People like me tend to fit what they know, or think they know, into a the mold of what is true. Russia, specifically Vladimir Putin, is currently using outright terror against Ukraine’s civilian population and committing war crimes. I’ve always thought the term “war crimes” was weird, since war itself is a contest of murder, but I digress.
So onto this modern war of a sort many of us thought we’d seen the last of, I have been trying to applying what I know about Russia, Ukraine and Poland as a framework through which to watch the news unfold. But like a lot of us in the West, I don’t actually know very much, so I’ve been going through great lengths to try to make what I think is true, be true.
The other day I started writing a long blog post about how all of this could be traced back to the Mongolian Empire. You laugh. And you should!
I sat down to make a compelling case but decided I needed to know more about the Cossacks, the Tatars, the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, the history of the Mongolian Empire and the entire history of Russia. So I started reading wikipedia entries like a beast.
What I learned was that I don’t know anything. There may be something to my original theory, but in order to make a case I realized I’d have to know the roots behind a thousand years of conflicts between Russia, Ukraine, the Ottoman Empire, the Crimean Khanate, and yes, the Mongolian Empire.
What I learned was that Russia itself is so geographically exposed to the rest of Eurasia that they’ve been forced to endure thousands of invasions themselves that resulted in the deaths of millions of Russians. The Mongols alone sacked Moscow a dozen times over hundreds of years, carrying off thousands of slaves each time and leaving the city a smoking ruin.
Russians in turn made alliances with neighbors, sometimes by force of arms, and developed a long complex relationship with the Cossacks, an ethnicity forged at the doorway of the Eurasian steppe, through which insanely efficient cavalry armed with the finest bow technology in the world would attack on an almost constant basis, even after the fall of the Mongolian Empire. The Cossacks were in turn hired, cajoled, enticed, forced and eventually rounded up and imprisoned in an effort to harness their fighting prowess. Or to simple create a buffer against attacks from the steppe.
Cossack culture (which shares an etymological root with Kazakhstan) helped formed the base of what is now Ukraine.
I still have no idea of my original theory has any merit, but what I learned was that the Russians have long relied on total war to get what they want. They’ve been besieged and burned, and have done the same to their neighbors countless times.
I’ve written before that I’m fascinated by genetic memory. What are we born knowing? What fears are passed in our DNA? What traumas? Eastern Europeans and Russian no doubt have some of these inherited traumas. For most of their history war has been a constant. It is only in recent years, these frothy days of online shopping and hashtag games, that the region has cooled somewhat, making this moment that much more surprising and terrifying.
Knowing some of this historical trauma helps perhaps explain some of Putin’s mad thinking. And some of the ferocity with which Ukraine has fought back.
Or, perhaps, I’m just trying to make sense of the senseless. Which I guess is a worthy goal, even if impossible to do.
figure 1. The Mongolian Empire
By Wikipedia User:Astrokey44, modified by Sting