Vejas Liulevicius: belief

Transcript context

…Well, I think the short answer is without a full historical reckoning that would’ve been healthy about the recent past in ways that’s not very surprising because given the economic misery of dislocations and the cumulative damage of all of those previous decades of this experiment, it left precious little patience or leisure or surplus for introspection. But after an initial period of great interest in understanding the full measure of what Russia and other parts of the Soviet Union had undergone in this first initial explosion of journalism and of reporting and investigations, historical investigations with new sources, after an initial period marked by such interest, people instead retreated into the here and now and the today. And the result is that there’s been less than would be healthy of a taking stock, a reckoning. Even in assigning of responsibility for those things that were experienced in the past, no Nuremberg trial took place in order to hold responsible those who had repressed others in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In other ex-communist countries, there was also precious little in the way of legal proceedings that would’ve established responsibility. And keep in mind, the Nuremberg trials had as one of their goals a very important one, as it turns out, not even individual verdicts for individual people found guilty, but to collect and publicize information, to create knowledge and transparency about what the reality had been in the past. In the case of the former Soviet Union, in the case of Russia today, instead of a clear-eyed recognition of the vast nature of what it all cost, Putin upon replacing Yeltsin was in a position to instead traffic in the most varied, eclectic, and often mutually contradictory historical memories or packages of memories. So on the one hand, in Putin’s Russia, the Tsars are rehabilitated as heroes of Russian statehood. Putin sees Lenin in a negative light because Lenin by producing federalism as a model for the Soviet Union, laid a time bomb at the base of that state that eventually smashed it into many constituent parts as nations regained their independence. While Stalin, it’s acknowledged exacted a dreadful toll, but also was effective as a representative of Russian statehood. This produced where we are today. It’s a commonplace echoed by many that Russia without Ukraine is a nation-state or could be a nation-state. Russia with Ukraine has to be an empire. Putin, who is not really seeking a revival of Stalin’s rule, but still is nostalgic about earlier forms of greatness and of the strength of Russian statehood to the exclusion of other values has undertaken a course of aggression that has produced results quite different from what he likely expected. rms of greatness and of the strength of Russian statehood to the exclusion of other values has undertaken a course of aggression that has produced results quite different from what he likely expected. And I think that timing is crucial here. It’s fascinating to try to imagine, “What if this attempt to re-digest Ukraine into an expanded Russian imperial territory had taken place earlier? ” I think that the arrival on the scene of a new generation of Ukrainians has produced a very different dynamic and a disinclination for any kind of nostalgia for the past, packaged however it might be, and however nostalgic it might be made to appear. And there, I think that Putin’s expectations in the invasion of 2022 were entirely overturned. His expectation was that Ukraine would be divided on this score and that some significant portion of Ukrainians would welcome- Some significant portion of Ukrainians would welcome the advance of Russian forces, and instead, there has been the most amazing and surprising heroic resistance that continues to this day. It’s interesting to consider timing and also individual leaders, Zelensky, you can imagine all kinds of other figures that would’ve folded much easier, and Zelensky, I think, surprised a lot of the world, this comedian, somehow becoming essentially an effective war president. So put that in the bin of singular figures that define history.…

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