3.26.22
"If things had turned out the way my mother wanted, I would have been a violinist," Volodymyr Zelensky said in a standup routine on his late-night variety show, "Kvartal-95." "That's right, as a good Jewish boy, I played the violin as a kid." That Zelensky is a good Jewish boy presents a problem for Vladimir Putin, who has repeatedly accused Ukraine of fascism and even anti-Semitism. Putin's language of "fascism," "nationalism" and "Nazism" revives Soviet-era shibboleths that suggest an ideology of protecting ethnic minorities, including Jews, from dangerous forms of ethno-nationalism. And yet Russia is now attacking a Ukraine that has one of the lowest rates of anti-Semitism in Europe (according to recent Pew studies), a diverse public sphere and a Jewish president. The inconsistency between Putin's accusations and Zelensky's Jewishness has helped to clarify the deeply problematic premise for the current invasion of Ukraine: Russia claims it is attempting to "de-Nazify" a country that has, over the past decade, become not more ethno-nationalist, but less so. In the process, Moscow has exposed its own right-wing nationalist agenda, and its distance from the antifascism and even anti-colonialism it may have represented at various points during the Soviet period.
Zelensky's rise to the presidency, as a Russian-speaking secular Jew, is living proof of this shift toward a pluralistic Ukrainian identity. Zelensky, who spoke out against Putin's invasion and in defense of Russian-language culture in 2014, was a vote against both Ukrainian ethno-nationalism and Russian neo-imperial nationalism. In a long article published on the Kremlin website in July 2021, Putin argued that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, the heirs of ancient Rus', with a shared language and religion. In a long article published on the Kremlin website in July 2021, Putin argued that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, the heirs of ancient Rus', with a shared language and religion. Putin declares that Ukraine is a Soviet construct, and that, by rejecting Russia, Ukrainians are "attempting to create an ethnically pure state." If such ideological rhetoric can be a weapon, Putin has mis-fired. Few in the world can take this draconian insistence on the importance of "blood ties" seriously after Russia's bombing of Ukrainian hospitals, university buildings and theaters, wreaking particular violence on the largely Russophone cities of Kharkiv, Mykolaev and Mariupol. Ukrainians' unity in defending their country and protesting the invasion has been inspiring.
