Overreach, page 4
PART I
BLOOD AND EMPIRE
CHAPTER 1
Poisoned Roots
The history of Little Russia is like a tributary entering the main river of Russian history. Little Russians were always a tribe and never a people and still less – a state.
Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, 18471
Putin the Historian
In the later years of his rule, Vladimir Putin came to see himself as something of a historian. Locked down in strict Covid isolation from the spring of 2020 onwards, Putin spent months working on a 7,000-word historical essay where he laid out the historical thesis that would became the ideological blueprint for war. For Putin, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine are ‘parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space … a single large nation, a triune nation’. Underlying all the practical and tactical factors that led to war, it would be a vision of history and historical destiny Putin largely borrowed from Russia’s nineteenth-century imperial historians that he used repeatedly to justify his invasion. Putin’s vision was based not on imperialism but on ethno-nationalism. Putin would claim that the war against Ukraine would be fought not to bring a foreign people under Moscow’s rule but to protect the rights of people he regarded as essentially Russian.
Ukraine and Russia’s ‘spiritual, human and civilisational ties formed over centuries and have their origins in the same sources’, wrote Putin in an essay published in July 2021. ‘They have been hardened by common trials, achievements and victories. Our kinship has been transmitted from generation to generation. It is in the hearts and the memory of people living in modern Russia and Ukraine, in the blood ties that unite millions of our families. Together we have always been and will be many times stronger and more successful. For we are one people.’2
Europe’s bloodiest war since 1945 was, by Putin’s own account, being fought over history. Or, more specifically, over Putin’s self-appointed historic mission to reunite a single people sundered by meddling foreign powers.
For many modern Ukrainians, as well as some Western commentators, the answer to Putin’s ‘one people’ thesis is simple. ‘The most important thing to know is that Ukrainians are not Russians, and that Ukraine is an ancient independent nation,’ argued Israeli historian Noal Yuval Harari. ‘Ukraine has a history of more than 1,000 years; Kyiv was a major metropolis and cultural centre when Moscow was not even a village.’
Both views were flawed. The Ukrainian nationalists were correct that theirs was indeed an ancient nation – but one which had rarely in its history been independent, and never in the borders it inherited from the Soviet Union in 1991. And Putin was correct that Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians were all descended from the historical polity of Kyivan Rus’ – but in the same way that the French and German states were jointly inheritors of the near-contemporary empire of Charlemagne, which hardly proved a recipe for subsequent historical unity.
Ukraine had always been a marcher country, a frontier. It was where the Eastern Slavic, Orthodox world met the Western, Catholic one. It was also where the Russian Empire met the Muslim world of the Ottoman Turks and the slave-raiding Tatars of Crimea.
Despite the two neighbouring people’s shared history, Putin’s fundamental error was to imagine that Russian-speaking Ukrainians naturally considered themselves ethnically and politically Russian. His invasion not only proved that to be largely untrue but forced many to make a choice in favour of their Ukrainian political identity over their Russian ethnic one. Millions of Russian-speaking Ukrainians fled from Moscow’s forces, and tens of thousands volunteered to fight against their would-be ‘liberators’. To historian Slava Shvets, an ethnic Russian born in Vinnitsa in central Ukraine, Putin’s talk of ‘one people’ was the political equivalent of a wife beater who sends concerned neighbours away from the door with the angry insistence that his noisy abuse is just a ‘domestic matter … we sort out our problems in our own house.’3
Nonetheless, Putin was correct in another important aspect. To almost every modern Russian and Ukrainian, relations between the two nations are not an abstract matter of politics, much less history, but of blood and family.
We all like to believe that we think with our rational minds. But a little bit of us, a deep bit, thinks with our blood.
My mother Lyudmila Bibikova was born in 1934 in Kharkiv – Kharkov in Russian – a Russian-speaking industrial city in northern Ukraine. Her father Boris was born in 1903 in Simferopol, Crimea and her mother Martha Shcherbak in Poltava in western Ukraine in 1904. Yet the Bibikov family did not consider themselves Ukrainian. Quite the contrary. For two centuries the Bibikovs played a significant role in Russia’s imperial rule over Ukraine, first as servants of the tsars and later as loyal lieutenants of Soviet power. The connection is not a comfortable one. Whether I like it or not, my family story – my blood – is intimately linked not only to Ukraine and Russia but to the history of the Russian Empire.
The Borderland
Ukraine literally means ‘by the edge’, derived from the Old Russian word okraina, or periphery. In modern Russian a speaker’s political affiliation is instantly readable from how they parse the word. To say na ukraine – literally, ‘on the periphery’ – uses the word as an adverb. V Ukraine, or ‘in Ukraine’ elevates it to a place name. Most Russians, including, pointedly, Putin, use the former, dismissive usage that implicitly defines Ukraine as a borderland of Russia.
The term okraina first crops up in written sources from the twelfth century. But in fact the territory of modern Ukraine had been a borderland between civilisations for centuries before. The northern shores of the Black Sea were where ancient Greek civilisation first encountered the wild peoples of the steppe, who they named barabaroi, or barbarians, after their babbling language. ‘It was the first frontier of a political and cultural sphere that would come to be known as the Western world,’ wrote historian Serhii Plokhy. ‘That is where the West began to define itself and its other.’4 In the first century BC the Greek geographer Strabo drew the easternmost boundary of ‘Europe’ – the term he used to describe the expanse of the Greek presence in the outer world – at the Don River that today runs just east of Ukraine’s border with Russia. Beyond lay Asia.
The state of Kyivan Rus’ – held up not just by Putin but by Muscovite historians from the seventeenth century onwards as the origin of the greater Slavic state – was in fact a Viking principality founded to defend trading posts that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Its great founder, Prince Vladimir of Kyiv (c. 958–1015), would not have recognised the modern version of his own name. Like his uncle, King Haakon Sigurdsson of Norway, he spoke Old Norse and called himself Waldemar. His grandparents, known to Russian history as Prince Igor and his wife Olga, would have been known to their contemporaries as Ingvar and Helga.
One of Putin’s obsessions in his 2021 essay was foreign meddling in Russian history. But Grand Prince (and to the Orthodox, Saint) Vladimir the Great of Kyiv – to whom Putin erected a 17-metre-tall statue outside the Kremlin in 2016 – was himself a foreigner. Not only was he a Scandinavian Viking by blood, culture and language, but he spent most of his reign as a pagan, took eight hundred concubines and erected numerous pagan statues and shrines. In 988 Vladimir, having carved out a kingdom that stretched from his native Novgorod near the Baltic to Chersoneses (modern Kherson) on the lower Dniepr, ordered his Slavic subjects to adopt Christianity as the price of his marriage to the sister of Byzantine Emperor Basil II.5 His son Yaroslav the Wise – grandson of a Byzantine emperor and husband to the daughter of King Olof Skötkonung of Sweden – introduced a Slavic liturgy and translations of the gospels written in an alphabet devised in the previous century by two Greek monks, Cyril and Methodius, neither of whom ever visited Rus’. Old Slavonic, the language of the Russian Orthodox Church ever since, came to Rus’ from Bulgaria, whose rulers had accepted Christianity earlier than the Kyivan princes.6
The Christianisation of Kyivan Rus’ was cited by Putin as the founding moment of the Russian world. But it began with foreign princes imposing a foreign religion, language and script on their Slavic subjects in order to bring them into the European world of Christendom. Just like England, France, Italy, Spain and Germany, Russia’s history and identity would be formed not by a single people’s inexorable march towards their historical destiny but by successive waves of conquest and rule by outsiders.
It would be nearly nine hundred years before the lands ruled by Prince Vladimir would once again be reunited under a single state by another foreigner with no Russian blood – Sophie Friederike von Anhalt-Zerbst, better known as the Empress Catherine the Great. For much of the intervening period the territory of modern Ukraine had been fought over and occupied by Mongols, Tatars and by the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. To the north various warring Russian principalities had come to be dominated by Muscovy, which had by the end of the fifteenth century decisively thrown off the Mongol yoke. It was during this period that the first member of my mother’s family known to history – born Bibik Beg, a Tatar warlord of the Golden Horde – joined the winning side by swearing fealty to Muscovite Prince Ivan III in 1486. The newly minted Russian nobleman Russified his name to Bibikov. Contra to Putin’s ethno-nationalist narrative of the inexorable rise of the Russian people, by the end of the sixteenth century close to a third of the Russian aristocracy were in fact of Tatar origin.
With the power of the Mongols broken, Muscovy’s most powerful rivals for the lands of Ukraine became the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and its successor, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth to the west, and the Ottoman Empire and its Tatar allies to the south. The steppes of central Ukraine, with no easily defensible natural borders, became a disputed no-man’s land. Slave raids by Crimean Tatars – the Turkic descendants of Central Asian invaders – made the steppes an exceedingly dangerous place to live. In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an estimated 1.5 million to 3 million Ukrainians and Russians were sold at the slave markets of the Crimean peninsula, an Ottoman fiefdom. One Ukrainian slave-girl, Roxelana (1504–58), became the concubine and then the official wife of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent.
The danger of slave-hunters and the lack of any central government meant that only the hardiest and most desperate men dared risk settling the lands of the lower Dniepr basin. The first Cossacks – the word originating from the Turkic term for a freeman or freebooter – were nomadic gangs of escaped serfs who lived from fishing, trapping and banditry. ‘Some are hiding from paternal authority, or from slavery, or from service, or from [punishment for] crimes, or from debts,’ wrote the early sixteenth-century chronicler Michalon Lituanus. ‘Others are attracted … by richer game and more plentiful places.’7 Cossacks would become best known to popular history as the Russian tsars’ most loyal and reactionary cavalry shock troops. But the original Cossacks were largely Ukrainian-speakers who fled servitude on the huge manorial estates, or latifundia, of the Polish–Lithuanian magnates and nobility for a free, if precarious, life in the dangerous steppes of what is now central Ukraine.
Most of what is now modern Ukraine was part of the Polish state for longer than it was inside the Russian Empire. By the seventeenth century the Cossacks of central Ukraine, who had come into existence on the margins of society and in opposition to an established polity, had become a political and military force in their own right. In their subsequent attempts to establish an independent state of their own they both found common cause with and rebelled against their neighbours the Poles, the Muscovites and the Ottomans. In 1610 and again in 1618 Cossack troops seized Moscow itself as part of a Polish army. But in 1654 Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the Hetman or leader of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, defied his Polish masters and swore allegiance to Tsar Aleksei Romanov of Muscovy. Three centuries later, the event would be lavishly celebrated by the Ukrainian-born Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev as the ‘reunification’ of the ‘fraternal peoples’ of Ukraine and Russia. But the two sides needed interpreters to understand each other, and the Cossacks clearly saw the oath in terms of an alliance rather than an act of submission.8
Khmelnytsky’s oath to Romanov would set the pattern for centuries of Ukrainian–Russian relations even into the twenty-first century – transactional, and dictated by expediency under pressure from outside powers. Indeed the first printed textbook of Russian history, published at the Cave Monastery in Kyiv in 1674 and hailing the city as the ‘first capital’ of the Muscovite tsars and the birthplace of Muscovite Orthodoxy, was published when Kyiv was preparing for an Ottoman attack and the Poles were demanding it back from Muscovy. The Chronicles of the Origin of the Slavo-Rossian Nation and the First Princes of the Divinely Protected City of Kyiv were written as a desperate appeal for military support from Moscow against Kyiv’s enemies. The book that founded the myth still accepted by most Russians today about the Kyivan origins of their nation was, in fact, an early attempt by Malorossiya – Little Russia, as the book’s authors described Ukraine – to bend history to serve the political exigencies of the day. In that sense the Chronicles were a direct antecedent of Putin’s 2021 essay.
By the time of the last great Cossack revolt, led by Ivan Mazepa in 1708 against the Russian Tsar Peter the Great, the Hetmans of Ukraine would have a very different attitude to their supposedly shared history. ‘Moscow, that is, the Great Russian nation, has always been hateful to our Little Russian nation,’ wrote Mazepa in December 1708. ‘In its malicious intentions it has long resolved to drive our nation to perdition.’ Mazepa’s revolt – which had been backed by Russia’s arch-enemy, the Ottoman Empire – was brutally crushed. With Mazepa died the last serious attempt of Ukrainians to carve out a separate state until the Russian Empire itself collapsed two centuries later.
Blood and Empire
It was the Empress Catherine the Great, whose imperial vision of Russia entailed subduing all her immediate neighbours and rivals including Poles, Cossacks and Ottomans, who brought most of what is now Ukraine under Moscow’s rule. The full incorporation of the semi-independent remnants of Mazepa’s Cossack state as well as other self-ruling principalities into the Russian Empire became one of the empress’s first priorities after she deposed her husband Tsar Peter III in 1762. ‘Little Russia [Ukraine], Livonia [Lithuania and northern Belarus] and Finland are provinces governed by confirmed privileges,’ wrote Catherine in 1764. ‘These provinces, as well as Smolensk, should be Russified in the easiest way possible so that they cease looking like wolves to the forest … When the Hetmans are gone from Little Russia, every effort should be made to eradicate from memory the period and the Hetmans, let alone promote anyone to that office.’
Catherine appointed her greatest general and administrator – also her lover and secret husband – Prince Grigory Potemkin to conquer the lands beyond Malorossiya from the Ottomans. The swathe of territory that stretched along the Black Sea coast from the lands of the Don in the east to modern Moldova in the west, as well as Crimea itself, would become known as Novo-Rossiya, or New Russia.
It was under the Empress Catherine that the Bibikov family’s connection with Ukraine began. Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bibikov was the son of the commander-in-chief of the Imperial Russian army. In 1767, at the tender age of two, he was enrolled into the Guards Izmailovsky Regiment with the rank of sergeant. In the summer of 1783 the young Captain Bibikov was one of the Russian officers who accompanied the empress on her first imperial progress through the newly conquered lands of south and west Ukraine. In Crimea, Catherine boldly (but intelligently) entrusted her security to an honour guard composed of her new Crimean Tatar subjects.9
Sweating in his heavy serge Guards uniform in the infernal heat and dust of a Crimean summer, Aleksandr Bibikov would likely have seen the great lands of New Russia – now made safe from Tatar slave raiders – as a fertile, empty prairie ripe for settlement by his countrymen. The valley of the Don River, later to be known as Donbass (Donbas in Ukrainian), would soon become the Russian Empire’s Wild West, with thousands of Russian-speaking settlers encouraged to move there to farm the rich fields. Greeks, Bulgarians and Moldovans from the Ottoman Empire as well as Mennonites from Prussia were also encouraged to settle, with land, tax breaks and benefits. Like English and Scottish Protestant farmers settled in Ireland by Oliver Cromwell or American ‘sooners’ flooding into the Great Plains, the separate non-Ukrainian identity of these settlers would in time become one of the roots of future conflict.
New Russia was very different from the old one. Like the Poles and Moldovans also subjugated to the Russian empire by Catherine, Ukrainians did not speak the same language as their new fellow countrymen. Ukrainian is as different from Russian as English is from Dutch – which both have a 35 per cent linguistic divergence (or 65 per cent similarity, depending on your point of view) – making the two languages similar, but not mutually comprehensible.
Just as importantly, the Russia of the tsars was a society of slaves and slave-owners, whereas Ukraine under the Hetmans had been one of free-holding yeomen-farmers where serfdom was rare. The Black Sea port of Odesa – one of the many great cities founded by Potemkin – was a cosmopolitan entrepôt where Russia met the Levant and the Mediterranean. The valley of the Don would, in the nineteenth century, become a land of industry and immigrant workers as enterprising Welsh mining engineers dug out coal to power Russia’s tardy industrial revolution. Novorossiya was not an extension of the old Russia. It was old Russia’s window onto southern Europe, and onto modernity.
