Charles W. King

The ongoing conflict in Eastern Ukraine has raised the question of how Europe and the United States should respond to Russian adventurism and aggression against its neighbors, particularly if the Russians make similar moves against nations with more established relationships or membership in NATO or the EU such as Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. It is important to address these possibilities and develop strategies to deter or Russian aggression. Asking, “How do we counter Russian moves” neglects an important question that will further illuminate the current situation in Eastern Europe and help to formulate effective strategies. The question that needs to be asked is why do the Eastern provinces of Ukraine (and Crimea) possess so much affinity for Russia that they would actively support Russian land grabs rather than resist as their Ukrainian neighbors are doing?

The Russian people descend from the Kievan Rus whose cultural and political capital was Kiev, but Kiev was in the southern reaches of the lands populated by the Rus. In addition the Rus were driven north in the 1240s by invading Mongols and they did not return for almost 250 years (see Russian Territorial Anxiety in Context). When the Russian Empire reacquired Ukraine in the 1700s it was populated by new people. The Russian Empire began a policy of “Russification” in Ukraine that would not only mandate Russian as the official state language and promote Russian culture, but also import Russian peasants to colonize the region. For a short time in the 1920s the Soviet Union promoted national minorities but many of minority leaders were later purged, especially in Ukraine. In addition a famine caused millions of Ukrainians to perish in the 1920s, and rather than attempt to alleviate the famine the Soviet government under Stalin used it as a punishment for Ukrainian peasants who were resisting the collectivization of farmland. This was followed by another wave internal colonization of the Ukrainian breadbasket by Russian peasants, directed by the Soviet establishment.

It is these policies of Russification and internal colonization that made Nikita Khrushchev confident that giving Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954 would be a change in title only. They are also what made Crimea and Eastern Ukraine a permissible environment for Russia’s ‘Little Green Men’. Recognizing the history of Russian attempts to solidify its hold over Ukraine over the centuries can help to understand how its operations in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea were so effective and better asses where such operations might plausibly be attempted. The exclave of Kaliningrad will remain an area of concern for the US and Europe for this reason, as will the large populations of ethnic Russians in the Baltic States. It is also important to recognize that much of Eastern Europe is not a plausible target of these kinds of operations. Understanding that Russian adventurism in Ukraine is not simply an operation by Russian Special Forces, but the culmination of centuries of Russian policy will allow a more accurate assessment of Russian capabilities, and the creation of better strategies to counter Russian aggression in Eastern Europe.

Charles W. King

In recent decades historians have increasingly made a distinction between the events as they happened and what people at the time remember about these events, termed “Historical Memory”. As scholars have diversified from event and biography based narratives of history to social and cultural narratives, historical memory has become increasingly important in the academic history profession. This raises the question of whether or not policy-makers need to make such a consideration towards historical memory as well. It is tempting to shrug off historical memory and insist that policy can be made solely based upon the facts on the ground but this ignores two important realities; first, that policy and diplomacy is done by people, and second, that people make such decisions not based upon what may have actually happened (which they may not know) but upon their perception of what happened. Historical memory is a significant part of this perception.

While the effect of public opinion is most pronounced in democracies, authoritarian regimes are neither immune from nor unaware of its importance. The provide some of the clearest examples of its use in policy-making. The creation of the “Stab in the Back” narrative that helped propel Adolf Hitler and he Nazis to power in post-World War One Germany. More recently, both the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin have demonstrated skill at using their population’s historical memory, frequently as victims of fascism, to turn their population against foreign powers and in favor of strengthening the powers or influence of their respective governments. The propagandist nature of these manipulations makes them appear crude to outsiders, but they frequently ignore how deep things like the ‘Great Patriotic War’ and ‘Hundred Years of Humiliation’ are to national identities.

Just as policy-makers, appointed or elected, cannot ignore the political realities their own country, they cannot ignore the political realities of others. It would be a grievous error to suggest that the Holocaust be ignored when considering how Israel interacts with its neighbors, allies, and the Palestinians today. Israel’s perception of existential threat is a significant factor in things as wide ranging as the position of political parties on settlements to the emphasis on crew survivability in the design of I.D.F.  armored vehicles. Historical memory has a clear effect on the Israeli people and state, and policy makers cannot afford to be ignorant of how this affects Israeli policy.

After the U.S.S. Maine exploded in Havana Harbor in 1898 newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearts was alleged to have telegrammed a journalist in Havana, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” That there is no evidence of such a telegram is not even beside the point but a demonstration of it. It did not matter if the Spanish had sunk the Maine and it only matters to a few historians that Hearst never said such a thing. it remains one his most famous attributions. This is because of the primacy of historical memory over historical fact. President McKinley could not stop the public call for war, Hearst is forever the man who fabricated a war to sell newspapers, and policy-makers need to recognize that memory and perception are frequently more important to making good decisions. Facts contrary to the dominant narrative while true are irrelevant, and hewing to them will not produce effective policy.

Further Reading

Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried, (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1990).

Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor's Tale, (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1991).

Margaret MacMillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History. (New York, NY: The Modern Library, 2010).

Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century, (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1998).

Zheng Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations, (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1983).

Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997)

Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2000).

Charles W. King

The 1240's were a landmark decade in Russian history. Victories at the Battle of the Neva and the Battle of the Ice turned back invasions by the Swedish and the Teutonic Knights. The year 1240 ended with more than a dozen cities of the Kievan Rus being sacked by invading Mongols, including the capitol, Kiev. This marked the beginning of hundreds of years of tribute and vassalage to the Mongols.

After Ivan III “threw off the tartar yoke” in 1480 the territorial incursions did not cease. The Ottomans burned parts of Moscow in 1571. The 1600’s were a time of internal conflict between the Rus princes and continued invasions from the north, west, and east. It was not until the 1700’s under Peter the Great that a single Russian state formed, and Catherine the Great that Russia began to exercise control over its neighbors instead of the other way around. This stability did not last long. When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812 he had yet to be defeated by any European power. In the 1850's Russia lost the Crimean War to an alliance of the British, French, and Ottomans, ceding territory and right to base naval forces in the Black Sea.

The twentieth century treated the Russian state no better. The tumult of the First World War precipitated two revolutions. Foreign powers intervened in the civil war that followed in the favor of the anti-Bolshevik White Army. Hitler’s Germany invaded in June 1941. Neither the end of the Second World War nor shared ideology would put a stop to the territorial incursions; the U.S.S.R. and the P.R.C. fought an undeclared border war in 1969.

Russian history begins with the loss of its cultural and economic capitol, hundreds of years of foreign domination, and after establishing control over its own sovereignty the encroachments never stopped. It is unsurprising that to this day the Russian state and people exhibit an anxiety bordering on paranoia for their territorial integrity. Combine this with the fact that when the Russian state has successfully turned back invaders it has been by trading territory for time and the territorial ambitions of the Russian Tsars, Soviet leaders, and Vladimir Putin are comprehensible, although not condonable. Even when Russia exerted control over its near abroad, the region was always a source of tension and concern in ways that other great powers did not experience.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia’s neighbors are increasingly looking west. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, and Romania are members of NATO and the European Union. Finland and Sweden are EU members and cooperate extensively with NATO on defense. Ukraine and Georgia have both looked to the EU and the US in recent years for trade and security. From the Russian perspective this expansion fits with hundreds of years of precedent of dangerous encroachment on Russian territory and security and must confronted. That this is not necessarily the intent of the EU, US, or NATO is irrelevant. A sphere of influence is historically important to the Russian state. What may appear to Western observers like unchecked aggression or exploitative meddling is to Russian policy-makers the crucial reinforcement of necessary regional order and defensive credibility. By recognizing this, the US and its European allies can better formulate strategies to deal with unacceptable acts of aggression as well as more insidious actions on the part of the Russian state.

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Further Reading

Jane Burbank, and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

Lorenz M. Luthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 2008).