‘Russian culture comes hand in hand with the regime of oppression, slavery, mass murder, and expansive war’: Pascal Bruckner In Dialogue With Iryna Vikyrchak
In order to comprehend the events of recent days, PEN Ukraine has launched a series of conversations entitled #DialoguesOnWar. On October 11, Ukrainian poet, translator, and cultural manager. Iryna Vikyrchak held a conversation with the French author Pascal Bruckner. This is a transcription of key moments from their conversation.
This conversation is supported by the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine.
By PEN Ukraine with Iryna Vikyrchak and Pascal Bruckner
Photo: Viktor Bystrov/Unsplash
Pascal Bruckner: We had to go through the wars in Chechnya and Syria, the annexation of Crimea and Donbas, and the full-scale war in Ukraine to understand who Vladimir Putin really is. Nobody understood that Putin was an angry civil servant of the former Soviet Union and that he wanted the West to pay for the destruction of the USSR.
Putin is the hell of Russia. He is waging this horrible war on Ukraine, and at the same time threatening to attack Paris, Berlin, Munich, London, and New York every day. I think we have to take his threats seriously. The first duty we have to the enemy is to recognise him as an enemy – not as a friend who has been misled. Putin had said many times that he would invade Ukraine, and eventually, he did.
In December 2019, Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, went to Russia with a team of French and foreign journalists. On his way back home, he was convinced of having reached a good deal: Putin had promised not to station troops and not to place nuclear weapons in Belarus, and to turn his troops back from Ukraine. We all know what happened later.
We must not believe a single word said by Vladimir Putin, the former KGB agent. His regime and his country are an empire of lies. We cannot trust him and we have to be suspicious all the time. That was Macron’s mistake – to believe Putin, to call him on the phone more than 20 times in an illusion that these calls could force Putin to change his mind.
Iryna Vikyrchak: As a dictator, Putin enchanted Macron the same way he did with the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi. They have a very good relationship.
Observing life here in India, I see that the East and the West are entirely different civilisations. This war has proven that, in terms of values, Ukrainians belong to the West. Russia, a former empire with many nations it has been suppressing over the years, however, has become a separate civilisation.
It is said that civilisation was born when people started to bury their dead. You may have seen the pictures of how deceased Ukrainian soldiers are met in their hometowns. Entire streets are lined up with people kneeling to give the last honour to their heroes. The Russians, however, simply do not care about their deceased. They are letting the corpses of their soldiers rot, and it is the Ukrainian side that collects them when the opportunity presents itself. Even this little example, in my opinion, proves that Russia has become a different civilisation which has made a full circle and is now approaching its end. What do you think about this?
Also, do you agree with me that this war is not only Putin’s project? 95% of the population supports this war and its atrocities. Thanks to social media, we know what an ordinary Russian person thinks about it. The comments they leave are hateful and genuinely scary. The protests in Russia were never against torturing Ukrainians – they were against mobilisation when the war affected citizens personally. Putin has created the nation of Rashists, and Russian society created Putin as the dictator.
Pascal Bruckner: On February 24, I was in Switzerland reading Life and Destiny by Vasily Grossman. From the very first pages, this book enlightened me about Russian society. Establishing a parallel between Nazism and Communism, the author proves that the whole history of Russia is not an expansion of freedom but one of servitude and slavery.
Our illusion after 1989 was to believe that Russia would eventually, after a few setbacks, take the path of democracy and that there was no way to stop this evolution. This was the mistake of most diplomats and heads of state. Putin’s actions in Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria should have opened our eyes, but we did not want to see.
The very nature of the Russian people is not fighting for freedom but fighting to choose a new master. Many westerners are making a mistake by saying that Russia belongs to the European circle of nations. Russia will never be Europe. It will never be a democratic country.
Iryna Vikyrchak: I call it another civilisation. It is about the very basic values that make us human. Russia has always been governed differently. Russia’s oppression of Ukraine has been there for centuries, but Stalin’s crimes against humanity and his ‘methodology’ of committing war crimes are still used by Russia.
On October 10, Russia launched over 80 missiles at peaceful Ukrainian cities. They targeted important objects of infrastructure and were aimed at depriving Ukrainians of electricity and heating just on the verge of the harsh winter in order to break our spirit. Another goal was simply targeting civilians, hitting children’s playgrounds in the centre of Kyiv to demoralise the Ukrainian population. However, based on what my friends, relatives, and acquaintances thought of it, these actions have only brought more anger and courage to Ukrainians.
I have a feeling that this war happened because Russia was never fully punished for the crimes it has been committing for centuries. Russian soldiers are cruel towards Ukrainian civilians because they are guided by the feeling of impunity. They simply have the freedom to commit all the crimes. It is the same for Russia and Putin. Russia was never made responsible or legally punished for the Holodomor, in a [the] way Germany was punished for the Holocaust after WWII. This impunity, in many ways, comes from the myth of the great Russian culture, which has been constructed for centuries, consciously and consistently, by the regime.
Ukraine did not have this kind of ‘shield’. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the population was trying to survive and deal with political and economic crises. Only in recent years, cultural diplomacy and a conscious approach to building the country’s image abroad were established at the governmental level. With one poem written in Ukrainian and later translated into many other languages, we can share our ideas, values, and emotions with the world. We still have to build our shield of culture and reinforce our image of the country.
Pascal Bruckner: The way that Russians are fighting nowadays in Ukraine, especially in the first weeks of the war, is very close to what Russian troops did in 1944-1945 in Germany. Their motto was: ‘Rape as many women as you can’. They did the same thing in Poland, in the Baltic countries. Everywhere they went, Russians were raping women. One could have thought that things have changed since then, but not at all. Still, when Russians invade, they rape, kill, and steal. We have seen many examples of Russian soldiers stealing washing machines to send back home.
Iryna Vikyrchak: And toilets sometimes too.
Pascal Bruckner: Yes, or taking their body armour off to hide a computer on their stomach instead. Stealing money. And, of course, killing people. The Russian army is one of the most brutal armies in the world.
Russians use their culture in the same way Nazis used Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. Many people in France have been deceived by this curtain, unable to believe that seemingly educated people can behave in such a barbaric way.
Culture is a way to reunite people, deliver a message, and, as you said, gather support. When it is used by Russia, it is just a mask to hide war crimes and totalitarian projects. Dictators might fool people for some time, but after a while, they start to wage wars – this is the only thing dictators can do.
Iryna Vikyrchak: Putin’s army is defeated on the frontline. It angers Russians, so they launch missiles at civilians.
I just wanted to tell you a little personal story. At the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, around March or April, my parents in the west of Ukraine were hosting a family from the Kyiv region. This family recalled meeting the Russian occupiers in their hometown. The Buryats, representatives of the national minority, broke into this family’s home. Early spring feels like winter in Ukraine, so it was freezing outside. The occupiers were barefoot, wearing only rubber flip-flops. The first thing they stole from this house was shoes. When they left, the family decided to escape immediately because the situation was unpredictable.
When mobilisation was announced in Russia, an interesting discussion was going on in the Russian Telegram channels. They were hoping that national minorities, rather than ethnic Russians, would be sent to fight in Ukraine. This example alone proves that Russia is a different world without any respect for its people, still doing the same thing they have been doing for centuries – exploiting the nations oppressed by Russia.
A couple of weeks ago, I was in Poland. My Uber driver was an Uzbek man. I have never met an Uzbek person before and I did not know much about this country, except for a part of its more recent history. He told me that Uzbekistan, an independent country nowadays, is still considered by Russia as its republic. When the truth started resurfacing about thousands of Uzbek intelligentsia, the brightest minds who were sent to gulags and became victims of the Soviet regime, it was immediately followed by a reaction from Russia.
Open statements were made by politicians and even celebrities insisting that these claims were “anti-Russian” as if Uzbekistan was still under Moscow’s control. In the Kremlin, when they think of Russia they still imagine the Soviet Union. These imperialistic ambitions never stopped. People in Uzbekistan are still scared to say anything anti-Russian.
This is what Russia wanted to achieve in Ukraine: to oppress us, to destroy our dignity and independence, to put us firmly under the boot of the empire. But Ukrainians as a nation have been resisting it for hundreds of years. We are independent, we are promoting our culture, and we have built as much as we could given the circumstances.
I want to ask you a question about the Russian mentality. Some time ago, I coined the term Ukrainity – it encompasses the set of values, as well as cultural and historical heritage of which I am a carrier. Do you agree that there is something like that in the Russian mentality?
Pascal Bruckner: I think one of the main lessons of this war learned by the Western Europeans is to disconnect Russia from Ukraine. Until February 2022, many of us saw Russia as the epitome of the Slavic world. Now we understand that there is another side to the Slavic world – Ukrainity. Russian culture comes hand in hand with the regime of oppression, slavery, mass murder, and expansive war.
Once Ukraine recaptures all its territories and regains control over Donbas and Crimea, we might face the dismantling of Russia. Connection with peripheral republics will be broken and the empire will collapse following centuries of oppression.
In the desire to show his omnipotence, Putin achieved an entirely opposite result. The whole world now knows that the Russian army has neither decent food rations nor weapons. After all the missiles launched at Ukraine, the Russian army is falling short of ammunition. How ironic is this? The strong man is now naked.
Ukraine was the nation that triggered the global awakening of the West and showed us a way to reinforce our defences and wake up from our decline.
Edited by Cammie McAtee