by Slavoj Zizek
Second, and much more important, what does the “Europe” the Ukrainian protesters refer to stand for? It cannot be reduced to a single idea: it spans from nationalist and even Fascist elements up to the idea of what Etienne Balibar calls égaliberté, freedom-in-equality, the unique contribution of Europe to the global political imaginary, even if it is today ever more betrayed by European institutions and people themselves. And between these two poles is the naïve trust in European liberal-democratic capitalism. What Europe should see in Ukrainian protests is its best and its worst, and to see this clearly, Europe has to look outside itself onto a Ukrainian scene.
Rightist nationalism, although relatively marginal in general, should not be underestimated. One of the signs of the deep shift in ideological hegemony that Western Europe has undergone in the last decade is the request of the new Right to establish a more balanced view of the two “extremisms,” the Rightist one and the Leftist one: that is, to treat the extreme Left in the same way Europe after WWII treated the extreme Right. Although Communist critics of Stalinism were naïve and full of their own flawed ideas, long before Solzhenytsin “the crucial questions about the Gulag were being asked by Left oppositionists, from Boris Souvarine to Victor Serge to C.L.R. James, in real time and at great peril. Those courageous and prescient heretics have been somewhat written out of history (they expected far worse than that, and often received it).”3 This large-scale critical movement was inherent to the Communist movement, in clear contrast to Fascism: “nobody can be bothered to argue much about whether fascism might have turned out better, given more propitious circumstances. And there were no dissidents in the Nazi Party, risking their lives on the proposition that the Fuehrer had betrayed the true essence of National Socialism.”4 Precisely because of this immanent tension at the very heart of the Communist movement, the most dangerous place to be in the time of the terrible 1930s purges in the Soviet Union was at the top of the nomenklatura: in a couple of years, 80 percent of the Central Committee and Red Army Headquarters members were shot. Furthermore, one should also not underestimate the “totalitarian” potential, as well as direct outright brutality, of the White counter-revolutionary forces during the Civil War: had a White victory been the case,
the common word for fascism would have been a Russian one, not an Italian one. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was brought to the West by the White emigration … Major General William Graves, who commanded the American Expeditionary Force during the 1918 invasion of Siberia (an event thoroughly airbrushed from all American textbooks), wrote in his memoirs about the pervasive, lethal anti-Semitism that dominated the Russian right wing and added, “I doubt if history will show any country in the world during the last fifty years where murder could be committed so safely, and with less danger of punishment, than in Siberia during the reign of Kolchak.”5
As if echoing this dark past, Putin’s official Russia presented the Crimean referendum as a choice against (Ukrainian) Fascism, while the entire European neo-Fascist Right (Hungary, France, Italy, Serbia) was firmly supporting Russia. (And another irony: Ukrainians were tearing down statues of Lenin, forgetting that the golden era of Ukraine was in the first decade of the Soviet Union when they established their full national identity.) But Putin’s Russia is not an exception here: from the Balkans to Scandinavia, from the US to Israel, from central Africa to India, a new Dark Age is looming, with ethnic and religious passions exploding, and the Enlightenment values receding. These passions were lurking in the shadows all the time, but what is new now is the outright shamelessness of their display. So what are we to do in such a situation? Mainstream liberals are telling us that, when basic democratic values are under threat by ethnic or religious fundamentalists, we should all unite behind the liberal-democratic agenda of cultural tolerance, to save what can be saved and put aside dreams of a more radical social transformation. However, the conflict between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalism is ultimately a false conflict—a vicious cycle of the two poles generating and presupposing each other.
So what about the liberal-democratic capitalist European dream? One cannot be sure what awaits Ukraine within the EU, beginning with austerity measures. In my books I often use the well-known joke from the last decade of the Soviet Union about Rabinovitch, a Jew who wants to emigrate. The bureaucrat at the emigration office asks him why, and Rabinovitch answers, “There are two reasons why. The first is that I’m afraid that in the Soviet Union the Communists will lose power, and the new power will put all the blame for the Communist crimes on us, the Jews and there will again be anti-Jewish pogroms—” “But,” interrupts the bureaucrat, “this is pure nonsense, nothing can change in the Soviet Union, the power of the Communists will last forever!” “Well,” responds Rabinovitch calmly, “that’s my second reason.” We can easily imagine a similar exchange between a critical Ukrainian and a European Union financial administrator. The Ukrainian complains, “There are two reasons we are in a panic here. First, we are afraid that the EU will simply abandon us to Russian pressure and let our economy collapse—” The EU administrator interrupts him, “But you can trust us, we will not abandon you, we will tightly control you and advise you on what to do!” “Well,” responds the Ukrainian calmly, “that’s our second reason.”
So yes, the Euromaidan protesters were heroes, but the true fight begins now, the fight for what the new Ukraine will be, and this fight will be much tougher than the fight against Putin’s intervention. A new and much more risky heroism will be needed here. The model of this heroism is found in the Russians that you mentioned, Nadya, who courageously oppose the nationalist passion of their own country and denounce it as a tool of those in power. What is needed today is to make the “crazy” gesture of rejecting the very terms of the conflict and proclaiming the basic solidarity of Ukrainians and Russians. One should begin by organizing events of fraternization across the imposed divisions, establishing shared organizational networks between the authentic emancipatory core of Ukrainian political agents and the Russian opposition to Putin’s regime. This may sound utopian, but it is only such crazy acts that can confer on the protests a true emancipatory dimension. Otherwise, we will get just the conflict of nationalist passions manipulated by oligarchs who lurk in the background.
But let me now really conclude on a more personal note. After reading your last letter, I found myself by chance listening to “Stenka Razin,” that most universally known of Russian folk songs, and its content reminded me of your point about how crucial it is for the subaltern to speak for themselves, and to break out of the situation where the sympathetic others (humanitarians, etc.) speak for them. The song describes how the mighty Cossack ataman was proudly sailing on the Volga with his beautiful young bride, a kidnapped Persian princess, at his side. But then, from behind, he heard a murmur: “He has exchanged us for a woman! He spent only one night with her, and in the morning he has become a woman himself!” The furious Stenka immediately decided what to do:
“I will give you all you ask for
Head and heart and life and hand.”
And his voice rolls out like thunder
Out across the distant land.
And she, with downcast eyes,
more dead than alive,
silently listens to the drunken
words of the ataman:
“Volga, Volga, Mother Volga
Wide and deep beneath the sun,
You had never such a present
From a Cossack of the Don.
So that peace may reign forever
In this band so free and brave
Volga, Volga, Mother Volga
Make this lovely girl a grave.”
Now, with one swift mighty motion
He has raised his bride on high
And has cast her where the waters
Of the Volga roll and sigh.
Now a silence like the grave
Sinks to all who stand and see
And the battle-hardened Cossacks
“Dance, you fools, and let’s be merry
What is this that’s in your eyes?
Let us thunder out a chantey
To the place where beauty lies.”
For me, the crucial moment of the song is the final reversal: when the common warriors get what they demanded from Stenka, their reaction is stupefaction, horror, even weeping, and Stenka, in the true gesture of a Master, makes them accept the gift of what they wanted as a source of joy—you asked for it, now you got it, so be merry! But the feature that is really shocking for us today is the absence of the woman’s point of view: she was first kidnapped, raped, then killed, so how did she experience the situation? What about her own song, rendering her own horror? I think that you, Nadya, and your fellow fighters are creating something similar to the imagined song of the Persian princess …
So I am looking forward to our common struggle, with friendship and solidarity,
Slavoj
1 Kim Lane Scheppele, “1984, Hungarian Edition,” http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/1984-hungarian-edition/
2 Ibid.
3 Christopher Hitchens, Arguably, New York: Twelve, 2011, p. 634.
4 Ibid., p. 635.
5 Ibid.