But did Kruschev consider himself a Ukrainian? Techniacally Stalin was Georgian, though he, as many other Bolsheviks abandoned their “nationality”, since it was what bolshevsim expected. So even if we were consider the leaders of the SU as non-russians (the Tzars weren’t of Russian descent, but German) doesn’t change the fact that the status of Ukraine within the power structure of the SU wasn’t equal to that of the RFSSR.
He changed his census-nationality several times, IIRC, despite being born to Russians in Russia. That it was under some circumstances politic to become a Ukrainian is specially significant, no? The USSR had an insecure anxiety to be seen as multinational and anti-imperialist.
Are you suggesting that history is irrelevant, and that past actions are of no use of predicting the future? There can be no tangible evidence on what is going to happen tomorrow or in an AH, but we can give some kind of predictions about it based on past experiences.
Past actions are one of a whole complex of intersecting things that explain the present. According to the weight of hereditary, I should be spending my life on a small northerly island digging my food out of the ground; but I'm not, because history is of course the study of a constant change.
To use a notion of the past which is itself stereotyped and coloured by present perceptions, of which more later, as ones only bit of evidence for something inspired no confidence.
Typical problem with studying history or politology – those closest to events are also least likely to be objective about them. But that doesn’t stop us from either agreeing or disagreeing with their statements. So if the Ukrainians are to be considered biased about the SU collapse, so should the Russians. And we ought to make up our minds based on all accounts.
The urgent question not being answered here is 'which accounts'? I can name some - Wilson, Lieven - and can name more if you want but in general have better things to do than hunt for books and articles about Ukraine, Russia, or the USSR that I read some time.
What are these sources, and is 'Ukrainian descent' a word for diaspora-driven historiography?
The Ukrainians did not, but the Russians were quite happy living in a country sending them to die in Chechenya, simply because their leaders said so, not because the Chechens were “unruly Russians” to be brought under control. The Russians big on “territorial integrity”, even (or especially) of non-russian territory.
This statement dances on the line beyond which lies outright prejudice. Russians apparently like violence and dictatorship, 'cos they're Russian.
Consider the actual situation, in which the Russians who lived in Chechnya had been forced into flight and the world of Russian knowledge was hardly devoid of grizzly social collapses for people to panic about. One can instantly perceive reasons for wanting to fight the Chechnyan insurgency beyond the thuggish love of violence implied by your nationally-charged analysis.
This is why I referred to other examples, like Lithuania and Azerbaijan, in which at least a substantial minority of Russians - whose goals were what came about, too - wished to have nothing to do with in boots-on-ground terms.
You seem like a reasonable person, but I hope you understand that this kind of bold, unsupported, and prejudiced remark is repellant.
Nah, it’s not “history as monoliths”. It’s “attempting to understand the reason why the majority made a particular decision”. Sure, the exact reasons why individual Ukrainians voted one way or the other are a highly individual matter, but overall the majority were dissatisfied with their situation and wanted to change it, somehow. The Galician might have wanted an independent Ukraine with all ties with Russia broken, a Kievan a Ukraine tied with Russia in some supra-national organization, a Kharkovite might have wanted Ukraine as part of some federation with Russia. But overall, most of them did not want to be part of the SU on the same basis as they were in the past.
This is what I said. Who does want to be standing in a queue for an egg?
Sure, it does. If you live in dictatorship, and the dictator asks you something, you always answer YES.
Unless you belong to the groups of people who voted no, or did not vote, whose actions have not been explained; but anyway, is this a concession?
But it might not have been. Especially if the New Union State would come into being and would don satisfy the Ukrainians. I wouldn’t say that they are the type of people who accept anything fate gives them and don’t want to change it.
Whereas the Russians apparently are.
That aside, this whole narrative rests on the assumption that the Ukrainians can never be happy in anything except a sovereign national state, because they can never be happy in anything except a sovereign national state.
You must appreciate that for me, a person happy not to live in a sovereign national state, this is a slightly personal matter. I am being called a historical aberration and threat to humanity's supposed march towards freedom.
I can’t give you a definition, no one can I think. Definitions are tricky, since it’s rare that one can’t find an example escaping any definition to prove his point.
For the purposes of discussion one can declare a definition acceptable to the two or three people concerned and decide that anything not matching it is simply not the thing being defined.
I think final authority in coercion, extraction, and punishment is a pretty good example. In Scotland's case, the position espoused by most people, including me, is that Scotland's people can not be subject to laws and levies that no Scottish person agrees to.
As for the second question – because like I said, such Unions ought to emerge from popular consent, not wishes of unelected leaders. That the Union of Scotland and England was not made in such fashion, doesn’t mean the way it occurred ought to be the standard fashion for creating such Unions. Better make it between free, independent states and avoid it’s legitimacy being questioned. The XX century has different rules than the XVIII.
What is the criterion of freedom?
Further, burden of proof. If good and functional unions can emerge from historical accident, it's up to you to prove that getting rid of the USSR is an inherent moral good.
Further, what were the 'Scotland' and 'England' being united? One was seven kingdoms that had been united by hooks and crooks and gone on to gain control of Wales in a protracted, racially-charged, and frequently bloody conquest; the other was the land and people gradually accrued to the descendants of MacAlpin by a few royal marriages and some underhanded deals and lots and lots of blood
All states must be unions or empires at some point in their history - they don't spring from the brow of Zeus - and if the only process of state formation that's allowed is democracy, hardly any state has a right to exist. Certainly not Ukraine, whose present territorial extent is the result of settler-colonisation visited on the steppes by tsarist Russia, Stalin's conquests, and Khrushchyov's arbitrary attachment of the Crimea.
So we disagree again. How many times did people abandon convenient lifestyles to fight, or serve something they considered to be of greater value?
Less often than they abandoned inconvenient lifestyles, that's for sure.
Even today, a lot of people serve in the British Armed Forces not because it ways extremely well and there is free bread, but because they feel service being important to them. Abstracts like “Honor”, “Duty”, “Freedom”, “God” have led people on the barricades for centuries.
And is the freedom not to get shot different from the other kinds?
Thou art clothes, and fire, and food
For the trampled multitude -
No - in countries that are free
Such starvation cannot be
As in England now we see.
More prosaically, which grand humbug is at stake in this particular case?
So yeah, I think they would mind anyway. Maybe a generation later, but still.
The purpose of this several million people appears to be serve as a projection for our particular grand humbugs, vis, 'national independence'.
Wasn’t there an office called “Secretary of State for Scotland”? And various Scottish Offices in London since the Union?
Appointed by a government which has no constitutional for any Scottish votes whatever. (Less importantly, there were two lengthy - as in, the second one was 139 years - intervals in which no such office existed.)
This is a transparent double-standard. If the name 'Scotland' is sufficient to make institutions Scots and the whole union hence voluntary, why isn't it enough that the UkSSR existed?
Different? Yeah. Any? Not really.
There were identities at the intersection of kingdom, language, religion, and other things which sometimes shared the names of modern 'nations' and sometimes didn't; but until very recently in the scheme of things hardly anybody believed that 'nations' were the basis of states and sovereignty.
You don’t really have a Belgian nationality despite over 2 centuries having passed (Joke I heard said that the only Belgians in Belgium are the Football team, the Royal Family and the Jews). So I never question that Belarus could remain part of Russia indefinitely, but Ukraine is a different matter. Different language, different traditions, even different rites. Perhaps East Ukraine, which was part of Russia since the mid-XVII century and highly russified, but Ukraine is larger than that, and adding it’s western parts led the Ukrainians to identify more with “Ukraine” and less with Russia.
You are still speaking in the terms of a world in which these things are mutually exclusive (leaving aside for a moment, but never forgetting, that Soviet is not Russian).
In the earlier half of the 19th C, Ukrainian language rustic poetry circulated in the Russian journals and Ukrainophilia was more-or-less compulsory for members of the Tsarist establishment, so that one critic who said bad things about Khmelnytsky was referred to the censorship authorities. Where do you think Shevchenko got the money from?
Let us consider your criteria of nationality in reference to Scotland.
Language? Five or six were used in Scotland when it's nationality originated, nearly all more-or-less identified with something outside Scotland as well (English, the Bardic standard of Gaelic that was basically Irish, Norse, French, Latin; as usual only the Welsh are native, and we're not Welsh up here now, are we?).
Traditions? Lowland oral tradition and music are far closer to those of England than those of the Gael.
Rites? Scotland has been the scene of dramatic religious difference.
Evidently, according to these criteria, Scotland never existed in the first place. India? Don't make me laugh.
I buy this, though it would require an early PoD.
You seem to have argued yourself into a corner. If a sufficiently early PoD can cause Ukrainians to identify as Russians, why can't a sufficiently early PoD cause them to identify, much less drastically, as Soviets?
Scots, we know, were able to become Britons starting in 1707; they weren't ready to become Englishmen under any circumstances, even though they could easily have become so centuries earlier if Bruce had fallen in the water.
Damn you! You have fooled me! Or is what you said just a lie as well?
There is room here for an edifying diversion.
If AH is good for a really serious purpose it is showing how much our historiography is shaped by our present. Britain became a democracy and never experiences a violent revolution in the critical period, hence it has 'a tradition of democracy'.
In Ed Thomas' magisterial timeline
Fight and be Right a different course of British party-politics in the 1870s and 80s leads some decades later to the establishment of dictatorship within the frame of the constitution and then to its overthrow by revolutionary socialists who, in their self-justifying pamphlets, explain that Britain, unlike other countries such as France,
never had any democracy of even bourgeois kind at all.
If Ukraine had not become independent, it would not be necessary to argue that its independence was inevitable. If Scotland had remained independent, it would not be necessary - as it was formerly quite usual to do - to argue that its union with England was inevitable.
Not so random. Being British You obviously know that it was British policy not to allow any state in Europe to dominate the continent, and it fought wars to prevent that from happening. Not because of random shit. It was a raison d’etat and for Britain to do anything else would be out of character.
I don't follow.
Obviously not 'random' in the sense of number-generators, but 'depending on the junction of factors and circumstances so numerous and complex within themselves as to render statistical analysis and prediction pointless' is a bleedin' mouthful.
But do you mean to suggest that the present patterns of identity in Europe were created by British foreign policy? We mucked up far too often for this to be true. If we decided everything, why does America exist, huh?
Sure, minorities can live in nation states, and Unions can survive. It’s just more likely for those which are new to break up than to survive.
They're all new at some point. Such is the nature of time.
The Italians and Germans and Spanish are for the most part single nations. (NEVER heard anyone refer to themselves as Brandenburgian, Berliner or Mecklemburgian. Only once some germanophonic dude from Poland called himself a Prussian, though I don’t know if he was pulling my leg or not.)
You are giving a very clear example of present-coloured and, honestly, woolly thinking.
People do identify as Austrians, Luxemburgers, Swiss, Dutchmen, Flemings, and Frenchmen who happen also to be Alsatian.
Wind the clock back far enough, and each of these people was at one point considered German by both themselves and others.
The people of modern German have been 'German' - although nationality was not until very recently the primary part of their self-identification - for a long time, yes. But other people who belonged to previous ideas of Germandom have ceased to be German. So evidently it no longer means the same thing to be German. Because history is indeed the history of change.
Do you know who believed in nationalities as distinct, discrete, inherent, privileged categories with a genesis and a continuous existence?
The Soviet historiographers, that's who.
A continuation of Muscovy, the Holy Rus.
But this is absurd. The Russian Revolution represented one of the most total breaks in history, with all the people, institutions, and organs of the previous regimes being destroyed and abominated. If an approximately similar shape is the beginning and end of continuity, it is clear that the republic of Egypt is one and the same with the united Nile kingdom at the dawn of civilisation. After all, they're both just that one big river, aren't they?