beginnings of the Russian Empire, leaving Ukrainian territory to successive foreign dominations. And this is what the Russian political elites of yesterday and today do not understand.
In the name of an imperial software constantly updated for almost a millennium, the successive Russian powers can only imagine their direct neighborhood within the framework of a limited sovereignty. It is moreover by manipulating this memory, which it wants to share with that of Ukraine, that Russia launched its war of invasion against kyiv, as if the “little brother” did not have the right to live freely on its territory, to grow as it sees fit and to take the paths of its development as it pleases, without being systematically called to order by the “big brother” of the north, as soon as its expressions of maturity displease him.
In Russia, as in all of central and eastern Europe, the regimentation of history by memory stifles all rational discussion, all sense of responsibility and discernment, in short, all logic of peace between nations. If nationalism is war, memory is its fuel. And distancing oneself from this destructive imaginary, for the benefit of history, would allow everyone to progress by avoiding dangers and going off the road and by limiting the risk of war and historical damage. This would certainly not solve all the problems linked to the post-Soviet transition of the States concerned, but it would allow them to evolve with respect for others and not their humiliation, in an identity at peace with itself, and above all in the sense of humility and history.
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