Having just lauded Kennan Institute Director Matthew Rojansky and two colleagues for a fine piece on Ukraine’s relationship with the United States, I hate to change my tune and criticize him for a subsequent article co-written with a Ukrainian academic, but their views on the “new Ukrainian exceptionalism” are so divorced from reality as to be mystifying.
Rojansky and Mykhailo Minakov, associate professor in philosophy and religious studies at Kyiv’s prestigious Mohyla Academy, begin their piece by paying due respect to Ukraine’s “struggle not only for its sovereignty, but for its very survival as a nation-state.” Rightly, they argue that “In this hour of need, every Ukrainian citizen and every self-described friend of Ukraine in the international community should not only speak but act in support of Ukraine.”
Then they slip off the rails:
But speaking out and taking action in support of Ukraine have become increasingly fraught in recent months. Russian-backed aggression, relentless propaganda and meddling in Ukraine’s domestic politics have pushed many Ukrainians to adopt a deeply polarized worldview, in which constructive criticism, dissenting views, and even observable facts are rejected out of hand if they are seen as harmful to Ukraine. This phenomenon might be termed the new Ukrainian exceptionalism.
“This exceptionalist worldview,” they write, “is nowhere more evident than in the discourse around Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko,” an oligarch supposedly committed to “de-oligrachization.” According to Rojansky and Minakov, “when queried about whether, as an oligarch himself, Poroshenko can be effective in removing oligarchic influence from Ukraine’s politics and economy, many Ukrainians feel compelled to defend their wartime leader by denying that he is, in fact, an oligarch in the first place. Or if he is one, they say, he’s a different kind of oligarch, certainly the best of the bunch.”
I don’t know whom they’ve been talking to and what they’ve been reading, but it’s obvious, at least to me, that their sources aren’t at all reflective of majority views. I’ve been in Ukraine now for close to three weeks and have yet to meet a person who’s spoken kindly of the president, prime minister, parliament, or any oligarch. And public opinion surveys back up my impression. Of the thousands of articles I’ve read about Ukraine in the last few months, I’d say at most 10 percent speak positively about the government. I can’t think of a single one that’s lauded the oligarchs. The fact is that Ukrainians are almost anarchically critical of every aspect of their political system. Indeed, from everyone I’ve talked to, from everything I’ve read, I’d say Ukrainians are almost destructively critical of everything. That may or may not be a good thing, but it’s hardly reflective of the group think that Rojansky and Minakov supposedly encountered.
Rojansky and Minakov then focus their attention on
the country’s far right political forces. Cite the rise of Praviy Sektor, or Right Sector … and many Ukrainians will point to the radical right movement’s poor performance in last year’s presidential and parliamentary elections. Point to the resurgence of symbols and slogans of the Second World War ultra-nationalist Union of Ukrainian Nationalists, OUN, or the newly passed laws banning ‘Soviet symbols,’ canonizing controversial Ukrainian nationalist figures Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, and they will say that Ukraine has every right to define its own history, even if it does so with blatant disregard and disrespect for that of millions of its citizens now living under Russian occupation or otherwise not fully represented in the government. … [R]aise the problem of private armies in Ukraine, and one is told that the famous ‘volunteer battalions’ are actually completely legal and legitimate police, interior ministry or army units that have been integrated under a single, responsible national command. … The same goes for so-called soldier deputies, commanders of the volunteer battalions elected to the parliament last October, many of whom still appear in uniform and demonstrate scant regard for the boundaries between civilian and military authority. Dashing but bellicose figures like Serhii Melnychuk, Semen Semenchenko and Dmytro Yarosh, we are told, are not really soldiers any more, their grandstanding is just a PR exercise.
Contrary to the authors’ claims, the “observable” fact—to use Rojansky and Minakov’s modifier—is that Ukraine’s right really is insignificant, that the newly passed laws do not even come close to “canonizing controversial Ukrainian nationalist figures Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych,” that Ukraine has as much a right to “define its own history, even if it does so with blatant disregard and disrespect for that of millions of its [pro-Stalinist, pro-Putin] citizens” as does post–Jim Crow America and post-Nazi Germany, which blatantly disregarded and disrespected the history of millions of their racist and Nazi citizens, that Ukraine’s problematic volunteer units represent a tiny fraction of the total volunteer movement, and that Melnychuk, Semenchenko, and Yarosh really are bit players.
But take note of what’s just happened as a result of my disagreement with the authors’ hyperventilation. I’ve effectively taken their bait and proven their point. For the observable fact is that Rojansky and Minakov frame their argument insidiously. They imply that disagreement with their (naturally correct!) views is reflective, not of genuine disagreement or, heaven forbid, the possibility of their being wrong, but of “exceptionalist” group think.
In other words, if I disagree with their claims, as I do, I am obviously incapable of the kind of critical thinking they claim to represent.
Just how is their stance supportive of the critical debate they supposedly endorse? It isn’t. In effect, if not in intent, Rojansky and Minakov are insisting that their critics remain silent—that there be no debate, that group think reign. But, naturally, the group think that Rojansky and Minakov support.
Ironically, Rojansky and Minakov are the “new exceptionalists.” Ukraine, in contrast, is becoming less exceptional, and more like everyone else in the West, with every day.
