Once upon a time, back in the day when I spent several hours on most days in front of a classroom, I taught a graduate seminar on "The Meaning of Culture." The way I went about it was to explore the range of meanings of a number of topics that intersected with culture: culture and religion, for example, or culture and society, culture and politics (i.e., power), and culture and civilization.
I let go of any serious academic pursuits when I retired, but my interest in those areas has not diminished. And, like Paul Krugman, who regrets he has only thirteen hours a day to devote to reading about Ukraine, I sit in frustration at our powerlessness to do anything to help the Ukrainians drive the Russians out of their country, and I try to channel that frustration into exploring the extent of the problem, as well as all sorts of ancillary issues such as the fact that Ukrainian и is pronounced like Russian ы аnd Ukrainian doesn't have the letter ы, that Russian и is pronounced like Ukrainian і and Russian doesn't have the letter і, that Ukrainian ґ is pronounced like Russian г, which Ukrainian also has, but it's pronounced like an English h, and a whole bunch of other stuff - Ukrainian geography, the history of Kievan Rus, and where to get a Ukrainian ribbon/flag to pin to my chest.
There is a wonderful Swiss television program which I watch regularly called Sternstunde Philosophie. It translates to something like "Great moments in philosophy," and the other day I happened upon a program from September 2015 entitled "Putin, Russia and the Crimea" which featured a Russian philosopher/writer born in France talking about the difference between Russian civilization and civilization in the West. His name is Victor Yerofeev [sometimes written Erofe(y)ev] (Ви́ктор Ерофе́ев in Russian, Віктор Єрофєєв in Ukrainian) - he's unknown here and although he has written for the New York Review of Books, none of his work that I know of has been translated into English.
Yerofeev's contention is that while the West is grounded in Enlightenment values, including respect for reason and the the rule of law, Russia went its own way, and retained more traditional authoritarian values, whether tsarist control backed by the Russian Orthodox Church or Soviet Marxism-Leninism. To Yerofeev, these are merely two sides of the same coin, both reflections of the conviction that the meaning of life, the natural way of things, involves the submission of the self to authority.
From this starting point, he argues that the West gets Russia fundamentally wrong. They are not, he implies, "duped" by the likes of Putin; their thinking may indeed be channeled by his control over Russian media, but they are naturally inclined not to question his authority in the first place. If you stick a microphone in their faces and ask them what they think of the war (read: "special military operation") or politics in general, they are inclined to say, "That's not for me to speak about." The West likes to think that shows Russians live in fear. Yerofeev maintains they are merely reflecting what they consider to be the natural order of things.
What came to mind when I heard Yerofeev hold forth on this wildly simplistic generalization about civilizational difference was something one of my Chinese students said to me when I asked her why there wasn't more opposition to the crackdown at Tiаnаnmеn Square back in 1989 - you remember, when that guy stood up and faced the tank? Her answer blew me away. She said, apparently in all seriousness, "Because they are our leaders." Those who like to run with cultural generalizations will claim this shows that Russia and China both share an Asian value system.
I used to struggle, in Japan, over the regularity with which I would have to listen to somebody explain culture difference with lines like "we Japanese think collectively, you Americans think individualistically." And I remember being lectured by an uncle back in 1960 who had lived through the Hitler years in Germany and had come up with a neat shortcut way of distinguishing between American and German values. "We Germans" he told me, "write you with a capital D (Du) and I with a small i (ich); you Americans do the opposite, always representing yourself with a capital letter. His conclusion: there was something off about a culture like ours which made us all into self-serving narcissists.
Yerofeev's main argument is worth taking into consideration, that we each, Russians and Westerners, tend to misjudge the other by looking through the wrong lens and seeing the other as inadequate versions of ourselves. That's hardly an original idea; the entire field of anthropology is based on the assumption that each culture can only properly be judged by its own cultural standards - and that's the purpose of ethnography, the chief method of doing anthropology. Yet at the same time I think Yerofeev misses the boat. He fails to account for the fact that culture is not static, but dynamic. It evolves. And it embraces more than a single set of attitudes, beliefs and practices. Modern national cultures, especially, are inclined to be umbrella categories containing a wide variety of contradictory values resting side by side.
This becomes relevant when one tries to answer the question of whether Putin has a point in arguing that Ukraine, like Belarus, is actually part and parcel of the same East Slavic civilization as Russia - and is therefore essentially authoritarian in nature. And he may be right that Ukraine is made up of two distinct national cultures, or "mindsets," one more "European" on the western side of the Dnieper River and a more "Russian" mindset east of the Dnieper, confirmed by the fact that Western Ukraine is essentially Ukrainian-speaking and Eastern Ukraine is to a large degree Russian speaking, or at least composed of people who code-switch between the two languages. Never mind that Putin is factually incorrect in arguing that Russia is under threat by Ukrainian Nazis - there are some, as there are in every European (and American) country, but they represent a very tiny number of folk. Putin wants us not to miss the point (and Yerofeev implies something quite similar, if I read him correctly) that Ukraine as a whole is a part of the East Slavic (i.e., "Russian") civilization, and that the years it spent living as a Soviet republic only solidified that tendency.
The reason I found the Yerofeev interview salient is that he seems to be making a cultural argument to strengthen Putin's argument that Russia, Belarus and Ukraine are essentially part of the same civilization, the implication being that they somehow belong together. And this takes us directly to the discussion of whether the West is pushing NATO on Ukraine or whether Ukraine, like the Baltic States, Poland, and the other formerly Warsaw Pact nations now in NATO actively sought out NATO membership as a means of getting out from under Russia's sphere of influence. If Putin and Yerofeev are correct, to want to join Europe is to bark up the wrong tree.
My reading of current events considers this a crude simplification. I think Putin (and Yerofeev, if I'm reading him right) are dead wrong. The evidence is everywhere and plain to see that the former Soviet republics on Russia's periphery wanted out. It is not the case that the West seduced them away from Mother Russia. In fact, Ukraine and Georgia would have joined NATO in 2008 if France and Germany had not kept them out because their governments were simply too corrupt to make them eligible. And now, with the reformed Zelenskyy at the helm, that argument no longer holds water for Ukraine.
I don't want to dismiss Yerofeev out of hand. I haven't read any of his books, and I don't claim to know him on the basis of a single interview on Swiss television. And I am intrigued, as somebody given to contrarianism, by his attempt to make a more nuanced analysis of Stalinism - his latest book, entitled Der Gute Stalin (The Good Stalin), is an autobiographical novel (not available in English) of his life as a kid growing up as the son of Molotov's French translator, and thus a child of Stalinist privilege. I know he goes a lot deeper than I'm portraying him here.
[As an aside here, Molotov is remembered as the man responsible for the holodomor, the genocidal agricultural policy in Ukraine in which millions of Ukrainians starved to death in the 1930s. I also note in passing that he broke with his father at some point, and that, whatever his political history, it's his cultural analysis of Russian culture I'm dealing with here, and his personal political history is largely irrelevant.]
I leave it to others to determine whether my insistence on seeing life in both/and terms rather than either/or wherever possible is an ideological bias that leads me to reject culture as a static, rather than a dynamic, phenomenon. And whether I'm making a mistake and looking too much through a Western European lens when I see the desire of Ukraine and Georgia to follow Poland, the Balkans and the rest of Eastern Europe in seeking closer association with NATO and the EU and seeing this as an issue worth fighting for.
I don't buy the argument would-be realists who eschew moral arguments are making, that the West is at fault for encroaching on the Russian sphere of influence and the point of reference should be the Monroe Doctrine. That's what-about-ism, the illogical argument that my wrong cancels out your wrong. Imperialists from Country A who trash their way around the world do not entitle imperialists from Country B to do the same. Two wrongs do not make a right. The death of four million Ukrainians from starvation in the 1930s did not entitle Pinochet to drop political opponents from helicopters into the ocean. And because the United States of America made attempts at regime change in Vietnam and Iraq, and before that several countries in Central and South America, that doesn't mean Ukrainians can't complain when Russia grabs whole areas of their country. Nor does it follow that American or European realists should tell Ukrainians to give in to Putin's bullying because bullying is just the way things are. As Germany, Spain, Japan and Italy have demonstrated, a fascist government in one century does not mean those countries cannot fight fascism in the next.
It bothers me no end to read (and I beg your forgiveness, Mr. Yerofeev, if I have read you wrong) that since Ukraine was once a part of the closed-minded world of Marxist-Leninist thought and before that it shared a czarist and orthodox world view with Russians, it must necessarily stay that way.
Today it is fighting to be free and democratic, and that, in my view, is an effort we should all want to get behind.
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