During the 300-year period of the Romanov dynasty, Ukraine was parcelled out between Poland and Russia more than twice. Under the agreement signed between Poland and Russia in 1654, Eastern part of Ukraine came under the Russian Tsar.
by Kusal Perera
Invading Ukraine over 14 days ago, Vladimir Putin the modern-day Tsar was out for a quick take-over either by eliminating Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky or by occupying Kiev expecting Ukraine forces to surrender. In fact, immediately after ordering the invasion, he called for Ukraine forces to lay down arms and surrender. Putin’s massive army yet could not overpower the Ukrainian People’s determination to fight back for their independence and sovereignty. There is now a ceasefire offer from Moscow for negotiations. With heavy economic sanctions slapped on Russia by Western powers, Putin seems to be ready for a new era of undefined “cold war”.
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| Longest ruling Queen in imperial Russia - Catherine the Great |
The question that yet remains to be answered is “why did Putin invade Ukraine?” Despite his claim that Ukraine belongs to Russia and his allegations over NATO interference, Neo Nazism and genocide against Russian speaking minorities by the Zelensky regime being way out of target, there is a long history that cements Putin’s feudal thinking of “Great Russian” dominance in regaining territory that was under the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republic” (USSR) when it collapsed in 1991.
All “Soviets” that were in the Socialist Republic created by the Bolsheviks after the 1917 revolution, were territories that belonged to the Tsarist empire. Romanovs were the last such dynasty from 1613 for over 300 years with two “Greats”; Peter the Great and Catherine the Great who expanded the Russian empire to be the largest empire on this planet. About 08 Centuries before in the 09 Century, the Kiev centred territory was occupied by a Slav population with a culture of their own and was known as the “Kievan-Rus”. Present day Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, all claim ancestral lineage to this Kievan-Rus’ culture.
During the 300-year period of the Romanov dynasty, Ukraine was parcelled out between Poland and Russia more than twice. Under the agreement signed between Poland and Russia in 1654, Eastern part of Ukraine came under the Russian Tsar. Again, after the Polish-Russian war from 1772 for 27 years, and the Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, Ukraine was divided between “Imperial Russia” and Hapsburg-Austria and remained divided for 100 years. Thus, Putin’s claim for “ownership” of Ukraine is a wild arrogant claim based on the same “Great Russian” psyche of the Tsarist empire.
The “Great Russian” majority ideology did not fall apart, though the Tsarist empire fell apart. It lived through the 1917 October revolution till the fall of the USSR and thereafter too. Tsarist Russia the revolutionary Bolsheviks captured was not a capitalist State by any definition. Russia under Tsars were nowhere close to a capitalist State. When the first revolution broke out in 1905, rural population in Tsarist Russia was 87 percent and in 1917 the year of the October Revolution, it was 85 percent rural. (Statistics of the Russian Land Commune - 1905 to 1917 / Dorothy Atkinson)
When Bolsheviks were planning for a revolution in Petrograd, the largest of all urbanised centres in Russia, the total industrial labour population in 1917 was roughly about 06 million in both private and State-owned factories. This was about 4.2 percent of the total population. (International Encyclopaedia of the First World - 1914 to 1918 / Michael S. Melancon).
Though the top “Marxist” leadership of the 1917 October Revolution including Lenin and Trotsky claimed they would establish a “Dictatorship of the Working-class” there was no working class proper in feudal Russia that could take over State power.
What was therefore effectively the most decisive factor in the 1917 October revolution was the war fatigued Russian army from the poor peasantry, the largest army in the world then at over 05 million soldiers. The “Marxist Internet Archives” note, “the 1914 mobilization heralded a significant change among village men who took up arms - some with patriotic fervour and others with great reluctance.” (WW I - Russia). It was this mutinous army and the pauperised rebellious large peasantry that basically deposed the Tsarist imperialism. A “revolutionary decree” thereafter announced the authority of the Bolsheviks over the whole Russian empire. As Trotsky says in his autobiography, “The decree that announced our willingness to make peace was passed by the “Congress of Soviets” on October 26, when only Petrograd was in our hands.” (My Life - p/362)
When civil war broke out in early February 1918, only part of Russia - Moscow, Petrograd and parts of its industrial territory was under Bolshevik control. Rest of the dismantled Tsarist empire was under local and provincial political and military leaders revolting and waging war for independence of their geographical territories. Finland and Baltic nations established independence in early 1918. Siberia and Caucasus established their independence too. Western Belarus and Ukraine joined the new Polish State. Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan had to be brutally crushed and annexed once again.
Lenin’s theoretical proposition for nation States to be in a loose “union” as a Soviet Socialist Republic in practise was overrun by the feudal imperialist “Great Russian” desire of the Bolsheviks. Central Committee chaired by Lenin thus decided to crush the civil war in the name of the “socialist revolution”. Personally proposed by Lenin as War Commissar, Trotsky’s ingenuity in military strategy and skills in assembling the Red Army into a disciplined fighting force while living in a train travelling from one front to another for two and a half years helped crush independent forces waging war to establish their own nation States. Advantage the Bolsheviks had in these scattered isolated wars was the Western allied forces did not want to commit themselves to another war immediately after the WW I was concluded in 1918 August.
When finally, the civil war was declared over in October 1922 almost the entirety of the Tsarist Russian empire had been regained by Bolsheviks for whom “Great Russian” dominance was vital for their Socialist Republic. Compromises were therefore worked out with different provincial forces to fit them with the broad framework of Lenin’s Socialist Republic. They subsequently became coerced compromises with Stalin emerging as the strong man of the Soviet Republic, after the demise of Lenin in January 1924.
Modern democratically structured and elected “Soviets” across the old empire was anyway not possible in a feudal society controlled by parochial nobility. “Traditional peasant life was defined by patriarchy, religious orthodoxy, and communality” says Sarah Badcock, an Associate Professor of History, University of Nottingham (in article - The 1917 Peasant Revolutions). There was no strong and large enough working class that could be the boulevard of an ideologically modern democratic State. The Bolsheviks had very little social space to engage ideologically in challenging the Tsarist “Great Russian” social mindset in a vastly primitive and backward, underdeveloped empire to establish an effectively functional modern democratic State. Nor were the Bolsheviks inclined to challenge the “Great Russian” dominance with which they regained the Tsarist empire under a new package.
Bolsheviks did catalyse an urban socio-political movement for change of political power with a change of State structure, but with insignificant change in feudal mindsets, as it happened here in Sri Lanka as well with the introduction of universal franchise in 1931 and the elected State Council. Political parties took over new State organs under them with elected representations in governance. Yet there was no change in feudal mindsets; caste, religion, gender disparities, feudal hierarchies and land tenure and ownership, all remaining with no significant change. Political parties adopted themselves to live with all those injustices and disparities, adopting the ideology of the majority ethno-religious constituency. Society is yet burdened with divisions, rivalry and hatred on majority ethno-religious dominance used by Sinhala-Buddhist political parties as social ideology for political power.
Putin in that sense is not alone on this planet this era. Most countries with economic downturns and utterly corrupt political leaderships rely on majority ethno-religious dominance with authoritarian power. Most conspicuous of them all were Donald Trump in the US playing for “White Supremacist” dominance, Narendra Modi creating a violent Hindutva frenzy in India and Xi Jinping in China creating larger space for “Han nationalism” while in different provinces with large minority Chinese ethnicities are seeing reducing space.
There nevertheless is a difference between Jinping’s Chinese Han nationalism and the other 03 majority ethno-religious campaigners: Trump, Putin and Modi. All of them are using chauvinism of the majority hyped to a violent social expression against minorities in the absence of decent, developmental alternative to the utterly corrupt, mega city centred, neo liberal market economies, while China is subtle with its economic invasions of countries they decide as geo-politically important to them on their massively funded BRI Project. What is more covert in all these majority dominant politics in a global market economy is that they are all in the UN Security Council, three of them as Permanent Members and are all leading arms and ammunition manufacturers and dealers in the global market. Putin therefore is a necessary evil for all of them, except for Zelensky and the Ukraine People. Ukrainians who have come under the boots of “Greater Russian” expansionism and tussle for global dominance.
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