Fwd: What Putin wants

And what nationalism means to him.

Hello, Weeds fans!

 

This week, I let Zack Beauchamp tell you what Vladimir Putin wants, and we look at a new take on why white Northerners turned against lynching.

 

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or comments, email weeds@vox.com or find me on Twitter at @DLind. And if you want to recommend this newsletter to your friends and family, tell them to sign up at vox.com/weeds-newsletter.

EXPLAINED IN 600 WORDS

The war on Ukraine, explained by Vladimir Putin

Look. The biggest story in the world right now is the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I do not pretend to know nearly enough to explain either of these countries to you. But Vox reporter and frequent Weeds guest Zack Beauchamp does. In a piece yesterday, he used Vladimir Putin's Monday speech preemptively justifying invasion to highlight how Putin's anger with the pro-Western turn of the current Ukrainian government is of a piece with his fundamental rejection that Ukraine ought to be a sovereign country.

 

Note in particular the way Putin is using nationalism: justifying the invasion with a classic nationalist trope that citizens of another country are really your countrymen, while explicitly rejecting "nationalism" to justify neo-imperial ambition.

 

Zack wrote:

 

"Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space," (Putin) said, per the Kremlin's official translation. "Since time immemorial, the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians."

 

What we now call Ukraine, he says, "was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik Communist Russia." In this questionable narrative, a trio of early Soviet leaders — Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev — carved land away from Russia and several nearby nations to create a distinct and ahistorical republic called Ukraine. The creation of Ukraine and the other Soviet republics, Putin says, was an attempt to win the support of "the most zealous nationalists" across the Soviet Union — at the expense of the historical idea of Russia.

 

In the speech, he uses a revealing metaphor on these issues: "the virus of nationalism." Ukrainian nationalism, in his view, is an infection introduced to the Russian host by the Bolsheviks; when the Soviet Union collapsed, and republics from Ukraine to Estonia to Georgia declared independence, the virus killed its host.

 

Putin's narrative is twisted history: It is simply incorrect to say that Ukraine has no independent national identity separate from Russia. "Putin is no historian," Timothy Snyder, a Yale University historian of Eastern Europe, writes in the Financial Times.

 

Regardless, Putin does see the former Soviet republics — and, above all, Ukraine — as parts of Russia wrongly wrenched from the motherland. As a result, he cannot see post-Soviet Ukraine as a real country; in his view, it has no real history nor national tradition to unite it. Instead, he sees it as a playground for oligarchs who deploy anti-Russian demagoguery as a smokescreen for their corruption.

 

"The Ukrainian authorities — I would like to emphasize this — began by building their statehood on the negation of everything that united us," he says.

Russian control over Ukraine, he argues, has been replaced by a different kind of foreign rule: that of the West. After the 2013 Euromaidan protests, which toppled pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, "Ukraine itself was placed under external control ... a colony with a puppet regime," Putin says.

 

The implication of this historical narrative is that the Ukrainian government, in its current form, is illegitimate and intolerable.

 

It is illegitimate, to Putin, because he views Ukraine as a rightful part of Russia separated purely by an accident of history. It is intolerable to him, because Ukraine's government seeks to legitimize itself by courting conflict with Russia, as he sees it, both oppressing its native Russian speakers and menacing Russia's borders. In his mind, a pro-Western Ukraine could serve as a launching pad either for a NATO invasion of Russia or, somewhat more plausibly, a CIA-backed popular uprising against his regime.

 

So there is, in Putin's mind, a seamless connection between Russian nationalism and Russian security interests. Putin believes that the current Ukrainian government threatens Russia for reasons bound up in their imperial past; restoring Russian control over territories that he believes it rightfully owns would be one way of ending the threat.

PAPER OF THE WEEK

Did it take an anti-Italian lynching to make white Americans care about anti-Black violence?

In a recently published paper, Charles Seguin and Sabrina Nardin look at the effects of an 1891 lynching in New Orleans, known as the lynching of the "Italian Eleven." The lynching victims were suspects in the murder of the New Orleans police chief, a high-profile Mafia-buster, and the initial reaction in the North was that the lynching was, at worst, a necessary evil given the threat of Mafia entrenchment in the US. (Teddy Roosevelt, in a letter, called the lynching a "rather good thing.") But three of the victims were Italian citizens, and the Italian embassy made a big deal of the lynching, causing an international incident. 

 

The uproar — which Ida B. Wells was able to follow up with tours of Britain a few years later presenting her work on the lynching of Black citizens in the US — was enough, in the authors' interpretation, to force white Northerners to see lynchings as their problem, too, turning the practice from accepted to controversial within the forcibly white world of US politics at the turn of the 20th century.

 

The paper essentially extends a narrative we're familiar with from the 20th century — in which a World War II/Cold War US government expanded civil rights as a way to retain "soft power" and international credibility — into the late 19th century. But the implication, also, is that lynching wasn't really a problem to Northerners until the people getting lynched weren't Black.

LISTEN TO THIS

 

Impossibly, Tuesday was this week, and Dylan, Jerusalem, and I took on the meaning of the recent San Francisco school board recall. We also discussed the theory that the "Great Resignation" helped cause inflation. Listen here.

MORE POLICY READS

• The invasion of Ukraine, explained. [Jen Kirby and Jonathan Guyer / Vox]

   

• The "marshmallow test" is a LIE. Eat those marshmallows if you want, when you want. [Dee Gill / Anderson Review]

   

• Mitch McConnell wants Republicans to run in 2022 on not being Democrats. Rick Scott wants them to run on the Tea Party — which is to say, pre-Trump — economic agenda. [Very Serious / Josh Barro]

   

• Inside the fall of a major climate activism group. [Zack Colman / Politico ]

   

• People aren't moving out of their hometowns anymore, and it's making society worse. [Jerusalem Demsas / Vox]