These days, Karl Schlögel is looking at Ukraine with sadness and Moscow with anger. at Anne Will he said we should even be prepared for a third world war. “Finally, finally” plain text is spoken about Russia, “somehow reality has arrived.” In the Berliner Ensemble on Monday evening he spoke to Jakob Augstein about this reality: about Putin, who carries the entire burden of the Soviet Union on his shoulders. And about Ukrainian men taking up arms because of him.
Jakob Augstein: Mr. Schlögel, were you surprised by the attack on the Ukraine?
Karl Schlögel: I was surprised. The night before I had called a fellow writer in Lemberg and we had talked about the fact that it was actually our job to go to Kyiv now. We thought about who we could get from Paris, London and New York to at least symbolically express something through their presence – as helpless as that might be. Then morning came and the news of the beginning of the war. It was inconceivable to me that a four-sided simultaneous invasion aimed at immediately seizing all of Ukraine would take place. The bombs and rockets fell not only in the east, the center and in Kyiv, but also in Lemberg and Rivne – that is, in the west. I cried. Out of sheer helplessness.
What do you think the aim of this war is?
It’s the destruction of Ukraine. And possibly also what Ukraine belongs to: Europe. At first I thought that Putin would be content with recognizing these so-called republics. And that he would work from there to destabilize the country. But a nationwide blitzkrieg action, no, I didn’t imagine that. In Russian it means “spezialnaja vojennaja operazija”, special operation.
I have now read in many newspapers that war is completely alien to us in the West. My colleagues must have forgotten the war in Afghanistan…
It’s not that the wars in Libya, Iraq or Afghanistan didn’t affect me. But he was far away, a “psychic experience”. In the case of Ukraine it is different. I know all these cities. If rockets are fired at Kharkiv now, then I know where they will fall. In which parks, on which streets and factories.
It’s easier to start a war than to end it. Aren’t the Russians afraid of the Afghanistan scenario?
I’m not a military expert and I don’t understand these things. But from the Russian side there was not only the idea of a military intervention, but until the end it played a major role whether the Ukrainian regime could not be overthrown from within. But it will be impossible for Russia to dominate Ukraine across the board. What will happen? Will they occupy Ukraine left of the Dnieper? With Kyiv? Without Kyiv? These things are all open. And Putin has already hinted at the possibility of escalating the conflict. How does this sentence of his, which is now quoted everywhere, go? “Whoever interferes, we will meet with means that no one has seen.”
You have already hinted at a possible end to the war: the division of Ukraine. What else is possible?
I don’t want to talk about that today.
Karl Schlögel, born in Upper Swabia in 1948, is a historian of Eastern Europe. In 1995 he took over the professorship for East European history at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder); In 2013 he retired. For The Soviet Century. Archeology of a lost world (CH Beck) he received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2018
Why?
Because we are now on the fifth day of the war! On the fifth day! And obviously they realized that subjugating Ukraine in two days is not possible. What does that mean? It means that at some point you will totally hit the ground running. We experienced that in Grozny. You remember? Nothing remains of this big city after the two Chechen wars. That threatens in Ukraine. Cities that we know, whose airports we landed in, whose universities we spoke to, whose museums we saw – they could now be destroyed. I call this the “Syrian experience” because the cities could be bombed out overnight – just like Aleppo was bombed out.
Do you think there are still Ukrainians who are happy that the Russians are coming?
Yes, there definitely are. There is definitely Russian support in the country, such as the Russian party “For Life”, which also has a few percent. A large part of the Ukrainian patriotic population left the Donbas. They didn’t want to be drawn into the war in 2014; they wanted to live and study normally. There are certainly people in the rest of the country who say: Before the whole world is ruined for us, we’d rather make peace. It’s a paradox anyway that Russians are supposed to be shooting at Ukrainians and Ukrainians at Russians. Nobody understands that.
Why did Putin start this war?
Why? That’s the big question. I don’t think he can even imagine Russia beyond the Empire. Not because he dealt with it historically so deeply, because he would have read many books about the Rus, the Moscow Empire and the Soviet Union. No, that’s in his…how should I put it…Soviet cultural genes. During his hour-long speech a few days ago, with which he wanted to justify the war, he sighed and groaned and held on to his desk so much that one had the impression that the entire burden of the defunct empire was on his shoulders. He farms the Russian trauma. And what he said last year in the essay On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians said that Ukraine is Lenin’s invention, that there is no Ukrainian people and that the state has no right to exist independently, these are all unrealistic imperial fantasies.
It is by no means only Putin who said that Ukraine is a key territory for Russia. The American geopolitician Zbigniew Brzeziński wrote in 1997: Ukraine makes the difference between Russia being a European and an Asian power. And if Ukraine turns to the West, then Russia must do the same – otherwise a major conflict will result. We are now acting as if Putin had unexpectedly gone mad, so to speak – but this is where a development that has been indicated for a very long time culminates.
Yes, this is not just Putin’s personal idiosyncrasy. Of course, the notion that Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians have a particularly close relationship is widespread. I just read an interview with the chauvinist and I would almost say fascist poet and writer Alexander Prokhanov. There he always spoke of the “sound of the empire”. We also know the talk of the magic of the empire from other empires that have come to an end. I mean the sound of the British Empire or the late Habsburg Monarchy. The only problem is that while these empires have become independent nation states, Putin is using all his might to resist this process on the territory of the former Soviet Union. Unlike the states that emerged from the Tsarist Empire, Ukraine had the misfortune that its national moment was very short: in 1918 in Brest it was briefly represented as a separate state. Immediately afterwards it became part of the Soviet Union. But of course it has also existed as a people and nation without the tradition of a continuous state.
Could the war have been prevented?
Well, apparently he wasn’t prevented. But we’re welcome to discuss that. I don’t think that Barack Obama’s famous dictum that Russia was a “regional power” was decisive, that is, the humiliation by the West. It was a foolish and damaging remark. But there was more at work here, the dynamics within Russia itself. It is a question of whether or not the Russian leadership is capable of stepping out of the empire’s shadow.
But Mr. Schlögel, the influence of the West in this matter goes far, far beyond Obama’s flippant remark. The West intervened massively in Ukraine at the time of the Maidan revolt and interfered in Ukrainian domestic politics. At the time, Russian intelligence released a phone conversation between US Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and then US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. They talk about whether Vitali Klitschko – known here as “Klitsch” – should or shouldn’t be part of the future government – as if it were the Americans who were assigning the posts there. Maybe it was them?
That the West expressed its preferences at the time is completely undeniable. But attributing the process of the Orange Revolution of 2004 or the Maidan popular movement ten years later to the effect of the dollar and the influence of the CIA is, in my view, nonsense. It all happened, yes, but it didn’t determine the fate of Ukraine.
The new federal government has thrown the traditional German and social democratic Russia policy overboard. Is that correct given our historical responsibility?
We Germans always praise our great special relationship with Russia, but that’s mostly “Russian kitsch”… Why do we only have a special responsibility towards Russia? Germany has a special responsibility towards the peoples of the Soviet Union, to whom we have inflicted unspeakable suffering. The main scenes of Nazi crimes were Belarus and Ukraine. But all of our empathy is projected onto Russia alone. Even a man as educated as Helmut Schmidt said in the 2014 crisis: Ukraine does not exist at all, it is not a nation, not a state. This is a German legacy: to see Ukraine as Russia’s backyard and breadbasket. As a colonial area…
In “Anne Will” you said that in 1936 Arthur Koestler or Ernest Hemingway went to Spain to fight against the fascist Franco. Should the able-bodied German men go into battle against Putin today?
Well, I initially related this sentence to myself.
But you were a conscientious objector.
Yes, for good reason. At that time it was about the Vietnam War and the crimes of the West. Herfried Münkler once said that we have arrived in the “post-heroic age”. Such statements could be afforded in Germany in recent years. But in the Ukraine, at this moment, tens of thousands are queuing at the military commandos to have their weapons handed over to them. I do not consider these men and women to be militarists. I consider them patriots who stand up for what my generation got for free: freedom and peace.