Ukrainian and Russian Culture Through the Ages

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The claim that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, “a single whole,” has been resounding in Russian mass media, film, and other discourses for the last two decades. Putin took a pronounced colonial turn with his return to the Presidency in 2012, describing Russia as a state-civilization, in which Russians and Ukrainians are joined in “spiritual unity.” In his long essay on “historical unity,” published in July 2021, Putin argued that Ukraine and Russia were a single country, bound by a shared origin. In this logic, the broken unity must be restored, even if through violence. History thus serves as a justification for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The claim that a nation does not exist is a rhetorical preparation for destroying it. The course will look at historical facts and cultural artifacts of Russia and Ukraine to determine the roots of Russia’s current aggression in Ukraine. Among others, the course will discuss the following questions. Is Kyivan Rus part of Russian or Ukrainian history, or neither? Does Ukraine have its own history and culture that is distinct from Russian? Was autocracy inherent to the Russian state or were there any democratic alternatives? Are Ukrainians divided into Russian-speakers (aspiring to join Russia) and Ukrainian-speaking nationalists (aspiring to EU)? The course will examine the origins, points of intersection and divergence of Ukrainian and Russian cultures through the lens of history, art, and literature from the Christianization of Rus (10th century) to the present time. We will look at the history of Russian imperialism, centuries of appropriation of Ukrainian cultural achievements, annihilation of Ukrainian traditions, extermination of Ukrainian intellectuals, and the politics of Russification with the purpose to see how the current events reflect a tendency that has already existed for centuries. The course will look closely into recent history, specifically the annexation of Crimea (2014), a sacred space in Putin’s neo-imperialism, as well as the war in Donbass initiated by Russia yet left largely unnoticed by the Western world since 2014. It is only after the full-scale invasion in February 2022, that the West suddenly became interested in the difference between Russia and Ukraine, or how to pronounce Kyiv. This entrapment in the imperial framework and silencing the war in Eastern Ukraine as a regional conflict allowed Russia to continue with its war crimes today. As a successor of the Soviet State, Russia continues its politics of totalitarianism, expansionism, militarization, repressions, censorship, and propaganda in a renewed form and context. All of what we see in Putin’s Russia today has existed there before. One of the tasks for this course is to identify and analyze the historical precedents in order to define the further trajectories.