As the Russo-Ukrainian War rages on, the underlying reality of the abiding presence of the social myth of Moscow claiming to be the Third Rome remains the motivating force for Russian aggression. Particularly in the aftermath the Second World War, Stalin, although himself a Georgian, tried to cement the allegiance of the nations he had swallowed up following the Yalta and Potsdam meetings in 1945.
For almost 50 years thereafter, Soviet leaders sought to amalgamate the Captive Nations into one body under the Russian umbrella. In that regard, they were brutal in enforcing their domination over the subject peoples. In Moscow, Stalin built seven monolithic buildings for state offices and then he built another, the Palace of Science and Culture, in Warsaw as a gift to the Polish people.
The first time I visited Warsaw, the guide who was showing the city to the group with which I was traveling, gave an extensively detailed description of the building. I commented that Stalin had built seven like it in Moscow, and she replied, “I am glad this is Warsaw.” The only veiled remark I got from her in criticizing the Soviet control of her country.
In Bratislava, then Czechoslovakia, now the capital of an independent Slovakia, the Soviet occupation forces named the main avenue through the bombed-out central city “Marshal Malinowski Boulevard” after the Soviet General, who had “liberated” the city from the Nazis at the end of the World War II. Slovaks were forced with recognition of the Soviet Russian hegemony every time they drove on that broad avenue.
In the days when Berlin was divided into the American, British, French and Soviet zones, the Soviets built the huge war memorial in their sector as a testament to the Red Army under Marshal Zhukov having overcome the Nazis.
In Ukraine, most of the cities were devastated by the bombings, but as he had done elsewhere, Stalin imposed his architectural dominance on the rebuilding, particularly in the capital of Kyiv. Ironically, in the present confrontation, much of what he did is being obliterated by Putin’s bombing.
These examples are but a few of the incidences of Russian efforts, both symbolic and political, to subjugate other peoples to Moscow’s control. For over 500 years, this myth has permeated Russian policy and strategy. Putin’s attempt to resubmit Ukraine to Muscovite authority is multi-faceted.
Traditionally, Ukraine often has been called the “Breadbasket of Russia,” meaning that its broad plains with their rich soil and abundant natural resources have been the basis of Russia’s agricultural economy. Following Ukraine’s gaining independence from the dying Soviet Union in 1991 the new Russia was left in a perilous state with respect to its potential production. Without Ukraine and the other former Captive Nations it controlled, Russia has been reduced from its superpower status to that of a lesser country, both territorially and with regard to population, but one with nuclear weapons.
Russian imperialism, directed by the myth of Moscow III Rome, under Putin has returned to its former practice of military aggrandizement. In the past, most of its practices in that arena either were failures or not worth the cost of trying to realize their dreams, as seen in the Balkan Wars of the 1870s. The cost of the present escapade has taken a significant toll on the Russian populace and economy, and the hardship it has visited on the people of Ukraine is incalculable.
Putin expected a three-day takeover, not a nearly five-year engagement that to date has achieved no tangible results. These 35 years of independence since the collapse of the Soviet Union are the longest period of Ukrainian independence in the nation’s history, thereby proving that national identity is a basic fact of existence as seen by Ukrainians’ willingness to give their all to preserve what they have accomplished.
