26.04.2024, Giessen, Guest lecture: The Russian Imperial Nationalist Myths Behind Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine

The talk will investigate the origins of Russia’s full-scale invasion through an analysis of four myths. The first Tsarist and White Russian émigré myth is of a pan-Russian people composed of great, little, and white Russians. Ukrainians are Little Russians and not a separate people. The goal of the special military operation’s ‘denazification’ is the destruction of Ukrainian identity and its replacement by Little Russians. The second Russian imperial nationalistic of Crimea and New Russia (southeastern Ukraine) being ‘historical Russian lands’ that were wrongly included in Soviet Ukraine and have been annexed in 2014 and 2022. The remainder of Ukraine will be constituted as a Little Russia satellite entity. The third Soviet myth is the description of the special military operation as a second great patriotic war to fight contemporary Nazis in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has transformed the great patriotic war into a quasi-religious cult alongside a positive rehabilitation of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The covering up of Stalinist crimes against humanity and autocratic dictatorship in Putin’s Russia has given impetus to the committing of a large numbers of war crimes by Russian forces in Ukraine. The fourth Soviet myth xenophobically condemns the West for transforming Ukraine into an ‘Anti-Russia’ that constituted a threat to Russia’s security which would be eliminated by a special military operation. The talk will conclude with proposals about how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine requires a fundamental perestroika of post-communist, Russian and Eurasian studies.