In Conversation with Daniel Beer

My name is Daniel Beer, and I am Reader in Modern European history. I teach here at Royal Holloway across the Modern European history modules, but my area of research is Imperial Russia especially in the context of Europe and the globe particularly in the 19th century. Although, some of my research has crossed over the revolutionary divide into the early Soviet period. I have an unhealthy fascination with crime and punishment, so my first book looks at how criminals are understood and represented in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. My more recent book The House of the Dead looked at the exile system which the Tsarist regime operated until its collapse in 1917. This was a system of punishment which used prisoners to settle, develop, and exploit Siberia in a colonial project. Before the Russian revolution in 1917, the Tsarist regime sent about a million Tsarist subjects and their families from European Russia to a variety of penal settlements, villages, towns, factories, and mines across Siberia. In comparison, this completely dwarves the British policy of deporting criminals to Australia in the 18th and 19th centuries as the British exiled 168,000 convicts until the late 1860s when the policy was ended. I am currently working on the revolutionary movement during the reign of Alexander II and the assassination of the Tsar by political radicals. As well as what this confrontation between the revolutionary movement and the Tsarist state meant for the development of Russian political and legal culture.

When I’m not being the Head of Department I teach courses on the Russian empire, 19th century Europe, and a special subject on European culture at the turn of the 20th century.

Lucy: So you ran some discussion sessions back in February that discussed the myth that the Kremlin has generated to base their current policies in Ukraine on. I was wondering whether you wanted to expand upon that and discuss that here?

A: Historians are keen to make the point that we need to use the past to better understand the present, it doesn’t mean we can understand it perfectly as of course history never repeats itself in any kind of clear or detailed fashion. I think for historians of Russian history the claim they make that their expertise should be brought to bear in order to understand current events, has been strengthened by the Kremlin in the last few years and particularly since the invasion of Ukraine in February. The Kremlin has framed the invasion very explicitly as a project designed to write a historical wrong so the mandate for the invasion as far as the Kremlin is concerned is essentially historical. A very good example of this is in July of last year, Putin published a historical essay. He didn’t write it, but it was published under his name on the historical unity of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. Some very perceptive commentators at the time said this essay was basically "[Putin's] essay ignores substantial differences between Ukrainians and Russians..." a declaration of war against the Ukrainian state. What the essay amounted to was a warped interpretation of Russian history and Ukraine’s position within both the Tsarist empire and Soviet Union. It essentially argued that Ukrainians do not have a legitimate organic national identity as Ukrainians and are instead Russians bound to the Russian state by history, language, and religion. What has happened is that Russia’s enemies throughout history and by enemies we mean the Polish Lithuanian commonwealth, Napoleon, the Austro Hungarian empire, the German empire in the First World War, the Nazis in the Second World War. These groups have tried to drive a wedge between Ukraine and Russia and have sought to convert Ukrainians - who are really Russians - into agents of western imperialism to attack Russia. This essay ignores substantial differences between Ukrainians and Russians in terms of the development of their political culture, language, and exposure to outside influences. It basically argues that Ukraine is not a proper state but a fabrication. Putin blamed the creation of the Ukrainian state in its current form on the Soviet regime.

In 1917 during the chaos of the revolutionary period the Bolsheviks tried to seize control of the Tsarist empire and hold it together in one coherent state. By the end of the 19th century the drive for national independence within Ukraine had developed to the point where the Bolsheviks had to make a concession to it. This concession led to the creation of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine at the same level as the Soviet Russian Socialist Republic and they existed together within a confederal state known as the USSR. What the Bolsheviks were doing was acknowledging Ukrainian national identity in order to build a state around it that would accommodate it within a broader union of the USSR, and it worked! It brought together the Ukrainians and Georgians who had also been developing a powerful movement for national independence from the Tsarist empire. Putin’s narrative argued there was no real claim for Ukrainian independence. Rather, the Bolsheviks randomly created a fake republic which then engendered an artificial sense of Ukrainian national identity among the elites, something which never had any purchase among the general population who always felt themselves to be Russian. So basically, he said that the creation of a separate Republic for Ukraine in 1920 was a time bomb underneath the USSR which eventually exploded in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed as Ukraine seceded from the Soviet Union and established its own independent state. But Putin’s argument is deeply flawed and tendentious.

The Kremlin believed that Russian troops would be able to seize the Ukrainian capital very quickly as to them, history was on their side and the Ukrainian state should never have existed. Putin felt the troops were going to be welcomed as parts of the population had done in the Crimea in 2014, and it would all be over very quickly. He was drunk on his own highly mythologised reading of Russia’s history, the history of Ukraine, and the history of other peoples on the periphery of the Russian federation. The Kremlin fundamentally believes it has a historical mandate for the invasion. It’s an interesting example, as we often think that politicians cast around for convenient historical narratives and myths to sell their policies, but this is one of those cases where the historical myth making does seem very substantially to have influenced decision making in the Kremlin.

These warped historical narratives also goes a long way towards explaining why the Kremlin has got it so disastrously wrong, because it turns out when you pour Russian armies into Ukraine the Ukrainians don’t want you to be there. The Ukrainians do not feel they are being liberated from some western imperialist cabal or from a Nazi regime based in Kyiv. They believe they are being invaded by another people that is seeking to extinguish their own culture and national identity. But the authorities in Russia were blind to this possibility, so consumed were they by their own vision of the history of Russia and Ukraine.

It’s a lesson in the way in which politicians who are bad historians are also bad politicians, if you misread history so disastrously it leads you to make wayward and ultimately self-destructive decisions. In a way, Putin is right that history really does matter in this region. However, if he had more historical curiosity and historical honesty, he would have looked at a whole host of different events in Ukraine’s not so-distant past that have helped to define significant parts of Ukrainian identity in opposition to Russia. He would have then thought very differently about what would have been needed in order to successfully invade his neighbour.

The short version here is that politicians traffic in historical myth at their own peril, especially they begin to believe their own false historical narratives. Part of the problem in Russia is that a lot of the debate about Russia’s past has actually been shut down and silenced. There have been various laws to prosecute people who were critical of the Nazi Soviet pact, which was the deal done between Stalin and Hitler at the beginning of WW2 to carve up the Baltic states and Poland. It was illegal in Russia to talk about the widespread rape and looting perpetrated by Soviet soldiers in the Red Army during the war. So there are lots of areas of historical debate that have been the object of persecution or have been shut down. In that context, when Putin’s essay was published, it was backed by the huge authority of the Kremlin. A version of that kind of history has been relentlessly pumped out now in Russian classrooms, exhibitions, TV documentaries, and online media. The Kremlin has lent into a multi-media effort to share this version of Russia’s past with the population and ensured that its own history frames their understanding of their own country and of the world around them. Of course, over a longer period of time, it makes a difference. That is one of the reasons why history in the classroom is fought over in any society because it becomes such an influential source of information and national identity. In Russia, it has gone almost completely unchallenged. Until quite recently, people have been able to write what they wanted online but at an institutional level, schools, TV studios, and so on, it’s basically enshrined a view of Russia as a state that is continually under assault both from western powers trying to destroy it and from and traitors within Russia itself. That kind of world view has really become very embedded and is a relentlessly one-sided and distorted account of Russian history.

One might think this is all a bit unfortunate and that this is just for the Russians to work through themselves, but you can see the very real-life consequences of this in the disastrous and appalling invasion of Ukraine. The things Putin is saying now, 20 years ago were the kinds of things that a sort of fringe collection of historians, public commentators and philosophers were spewing out online, but they weren’t really getting amplified or gaining much traction with the wider population. In a way they have now moved more centre-stage due to the authority of the Kremlin and are now no longer confined to online chat forums but are out there in the real-world shaping events in central Europe. It’s a cautionary tale for where these sorts of ideas can lead. Every society deals with this kind of thing; Britain and the USA have their own policies influenced by myths and histories that sustain myths.

There is nothing unusual about the Russians wanting to have a narrative of the past that seeks to unify the population. But myths are not only reassuring sources of solidarity and consensus; they can also be really murderous things when they are taken too seriously and when they are reinforced and amplified by the power of a state. The case in Russia I think shows the importance of maintaining vibrant historical debate and these sorts of ideas need to be challenged, need to be punctured, need to be taken down and unfortunately Russia at the moment is not a country where that is happening.

If you would like to explore this topic further, Daniel wrote an article that is freely available here https://www.newstatesman.com/ culture/history/2022/03/russias-war-with-the west that discusses similar themes. We at Historia would also like to thank Daniel Beer once again for taking the time to speak with us.

Interviewed by Lucy Ham (22-23 Editor), 3rd Year History

Issue 9, Myths, Fairytales and Legends, Autumn 2022