The irony seemed utterly lost on Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov when he turned up in Alaska wearing a CCCP sweatshirt (Cyrillic spelling of USSR) – a walking billboard for everything that Ukraine has grown beyond. Indeed, though many people expressed a certain disapproval or disgust in this gesture, there could not have been a more perfect time for a senior Russian diplomat to have worn it. There, in full public display, was the mind of Russia. Ukrainians should have been delighted.
I don’t doubt that some older Russians carry a sort of nostalgia for the Soviet Union. The delightful melody of “That’s You and Me,” “Winged Swing,” the insistent refrains of “Love, Komsomol, and Spring” and memories of space exploration and Young Pioneer camps. In your childhood you don’t grasp the wider social context of the songs, habits and expectations of the society around you. They mould your world and shape a security and safety that grips the mind with an allure in the later uncertainties of adulthood.
Perhaps Lavrov’s sweatshirt really was just a moment of nostalgia. Perhaps when he woke up in the morning before he left for the airport, he saw a brown fading copy of “Agricultural Targets of the Ninth Soviet Five Year Plan, 1971-1975” on his bookshelf and a warm fuzzy feeling came all over him. He grasped for his fading CCCP sweatshirt, wearing a jacket over it as he got out of the car because, after the long journey and some clarity, he felt embarrassed about it.
Beyond nostalgia
Nostalgia is an inescapable part of the emotional baggage of being an adult. However, another part of being an adult is developing the maturity and social insight to think beyond the rose-tinted view of the past and see things for what they are, especially in the domain of human history.
Anyone, let alone a senior diplomat, who had spent even just an hour reading about the Holodomor of 1932-1933 would not turn up to a meeting that had anything to do with Ukraine sporting a CCCP sweatshirt. It would be like the British foreign minister arriving to a summit with the Irish to discuss potato export regulations with a sweatshirt proclaiming “British Empire.” Of course it is far worse, because Russia is actively invading Ukraine.
As if it wasn’t obvious, many Russians have not confronted the end of the Soviet Union. This inability to accept that the empire is no longer extant seems a shortcoming of the Russian education system and of society at large. The unwillingness to face up to historical change, now, it should be emphasized over 30 years ago, is at the heart of most of Russia’s antagonisms with its neighbors.
The country did go through a phase of confronting the horrors of Stalinism, with the founding of Memorial and other groups that wanted to take a sincere look at history, but it seems that, like death clutching the hands of the soon to be departed, the ghost of totalitarianism grips the hand of Russia. Memorial was closed in 2022. If one cannot critically examine the past within one’s own borders, it is hardly a mystery that treating other members of your long-gone empire as equals and with some basic level of respect and decency proves to be difficult. However, that challenge must be faced.
Facing history
A dimension to the nostalgia for the CCCP that seems especially odd is the nature of that empire. It had a peculiar brutality. The Holodomor aside, even within Russian borders, the servility and apparatus of state coercion it encouraged should leave any free-minded person with a sense of horror. Nearly 20 million people passed through the Soviet gulag system at its peak. It is understood that millions – the exact number is not properly documented – perished.
While it is true that the worst years of the gulag, especially the late 1930s, were a part of a longer history, they were emblematic of a system of state repression that characterized the entire Marxist-Leninist experiment from its inception to its demise. The scale of its deep antipathy towards the human soul, and its wanton disregard for the individual against the claimed greater glory of the collectivist communist vision should make any person familiar with that history sufficiently circumspect to at least desist from wearing sweatshirts extolling that empire on the international public stage.
One might also say that there is something rather sad in it. A system that quashed freedom of expression, that did its best to stifle critical thinking about the power of government, and that imprisoned and harassed anyone who would express countervailing views about the direction of society isn’t one to which most thoughtful people aspire.
That Lavrov and others still have a hankering for a socialist empire where the state tells you what to think and do shows that in many Russians, their spirit does not yet yearn for freedom and the dignity of the individual. There remains a reverence for the strong man, the dictator and all the apparatus of control that emerges from that. A radical university student wandering around campus with a CCCP sweatshirt can be forgiven for their cluelessness. But a senior member of the Russian government who is supposed to have a grasp of history and politics wearing such a sweater to an international summit demonstrates a withered subservience to a morose autocratic ideology.
Perhaps what was most striking about Lavrov’s chosen attire was that it represented everything that the rest of the world, Ukraine especially, has worked to move beyond. We’ve learned the horrors of monolithic totalizing ideologies, the dead hand of the state in crushing cultural and historical identity. For most of us these were errors of the 20th century, with roots reaching back into preceding centuries. It’s time to surpass that. After all, it was Russian President Vladimir Putin himself who once said that “whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart; whoever wants it back has no brain.” Well, we can at least agree on the latter.
Lavrov might have thought that his gesture was an entertaining way to needle Ukraine – an easy way to twist the knife and cause some gratuitous enragement – but instead it exhibited that callous and cruel side to Russian history that wallows in the expression of rank and raw power. It is everything from which Ukraine seeks to run.
Anyone who owns a CCCP sweater should make the effort go to the Holodomor Museum in Kyiv. Wear your sweater, peruse the books full of the victims of Marxist famine, then look in the mirror at yourself and ask if there is not the possibility of a more intelligent outlook on history.
Charles Cockell is Professor of Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh.
The views expressed are the author’s and not necessarily of Kyiv Post.