War Stories

Normally on my day off I wouldn’t venture to the church unless I absolutely had to, but yesterday it felt too isolated to say my prayers at home, and I went down to open up the church building. Some other souls were clearly drawn to do the same as I found candles alight when I went to close the doors again at the end of the afternoon.

All conflicts, whether between neighbours or states, have an interminable history and you can never reach a starting-point, never reach an original act to assign the primal blame. I have seen left-wing people online recounting the various crimes of NATO which explain why Mr Putin has begun a war, and there is really no end to this. I reminded myself of how catastrophically dreadful the Russians’ only experience of democracy and a free economy – under Mr Yeltsin – had really been, and how, so far as I can see, the West had a chance to change the safety and security of the world permanently for good, but chose to make a quick profit instead. I was also reminded by someone else that the distorted shape Russian capitalism took was directly related to the way the Soviet Union used to function, corruption allowing the system its only element of flexibility. There’s no start to the story: it goes back and back to Prince Vladimyr of the Rus, and so to Kiev.

The aspect of President Putin’s statements about Ukraine that intrigued me most was his rhetoric about ‘de-Nazifying’ the country. It raises the question of how far he actually believes this narrative, which to anyone else looks like a ludicrously incredible cover story for destroying a democracy, albeit flawed – aren’t they all? – because democracy anywhere nearby threatens to expose his thefts and frauds: the knowledge all authoritarians fear, that the day is not far off when their head will be carried through their capital’s streets on a pitchfork. Of course the Ukrainians, whatever else they may be, are not Nazis, but the story Russia tells itself suggests they might be. Russians, so the legend of the Great Patriotic War goes, stood and suffered as good as alone against the Reich, surrounded by vicious breakaway states who seized the first available opportunity to persecute them in the aftermath of Blitzkreig. The pattern plays itself out again, they believe. We in Britain might recognise this story, because it’s uncomfortably close to the one we have too often told ourselves. Ours isn’t as extreme, because we haven’t had the same extreme experiences as the Russians have, but its outlines are similar and like all such national myths blends truth and falsehood.

Every national history – like every history of a person – has things to celebrate and things to deplore, but the tendency (as with people, so with states) is to elide them into a single story of mingled glory and victimisation, to justify your current enmities and outrages. Beware the politicians who tell you this: they have their own, malign purposes, and will hurt you, and those you care for.