So, I have suddenly understood, that it was why I never referred to my “inner Russian”. There wasn’t anything positive in this sub-personality. Its primal (and almost the only) call was to merge with the other Russians, to be part of something larger than life.
Nonetheless, I almost fell to it. Urges of the “inner khokhol” seemed too petty, they were all bread-and-butter. I can firmly say that nothing but God saved me from becoming a “vatnik” – I satisfied my narcissistic urge to become “larger than life” by joining the Roman Catholic Church. One must admit, the Russian-Soviet Empire looks threepenny in comparison. So, I remained a narcissist, still, but a narcissist on my own.
Yes, any kind of nationalism, any kind of –ism can satisfy this narcissistic itch. It gives an illusion of closing the abyss between one's narcissistic miserable self and the one's narcissistic grandiose self: the one can be miserable personally, but if the one is part of a grandiose group, the one is grandiose, too! That’s how it works in general. But there are jingoists in every country, what’s so specific about this one?
The fact that “being Russian” is all about this. You can speak Russian since your babyhood, can be pure-blood Russian and all – but if you do not want to be part of their Empire, they will never recognize you as Russian. They intensively reject the Russians who refuse to support that common narcissistic idea of greatness. The story goes from prince Kurbsky till now. And vice versa – if you are a foreigner, but you want to embrace the Empire – you are Russian no doubt! Look at Gerard Depardieu!
It gets ridiculous sometimes. Take one patriotic Russian writer in particular. She lives in Germany. She had emigrated there as a repatriate, being a wife of an ethnic German. She pays taxes in Germany. She raises her kids in Germany, because she is very well aware of how it goes with challenged kids in Russia. She is not even Russian Orthofox – she’s Roman Catholic. But she supports the Russian cause in this war and is fond of the USSR – so she is recognized as Russian alright.
And vice versa – there is Arkadiy Babchenko, a journalist. He lives in Moscow. He fought for Russia in two wars. He pays taxes in Russia, he raises kids in Russia… But since he begun to systematically expose the lies of the Russian media about the Maidan and the ATO, he's been branded as a “national traitor”.
The cruel irony lies in the fact that usually true patriots are the bitterest critics of their countries. But you remember the part about criticism and narcissism, don't you?
The main problem with the Russian nationalism is that it is not nationalism at all. Nationalism is about making the country better for its people. The Russian nationalism is about keeping the Empire together and expanding it, no matter what. In the Soviet times it would easily pass for internationalism, but it wasn't. Internationalism is “all nations are OK”. In Soviet Russia it was “all nations are OK as long as they want to join us”.
During the Perestroika there was a chance for the Russians to break the narcissistic cycle. Many of the Soviet people would say: to hell with greatness, we want wealth. We want food, we want good clothes, good cars and proper service”. It seemed for a couple of years, that reality had prevailed.
But the trick is that the desire for wealth is not enough. Just like a narcissistic personality, a narcissistic nation cannot just leap from narcissism to normality. It takes digging out and facing one's real faults and sins. With Germany, the digging was literal: the Allies forced the Germans to dig out the victims of death camps and rebury them in the civil cemeteries. Pity that no one has forced the Communist Party members to dig out and rebury the victims lying in Butovo or Bykivnya or any other site of mass murder. Were it done, there would be much less jokes about “forty millions shot by Stalin personally”.
But the disclosures of the Perestroika turned out to be only a new cycle of the narcissistic mortification. Soon after that – reboot: Russia “gets up off her knees”.
The worst thing about narcissists is that they make their relatives and neighbours suffer. Well, any person with any disorder makes neighbours suffer, but a narcissist causes the heaviest damage on the ones who love him/her the most.
This damage is called a narcissistic injury. And the Ukraine suffers from it bitterly.
Narcissistic injury is a traumatic personal disorder that happens to people who live in close contact with a narcissist and suffer from his/her attempts to destroy their personality.
It starts with idealisation. The narcissist idealises his/her partner, friend, child, because everyone about him/her must be perfect. But this phase is short – first, nobody’s perfect and second – the narcissist just cannot stand anyone who really is superior or at least equal. So here begins the phase of derangement or the “you could do better” phase. Every personal achievement of the narcissist’s partner the narcissist tries to claim as his/her own or, otherwise, devalue. There goes the phase of humiliation: the narcissist tries to get the victim down as low as possible. The humiliated victim has to believe that the narcissist is the only bright spot in the victim’s miserable world. This is a phase of direct violence – verbal, economical, physical.
Why does it happen? First, because deep inside the narcissist feels his/her misery and just cannot believe anyone to be with him/her willingly. Second, the narcissistic self is blurred and unstable, thus he/she cannot firmly tell his/her personality from the others’. I don’t mean he/she really does not understand that some Ivan Ivanov is not he/she, on the conscious level the narcissists grasps the idea just fine. But on the subconscious level he/she hardly can tell his/her own emotions and needs from those of the others. For example, if the narcissist hates someone, he/she feels like that person hates him/her, too. If the narcissist loves some person, he/she feels like that person reciprocates and if that person really does not, the narcissist takes it as betrayal. And if this person does love him/her back, God be merciful to the person in question, because the narcissist cannot really believe somebody to love him/her. The narcissist demands love to be proved over and over again, up to the total dissolution of the “beloved one’s” personality. And when it is dissolved, the narcissist sees that he/she has nobody to love anymore and starts to seek a new victim.
I want you to know that inside the narcissist does not feel like a successful predator. On the contrary, he/she feels like a victim. “I fell in love with an extraordinary woman and suddenly she became a common wench with petty needs” – that is the usual story. And the “narcissistic injury” is what that “common wench” suffers from. The victim shows some symptoms of the narcissistic disorder, but, since the victim’s ego was established before the interaction with the narcissist, the core of personality can be restored.
The Russians do really love to describe their relationship with former colonies in terms of domestic relations: The Russians and their satellites are “brotherly nations”. And the Russian nation is the Elder Brother, of course. Skip that awkward moment that the Georgians and the Armenians were christened a half-millennium before the Russians, and Kiev was a prosperous mediaeval city when there was nothing but a swamp on the site of what would become Moscow. Moscow holds the upper hand now, so the Russians are “elders”. And they are destined to guide their “little brothers” to… what exactly? Whatever, anywhere the Russian Elder Brother guides you to is OK.
The Russians love their “little brothers”, those proud little nations that held a heroic strife against oppressors – the Poles, the Turks, the Tartars and the Germans, and whoever oppressed them. And Russia had given them a friendly hand and helped to defeat the oppressor. And after that they happily united with their elder brother and became parts of the Empire.
And as soon they had become parts of the Empire, they willingly wanted to study Russian and the more they studied the more they saw that the Russian language, “the great, mighty, true and free”, is way better than the petty languages of their own. So they changed their languages to Russian, or, at least, they changed their alphabets to Cyrillic. Except for the Baltic nations, suspiciously Western, and the Georgians-Armenians who stupidly held to their ancient doodlings.
But some Undesirables in those nations arrogantly stated that Russia is an oppressor, too, and that “liberation by Russia” was another conquest, nothing more. They stuck to their funny languages, tried to compose some ridiculous literature and so on. They were the separatists and bourgeois nationalists, the Tsarist government dandled with them, having them sent to exile, the Soviet government shot them and sentenced them to labour camps, but somehow in couldn’t help, and in 1991 those traitors turned on us and proclaimed the sovereignty of their countries. But they could not properly govern themselves, so we had to establish puppet governments for them. The good ones will return to us when they get bored with their false independence, the bad ones will be forced to return to us anyway.
The core of the Ukrainian national ego was established before the intensive impact with post-Mongol Russia. It was formed in the Zaporozhian Host, a settlement of rebels, outlaws and refugees. Yes, of course, the Ukraine was much more than that, but it was the Host of Zaporozhye that became the crucial political power of the Ukraine and created the role model of Ukrainian: a Cossack, “unbowed, unbent, unbroken”.
The Russians consider the Pereyaslavska Rada (Council) as a “reunion treaty” between Russia and the Ukraine. The reassignment of the Crimea to the Ukraine in 1954 was timed to meet the 300th anniversary of this event. From the Russian perspective, the March Articles, signed by Bohdan Khmelnitsky, were the key factor that tied the Ukraine to Russia forever, a sacred marriage between two long-separated lovers.
Ukrainian leaders of that time, and Khmelnitsky personally, would have been very much surprised. For them, it was a serious, but neither sacred nor everlasting, alliance between the Zaporozhian Host and the Tsar to overthrow Rzeczpospolita, and it ended when the Tsar broke his obligations and signed a peace treaty with the Polish king. The Cossack reasoned in the Western terms of vassalage and suzerainty, the Tsar – in terms of the Eastern despotism. The ambassador of Moscow refused to Swear fealty to the Cossacks on behalf of his Tsar – “The Tsar does not swear fealty to his subjects”. On this ground many of the Cossack leaders refused to keep this treaty and swear fealty to the Tsar. So, this treaty was unsteady from the very beginning, it would end after 13 years and moreover – the March Articles contained not a word, not a character about uniting all the Ukraine to Russia! Hetman was only obligated to pay taxes and go to war for the Tsar, with all the Zaporozhian Host, mount and blade. What the heck, where has this eternal union popped up from?
This difference in perspectives of Russia and the Ukraine is a keynote of our relationship. Russia, no matter what it called itself – the Empire, the Soviet Union, the Federation – never regarded the Ukrainian point of view. For them, if the Ukrainians signed an alliance than they agreed to unite forever, period.
This is the crucial problem with the narcissists – the so-called narcissistic egocentrism. Again, a certain measure of egocentrism is normal. How are we supposed to have a perspective of our own, if we should watch the things from the others’ perspectives all the time? But from time to time we have to switch from our own perspective to that of others to understand the others better.
The narcissist is totally incapable of doing this. No matter how hard he/she tries, the only result is his/her own perspective projected on others. The narcissist sees him/herself grandiose – hence, that’s how the others feel towards him/her. For the narcissist, there is no point of view, from which the narcissist can be seen as… a common person, leave alone a bad one.
The same we can observe in the Russian-Ukrainian relationship. It doesn’t matter if the question at hand is historical or contemporary, the only perspective is always Russian. Lately, it has taken on a ridiculous form, when both the Russian nationalists and liberals alike started to see the Ukraine as an “alternative Russia”, set against the disappointing Putinist Russia. For the first group, it is their “Novorossia” in the lands of the Eastern Ukraine, for the second group – the Russian-speaking minority in the Ukraine. These groups hate each other furiously, the first one wants the Ukraine to be conquered by Russia (except the Western Ukraine, which they generously give away to Poland), the second one wants the Ukraine to prevail, but they share the common habit of not taking the Ukrainian perspective into consideration.
No wonder that the Ukrainians readily picked up a semi-humorous “national idea” phrased by the satiric writer Les Podervyanski: “Just fuck off, all of ye!”
This is a very clear symptom of the narcissistic injury: at the end of the day the only thing a victim wants is to be left alone.
Since the times of Peter I, Russians writers, thinkers and politicians (most of them) tried to convince the Ukrainians that they are “lesser” people. Even the name given by the Russian Emperors to Ukraine means “Lesser Russia” – Malorossiya. This naming embodies two narcissistic claims at once: first, we are Russians (and that’s the highest praise they can come up with), second – we are “lesser” Russians.
This is the narcissistic way of love: on the one hand, the narcissists want the objects of love to dissolve into them. This dissolution is the ideal of love they imagine. But the dissolution will turn the object into the subject, i.e. into the narcissist. That is unacceptable, the object must remain the object, and so, on the other hand, the narcissists begin to humiliate the ones they love. They are totally sincere when they say they love Ukraine. But for them, the word “love” means “absorption and subjugation”.
The Russians like to state that the persecutions against the Ukrainians in the Russian Empire were rather clumsy, and blame us Ukrainians for the “ungratefulness” towards the Soviet Power which supposedly “permitted” us to create our own culture and study our own history.
Leaving aside the ridiculousness of such “permission”, let’s focus on studying history. Of course, the special studies in the universities were, despite the ideological colouring, more or less thorough and correct. But the school course was formed precisely to make the impression of the “lesser” nation, which bravely, but unsuccessfully had been fighting the Poles, the Turks and the Tartars until the elder brother gave a hand.
Ukraine somehow “vanished” from history after the Tartar invasion and ruining of Kiev, and somehow “popped up” in the time of Khmelnitsky’s rebellion. A short paragraph of the Zaporozhian Host, that’s it.
And the problem was not only in some awkward moments, such as Sahaidachny’s raid on Moscow. The main problem was that Ukraine of that time was ahead of Russia in many ways. It was more culturally and industrially developed, more socially advanced, and all of this despite the internal strife known as “the Ruine”. Yes, comparing to the contemporary Western Europe it was an underdeveloped agricultural country. But for Moscow it was an outpost of civilization. For the Church reforming, Tsar Alexey had taken the Ukrainian liturgic books for reference and invited teachers from Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium, because there were no scholars in Muscovy educated enough to perform this task.
The same is true about the Ukrainian literature: in the school course it starts with “The Lay of the Host of Igor” (XII century), then epic folk songs “duma” (XVII century) and Gregory Skovoroda (XVIII century) and further on. There was no Ukrainian literature in the gap of 500 years, because there couldn’t be any culture beyond the borders of the Russian Empire!
People who studied literature in the higher schools, knew about the literature and history outside the Russian Empire, but the majority of the Ukrainians would graduate with a strong conviction that their culture is something secondary, something inferior, something for the unwashed villagers.
And this way of cultural suppression was way more effective than the repressions of the Tsarist times. Russia successfully projected its inferiority complex upon us.
Many of us really wanted to become Russians. But there was this strange effect: the Russians had successfully “adopted” the persons they could use to support their national grandiose ego, but the majority of those who tried to merge would encounter some kind of resistance: they would still remain the “khokhols”, no matter how hard they tried to conjugate. There was something special about them, something that would alienate them from the Russians. The latest example is the attitude towards the Donetsk and Luhansk inhabitants: as long as they remained in the Ukraine, they were “the Russian people we have to save”, but when they became refugees, they magically turned into “lazy stupid khokhols, go back where you came from!”
I dare to say that this “something” is the Ukrainian mentality, the most prominent components of which are concretion, industriousness and opportunism (which failed us so often). Just look at those separatists. They may call themselves Russians as they please, but have you ever heard about the Russians who en masse played the separatist card? No way!
Let’s pick up a topic of the WWII victims. As I have already said, from 8 to 10 millions of them were Ukrainians (the statistic is so clumsy because nobody could properly count the victims of occupation, and both Germans and Soviets were interested in this lack of precision). But Russia had successfully “owned” those victims, as it “owned” the victory. The price the Soviet Union had paid somehow “pardons” every injustice done to the Eastern Europe, so it could be never ceased. The Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union, and the loss is our common loss. But speak of the common victory – no way, the Russia is the sole heir to the Soviet Union, and Victory is Russian only, thank ye gramps!
Hilarious moment: the most of the Ukrainians still talk of 27 millions killed in total, never take the particularly Ukrainian loss into consideration.
The subjugation is one of the methods for dealing with the narcissistic injury: submit to the aggressor and survive. The other method is, let me phrase it as “outnarciss the narcissist”. The narcissist creates a false grandiose personality? OK, let’s create a three times more grandiose one! He/she devalues you? Devalue back, down to the ground and six feet below! Tries to own you? Own him/her yourself! And so on.
Applied to the Russian-Ukrainian relationship it looks like that: you call us “lesser Russians”? So, for us you are “moskali”, for ever. And yes, it is derived from “swamp”, which “Mocow” means in the languages of peoples you’ve destroyed. And yes, it is the only thing you’re good for. No, you are not an “elder brothers”, you are but northern savages. We were Europe all the way, and you were a joke. Mazepa might have been a bastard, but he was a cultured bastard, refined and sophisticated bastard, he was everything that drunken slob Peter desperately and hopelessly tried to be. And we have nothing in common with you, we are an ancient nation, we were before Troy, have you ever heard of Trypillia? And so on.
Between these two poles lies a wide spectrum of other narcissistic defences. What’s wrong with them all? Oh yes. They are narcissistic.
Today I have read in a friendly psychotherapist’s blog a message that seemed important to me. “It is not easy to live consciously. One of my clients one day cried: “I hate therapy, now I even cannot escape into illusion!” (…) It seems unbearable to accept one's own self and one's own appearance, to accept death of someone near and dear, to accept that one was deluded to one's own ruin. It's easier to say “It is not me”. And it works. When there's no diseased, there's nobody to cure. But the problem is that if it is not my bruises, lingering for a month – whose are they? If it is not my 100 kg weight – than whose? If it is not I who's been deluded and betrayed by a loved one – than who? Every time we leave such experiences unconscious, we cut off and throw away pieces of our selves. And the more we throw away, the less we become”.
The person that uses the narcissistic defences – i.e. throws away “unacceptable pieces” – becomes less. Russia becomes less amazingly quickly, but so do we when we try to defend our selves with narcissistic methods.
The Russians are afraid of consciousness. Their nightmare is to be made “to pay and repent”. The word “svidomy”, which means “conscious” in Ukrainian, is an invective for them.
It is impossible to be a conscious person and not to pay debts, not to repent sins. So we have to. I may say, we already do. When we, the Ukrainians, raise funds for the army, or volunteer, or work for various citizen committees – we pay for our former indifference and passivity. When we mourn for the killed in the ATO, we repent for our former silent agreement with corruption. And we shall pay more, because nothing is over yet.
We cannot afford to be narcissistic. However strong is the temptation to use narcissistic defences against the narcissistic neighbour, we have to keep conscious.
What does it mean? It means to remember some simple truths. First, we are an underdeveloped country of Eastern Europe. The key word is “underdeveloped”. We are neither great, nor miserable, we are just like any other country, but underdeveloped. Second, it depends only on us to develop. Third, it takes not only the hard work, but the control over authorities that proved to tend to embezzle our money. Fourth, and most important – we have to separate from Russia.
And I do not mean the economical separation only. We have to separate from Russia, first of all, in our minds.
The main difficulty in the separation from the narcissist is the separation from the victim’s own narcissistic defences. We just got too used to using them. We are fixed on “What will the Russians say? What will the Russians do?” even now. We still feed them with narcissistic supply – and feed on them.
We have to stop it. It doesn’t mean we have to become fierce enemies of the Russians. On the contrary. Cold turkey. Enmity is a very fruitful narcissistic supply. For now, the Russians are gathering hatred gladly – they are at the centre of common attention, they steal the show. So let them. Concentrate on what is ours, as an old motto says. Stay conscious. Keep calm and carry on. We have a country to save.
Now, closing the circle and returning to our perfection-seekers and anti-Putinists. While this article was still in progress, one more tragedy occurred. Ukrainian soldiers on the border with Russia, having been under a fierce artillery bombardment from both the Russian forces and the separatists, crossed the border and retreated to the Russian territory in hope that the Russians would not shell their own country. The anti-Putinist liberal guy expressed very intense resentment about their behaviour. How could they retreat to Russia if they consider Russia an enemy?
No, he never expressed his resentment about the Russian army having shelled them. Of course, the Russian army is below any criticism. But why didn't the Ukrainians die fighting?
And this is the point. When the narcissist wants somebody to be perfect – that means subconsciously he/she wants this somebody to be dead. A good reason to stay away from that kind, don’t you think?
Nonetheless, I almost fell to it. Urges of the “inner khokhol” seemed too petty, they were all bread-and-butter. I can firmly say that nothing but God saved me from becoming a “vatnik” – I satisfied my narcissistic urge to become “larger than life” by joining the Roman Catholic Church. One must admit, the Russian-Soviet Empire looks threepenny in comparison. So, I remained a narcissist, still, but a narcissist on my own.
Yes, any kind of nationalism, any kind of –ism can satisfy this narcissistic itch. It gives an illusion of closing the abyss between one's narcissistic miserable self and the one's narcissistic grandiose self: the one can be miserable personally, but if the one is part of a grandiose group, the one is grandiose, too! That’s how it works in general. But there are jingoists in every country, what’s so specific about this one?
The fact that “being Russian” is all about this. You can speak Russian since your babyhood, can be pure-blood Russian and all – but if you do not want to be part of their Empire, they will never recognize you as Russian. They intensively reject the Russians who refuse to support that common narcissistic idea of greatness. The story goes from prince Kurbsky till now. And vice versa – if you are a foreigner, but you want to embrace the Empire – you are Russian no doubt! Look at Gerard Depardieu!
It gets ridiculous sometimes. Take one patriotic Russian writer in particular. She lives in Germany. She had emigrated there as a repatriate, being a wife of an ethnic German. She pays taxes in Germany. She raises her kids in Germany, because she is very well aware of how it goes with challenged kids in Russia. She is not even Russian Orthofox – she’s Roman Catholic. But she supports the Russian cause in this war and is fond of the USSR – so she is recognized as Russian alright.
And vice versa – there is Arkadiy Babchenko, a journalist. He lives in Moscow. He fought for Russia in two wars. He pays taxes in Russia, he raises kids in Russia… But since he begun to systematically expose the lies of the Russian media about the Maidan and the ATO, he's been branded as a “national traitor”.
The cruel irony lies in the fact that usually true patriots are the bitterest critics of their countries. But you remember the part about criticism and narcissism, don't you?
The main problem with the Russian nationalism is that it is not nationalism at all. Nationalism is about making the country better for its people. The Russian nationalism is about keeping the Empire together and expanding it, no matter what. In the Soviet times it would easily pass for internationalism, but it wasn't. Internationalism is “all nations are OK”. In Soviet Russia it was “all nations are OK as long as they want to join us”.
During the Perestroika there was a chance for the Russians to break the narcissistic cycle. Many of the Soviet people would say: to hell with greatness, we want wealth. We want food, we want good clothes, good cars and proper service”. It seemed for a couple of years, that reality had prevailed.
But the trick is that the desire for wealth is not enough. Just like a narcissistic personality, a narcissistic nation cannot just leap from narcissism to normality. It takes digging out and facing one's real faults and sins. With Germany, the digging was literal: the Allies forced the Germans to dig out the victims of death camps and rebury them in the civil cemeteries. Pity that no one has forced the Communist Party members to dig out and rebury the victims lying in Butovo or Bykivnya or any other site of mass murder. Were it done, there would be much less jokes about “forty millions shot by Stalin personally”.
But the disclosures of the Perestroika turned out to be only a new cycle of the narcissistic mortification. Soon after that – reboot: Russia “gets up off her knees”.
The worst thing about narcissists is that they make their relatives and neighbours suffer. Well, any person with any disorder makes neighbours suffer, but a narcissist causes the heaviest damage on the ones who love him/her the most.
This damage is called a narcissistic injury. And the Ukraine suffers from it bitterly.
Narcissistic injury is a traumatic personal disorder that happens to people who live in close contact with a narcissist and suffer from his/her attempts to destroy their personality.
It starts with idealisation. The narcissist idealises his/her partner, friend, child, because everyone about him/her must be perfect. But this phase is short – first, nobody’s perfect and second – the narcissist just cannot stand anyone who really is superior or at least equal. So here begins the phase of derangement or the “you could do better” phase. Every personal achievement of the narcissist’s partner the narcissist tries to claim as his/her own or, otherwise, devalue. There goes the phase of humiliation: the narcissist tries to get the victim down as low as possible. The humiliated victim has to believe that the narcissist is the only bright spot in the victim’s miserable world. This is a phase of direct violence – verbal, economical, physical.
Why does it happen? First, because deep inside the narcissist feels his/her misery and just cannot believe anyone to be with him/her willingly. Second, the narcissistic self is blurred and unstable, thus he/she cannot firmly tell his/her personality from the others’. I don’t mean he/she really does not understand that some Ivan Ivanov is not he/she, on the conscious level the narcissists grasps the idea just fine. But on the subconscious level he/she hardly can tell his/her own emotions and needs from those of the others. For example, if the narcissist hates someone, he/she feels like that person hates him/her, too. If the narcissist loves some person, he/she feels like that person reciprocates and if that person really does not, the narcissist takes it as betrayal. And if this person does love him/her back, God be merciful to the person in question, because the narcissist cannot really believe somebody to love him/her. The narcissist demands love to be proved over and over again, up to the total dissolution of the “beloved one’s” personality. And when it is dissolved, the narcissist sees that he/she has nobody to love anymore and starts to seek a new victim.
I want you to know that inside the narcissist does not feel like a successful predator. On the contrary, he/she feels like a victim. “I fell in love with an extraordinary woman and suddenly she became a common wench with petty needs” – that is the usual story. And the “narcissistic injury” is what that “common wench” suffers from. The victim shows some symptoms of the narcissistic disorder, but, since the victim’s ego was established before the interaction with the narcissist, the core of personality can be restored.
The Russians do really love to describe their relationship with former colonies in terms of domestic relations: The Russians and their satellites are “brotherly nations”. And the Russian nation is the Elder Brother, of course. Skip that awkward moment that the Georgians and the Armenians were christened a half-millennium before the Russians, and Kiev was a prosperous mediaeval city when there was nothing but a swamp on the site of what would become Moscow. Moscow holds the upper hand now, so the Russians are “elders”. And they are destined to guide their “little brothers” to… what exactly? Whatever, anywhere the Russian Elder Brother guides you to is OK.
The Russians love their “little brothers”, those proud little nations that held a heroic strife against oppressors – the Poles, the Turks, the Tartars and the Germans, and whoever oppressed them. And Russia had given them a friendly hand and helped to defeat the oppressor. And after that they happily united with their elder brother and became parts of the Empire.
And as soon they had become parts of the Empire, they willingly wanted to study Russian and the more they studied the more they saw that the Russian language, “the great, mighty, true and free”, is way better than the petty languages of their own. So they changed their languages to Russian, or, at least, they changed their alphabets to Cyrillic. Except for the Baltic nations, suspiciously Western, and the Georgians-Armenians who stupidly held to their ancient doodlings.
But some Undesirables in those nations arrogantly stated that Russia is an oppressor, too, and that “liberation by Russia” was another conquest, nothing more. They stuck to their funny languages, tried to compose some ridiculous literature and so on. They were the separatists and bourgeois nationalists, the Tsarist government dandled with them, having them sent to exile, the Soviet government shot them and sentenced them to labour camps, but somehow in couldn’t help, and in 1991 those traitors turned on us and proclaimed the sovereignty of their countries. But they could not properly govern themselves, so we had to establish puppet governments for them. The good ones will return to us when they get bored with their false independence, the bad ones will be forced to return to us anyway.
The core of the Ukrainian national ego was established before the intensive impact with post-Mongol Russia. It was formed in the Zaporozhian Host, a settlement of rebels, outlaws and refugees. Yes, of course, the Ukraine was much more than that, but it was the Host of Zaporozhye that became the crucial political power of the Ukraine and created the role model of Ukrainian: a Cossack, “unbowed, unbent, unbroken”.
The Russians consider the Pereyaslavska Rada (Council) as a “reunion treaty” between Russia and the Ukraine. The reassignment of the Crimea to the Ukraine in 1954 was timed to meet the 300th anniversary of this event. From the Russian perspective, the March Articles, signed by Bohdan Khmelnitsky, were the key factor that tied the Ukraine to Russia forever, a sacred marriage between two long-separated lovers.
Ukrainian leaders of that time, and Khmelnitsky personally, would have been very much surprised. For them, it was a serious, but neither sacred nor everlasting, alliance between the Zaporozhian Host and the Tsar to overthrow Rzeczpospolita, and it ended when the Tsar broke his obligations and signed a peace treaty with the Polish king. The Cossack reasoned in the Western terms of vassalage and suzerainty, the Tsar – in terms of the Eastern despotism. The ambassador of Moscow refused to Swear fealty to the Cossacks on behalf of his Tsar – “The Tsar does not swear fealty to his subjects”. On this ground many of the Cossack leaders refused to keep this treaty and swear fealty to the Tsar. So, this treaty was unsteady from the very beginning, it would end after 13 years and moreover – the March Articles contained not a word, not a character about uniting all the Ukraine to Russia! Hetman was only obligated to pay taxes and go to war for the Tsar, with all the Zaporozhian Host, mount and blade. What the heck, where has this eternal union popped up from?
This difference in perspectives of Russia and the Ukraine is a keynote of our relationship. Russia, no matter what it called itself – the Empire, the Soviet Union, the Federation – never regarded the Ukrainian point of view. For them, if the Ukrainians signed an alliance than they agreed to unite forever, period.
This is the crucial problem with the narcissists – the so-called narcissistic egocentrism. Again, a certain measure of egocentrism is normal. How are we supposed to have a perspective of our own, if we should watch the things from the others’ perspectives all the time? But from time to time we have to switch from our own perspective to that of others to understand the others better.
The narcissist is totally incapable of doing this. No matter how hard he/she tries, the only result is his/her own perspective projected on others. The narcissist sees him/herself grandiose – hence, that’s how the others feel towards him/her. For the narcissist, there is no point of view, from which the narcissist can be seen as… a common person, leave alone a bad one.
The same we can observe in the Russian-Ukrainian relationship. It doesn’t matter if the question at hand is historical or contemporary, the only perspective is always Russian. Lately, it has taken on a ridiculous form, when both the Russian nationalists and liberals alike started to see the Ukraine as an “alternative Russia”, set against the disappointing Putinist Russia. For the first group, it is their “Novorossia” in the lands of the Eastern Ukraine, for the second group – the Russian-speaking minority in the Ukraine. These groups hate each other furiously, the first one wants the Ukraine to be conquered by Russia (except the Western Ukraine, which they generously give away to Poland), the second one wants the Ukraine to prevail, but they share the common habit of not taking the Ukrainian perspective into consideration.
No wonder that the Ukrainians readily picked up a semi-humorous “national idea” phrased by the satiric writer Les Podervyanski: “Just fuck off, all of ye!”
This is a very clear symptom of the narcissistic injury: at the end of the day the only thing a victim wants is to be left alone.
Since the times of Peter I, Russians writers, thinkers and politicians (most of them) tried to convince the Ukrainians that they are “lesser” people. Even the name given by the Russian Emperors to Ukraine means “Lesser Russia” – Malorossiya. This naming embodies two narcissistic claims at once: first, we are Russians (and that’s the highest praise they can come up with), second – we are “lesser” Russians.
This is the narcissistic way of love: on the one hand, the narcissists want the objects of love to dissolve into them. This dissolution is the ideal of love they imagine. But the dissolution will turn the object into the subject, i.e. into the narcissist. That is unacceptable, the object must remain the object, and so, on the other hand, the narcissists begin to humiliate the ones they love. They are totally sincere when they say they love Ukraine. But for them, the word “love” means “absorption and subjugation”.
The Russians like to state that the persecutions against the Ukrainians in the Russian Empire were rather clumsy, and blame us Ukrainians for the “ungratefulness” towards the Soviet Power which supposedly “permitted” us to create our own culture and study our own history.
Leaving aside the ridiculousness of such “permission”, let’s focus on studying history. Of course, the special studies in the universities were, despite the ideological colouring, more or less thorough and correct. But the school course was formed precisely to make the impression of the “lesser” nation, which bravely, but unsuccessfully had been fighting the Poles, the Turks and the Tartars until the elder brother gave a hand.
Ukraine somehow “vanished” from history after the Tartar invasion and ruining of Kiev, and somehow “popped up” in the time of Khmelnitsky’s rebellion. A short paragraph of the Zaporozhian Host, that’s it.
And the problem was not only in some awkward moments, such as Sahaidachny’s raid on Moscow. The main problem was that Ukraine of that time was ahead of Russia in many ways. It was more culturally and industrially developed, more socially advanced, and all of this despite the internal strife known as “the Ruine”. Yes, comparing to the contemporary Western Europe it was an underdeveloped agricultural country. But for Moscow it was an outpost of civilization. For the Church reforming, Tsar Alexey had taken the Ukrainian liturgic books for reference and invited teachers from Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium, because there were no scholars in Muscovy educated enough to perform this task.
The same is true about the Ukrainian literature: in the school course it starts with “The Lay of the Host of Igor” (XII century), then epic folk songs “duma” (XVII century) and Gregory Skovoroda (XVIII century) and further on. There was no Ukrainian literature in the gap of 500 years, because there couldn’t be any culture beyond the borders of the Russian Empire!
People who studied literature in the higher schools, knew about the literature and history outside the Russian Empire, but the majority of the Ukrainians would graduate with a strong conviction that their culture is something secondary, something inferior, something for the unwashed villagers.
And this way of cultural suppression was way more effective than the repressions of the Tsarist times. Russia successfully projected its inferiority complex upon us.
Many of us really wanted to become Russians. But there was this strange effect: the Russians had successfully “adopted” the persons they could use to support their national grandiose ego, but the majority of those who tried to merge would encounter some kind of resistance: they would still remain the “khokhols”, no matter how hard they tried to conjugate. There was something special about them, something that would alienate them from the Russians. The latest example is the attitude towards the Donetsk and Luhansk inhabitants: as long as they remained in the Ukraine, they were “the Russian people we have to save”, but when they became refugees, they magically turned into “lazy stupid khokhols, go back where you came from!”
I dare to say that this “something” is the Ukrainian mentality, the most prominent components of which are concretion, industriousness and opportunism (which failed us so often). Just look at those separatists. They may call themselves Russians as they please, but have you ever heard about the Russians who en masse played the separatist card? No way!
Let’s pick up a topic of the WWII victims. As I have already said, from 8 to 10 millions of them were Ukrainians (the statistic is so clumsy because nobody could properly count the victims of occupation, and both Germans and Soviets were interested in this lack of precision). But Russia had successfully “owned” those victims, as it “owned” the victory. The price the Soviet Union had paid somehow “pardons” every injustice done to the Eastern Europe, so it could be never ceased. The Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union, and the loss is our common loss. But speak of the common victory – no way, the Russia is the sole heir to the Soviet Union, and Victory is Russian only, thank ye gramps!
Hilarious moment: the most of the Ukrainians still talk of 27 millions killed in total, never take the particularly Ukrainian loss into consideration.
The subjugation is one of the methods for dealing with the narcissistic injury: submit to the aggressor and survive. The other method is, let me phrase it as “outnarciss the narcissist”. The narcissist creates a false grandiose personality? OK, let’s create a three times more grandiose one! He/she devalues you? Devalue back, down to the ground and six feet below! Tries to own you? Own him/her yourself! And so on.
Applied to the Russian-Ukrainian relationship it looks like that: you call us “lesser Russians”? So, for us you are “moskali”, for ever. And yes, it is derived from “swamp”, which “Mocow” means in the languages of peoples you’ve destroyed. And yes, it is the only thing you’re good for. No, you are not an “elder brothers”, you are but northern savages. We were Europe all the way, and you were a joke. Mazepa might have been a bastard, but he was a cultured bastard, refined and sophisticated bastard, he was everything that drunken slob Peter desperately and hopelessly tried to be. And we have nothing in common with you, we are an ancient nation, we were before Troy, have you ever heard of Trypillia? And so on.
Between these two poles lies a wide spectrum of other narcissistic defences. What’s wrong with them all? Oh yes. They are narcissistic.
Today I have read in a friendly psychotherapist’s blog a message that seemed important to me. “It is not easy to live consciously. One of my clients one day cried: “I hate therapy, now I even cannot escape into illusion!” (…) It seems unbearable to accept one's own self and one's own appearance, to accept death of someone near and dear, to accept that one was deluded to one's own ruin. It's easier to say “It is not me”. And it works. When there's no diseased, there's nobody to cure. But the problem is that if it is not my bruises, lingering for a month – whose are they? If it is not my 100 kg weight – than whose? If it is not I who's been deluded and betrayed by a loved one – than who? Every time we leave such experiences unconscious, we cut off and throw away pieces of our selves. And the more we throw away, the less we become”.
The person that uses the narcissistic defences – i.e. throws away “unacceptable pieces” – becomes less. Russia becomes less amazingly quickly, but so do we when we try to defend our selves with narcissistic methods.
The Russians are afraid of consciousness. Their nightmare is to be made “to pay and repent”. The word “svidomy”, which means “conscious” in Ukrainian, is an invective for them.
It is impossible to be a conscious person and not to pay debts, not to repent sins. So we have to. I may say, we already do. When we, the Ukrainians, raise funds for the army, or volunteer, or work for various citizen committees – we pay for our former indifference and passivity. When we mourn for the killed in the ATO, we repent for our former silent agreement with corruption. And we shall pay more, because nothing is over yet.
We cannot afford to be narcissistic. However strong is the temptation to use narcissistic defences against the narcissistic neighbour, we have to keep conscious.
What does it mean? It means to remember some simple truths. First, we are an underdeveloped country of Eastern Europe. The key word is “underdeveloped”. We are neither great, nor miserable, we are just like any other country, but underdeveloped. Second, it depends only on us to develop. Third, it takes not only the hard work, but the control over authorities that proved to tend to embezzle our money. Fourth, and most important – we have to separate from Russia.
And I do not mean the economical separation only. We have to separate from Russia, first of all, in our minds.
The main difficulty in the separation from the narcissist is the separation from the victim’s own narcissistic defences. We just got too used to using them. We are fixed on “What will the Russians say? What will the Russians do?” even now. We still feed them with narcissistic supply – and feed on them.
We have to stop it. It doesn’t mean we have to become fierce enemies of the Russians. On the contrary. Cold turkey. Enmity is a very fruitful narcissistic supply. For now, the Russians are gathering hatred gladly – they are at the centre of common attention, they steal the show. So let them. Concentrate on what is ours, as an old motto says. Stay conscious. Keep calm and carry on. We have a country to save.
Now, closing the circle and returning to our perfection-seekers and anti-Putinists. While this article was still in progress, one more tragedy occurred. Ukrainian soldiers on the border with Russia, having been under a fierce artillery bombardment from both the Russian forces and the separatists, crossed the border and retreated to the Russian territory in hope that the Russians would not shell their own country. The anti-Putinist liberal guy expressed very intense resentment about their behaviour. How could they retreat to Russia if they consider Russia an enemy?
No, he never expressed his resentment about the Russian army having shelled them. Of course, the Russian army is below any criticism. But why didn't the Ukrainians die fighting?
And this is the point. When the narcissist wants somebody to be perfect – that means subconsciously he/she wants this somebody to be dead. A good reason to stay away from that kind, don’t you think?
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