Amid the deluge of Communist-related media content expected to come this fall on the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the audience is unlikely to see a serious analysis of Ukraine's 1917-21 statehood bid and its considerable relevance to the geopolitical tensions of today, Peter Dickinson wrote for the Atlantic Council.
Instead, the Ukrainian independence struggle looks set to be airbrushed out of the Bolshevik spectacular, much as it has been for the past hundred years. Ukrainian history will remain the great unknown of the European narrative, the article on the Atlantic Council reads.
The author says it is both an error and a missed opportunity. It is an error because "events in Ukraine decisively shaped the outcome of the Russian Revolution. The Ukrainian theater played a central role in the fighting that engulfed the Russian Empire after 1917, while Bolshevik opposition to Ukraine's independence bid exposed the old-school imperial instincts. USSR was a colonial power from the moment its troops first crossed into Ukraine."
Read alsoOld narratives of Stalin's Holodomor shape up Putin's act against Ukraine - media
With little prior knowledge about Ukraine, people have tended to accept Kremlin narratives at face value. For example, many did not think twice when seeing Russian-speaking Ukrainians casually depicted as default Putin supporters, and swallowed arguments that Crimea was "historically Russian" with equally little protest. "A more nuanced appreciation of Ukrainian history would have alerted audiences to the paucity of these claims," the piece reads.
Even now, after three and a half years of intensive coverage, numerous commentators continue to view Ukraine as a hapless pawn in the wider geopolitical fight between Russia and the West. "Such thinking not only denies Ukrainians agency. It also diminishes one of Europe's long-running independence struggles and perpetuates what is arguably the continent's most glaring historical oversight," the article reads.
Read alsoWest needs to get real on Ukraine - media
Accounts of World War II are a particularly good example of this practice. Western histories of the war routinely refer to Soviet forces collectively as "the Russians." We learn that "the Russians" suffered twenty-seven million losses before taking Berlin. Meanwhile, there is scant reference to the fact Ukraine saw far more of the actual fighting than Russia, nor to the millions of Ukrainians who fought in the Red Army. The scale of Ukraine's human and material losses during the conflict defies comprehension, but the country barely gets a mention. This staggering omission demonstrates the sheer size of Europe's Ukraine-shaped blind spot.
Read alsoSpeaking of Crimea, Merkel recalls history of GDR
"Eventually, Ukraine's European credentials will become self-evident, even in Russia itself. However, until we reach that point, Europe will struggle to formulate a coherent policy toward a country whose awkward emergence poses important questions for the continent's understanding of its own past," the author concludes.