Ukrainians are determined to “decolonize” their country. Imperial rule may be a thing of the past, they say, but the damage done to their culture and identity still needs to be undone. Specifically, their history needs to be rewritten from their own vantage point — as history’s losers.
Central to this shift in perspective is the question of violence, with which Ukrainian history is all too replete. A variety of invaders — Mongols, Poles, Russians and Germans — employed extreme violence in their attempts to colonize Ukrainian territories. Ukrainians responded in like form, but since their violence always ended in defeat, it was generally categorized as brutish by history’s winners.
Seen through the decolonization lens, Ukraine closely resembles the colonies that rebelled against European political domination, economic exploitation and cultural oppression by resorting to oftentimes horrific violence against their exploiters. But, in the colonies as in Ukraine, indigenous violence, though morally lamentable, was never the inexplicable product of incomprehensible primordial prejudices. Quite the contrary, in Ukraine as in most colonies, the violence was the product of reactive national liberation struggles and peasant wars.
As Eric Wolf wrote in his 1969 classic, “Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century,” “the decisive factor in making a peasant rebellion possible lies in the relation of the peasantry to the field of power which surrounds it.” Peasants are rational, having material interests and moral codes that they try to pursue in contexts that militate against success. When opportunities to pay back their oppressors for the indignities they’ve endured arise, they take them and often act with extreme cruelty.
By the same token, nationalists are revolutionaries who —........