Here's the psychological dynamic at work. At a 2013 conference at Riga Business School my colleague Glen Grant had a conversation with a Russian prof who attended. He asked how people in Latvia and the West viewed Russia, whether we respected Russia. When Glen replied that we see nothing in Russia's society or political system worthy of emulation and that we think hardly at all about Russia this Russian got really angry and had to be pulled away by his colleague.
It's not our job to act as psychotherapist for Russians' inferiority complex and wounded pride.
This Times radio interview with Russian-fluent UK historian Anna Reid, who lived in Moscow and Kyiv in the '90s explains the colonial psychological dynamic at work:
"People now are radically misinformed about their own history…The view of their country they have on their head has no connection with reality anymore at all. People have been encouraged to live in this fantasy world and a chunk of the population like doing so because it makes them feel better about themselves…They live in a country where there's an enormous gap between rich and poor….For a vast chunk of the population living standards have not improved. If you look at the average age people live to, life expectancy (has) hardly gone up. It's still in the 60s for both men and women and they feel they still feel this sense….it's the West's fault. There's this resentment, this deep inferiority complex…this feeling that actually we live in a great country and we're making the world…respect us again. It makes them feel better about themselves even if they're still living in this God forsaken hole In the deep provinces with a crap job and barely able to afford meat once a week. It's born of an inferiority complex.
TR: it's all deeply psychological you mentioned um the access to to his to proper understanding of history and it's interesting that uh President Putin's actions to try and seize Ukraine is based on his own interpretation of history that Ukraine isn't a real State and that Russian Ukraine have a shared Destiny why does he see it like that?
AR: It's well if I don't mind go if you don't mind me going back into history a little bit indeed the eastern part of Ukrainian so east of the river Dnipro which bisects down the middle, if went to Russia in the second half of the 17th Century went to what was then Muscovy in the second half of the 17th century so about the same time Scotland started being ruled from London okay so they there is a long history of not all of present-day Ukraine but a lot of it half of it being ruled from Moscow um before that Ukraine was mostly ruled by Poland or preceding that it's called the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth so it has got this history of being rolled by outside Powers either from Warsaw or by Petersburg Moscow and being split so you've got so you know it's been a distinct nationality you know for for centuries but it has not been a state it was never an independent state until 1991 so just over 30 years ago and that is there's nothing very unusual about that history you know that sort of history of being the underdog Nation got your Independence sometime in the 19th or 20th century you know that's that's lots of places are like that that's Finland's that's Norway you know that that's Slovakia or Slovenia you know that that's a common European story there's nothing sort of weird about that that doesn't make Ukraine particularly fragile or you know not a real place but for Russians and it applies to an extent to sort of liberal Russians as well as nationalists you know Putin supporting Russians they do have the sense of ownership over Ukraine I often feel the top you know it's a bit like trying to talk to a sort of rather you know sort of conservative Brit in 1900 about Ireland you know they sort of made they made even even somebody who accepts that home rule is you know sort of you know a necessity and you know things have gone too far we can't carry on ruling Ireland you know sort of still feels that you know it's an unhappy necessity and really island is part of Britain and you know we're really we're all sort of part of the one thing I know we love Ireland we love going on holidays and Russians sort of feel Russians today feel a bit the same about Ukraine and the culture the languages are different but fairly similar and it's like German and Dutch for example and it's a place people have relatives and vice versa you know Ukrainians have relatives in Russia as well they're likely to have been there a bit but so for them the losing Ukraine is much as they did back in 1991 was much more painful than losing the Baltic countries or Georgia or the Central Asian countries. They felt they'd lost a part of themselves and this back when I was living there in in Kiev in the ‘90s I assumed that Russia would take this post-imperial path like France or Britain and they'd get used to the idea that no they were just a normal European country and get on with you know enjoying life and being a consumer society and sort of frenzy but separate relations with Ukraine and that did not happen the reverse happened Putin started off trying to undermine various Ukrainian elections and put his own guy in power and then the Ukrainians mass demonstrations would reverse that and he'd be angry and they know then in 2014 he actually did his first invasion and now we've got this full-scale Invasion last year so it went completely the other way. He went completely revanchist and that was a surprise because it's such an irrational thing to do. Ukraine was already heading off on its own path it was more and more separate from Russia."
