Russian Historian Airapetov: Could Battle At Alta Be Considered First Example Of Ukraine-Kazakhstan War? – OpEd
A month ago, Mark Feygin, a Russian politician in exile and blogger, hosted a debate on the [Russian] imperial legacy between Vitaly Portnikov, a Ukrainian journalist, and Yulia Latynina, a Russian liberal journalist, on his Feygin LIVE YouTube channel. The battle of words between the latter two has been viewed over one million times on the Internet and provoked lively discussions in social networks, particularly in the post-Soviet states and among people from the post-Soviet space.
Here’s what Vitaly Portnikov said about that: “People from many other former Soviet republics have spoken to me about this debate. Their reaction was the same as that of the Ukrainians. Oddly enough, this perception also arose among many repatriates to Israel, Jews by origin… This video debate is also being watched in Russia because even people with anti-imperial views in Russia itself may not have seen such a [verbal] clash either. It’s important to note that this is not a clash of enemies. This is a discussion between people who are supposedly from the same liberal camp – between those who talk about democracy and oppose [Vladimir] Putin. But when discussing the above topic, they follow opposing narratives”.
In Vitaly Portnikov’s opinion, the Russians “were formed as an imperial nation but were not formed as a political nation”, and “that is why they are not very concerned, say, with the problems of the peoples [ethnicities] of Russia”.
“We are dealing with a Moscow-centric model of empire. People in Russia perceive this as a norm of State building”, Vitaly Portnikov added. “Imperial identity and attitudes do not begin to develop [in children] at school, they begin with the family. Such consciousness is a product not only of education but also a consequence of a kind of compensation. If a person does not have the ability to control his own country, then the only way to compensate for this is to dominate other people. And this dominance leads to neglecting those others. For example, some Russian liberals, such as Yulia Latynina, speak disdainfully of the Black Lives Matter protest movement. They do not realize that this movement, as well as public figures such as Martin Luther King, called for working towards freedom. In general, Russians and Ukrainians were freed from serfdom [in 1861] at virtually the same time that African Americans in the United States were freed from slavery [1865]. African Americans and Ukrainians managed to do this freedom work. Therefore the President of the United States can be an African American man, and the Vice President of the United States can be an African American woman. Therefore in Ukraine, there can be an independent State, the President can be an ethnic Jew, and the Prime Minister can be an ethnic Buryat [Yuri Yekhanurov, a representative of the Buryats, the largest ethnic minority group in Russian Siberia, and a Ukrainian politician, who was Prime Minister of Ukraine from 2005 to 2006 and Minister of Defense from 2007 to 2009] – and no one will be bothered by this at all. We hardly ever mention the ethnicity of our politicians or cultural figures”.
The Ukrainian journalist noted the Russians “have not done any real work on freedom, they never tried to rethink either their own or others’ history”.
It appears that the last particularly struck a nerve with the Kremlin propaganda machine and some Russian historians, as the most important narratives of Moscow’s propaganda about today’s Ukraine are to claim that the Ukrainians do not know their true history. While the well-known Ukrainian journalist fights the Russians with the latter’s weapons.
The above debate on the [Russian] imperial legacy between Vitaly Portnikov and Yulia Latynina took place on May 27, 2024, and has already gathered 1,1M viewers. The interview with Vitaly Portnikov on that debate was published on June 11, 2024. It would seem that this story can already be considered more than exhausted. But it was not there.
Prominent Russian historians, Alexander Kolpakidi and Oleg Airapetov, held an online conversation entitled “Portnikov, Latynina and Ukrainian fairy tales about Ancient Rus: truth and myths of history”, on June 25, 2024. It seems what infuriates them the most is that Vitaly Portnikov “directly interpreted the campaign of Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky against Kyiv [in 1169] in a modern context”, i.e. as an example of the war between Russia and Ukraine. The sack of Kyiv took place on 8–12 March 1169 when a coalition of 11 princes, assembled by Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky of Vladimir-Suzdal, attacked the Kyivan Rus’ capital city of Kyiv. Alexander Kolpakidi and Oleg Airapetov believe that campaign should not be considered an example of the war between Russia and Ukraine, as, according to them, one cannot speak of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians concerning the strife of the 9th-12th centuries. He further speaks of the Battle of Alta River which was a 1068 clash on the Alta River (near the city of Pereiaslavl, southeast of Kiyv) between the Cuman army on the one hand and Kyivan Rus’ forces of Grand Prince Iziaslav I of Kyiv, in which the Rus’ forces were routed and fled back to Kyiv and Chernihiv in some disarray. “What is this, the first example of the Ukraine-Kazakhstan war?” Oleg Airapetov then says sarcastically. His answer to this question is of course negative. But at the same time, Oleg Airapetov explicitly recognizes the Cumans as the ancestors of the Kazakhs. Thus, he, attempting to stand up to the Ukrainian historical narratives, undermines the basis of the Russian official historical narrative concerning the origin of Kazakhs.
Through the mouths of its politicians, historians, writers, thinkers, and publicists, Moscow has always stated that the Kazakhs had never lived west of the Ural (Yaik) River, east of the Irtysh River, and in the northern part of today’s Kazakhstan. Here is what Lenta.ru, in an article entitled “On their own land” said on the subject: “Disputes about how justified (from a historical point of view) the transfer of the northern regions of Kazakhstan to the Kazakh SSR, and then independent Kazakhstan, were, have been going on for decades. At the turn of the century, the project of these territories’ seceding [from Kazakhstan] was even discussed”.
All of this talk has been and is taking place at a fairly high level in Russia. Here are a couple of examples of it from the relatively recent past. Appearing on Russian state television in December 2020, Russian MP Vyacheslav Nikonov said: “Kazakhstan simply did not exist, northern Kazakhstan was not inhabited at all and today’s Kazakhstan is a great gift from Russia and the Soviet Union”. Then Evgeny Fyodorov, yet another State Duma deputy and a member of the Central Political Council of ruling United Russia party, more clearly articulated what is meant by ‘a great gift from Russia’. He called the titular ethnic group of Kazakhstan, the Kazakhs, ‘nitshebrody’ (‘vagrants and beggars’, ‘trash’, ‘homeless people who beg for alms’) who do not have the right to their own land. Literally, Evgeny Fyodorov said: “Take the Kazakh Constitution off from the territory of Kazakhstan and Kazakh laws from the territory of Kazakhstan!.. What I’m talking about now is a direct territorial claim. A direct, distinct territory claim”.
Pyotr Tolstoy, the Deputy Speaker of Russia’s Parliament, just recently claimed publicly that Almaty is a Russian city. He, according to Anatoly Nesmiyan, “described the Kazakh statehood extremely contemptuously as ‘a certain Kazakh state”.
Such Russian narratives have existed since Soviet times. Even those Russian historians who were thought to have a favorable view of the Kazakhs viewed their history the way described above. So, for example, Lev Gumilev whose name is worn by Astana University, at the time said that the ancestors of the Kazakhs had never reached Moscow. Oleg Airapetov now claims that the Cumans, whom he explicitly considers the ancestors of the Kazakhs, reached at least as far as Kiyv which is about twice as far from Kazakhstan as Moscow.
