Thread by @Irkutyanin1

@LatvianOrthodox One thing to keep in mind is that Ukraine isn’t Russia, it doesn’t have a people that anchor the state down like Russia across the Urals and Siberia, it is at least 3 or 4 peoples that geography separates but is welded together by a contradictory philosophy of state.

@LatvianOrthodox The Communist Ukrainian Nationalism, which attracted many pre Revolution intelligentsia including the absolute main man of Ukrainian nationalist historiography, Mikhailo Hrushevsky, was a attempt to weld Pan Slavism and Separatism (from Russia) together.

@LatvianOrthodox It was always Soviet justification on Ukrainian National autonomy to call back to these intellectuals and their vision of the Ukrainian people, despite the territory of Ukraine including fairly different sub Ukrainian groups. This includes:

@LatvianOrthodox Russian settlers into the Novorossiya and Crimea territory acquired by Catherine the Great from the Crimean Khan.

The old Cossack Hetmanate(s) of Khmelnytsky and Doroshenko, who were Orthodox peasants of medieval Lithuania who rose up against Poland after Union of Lublin

@LatvianOrthodox The mostly Greco-Catholic Galicians who converted after the Union of Brest and were not a part of Imperial Russia and were considered an integral part of Poland through “Red Ruthenia” they became Austrian

And the Orthodox but conflicted Carpatho Rusyns in the far West.

@LatvianOrthodox Now, the Ukrainian nationalist historiography was in part promoted by Austria-Hungary, in part a subversive intellectual movement inside of imperial Russia that catered to existing old Anarchist and actual peasant communist feelings of community independence.

@LatvianOrthodox The Soviets, in an attempt to suppress Ukrainian nationalism, coopted it and set it apart in its own historiography. It did this after the Rada and Hermanate collapsed, and did so to compete with local SRs and other radicals. Hardliners fled to Canada/Europe and America.

@LatvianOrthodox The “Ukrainian independence” school was nurtured in the United States and Canada especially Harvard, Toronto, and Alberta, you still see the most hardcore diaspora in these places. They are disproportionately Galician.

But the Soviet Union also had its own form of Ukrnationalism

@LatvianOrthodox The Soviet Union embraced a altered form of Hrushevsky’s Ukraine, through a Marxist Lensen of course, but it did so to beat down the Galicians and Rusyns, (newly annexed) and confuse the internal self perception of Ukrainians.

@LatvianOrthodox No one had planned the actual independence of Ukraine, it didn’t come as something the population living there expected, and the diaspora nationalists with intel connections were flown in when the Soviet Union fell apart and the oligarchization of Ukraine began.

@LatvianOrthodox What set it apart from Russia or any of the other Soviet republics was that Ukraine had extreme internal tensions that couldn’t just solve themselves with a Ngorno Karabakh partition. The ideas of nationalism in Ukraine’s intact territory are at odds with its real regionalism.

@LatvianOrthodox The Kuchma period was as bad as the Yeltsin era, but the 2004 color revolution that brought Yushcenko to power was a Maidan 1.0 that lead to basically set the stage of permanent inaction and fighting within the Ukrainian oligarch class as they “courted” their bases.

@LatvianOrthodox The instability of Ukraine lead to its faction leaders and competing oligarchs free reign to loot the country. There was no Putin or no EU oversight committee to stop the huge theft that was going on, Ukraine was left in the worst of all worlds with no political normalization.

@LatvianOrthodox This Moorish revival villa? I visited it in 2014 after Crimea was Russian, the marble floor and furniture had been appropriated by the government for “restoration” in 2005 and sold at Kiev, that’s thetype of grift we are talking about.

@LatvianOrthodox There are not many images but it’s hard to describe how bad some of the railways and roads look in some areas. There are cars and lines that definitely have only seen enough maintenance to barely keep them online, and now the whole system is being bought out by Germany.

@LatvianOrthodox And that’s before we get into the oligarchs themselves and the ludicrous things the oligarchs have spent money on instead of the country. Poroshenko was a “chocolate king” Yanukovych bought a solid gold loaf of bread, Zelensky’s wife lives in the first picture.

@LatvianOrthodox It’s all just robbery and setting one half of the population against each other for the benefit of the political “business” class until one side gets couped by another because it was so inept it ran the country further into the ground, so they just embrace extracting every thing.

@LatvianOrthodox One of my favorite living authors is Pelevin, who wrote this book before Maidan, but I think it gives the absolute best spiritual feel of what it’s like in Ukraine. He essentially wrote a dystopia of only a slightly more far gone Ukraine state

amazon.com/S-N-U-F-F-Vict…

@LatvianOrthodox Fin