Maarten Boudry, writing in Quillette, enjoys a performance of Charles Gounod’s opera Faust in Lviv, western Ukraine. There’s a resonance:
Mephistopheles allows Faust to relive all the carefree pleasures of youth for the modest price of his soul—a tempting bargain indeed. The latter-day Faust in the Kremlin, however, has struck a far more diabolical pact: he has traded away the youth of hundreds of thousands of young men, many of whom never had the chance to enjoy it, and never will. And in return for what, exactly? The old KGB officer is turning 74, and although he is frantically investing in longevity and anti-ageing research, he is rumoured to be in declining health and running out of time. All Putin expects in return for condemning so many to premature deaths is personal vainglory—or what passes for it in his febrile imagination: restoring the mystical bond with the Ukrainian people, resurrecting the mighty Russian Empire, and turning Moscow into a “Third Rome” that will save Christian civilisation.
He visits a drone lab, and talks to the designers of the weapons that are currently thwarting Putin’s ambitions:
Not all drones are airborne. The next day, at a training centre for military recruits, we saw some ground drones, which are used for logistics, attacks, and, importantly, rescue missions. In the early stages of the war, soldiers sent to rescue wounded comrades often became casualties themselves. Now an injured soldier can crawl into an armoured ground drone, dubbed a “sarcophagus,” and be driven to safety.
When I asked whether the Russians had developed anything similar, the answer was no. In a way, this humble ground drone embodies the moral chasm between the two armies’ attitudes towards human life. In the Russian army, life is cheap, and soldiers are sent off in densely packed “human wave” attacks to overwhelm Ukrainian defences. Many of them are convicts recruited from penal colonies with the promise of an early release, or alcoholics and addicts dumped into punishment units. Some, reportedly, are ordered into such assaults just as their contracts are about to expire—a discreet way of getting rid of them. Killed and wounded Russians are often left behind on the battlefield and listed as “missing” (families need proof of death to claim compensation).
Also, annoying and condescending western intellectuals:
I noticed inklings of such frustration during our visit to INDEX (Institute for Documentation and Exchange), a research institution dedicated to fostering and promoting Ukrainian culture. Our eloquent host, Sasha Dovzhyk, the director of INDEX, holds a PhD in English and comparative literature. She spoke about the institute’s mission to “empower the Ukrainian intellectual vanguard,” and she told us about writers and artists whose lives of the mind had been abruptly upended by the war. But she also expressed some annoyance at the petty preoccupations of her foreign colleagues while her country is at war. At literary festivals and in interviews abroad, for instance, she is often pressed about the banishment of Russian literature and language from Ukraine, in what looks like a thinly disguised attempt at both-sidesism: “Well, surely Ukraine shouldn’t discriminate against Russians either?” What many in the West fail to realise, she argues, is that Russia has used its culture and language as instruments of imperialism for centuries. Worse still, there have been repeated, concerted campaigns throughout history to suppress Ukrainian culture, such as the Executed Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, when Stalin’s regime exterminated a generation of Ukrainian intellectuals and artists.
In fact, Sasha explained, until the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian literature was still a niche market, overshadowed by Russian-language titles, and writers who published in Ukrainian were effectively acting against their own economic interests. This slow but steady efflorescence of an independent Ukrainian literature posed a threat to Putin’s imperial ambitions, which is why it had to be eradicated. If a taboo has developed around the Russian language, she argues, that is entirely Moscow’s fault. Millions of native Russian speakers in Ukraine—including President Zelensky—have switched to Ukrainian as an act of defiance against the invader, and out of solidarity with their countrymen.
None of this means that elderly ladies who still speak their native Russian are assaulted in the street. But it does mean that the Russian language and culture have been deeply tainted after centuries of being wielded as instruments of oppression. In a perfect world, everyone would be free to speak whatever language they please, and no language would be frowned upon. But when you are waging an existential war against an enemy that is abducting your children and stamping out their language and culture, moral scruples like these are a luxury.
All in all, a powerful reminder of why Ukraine matters, still, more than ever.
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