We’re starting off with a very short one for the first week. This text was published in 1915, two years before the October revolution, and is sadly still highly relevant in the imperial core.
This reading group is meant to educate, and people from any instances federated with Lemmygrad are welcome. Any comments not engaging in good faith will be removed (don’t respond to hostile comments, just report them).
You can post questions or share your thoughts at any time. We’ll be moving on to a new text next week, but this thread won’t be locked.
You can read the text here.
That’s just Great-Russian chauvinism. Sorry but you’re parroting the most reactionary Russian propaganda, like this piece which openly states de-nazification of Ukraine is necessarily also de-Ukrainization: https://ria.ru/20220403/ukraina-1781469605.html
I can’t agree with that. Even Nazi Germany didn’t need to be de-Germanized after the WW2, you only had to change the system and you got DDR.
Please read the rest of the paragraph. I explicitly say that this is not the view of the majority of Russians (and obviously it’s not my idea of what being Ukrainian should mean either). This is what the current Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian nationalist (Banderite) movement have been insisting on telling the Ukrainian people. It is they who have turned the notion of being Ukrainian into the antithesis of everything Russian, when this clearly didn’t need to be the case and wasn’t the case in the USSR. It is they who insist that you are not Ukrainian if you don’t embrace Bandera worship, that you are Russian and thereby an enemy of Ukraine if you have a positive view of Ukraine’s Soviet past, if you want to be a part of “the Russian world” instead of (or even in addition to) “Europe” and the West.
And i don’t agree with that. I think history shows that that is not the case. But there does need to take place a rethinking in certain segments of Ukrainian society of what it means to be Ukrainian, a kind of return back to how it was viewed in the USSR as something more broad and heterogenous that could include people of various languages and diverse cultures, away from the almost all-consuming obsession with linguistic homogenization and from this self-destructive Russophobia that has led Ukraine into catastrophe. A culture cannot define itself purely by what it hates and what it isn’t. That is neither healthy nor sustainable. It actually makes for a very poor foundation for building a national identity.
Ironically, it is precisely this kind of negative and exclusionary definition of national identity that, far from saving the Ukrainian nation as Ukrainian nationalists think it does, risks destroying it.