The War of Anthropologies and Cultural Narrative: How Not to Return to the Past

One who does nothing makes no mistakes.

Mistakes are an integral part of our lives. However, some of them can be costly, especially those concerning existential and worldview issues on a national scale, and can affect history.

The Aspen Institute Kyiv organized a screening and discussion of the film from the “Last War” series produced by Public Broadcasting for Community members.

“Какая разніца” (“What Difference Does It Make”) is a story about the decolonization of Ukrainian society’s consciousness during the years of Independence, the mistakes made by Ukrainians and whether they could have avoided them. This film attempts to analyze the causes of the war in Ukraine and the Russians’ attempts to destroy everything Ukrainian.

After the film screening, participants talked with its author, Myroslava Barchuk, and the speakers:

• Vakhtang Kebuladze, Ukrainian philosopher, publicist, and translator;
• Irma Vitovska, Ukrainian theater and film actress, producer, and public figure;
• Yuriy Makarov, Ukrainian journalist, TV presenter, and documentarian.

Andriy Kulakov, Program Coordinator of the Aspen Institute Kyiv Community, moderated the conversation.

Vakhtang Kebuladze: We Must Accept Even the Dark and Terrifying Pages of Our History

Currently, Ukrainians lack an honest dialogue about the present, sometimes even with themselves:

“Very often, we analyze events retrospectively: we think about what exactly we did or what Russia did wrong. But in my opinion, we miss the discursive nature of a dialogue about what we are doing wrong right now. Moreover, dialogues about what we should do to avoid endangering future generations,” says Vakhtang Kebuladze.

(Non) War of Civilizations

Vakhtang Kebuladze reflected on the causes of the full-scale war:

“The Russian-Ukrainian war is not a war of countries for territories. It is not a conflict of civilizations or ideologies. The current war with Russia is a war of two anthropologies: perceptions of what a person is and that everything Russian is dangerous to us. And we need to convey this to our partners. But firstly, we must understand it ourselves.”

If, in 50 years, our descendants perceive the Russian language and literature as their own, it means we have lost, believes Vakhtang Kebuladze. “And it will mean that the Russians will come with war through generations. I would be happy to wake up and realize that there is no Pushkin, Dostoevsky, in the world… But they already existed, and we have to live with it. We need to study this but not be infected by it. We need to imagine a world without Russia, not without Russians, but without the Russian empire. And then, perhaps, we will find solutions to today’s most complex problems, as public imagination is a powerful tool of historical development. This is the task of our and future generations. I hope we will find political, diplomatic, economic, and cultural tools to achieve this.”

Irma Vitovska: We Must Fill the Deficit of Ukrainian in the Consciousness of Our People

Russia tried to occupy the Ukrainian space with its narratives. Sometimes successfully.

“I often visited the Donetsk region, particularly Donetsk. I constantly felt a deficit of Ukrainian culture in the region and the city. Russia, on the other hand, used this. And the residents, for various reasons, could not resist Russian influences, particularly due to the lack of access to quality Ukrainian content,” says Irma Vitovska.

Reinterpretation: The Path to a New Understanding of Oneself

According to Ms. Irma, some people who were hostages of Russian-based raising and literature began to rethink culture.

“Now, as an actress, I am very pleased to observe the development of Ukrainian theater. The current flourishing of theaters is the discovery of freedom. People who poorly knew Ukrainian classics are discovering something new for themselves. The path of self-discovery begins when a person, searching for their own ‘I,’ tries to distance themselves from the Russians’ culture, habits, and traditions. But we pay a terrible price for this accelerated understanding of ours ‘I.’

Irma Vitovska emphasizes: “You connect yourself with your lineage through overcoming many steps. Many of them were removed, consciously or unconsciously. But now the steps to understanding yourself are reuniting and restored, and you become Ukrainian.”

Yuriy Makarov: There Is No Chance That Dominant Ukrainian Culture Will Be Archaic, Repressive, Uninteresting

Yuriy Makarov believes that Ukrainians are very adaptive. Changes within our society are happening quickly. For many countries, such changes could take 50 years or at least two generations. We only needed about 15.

We have passed the point of no return, and now we cannot accept that Ukrainian culture can be humiliated.

In Ukrainian culture and civilization, there was obligatory normativity, the bearers of which were representatives of “barefoot childhood,” says Mr. Yuriy. “People who were sincere, obviously quite talented, but had difficulty accepting something new. These people should not be despised. They preserved the Ukrainian tradition and language. But today, when some people with great subjectivity insist that their archaic ideas about Ukraine are the canon, no one listens to them. A layer of amateur agents already does not consider such ideological worldview restrictions.”

Yuriy Makarov believes that ten years ago, most of our fellow citizens were ready to accept a new Ukrainian matrix.

“And this is not only Ukrainians who received a good education, but also older people who showed the ability to accept and tolerate the new.”

Myroslava Barchuk: Moving Away from Imperial Narratives is the Path to Developing One’s Own Identity

“When we say that people know and understand everything Ukrainian well, we orient ourselves on our bubbles. To understand and love, you need to know. But if a person grew up purely on the soil of Russian literature, if they are enchanted by ‘snowflakes on the sable collar of Eugene Onegin,’ they will not be enchanted by ‘silver sleighs’ of Antonych because they have not read it, do not know it. So this is primarily a question of education.”

We must openly talk about overcoming the mental dependence on the former metropolis, the Russian matrix, which has been so deeply rooted in us for several generations, believes Ms. Myroslava:

“Sometimes we do not understand what is ours and what is imposed. Hence our eternal wavering between identities, vectors of movement, symbols, and signs, and the ‘post-Soviet schizophrenia,’ which sometimes seemed impossible before the great war.”