Holding up a mirror to Russian national identity Why life in the borderlands should remind the West to reject the Kremlin’s messaging on the Ukrainian state
Holding up a mirror to Russian national identity Why life in the borderlands should remind the West to reject the Kremlin’s messaging on the Ukrainian state
By Dr. Matthew Light, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Center for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies
Last month’s spectacular raid from across the Ukrainian border brought the Russian region of Belgorod an unaccustomed level of public attention. Having spent some time in 2005-06 as a doctoral student conducting dissertation research in Belgorod and another Russian region bordering Ukraine, Krasnodar Krai, I would like to share a few thoughts on these two provinces and their complex history between Russia and Ukraine. The stories of these two regions shed light on the Kremlin’s success in focusing international attention on the construction of Ukrainian identity, while obscuring the ambiguities in Russia’s construction of its own boundaries.
I spent some months in Belgorod and Krasnodar as a graduate student in political science, working on a dissertation (later a book) about the evolution of freedom of movement and choice of residence in post-Soviet Russia. Russian colleagues in Moscow, where I was based, pointed out that the leaders of these two regions had taken contrasting policies toward migrants from other parts of the Russian Federation and other post-Soviet countries. Whereas Krasnodar’s populist governor used and abused the power of his office to harass newcomers (particularly those who were not ethnically Russian), Belgorod’s leadership affirmatively sought out highly educated and well-off new residents to improve the region’s human capital.
Starting out from Moscow for my field research, I had no idea that either Belgorod or Krasnodar had any historic connections to the neighboring, and to me still unfamiliar, Ukraine.
As I explored Belgorod, it proved to be a region of contradictions. It stood out among Russian regions at the time for its relatively smooth transition from the USSR’s planned economy to a successful capitalist one. Robust mining and agriculture — the province lies in Russia’s fertile “Black Earth” zone, which also extends into Ukraine — were now being supplemented by increased interest in Belgorod as a place to settle among well-off professionals from other parts of the country (particularly people from the far north, who found its warmer climate attractive). The regional capital, Belgorod city, was full of cranes and new apartment buildings. Belgorod also featured a lively civil society and academic community, both of which welcomed me and encouraged my interest in their region.
At the same time, despite the regional government’s supportive policies toward at least some new residents and its suppression of far-right violence against ethnic minorities, it was clear that strong public criticism of policies or officials was unwelcome. In other words, there was no real political opposition.
Belgorod was also the starting point for my first foray into Ukraine. Belgorod city is a short journey from Ukraine’s Kharkiv, and connections between the two have historically been close. Indeed, during the Soviet period, Kharkiv was arguably the local metropolis for Belgorod residents, the place to go for opportunities not available in the smaller regional capital. During my visit to Belgorod oblast, I heard some negative comments about Ukraine’s independence, including complaints about the disruption caused by an international border between neighboring communities and Ukraine’s official language policy.
When I eventually made it across the border, it was immediately clear that I was in a more pluralistic environment. I happened to arrive in Kharkiv during a parliamentary election campaign and was struck by the prevailing boisterous, open disagreement, and even the slinging of insults between political candidates, all of which contrasted sharply with the buttoned-up political conformism of Belgorod. I also noticed that despite the use of Ukrainian in official contexts, Russian was spoken everywhere — a situation most people I met seemed to regard as normal.
Yet in view of the political contrasts between Belgorod and Kharkiv, it’s worth reflecting that Belgorod itself has a complex history closely linked to Ukraine. In the early modern period, it was part of the “Wild Field,” a region of fractured sovereignty contested between the Muscovite state, Ukrainian Cossacks, and even the Ottoman Empire and Crimean Khanate. A significant proportion of the population is of ethnic Ukrainian origin, and early in the history of the USSR, Belgorod was even considered for inclusion in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic before ultimately being assigned to Russia. I was told that some older residents in rural districts spoke a local dialect derived from Ukrainian, which was even modeled for me once or twice by younger people, as an example of local color.
However, there’s no doubt that the region’s mixed Ukrainian-Russian identity is now mainly a matter of historical curiosity. Ukrainian has no official status and has not been used in public education at least since the 1930s. Whereas Kharkiv is effectively (though not officially) bilingual, Belgorod is monolingual in both law and practice. As far as I could determine, its residents have no interest in Ukraine as a political community that might include them in some way. Rather, they take their Russianness as both desirable and self-evident. Years later, having moved to Toronto, I noticed similar attitudes on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border between Ontario and New York State. The border is taken for granted, and what lies on the other side is familiar but clearly other.
Many of these observations also apply to another Russian region that I visited during the same doctoral research: Krasnodar Krai, which is also sometimes referred to locally as the Kuban, after its main river. The region is familiar to many Westerners as the home of Sochi, a beach and mountain resort that hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics.
By a strange coincidence, Krasnodar also figured as one of the case studies in my dissertation, as its governor at the time, Nikolai Kondratenko, had earned a well-deserved reputation as a populist known for using administrative measures to harass newcomers to the region. While even ethnic Russians who moved to Krasnodar were targeted, the worst treatment was reserved for non-Slavs, such as Armenians and a small Turkish community from the Meskheti region of Georgia. Krasnodar clearly had a strong regional identity, rooted as I learned in its unusual and tragic history. Until the 19th century, the Black Sea littoral was the home of the Circassians, an indigenous community with a reputation as skilled horsemen and warriors, whom the advancing Russian Empire dispossessed and slaughtered in an act of calculated ethnic cleansing that resulted in the flight of most of the Circassian population into Turkey and other lands of the Ottoman Empire, where their descendants now live. The settlers who entered the region in the wake of Russian conquest were mainly from what is now Ukraine, and as in Belgorod, some reminders of this past linger in a fading local dialect.
Governor Kondratrenko emphasized some aspects of this history, as in his support for a local neo-Cossack movement and his tense relations with the Circassian community in Krasnodar and neighboring regions. Yet as in Belgorod, there was no discussion of any link to contemporary Ukraine. Whatever disagreements local residents might have with the Kremlin, Russia was their state, and Russian was the official language, required for official communication and professional advancement.
A few related points with contemporary relevance follow from these vignettes of my travels nearly 20 years ago. One is simply the disparity between, on the one hand, Russia’s insistent focus on the constructed nature of Ukraine’s national identity and its success in imposing that focus on much of the Western media and official discourse, and on the other hand Russia’s unwillingness to acknowledge that its own identity as a state and a civic community is also the result of deliberate construction, which in part involved the suppression of Ukrainian identity in these two regions. It’s noteworthy how little hay the Ukrainian government has tried to make of this past, even though, had history turned out a little differently, both Belgorod and Krasnodar could very easily have been included in Soviet and then independent Ukraine. Kyiv has never claimed them as Ukrainian territory, never denounced the border with Russia or derided it as fake or illegitimate, and never even pressured Russia to accord official status to the Ukrainian history and culture in Belgorod and Krasnodar.
In effect, Ukraine recognizes what should be obvious to every fair-minded observer, that although borders are by their nature political constructs that divide people and communities in artificial ways, the most humane course of action is to try to make the best of them.
As far as Ukraine is concerned, there is no reason why the people of Belgorod and Krasnodar should not visit, trade with, and otherwise engage with their neighbors in, say, Crimea, Donetsk, or other parts of Ukraine. For that matter, in a democratic Russian state, they would have the right to explore the Ukrainian and Circassian heritage of their regions without incurring official hostility. Although we are sadly far from such a reality, it is incumbent on Western observers of the Russian invasion of Ukraine not to accept at face value the Kremlin’s messaging that the Ukrainian state is artificial and in need of correction, which presumably it is Russia’s role to provide.
As Professor Louis Römer of Vassar College has pointed out to me, Russia’s focus on Ukraine’s alleged fragility and defects is an intrinsically colonial narrative that treats one political community as necessarily subject to guidance from another. The point is not that Russia’s heritage of conquest is unique: indeed, as a native of the former Mexican territory of Alta California, I am aware of the violent process that resulted in its annexation by the United States. But the Putin regime’s success in crushing alternative voices within Russia should not lead international observers to accept its self-serving historical myths at face value.
And a second, related point: the authoritarian Russian state’s erasure of Ukrainian identity in Belgorod and Krasnodar paradoxically suggests some ways in which Ukraine is stronger than many outside observers believed and indeed stronger than Russia. Contrary to the Kremlin’s narrative, Ukraine’s well-publicized debates about official language policy and other regional differences reflect something highly positive about the country’s political evolution to date: the emergence and acceptance of pluralism over the post-Soviet period. One of my professors in graduate school, Ian Shapiro of Yale University, was known for saying that wherever you are told there is consensus, you should instead look out for hegemony.
Indeed, while I met many good-hearted, humane people in Belgorod and Krasnodar who would flourish in a more open political system, such an opportunity is denied to them by a state that evidently believes it can only survive by silencing all dissenting or even unofficial interpretations of its own history. In contrast, no one would say Ukraine’s politics are characterized by consensus, yet its fractious people have come together to oppose Putin’s invasion with a determination that has amazed the world. It is Ukraine’s good fortune that it has found within itself the strength to construct a civic identity built on the acceptance of difference, and Ukraine’s tragedy that Russia has failed to do so.
An associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Center for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, Dr. Matthew Light studies migration control, policing and criminal justice, and public and citizen security, primarily in the post-Soviet region.