Opinion: Ukraine’s war is the reckoning with empire Europe can no longer avoid

Thirty years ago, in a Ukrainian churchyard where my Russian ancestors are buried, I knelt beside a very old woman leaning on a stick, her hair covered in a black kerchief. Behind us stood the Russian church that my great-grandfather built on his estate and where he lies buried.
The old woman was the last villager left who could remember the time when our family lived there. She had been a young girl of six or seven, running up to the kitchen door of the big house, carrying blueberries in her apron, and receiving from my grandfather’s sister a spoonful of hot blackberry jam. After that, the Bolshevik Revolution came, my family fled, the church was closed, and Soviet agents from the city eventually confiscated the grain, took away the kulaks, and left everyone to starve. The Holodomor, the famine that Stalin inflicted on Ukraine, reduced people who had farmed the richest soil in Europe to eating grass.
Then came the war, when the Nazis set the village thatches alight and massacred the local Jewish population. The old woman sat next to me in the church and told me her story; at the end, she leaned her thin body against mine and began to howl.
I have never forgotten the sound. Whenever I hear it again in memory, I understand what the Ukrainian struggle is about. The troops fighting to hold on in Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine, the firemen pulling civilians out of the rubble of bombed buildings in Kharkiv, and the drone pilots targeting Russian ships in the Black Sea are fighting to give themselves and their children a different history than the one that made that old woman howl.
This is what we don’t seem to understand. The Western European and American public is increasingly disengaged from their struggle. The carnage seems unbelievable — is it really possible that a half-million Russians and perhaps nearly as many Ukrainians have been killed or wounded since the full-scale war began in February 2022? For too many, the dying could just as well be happening on another planet, and our politicians’ insistence that our security depends on a Ukrainian victory sounds abstract, thin, and less than credible.
If the Ukrainians are truly fighting for us, it is because they are fighting the last battle against European imperialism. Every other imperial power in Europe has given up its colonies and begun a reckoning with the harm that empire did to its colonial subjects and to its own people. For with empire came the invention of racial hierarchy and racially justified domination, violence, and cruelty.
These poisons still affect us, and nostalgia for vanished imperial greatness has been just as damaging. Even in America, which had no empire, but an immensely profitable global hegemony, much of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign stokes and exploits this atavistic sentiment, with its call to “make America great again.”
You can’t build democracy at home unless you dispense with empire and nostalgia for its loss. Until you do this, your politics will be consumed by deluded dreams.
Spanish historians have told me that the final defeat of the Spanish empire with the loss of Cuba and the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century fostered the authoritarian turn that delivered Spain to Franco and delayed the transition to democracy for two generations. Empire in Africa prevented a democratic transition in Portugal until 1974. Marine Le Pen’s right-wing movement in France began with her father’s fury at the loss of Algeria and his contempt for the democratic institutions Charles de Gaulle put in place after he withdrew France from North Africa.
When societies face up to their past, they create the possibility of a politics based in reality, not fantasy. In Britain, the Labour government of 1945 understood that it could not build democracy at home unless it abandoned India and Palestine. Germany had to be unconditionally defeated before it gave up its fantasy of an imperium across Europe and Asia.
Russia remains the one European society that has never honestly faced up to its imperial past. In refusing to acknowledge the legacy of Stalin, in failing to face up to his crimes in Ukraine, in the other “captive nations,” and in Russia itself, Russia closed off any path to its own democratic future. Its people have laid themselves open to the perpetual tyranny of a man who can only turn their sons into cannon fodder.
This is the lethal pathology that Ukraine is fighting in our name. When Ukraine’s citizens say they want to join Europe, what they mean is that they want to rip empire out of their souls and live as free people, liberated from a past whose memory made an old woman howl in pain.
All imperial nostalgias are best laid to rest, even benign ones like hers and mine for the sweet days of the ancien régime when my Russian ancestors kept the kitchen door open for peasant girls and gave them dollops of blackberry jam. A free Ukraine will have to make its own peace with the remnants of old Russia, like the churchyard where my ancestors are buried.
For now, Ukrainians are pulling Tolstoy off their shelves, and toppling Catherine the Great from her plinth in Odesa. Later, a more complex reckoning will fall due. You have to own all of your history, not just the parts that fit your mythologies.
Once Ukrainians have won a peace they can live with, a free Ukraine will have to own the imprint of the Russian past on its soul, and then wrestle free of that past. Only then can it begin to make a new history beyond terror, violence, and fear.
Editor’s Note: Copyright, Project Syndicate. This article was published by Project Syndicate on Oct. 22, 2024, and has been republished by the Kyiv Independent with permission. The opinions expressed in the op-ed section are those of the authors and do not purport to reflect the views of the Kyiv Independent.