Two museums, a pedestrian bridge, a philharmonic, an office building, a children's playground, a university building and a statue – these are just some of the “important military targets” that Russia has struck with missiles in Kyiv this morning. They are also hitting civilian targets in other towns in the country with rockets, including those in which friends still have family. They seem to be callously using these crude attacks on random civilian targets to stretch the resources of the Ukrainian anti-air defences in the hope that by forcing them to attack multiple civilian targets, more of their (more expensive) guided missiles reach their targets of the energy grid, hoping to cripple it before winter to freeze Ukraine out, a repeat of Stalin's Hołodomor tactic.
As far as we can see, television audiences all over the RF are delighted that "Russia is showing its might" in such a way. It seems many Russians share their leaders' regret that the "glories" of the good-old-Soviet-days are over and thus actually tacitly or openly support this attack on those who declined the invitation to stay part of it with a grim cruel satisfaction. The overall message in the Russian public media seems to be: "serves them [insert mindlessly dehumanising label] right". There are no street protests. massive or otherwise, in big cities of "Good Russians" denouncing their government and the "culture" of death and destruction it has inculcated in the nation. The picture one gets is one of near-total passivity. The passivity and disinterest, surrender of agency to the state, is today an inherent part of being Russian it seems. It has of course historical roots going back to the Romanovs and Bolsheviks who aped them.
This is for me and my family, who took active part in it back-then, a huge contrast to the way countries such as Poland, the Baltic states and others reacted to Soviet repression in the 1980s and 1990s. My own family knows the cost of standing up for freedom and opposing the regime in those days. I took part in street demonstrations that faced and struggled with echelons of baton wielding 'milicja' in riot gear. So for me weak Russian shoulder-shrugging bleating of "what can we do?" cuts little ice. Daily, in a free Poland, I rub shoulders with people that did stand up among the thousands that refused to be cowed. Just like the Ukrainians of the 2004/5 Orange Revolution and February 2014 Revolution of Dignity.
Now Russia wants to turn the clock back and engulf a sovereign nation like Ukraine into a revived Russian hegemony, not recognising that the model of the Soviet Union is long past its sell-by date. And the majority of the population of the Russian Federation stands idly by. Unless, that is, they themselves feel they might get called up to fight in this nasty war. It is only then they try to kick against the system. But by running away to save their own skins. "Good Russians"?
My specialism is officially Slavic archaeology, I have collaborated, sometimes closely, in the past with Soviet and Russian archaeologists, even invited some of them to my home (one even to my parents in England), I've used their literature, even wrote on the beginnings of this Russian state. I am totally at a loss to know how I should see that now. While is is true that I see some of them are vaguely reported in secondary sources in our Polish archaeological circles to be "against" this war, not a single one of the academics I know has come out with any direct protest. [I would overjoyed to find put that I had missed something]. Academics no longer function anywhere as opinion-formers of course. Nevertheless, it will be a long time before I even speak to a Russian colleague while memory of this attack and their compliance are still fresh.* We can do without them.
In my own field (but I see it in others) I have long been conscious of the way that Soviet approaches to the past has influenced the interpretation of archaeological material over a wide area of central and eastern Europe. I wrote a paper in 1992 about Marxist influences in Polish archaeology that did not go down too well among colleagues cited there (and was one of the reasons sited when I as kicked out of the University). This goes deeper however as it seems to me that the whole approach to identity/ ethnicity and ethnic qualification used in large swathes of archaeology relates to ideas produced in the crucible of cultures that was the Soviet Union that were then disseminated in the Soviet Bloc to become the conceptual legacy of the way these issues are still approached today. Maybe it is time to attack this issue again with renewed vigour and try and unpick the Sovietisation and Russification of our archaeological models.
As Russia tries to gobble up artefacts that reflect a mythical proto-Russian past for all the territories it is trying to lay claim to, and make Russia and its lands the centre of their own narrative, maybe it is time to see what benefits might come from creating an Archaeology Without Russia, in the same way as in the 1920s-1950s they tried to create an archaeology free of the ideology of the despised "Western Bourgeoisie" (after all, in the 1992 article I actually said this attempt could have led to some good things for Polish archaeology, but did not).
* I think also we need to look through the light of these events at the activities of Justinian ("the Great") and all the rest (including the East Roman equivalent of Putin's patronage networks of oligarchs) involved in the short-lived Renovatio Imperii that led to the fall of the Justinian Dynasty and the rise in power and influence of the Slavs (hooray!) and Avars leading to the creation of a new world order in that part of Europe.
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