The Clash of Narratives

“He was coming home drunk every night and behaved abusively towards me and the children.”

“She only married me for my money. She never loved me nor respected me.”

Two narratives. Who's right? Unless we knew these people, it's hard to tell at first sight.

“The West has been encroaching upon Russia since the end of the Cold War. Russia had to take Crimea in its own self-interest, to stop its naval bases falling into the hands of NATO.”

“Russia is again meddling in the affairs of a sovereign nation, using force, subterfuge and blatant lies to unilaterally re-draw European borders against the will of the international community.”

Two narratives. Who's right? Unless we know history, it's hard to tell at first sight.

The Russian narrative hinges on its tragic 20th Century, its victory over Fascist Germany in the Great Patriotic War taking centre stage, with the Gulag, the terror visited upon millions of Russians by Russians, pushed back an an uncomfortable sub-plot. The raising of the Soviet flag over the Reichstag is still the crowning moment in the Russian narrative. Fascism the enemy. If Russia wishes to denounce an enemy, it is in terms of fascism.

The Red Army liberated the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe. The imposition on the back of Stalin's tanks of a brutal, economically stupid, regime on the captive nations of the countries that would become the Soviet bloc is viewed in Russia in imperial terms. The Soviet bloc was but a slightly enlarged version of the Tsar's empire, with Russia at the heart of it. Something that Stalin, himself a Georgian, understood full well in 1945. Russia, a great nation, arrayed around it its brothers and its cousins Ukrainian, Byelorussians, Latvians, Armenians, Kazakhs; call it the “Russian Empire”, the“Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”, the “Eurasian Union” or whatever – it is, was and will be, eternal, imperial Russia. Sonorous as the great Kremlin bells, vast as the endless taiga stretching from Europe's borders unto the Pacific Ocean

And against Mother Russia – there stands the West. America, Europe... Decadent, liberal, crypto-fascist. Meddling in the world's affairs, be it in Iraq or Afghanistan, in Syria, Libya or Egypt... or indeed in Ukraine. Always meddling. Always figuring a way to encroach still deeper into Russia's sphere of influence.

In the Russian Narrative (be it voiced by Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin or the late Peter Ustinov) Ukraine is Russia's cradle, Kievian Rus'; Kiev and Moscow – the heartland. In the Russian Narrative, Ukrainians are merely Russians who speak a bit funny (as Englishmen see Welshmen). They are to be gently mocked as bumpkins, kept in the fold, but, should their national aspirations get out of hand, they are to be denounced as fascists. After all, says the Russian Narrative, they collaborated with the fascists during the war. [The question of 'why' is inconvenient – Ukrainian school textbooks mentioning the Hlodomor – Stalin's enforced famine that killed several million Ukrainians in the 1930s – were burnt by Russian nationalists in Kharkhiv last week.]

The Russian Narrative also sees Mother Russia as perpetual victim, surrounded on all sides by historical enemies intent on bringing their armies ever closer to the Kremlin walls. Mongols, Tatars, Swedes, Poles, the French, the Germans – they've all tried and failed miserably. And central to the failure of the evil outsiders to conquer Mother Russia is the figure of the one strong leader to maintain Russia's glory. From Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Stalin... and Putin. Russia's weakness stemmed not from weak institutions, underdevelopment or lack of good governance and a strong middle class, but from the lack of a strong man. Russia's 20th Century defeats are the fault of the weak Romanov Tsars, of the weakness of Gorbachev and his superannuated predecessors. A strong man must break eggs to make omelettes. Yes, innocent Russians will perish at the hands of Russia, but their sacrifice will have been for Russia's greater good. The strong man must be kept strong by strong a strong security apparatus, be it the Okhrana, the NKVD, the KGB or FSB. The courts, the media, the church, must all be behind the strong man, or else his strength will ebb and Russia will be threatened. All voices questioning the strong man are therefore questioning Russia itself.

It is historians who hone narrative, who nuance it, who question given theses on the basis of new sources coming to light, who revise the narrative until there's a consensus around it. The West's narrative is disparate, many-stranded, divided; but the West's core strength lies in the very things that Ukrainians were protesting for in Kiev's Maidan. Rule of law, a civil society, a lack of corruption, property rights, strong institutions, stability and predictability – the bedrock upon which young human beings can plan their lives, study, save, buy a place of their own, raise children.

The Ukrainian narrative is young and fragile; it has yet to find a place for the ethnic cleansing that went on in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands in 1943, for the Ukrainian SS units that fought alongside the Nazis, for the corruption and cronyism that dashed the hopes of the 2005 Orange Revolution. The narrative needs to be wise, nuanced and palatable to the West.

Russia, for all its posturing, is weak. Its computers run on Microsoft Windows; its browsers are Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google or Opera. Its banks' credit cards are in the Visa and Mastercard networks. It is weak because it is insufficiently pluralist. We live in an interconnected world, and the Big Man's Big Fist is no longer enough. If it keeps going down the Putinist path, propelled by a dangerously one-sided narrative, it will implode.

If one good thing's come out of the Ukraine crisis, it's the resurgence of the term 'the West' - and this time Poland is in the West.

This time last year:

The Church and democracy

This time two years ago:
Prime lens or zoom?

This time three years ago:
Warsaw's failed bid as City of Culture, 2016

This time four years ago:
Stalinist downtown at dusk

This time five years ago:
The End of an Age of Excess?

This time six years ago:
Snowy Easter in England