In 2003, the pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma published a ghost-written book called "Ukraine Is Not Russia." Last summer, Russian President Vladimir Putin authored a long historical article making the opposite argument — it was called “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” — and many a Ukrainian heart sank. Sure enough, in less than six months, Russian troops and tanks started massing near the Ukrainian border.
If you don’t want to live in interesting times, as the alleged curse goes, best to avoid the parts of the world where heads of state write history treatises.
In trying to make the case that Ukraine and Russia are historically “one people,” Putin (or his scribes) did not go back to the Soviet version of history; instead, they reached for the most reactionary tsarist one. That’s because the Soviets did recognize Ukrainians as a separate ethnic nation with their own language and the (theoretical) right to self-determination, which in practice meant they were granted a Ukrainian republic within the Soviet Union. Unlike the Soviets, the Russian tsars saw Ukrainians as part of the Russian nation, representing no more than its “Little Russian tribe,” and their language a mere regional dialect. They also believed that over the centuries the West had attempted time and again to undermine Russo-Ukrainian unity. Putin borrowed this point, adding NATO and the EU to the list of Western offenders.
