Ukrainian academic says Putin wants to return to the prevailing thinking of the Tsarist era
Putin’s thinking about relations between Russia and Ukraine contrasts with Bolshevik ideology and seeks to return to the thinking that prevailed among the elite of the Tsarist empire in the 19th century, said Ukrainian academic and activist Lusa.
“Putin considers that there is no specific Ukrainian identitywants to go back to the history of the 19th century when the Russians said that there was a Russian nation made up of great Russians, Muscovites, Belarusians, and little Russians, who for them were Ukrainians,” said Lusa Volodymyr Yermolenko, philosopher and associate professor at Kiev-Mohyla University.
We must understand that Putin is more outdated than the Soviet ideology itself. He noted that he tried to bypass Soviet ideology, referring to a long text signed by the Russian president on July 16, 2021 entitled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, which sparked wide debate in the academic and political circles of the two countries.
A document that goes against “ideas of a Ukrainian people separated from the Russian people” and traces a “long common history” of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, “heirs of Ancient Rus, which was the largest country in Europe,” a medieval Slavic state, initially centered in Kiev, dating back to the ninth century.
From an academic perspective, The head of the Russian state intends to “bypass the Soviet Union”where the official ideology held that the Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians constituted “three different countries”, but of common ancestry.
He explained that “the approach of Stalinism was that they would most likely ‘will unite into one people'”, but the original construction was designed by Lenin, and about a federal project.
