Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression against democratic Ukraine is legitimized in part by the claim that there is no Ukrainian nation. Contemporary Ukraine, Putin maintains, is an artificial state created for no good reasons by the Bolsheviks. It has always been Russian and should be Russian again. He developed these notions in a July 2021 article which became something of a historical justification for the invasion.

This lecture engages with the President-Historian’s thoughts and explores to what extent his arguments conform to historical reality. The lecture will show that Putin’s claims about the non-existence of the Ukrainian nation are not only historically ill-informed, rather, they are a projection of problems with Russian national consciousness. In sharp contrast to Ukraine, the Russian state has not managed to find a national identity which would break with the imperial past. Intellectually, a decolonization of Russian self-understanding is possible. But the historical unity of the Russian state, the Russian empire, and Russian nation make such a post-imperial consciousness difficult.
As one historian has put it: Russia never had an empire; it was one from the outset. The war on Ukraine is one outcome of the inability of Russia’s political elite to find a positive sense of self after the breakdown of the Soviet empire in 1991.

Mark Edele is a historian of the Soviet Union and its successor states, in particular Russia. He was trained as a historian at the Universities of Erlangen, Tübingen, Moscow and Chicago.