OLEKSANDR KOBZAR

TOADS, NATIONALISTS, MANKURTS, AND

THE QUESTION OF CAN I LOVE UKRAINE?

Ukrainians have, perhaps more than any other people, become keen observers of European politics since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. Every election in Europe has direct consequences for Ukraine in terms of the support it receives, so Ukrainians feel the developments in regional and global politics particularly acutely—often painfully.

Recent presidential elections in Poland and Romania proved to be a mixed bag for Ukraine, with unfriendly right-wing populists securing a victory in Poland while losing in Romania. In many ways, these two elections were international events. After winning the presidency in Romania, centrist politician Nicușor Dan travelled to Poland to campaign for Rafał Trzakowski of the governing centrist coalition, while the loser George Simion did the same for Karol Nawrocki of the national conservative PiS party. The government of Hungary also involved itself in both elections, backing Nawrocki at the Conservative Political Action Conference, organised by the US Republican Party in Budapest. Even more curiously, the former football hooligan Simion, whose illustrious CV includes the infamous desecration of a cemetery of the Székely Magyars (ethnic Hungarians) in Romanian Transylvania, received cautious boosts from Viktor Orbán, the toad in Budapest, and Simion returned the favour.

It isn’t strange for pro-Europeans in different countries to collaborate across national border sbased on their shared ideology of transnational cooperation. But the emergence of an organised right-wing nationalist international (a transnational organisation of political parties/movements with a shared ideology), with a common vocabulary of anti- globalism, anti-Europeanism, and anti-liberalism, is more counter-intuitive. These international nationalists also tend to partake in culture war issues that originate in the West, regardless of the local relevance of these issues. Anti-globalism is now global, and nationalists kiss the rings of national enemies as long as they share a similar ideology.
What gives?

A clue may be their incessant references to ‘globalists’ and ‘globalism.’ Every time I hear the word I’m reminded of Stalin’s ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ – a similar slur he directed at intellectuals (most often Jews) he saw as harbouring ‘un-Soviet’ attitudes and influenced by western ideas. The Stalinist term and the modern term make essentially the same accusation: that the subjects of their insults are ‘un- rooted’ from their origins, nations, and societies. The accusers in turn brand themselves as the most ‘rooted’ and national, and thus the only ones fit to take the reins of power on behalf of the people. There may be a kernel of truth in the nationalist’s argument that unproductive attitudes of self-hatred and self-abasement do abound in Eastern European society, but the irony is that these accusers are themselves ‘rootless’, in that they fail to accept and about national culture are kitsch—and often remain tantalisingly disconnected from the practice of cultural production and consumption. What’s more, their list of grievances are globally shared, and unreflective of local issues. This all betrays a shallow, unserious, and impress-ionistic understanding of the complexities of the history, culture, and politics of those they claim to represent.

Being in diaspora and coming from a magical land that I sometimes jokingly refer to as Zamordyoria (the land beyond Mordor), I’ve frequently been confronted by the nagging question of whether or not I’ve become a self-hating Zamordorian: a xanzhiy (traitor to the Xan?), in the standard Zamordorian tongue. Someone who is kopyan, naiva, who worships the exotic and sucks up to the foreign. The Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov, in his 1980 novel The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years wrote of the mankurts—slaves without memory who retain no connection to their families and tribes. The term mankurt has since taken on a life of its own in Central Asia and the broader post-Soviet space, often being used to denote the most russified people, who have abandoned their national heritage and ancestral language, and hold no loyalty to their homelands. Ukrainians will be well-aware of how lively the topic of memory, language, and heritage is discussed in their own country, and of how sometimes one feels pressed between the ghost of the ethno-linguistic bigot Iryna Farion and the living visage of the russophile mayor of Odesa Hennadii Trukhanov (vocally in favor of retaining the city’s statue of the russian tsarina Yekaterina II, and gave his daughter the same name). As someone who keeps the company of khokhlaky (‘easterners’), I feel that I can relate to some part of the struggle many of them experience. I was educated in Standard Zamordorian, and cannot speak but a few words of my grandparents’ language (which is dismissively referred to by official discourse as a ‘dialect’). Am I a mankurt? Are we mankurts? Was I Simon, and Orban, and Stalin, and the ursine vozhd-vedmid (‘führer-bear’) of the Zamordors’ Narodna Respublika (‘Zamordorian People’s Republic’) were right, and we really are globalists and rootless cosmopolitans? And will we all inevitably lose to the supposedly robustly-rooted bigots?

The answer I can give is a resounding no. Not that we should be content with relegating Ukrainian literature to the dustbin, or replacing Ukrainian language artists like Vakharchuk and Kompanichenko with homines sovietici (‘Soviet people’) like Kobzon and Gurchenko, but we do not need to be unrooted. There is no curse on us. Rather, I argue, we can be ‘rooted cosmopolitans’. My family survived our Zamordorian version of the Holodomor (man-made famine in Ukraine in 1932-33) because they were fishermen. My father became a student, then a dissident, then an academic. I grew up as a good patriotic little mankurt, like everybody around me did, but when my father gave me a book about our Holodomor, my orientation changed rapidly. As a Zamordorian, I support Ukraine, write about Ukraine, about the Holodomor, about genocide, about repression, and about resistance—because I am rooted in the heritage and memory of those who came before me, who suffered, resisted, lost, and survived.

The Zamordorian experience I am rooted in is not the standard pastiche offered up by either the regime or diaspora influencers with exaggerated accents. Nor is it representative in many ways. But how can you be rooted in anyone else’s idea of a heritage when it’s not your own? Moreover, heritage and roots are not simply given to you by birth, like the anti-globalist nationalists like to claim. Nor are they obtained by toeing the line and pretending someone else’s shallow idea of heritage is yours, like Stalin would have you do. You are given some things, others you must dig up yourself out of the obscurity of forgetting and indifference, then there are things you can build and create yourself to add on to the rest. The choice of what to dig up and what to build up is in your hands. What’s more, by delving into your own history, you become more rooted than if you had simply pretended to have always been rooted in some arbitrary way. The more rooted cosmopolitanism that comes from such a process is robust and resilient because it doesn’t require lying to yourself or to anyone else. It is strengthened by (and in fact requires) bringing your own heritage into conversation and co-existence with different heritages and finding common ground. Doing something with the roots you have and planting new ones where none have existed before, is all that we can do, but much more than many will ever consider.

Toads may croak in their swamps and bears may rub their behinds on trees. Let them—we are neither toads nor bears, and we shouldn’t pretend to be. Let no one tell you that you cannot choose to love Ukraine because of what languages your parents spoke, or that you are a globalist pawn because you march for who you love under a rainbow flag to jeers and mockery. Let no one tell you that you are a rootless cosmopolitan because you have seen and known more than the meager portion of sky that a frog sees from the bottom of a well.