#arman shuraev

[tomorrowusa]

I’ve said it in several previous posts; nobody since the end of World War II has done more damage to Russia than Vladimir Putin. In that context, Putin is Russia’s greatest enemy.

Putin’s aim has been to destroy Ukraine as a national entity. That includes eradication of its culture. What has happened instead is that people in Ukraine in addition to other countries now want nothing to do with Russian culture.

“I was a Russian speaker until 24 February,” said Adeline, an art student from the now Russian-occupied town of Nova Kakhovka, referencing the date of Russia’s full-scale invasion earlier this year. Russia has failed to take over Ukrainian culture, she said, so now it has set out to kill it. Several other Ukrainian students told me they find “the spirit of freedom” in Ukrainian literature, but of subservience to power in Russian literature.

Tetiana, a refugee from the ruthlessly bombed and destroyed city of Mariupol, had suffered without heat, light or water in a cellar under constant bombardment, seen her best friend killed by a Russian missile, and then had a traumatic odyssey of escape. Tetiana not merely speaks much better Russian than Ukrainian; her mother is actually from Russia, as are her parents-in-law. The Russian president would consider her a Russian. So I asked her for her message to Putin. She replied that she would like to kill him.

Wherever I turned, in every conversation, there was a total rejection not just of the Russian dictator, not merely of the Russian Federation as a state, but of everything and almost everyone Russian. Polling by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology shows that some 80% of Ukrainians had a positive attitude to Russia in 2013; by May 2022, the figure was just 2%. A university lecturer told me that his students now write “russia” with a small initial letter. “I don’t correct them.”

Some pre-war stats suggest that roughly 22% of Ukrainians spoke Russian as a first language. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself grew up speaking Russian. Now there is an abject hatred of all things Russian in Ukraine.

While this attitude might be expected in a country where Russia is committing acts of genocide, it is not limited to Ukraine.

In Georgia, a strong resentment of neoimperial Russia is more than understandable, since Russia has occupied roughly – a fifth of the country’s sovereign territory (in Abkhazia and South Ossetia) since 2008. But following the invasion of Ukraine, that hostility has enveloped almost all Russians. Ironically enough, this impacts the many tens of thousands of Russians who have fled to Georgia precisely to avoid being conscripted into fighting in Putin’s war against Ukraine. Georgians ask: why don’t you protest back home? Or as one banner put it, “Putin is killing people in Ukraine while Russians eat khachapuri in Georgia.” (Khachapuri is the distinctive Georgian cheese bread.)

Actually, khachapuri is best described as a Georgian equivalent of pizza. But you get the idea.

There is also high profile resentment of Russia in Kazakhstan.

On YouTube, you can watch a magnificent excoriation of the bullying Russian ambassador to Kazakhstan, Alexey Borodavkin, delivered in fluent Russian by the Kazakh journalist Arman Shuraev. “Russophobia is all that you have achieved with your stupid actions,” he says. If Russia invades Kazakhstan as it has Ukraine, “the entire Kazakh steppe will be strewn with the corpses of your conscripts … You are idiots. You are cannibals who eat themselves.”

“Borodavkin,” he concludes, directly addressing the ambassador, “if you want to see Nazis and fascists in Kazakhstan, look in the mirror and you will see the main Nazi and fascist. Glory to Ukraine! Forward Kazakhstan!”

The cultural concept of “russkiy mir” (”the Russian world”) began in a somewhat benign way after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Putin hijacked it and has used it as an imperialistic justification for his military adventures.

The notion of russkiy mir was revived and repackaged in the late 1990s as a kind of Russian soft-power initiative (mir means peace as well as world). In 2007, a Russkiy Mir Foundation was created by presidential decree. This was presented as a Russian counterpart to the British Council or Germany’s Goethe-Institut, but the concept was then weaponised by Putin to justify his war of recolonisation in Ukraine. He explicitly mentioned the term in a speech justifying the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

The entirely predictable result: revulsion against his recolonisation wars has extended to the whole broader notion of a Russian-speaking world.

Outside of Russia, russkiy mir/the Russian world is usually used in a derogatory way. You may read or hear this expression in the media when Ukrainians or others talk about Putin’s territorial ambitions.

Instead of killing Ukrainian culture, Putin’s invasion is inflicting serious damage on Russia’s international cultural standing.

Russian culture is thus a collateral victim of Putin’s self-devouring cannibalism. There was an alternative future in which Russian-speaking culture, like today’s English-speaking culture, may have become multiculturally enriched by authors and artists from all its former colonies. What would contemporary English-language literature be without authors from India, Africa and Oceania? And, after all, fine contemporary Ukrainian writers such as Andrey Kurkov write – or should I say wrote? – in Russian.

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In the end, Vladimir Putin will go down in history not merely as the man who failed to restore the Russian empire, but as the destroyer of the Russian world.

Indeed. No matter what happens, history will regard Putin as a loser. Future generations in Russia will despise him the way modern Germans hate Hitler. Those who try to overthrow Putin would be regarded as true heroes in Russia’s future.

EDIT: Here is the vid (with English subtitles) of Kazakh journalist Arman Shuraev telling Russian Ambassador Alexey Borodavkin and Russia to fuck off.