by Noam Bizan, @NoamBzn
On 6th February, former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson interviewed Russian president Vladimir Putin in an intricately decorated room in the Kremlin.[1] Much has been written analysing this interview and Carlson’s trip to Moscow, largely focusing on the interview’s implications for current US-Russian relations and the war in Ukraine, which just marked its second anniversary.
As a PhD student of Soviet history, I was especially interested in Putin’s history lesson to Carlson. He assured Carlson that it would take ‘only thirty seconds or one minute’; in fact, it took him over forty-five minutes to give Carlson his version of Russian history from its founding in 862 to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Putin’s obsession with history is unquestionable, but his narrative of history is less certain. The truth is much more nuanced than Putin presents it.
Establishment of the Russian State
According to Putin, in 862 the northern Slavs invited the Scandinavian Prince Rurik to rule over them in their capital city of Novgorod. Rurik ‘gathered the Russian lands’ and the Russian state, or Rus’, was born. In 882, Rurik’s successor, Prince Oleg, arrived in Kiev, and established a second center of power there. In 988, Prince Vladimir, Rurik’s great-grandson, adopted Orthodoxy and baptised Rus’, after which Rus’ grew stronger thanks to its common religion, language, and trade. Due to competition between the various principalities of Rus’, the state became fragmented and was an easy target for the Mongol Horde’s invasion in the thirteenth century. The southern parts of Rus’, including Kiev, ‘simply lost independence’, while northern cities preserved some of their sovereignty and the center of power moved to Moscow.
Although this history is complicated and over 1,000 years old, it remains important to Putin’s simplified narrative because it gives him the opportunity to dismiss the relevance of Kiev from the start. Firstly, the origins of Rus’ are based on a founding myth, the Primary Chronicle, whose truth, like that of all myths, cannot be determined and is likely greatly oversimplified. Secondly, while Putin highlights the duality of Novgorod and Kiev, historians of Rus’ explain that Prince Oleg instead moved the center of power from Novgorod to Kiev, after which Rus’ became known as Kievan Rus’, a name which Putin never uses.[2] Putin presents the people of Rus’ as one group, a narrative which historian Andrew Wilson categorises as one of the ‘theories of unity’, which do not distinguish between the various tribes within Rus’.[3] However, other historians argue for ‘theories of difference’, which present Rus’ as merely ‘a loose collection of warring principalities’ with six distinct peoples: the Ukrainians (or Southern Rus’), the Northerners, the Great Russians, the Belarusians (or White Rus’), and the people of the city-states Pskov and Novgorod. Theories of difference are, unsurprisingly, especially promoted by Ukrainian and Belarusian historians, beginning even in the nineteenth century.[4]
The Artificial Creation of Ukraine
The fact that there were Ukrainian historians arguing that Ukrainian roots could be traced back equally as far as Russian ones negates Putin’s central claim that Ukraine is an artificial state. Putin’s narrative is as such: While the northern part of Rus’ consolidated around Moscow, its southern cities, including Kiev, began gravitating towards another European power, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. When the Grand Duchy and the Kingdom of Poland formed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the sixteenth century, the Rus’ lands in question came under Polish control. The Poles undermined the people’s sense of Russianness by claiming that they were “Ukrainians”, since they lived on the fringes of the Commonwealth. Putin emphasized that “Ukrainian” ‘did not mean any particular ethnic group’: the term “Ukrainian” originally denoted a person who lived on the outskirts of a state or served in border patrol. The Poles treated the Russian people harshly, and they soon began to struggle for their rights. The leader of the Russian lands, Bogdan Khmelnytsky, asked the Tsar for help, and in 1654, a Russo-Polish war broke out in the Tsar’s attempts to help the Commonwealth’s Russians. The treaty ending the war gave Russia the left bank of the Dnieper River, including Kiev. Catherine the Great, the Russian Tsar from 1762-1796, reclaimed all the remaining historic lands of Rus’.
Putin’s so-called Russian hero, Bogdan Khmelnytsky, is also known as the Ukrainian Cossack, Boghan Khmelnytsky. The Ukrainian Cossacks, traditionally a free people, resented being part of the Commonwealth, so in 1648 Khmelnytsky led a Cossack uprising against it. This uprising was so successful that in 1649, the Commonwealth recognized a new Cossack state in the southeast, the Zaporozhian Host. In 1654, Khmelnytsky offered the Tsar his Cossack army’s services in exchange for Russia waging war on the Commonwealth,[5] which Russia also desired in order to reunite the historically Orthodox lands of Rus’.[6] Putin makes no reference to the Cossacks, traditional symbols of Ukrainian nationalism, in the interview. The Russian Empire justified the war with Poland on the grounds of saving Russian minorities in other states and, importantly, Putin uses the same trope to justify the current war in Ukraine.
The Soviet Union
Putin also blamed the Bolsheviks for the artificial nature of Ukraine, claiming that they ‘established Soviet Ukraine, which had never existed before’. He was critical of Lenin’s nationality policy and seemed irritated that ‘for unknown reasons…, the Bolsheviks were engaging in “Ukrainianisation”’ as part of their general ‘indigenisation’ policies.
However, the reasons are far from unknown; historians have conducted countless studies on Soviet nationality policy, and it is indeed one of the focuses of my own research. For the class-based, rather than nation-based, Soviet system to succeed, the early Bolsheviks needed the non-Russian peoples’ support in order to prevent nationalist uprisings against them. Moreover, to modernise the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks implemented ‘affirmative action’[7] to promote progress among the ostensibly “backwards” non-Russians, creating national territories, native-language education and culture, and ethnic-based hiring practices. Finally, Lenin wished to contrast the progressiveness of the Soviet multiethnic union with the chauvinism of the Russian Empire.[8] Therefore, not only was Putin’s supposed confusion about Lenin’s nationality policy unfounded, but the very fact that the Bolsheviks felt it necessary to appease nationalist groups by creating national republics shows that those national identities – including Ukrainian – already existed.
The narrative Putin spun in his history lesson to Carlson is not new to anyone who is familiar with his 2021 article On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians[9] or his speech on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.[10]Given Carlson’s popularity in the US, though, this interview likely reached a wider audience. In the second hour of the interview, Putin focused on his narrative of post-Soviet politics between Russia, Ukraine, and the West, in particular the United States, but for lack of room I am leaving that fact-checking to the political pundits.
Cover Image: Tucker Carlson (Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons), Vladimir Putin (Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons, originally Kremlin.ru)
[1] Vladimir Putin, interview by Tucker Carlson, February 6, 2024, https://youtu.be/fOCWBhuDdDo?si=Kig8kilFkHOHiKbN.
[2] Jonathan Shepard, “The Origins of Rus’ (c. 900–1015),” in The Cambridge History of Russia, ed. Maureen Perrie (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 56.
[3] Andrew Wilson, The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022), 4-7.
[4] Wilson, The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, 8.
[5] Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 113-114.
[6] Amelia M. Glaser, “Introduction: Bohdan Khmelnytsky as Protagonist: Between Hero and Villain,” in Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising, ed. Amelia M. Glaser (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 9.
[7] Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017).
[8] Brigid O’Keeffe, The Multiethnic Soviet Union and Its Demise (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 8-10.
[9] “Article by Vladimir Putin ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,’” President of Russia, July 12, 2021, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181.
[10] “Address by the President of the Russian Federation,” President of Russia, February 24, 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67843.
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