No Doubt It Is a Culture War

Joanna Zielińska: Where are you now?

Oleksiy Radinsky: I’m now in Kyiv.

JZ: Can you describe your background?

OR: I’m a filmmaker and writer. I mostly work with the documentary form. My background is in film theory. I graduated from the Cultural Studies department at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy which at the time (the first decade of this century) had been a very special place to study, as it was combining the interdisciplinary approaches of dissident humanities of the late-Soviet era with the Western theory that arrived in our academia like an avalanche during the 1990s, after decades of being banned. In 2008, together with fellow students and young faculty of our department, we founded a collective called Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC). We were interested in interdisciplinary action between the fields of research-based art, grassroots activism and experimental knowledge production. These were the years of decline of the Center for Contemporary Art founded by George Soros in Kyiv and hosted in our academy, which has been growing increasingly conservative and nationalist, and was striving to get rid of any kind of contemporary art within its walls. Our collective shared a space with the CCA until the academy kicked it out. After that, we were able to sustain a programme of exhibitions, seminars and debates in the same premises for a couple of more years, until VCRC were kicked out of the academy as well. Since then, VCRC has been functioning as an autonomous, nomadic para-institution. In the meantime, I had quit the PhD programme in film theory at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy to focus on my own film practice.

The turning point for my practice as a filmmaker came during the Maidan uprising in Kyiv, which has been an important part of the take-the-square movements during the 2011–14 global cycle of struggle. It’s interesting that the uprising at Maidan was nearly the only one of those movements that managed to achieve its goals (to oust the authoritarian government and prevent the recolonisation of the Ukrainian state by Russia). However, the Maidan has been nearly totally erased from the global history of these struggles, which are most often associated with Tahrir, Occupy Wall Street and Indignados. This is of course due to a successful disinformation campaign by Russia, as well as the fact that it managed to start a counter-revolutionary war in Ukraine to do away with the Maidan event which could lead to a domino effect in Russia and other regional autocracies.

During the Maidan uprising, me and my film team had been documenting the development at the occupied central square in Kyiv for over three months, in-depth, in the form of engaged anthropological observation. After the fall of the regime and the victory of Maidan, we went to Crimea to film the start of counter-revolution in the form of the Russian military takeover of the peninsula, and then to the Donbas region where the anti-Maidan counterrevolution had only just started taking the most violent form. We’d been working in the mode of counter-information, immediately editing and publishing our footage online. Later on, we developed this into a film duology dealing with the Maidan uprising (Integration, 2015) and the subsequent counter-revolution (People Who Came to Power, co-directed with Tomas Rafa, 2016). In the following years, I’ve focused more on research-oriented documentary practice.

JZ: How would you describe the political climate in Ukraine between the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the beginning of the war in 2022? How would you connect these political moments in history?

OR: I would prefer to speak of the political climate in Europe (or ‘Eurasia’, if you will – in the sense of this term that I’m describing in my next answer), and the political climate in Ukraine as a part of it. Climate in any sense (be it planetary climate or ‘political climate’) cannot be confined to one given country. I would describe this climate on the continent as an attempt to do business as usual – whatever it takes – while ignoring the impending disaster. This refers both to the attempts to do business as usual with the Russian Federation (despite the cosmetic sanctions introduced after the annexation of Crimea), as well as the tendency to do business as usual with regards to the planetary climatic disaster that we’re all facing. And these two tendencies are very closely connected, since everyone knows that in order to prevent planetary catastrophe, humanity needs to stop burning fossil fuels – while our continued dependence on fossil fuels is a backbone of Putinism. In that sense, survival of humanity on planet Earth and the survival of the Russian ruling regime are two conflicting things at odds with each other and they can’t really be reconciled. After 2014, Europe had a chance to wake up to both the military and climatic catastrophes that were impending, but it chose to ignore both of them. As late as 2015, Germany had signed the contract with the Russian Federation to build Nord Stream 2, a gas pipeline that would not only lock in the European continent in its attachment to Russian fossil fuels, but would also render obsolete the geopolitical raison d’être of the Ukrainian state, which had unfortunately been reduced to the status of the transit zone transporting Siberian fossil fuels to Western Europe. The moment the deal to build Nord Stream 2 had been signed by the Germans, the stage for the all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine had been set.

JZ: What would be your understanding of the concept of Eurasia that has various, sometimes very extreme interpretations? Some understand it as a supercontinent with complex political, economic and cultural relationships, an example of diversity reflecting the dynamic processes of modernisation and multipolarity. For others, it is an illustration of a certain ideology and imperialist ambitions. For the East and for the West, Eurasia means something completely different. There is also increasing discussion of regionalisation, and the importance of locality.

OR: I would describe Eurasia as a space where transcontinental infrastructure for the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels operates: a space between the unceded lands of the Indigenous in the Siberian tundra where oil and gas are extracted, and the European factories and homes where it is emitted into the atmosphere. Eurasia is a span of the Friendship oil pipeline, it’s a span of Nord Stream gas pipeline. These pipelines are not just connecting the different parts of the continent, they are creating a financial and political symbiosis between Russian autocracy and European liberal democracy. Eurasia is a space of complicity: it’s a space that has made it possible for the German taxpayers to become the single biggest sponsors of Russia’s fascist war in Ukraine, simply by paying their gas bills.

The only use of the concept of ‘Eurasia’ that is relevant for us in Ukraine is, unfortunately, its appropriation by the Russian far right ideology of ‘Eurasianism’. It’s been developed by fascist thinkers such as Alexander Dugin and has become an official ideological doctrine in the Russian Federation. This is exemplified for instance in the foundation of Eurasian Economic Union, a new tool of Russian imperialism that tries to regain control over its former colonies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, which it had lost during the two previous waves of disintegration of the Russian Empire (that is, after 1917 and 1991).

Eurasianism is an extremely obscurantist, anti-Western, anti-liberal and in some cases openly fascist ideology whose main point is to prove that Russia somehow belongs to a different kind of civilisation that has nothing to do with the West. In that sense, it’s a pure form of deceit, an ideological manipulation that’s trying to cover the void at the core of its argument, or indeed a void in the place of this obscure idea of a ‘mysterious Russian soul’ or ‘great Russian culture’ still cherished in the West. In reality, there is nothing non-Western about the Russian state, its history and its development. Of course, I’m not speaking here about the ‘West’ as a set of values, or in a qualitative sense. I’m speaking about the West strictly in the sense of white colonial expansion in the modern era. This expansion of white settlers from Europe has been directed not only westwards, to the Americas and other continents, but also eastwards, towards the Eurasian lands that now comprise the Russian Federation but that belonged to largely Turkic and Ugro-Finnic peoples. A lot of them were exterminated in genocides that were so brutal that very little knowledge about those events themselves has even survived.

For some time now, there’s been a reckoning going on for the westward expansion of white Europeans. Now it's high time to reckon for their eastward expansion as well, which would expose and question the settler colonial nature of the Russian state itself. The Russian Eurasianists are simply trying to obscure this essentially Western colonial nature of their state in their absurd attempts to distance themselves from the West.

If there’s any chance to reclaim the concept of Eurasia from the Russian fascists, this can only come through decolonial thought and action. Eurasia is a very homogenising term that is used to describe wildly different cultures that still exist in the territory of the Russian Federation. Instead of talking about Eurasia in general, I would rather talk about the Bashkirs, the Buryats, the Kalmyks, the Khanty, the Komi, the Mari, the Nentsy, the Tatars, the Udmurts, the Yakuts and many many others – all of those peoples that are still oppressed under the Russian colonial rule.

JZ: You are right in saying that the term Eurasia has been completely ideologised in recent decades. However, it is important to take a broader historical perspective that definitely goes beyond Russian territory and a Russian definition of Eurasianism. This term was also used by some artists like Joseph Beuys and Jimmy Durham and Nam June Paik to describe plurality of cultures. That is why the decolonisation discourse you are talking about, which will revise these concepts, is so important now. How do you see the process of decolonisation of the East in this context? This concept wasn't popular enough. What is the future?

OR: You are right that the application of decolonial optics to Eastern Europe and Russia hasn’t really been happening in the Western discourse until very recently. I think that one of the reasons for this is that decolonial thinking remains quite Eurocentric itself, in the sense that it’s focused on critiquing and countering those forms of colonialism that characterised the westward expansion of white Europeans. This was largely the colonialism of maritime empires that colonised distant lands. But this is not the only form that this white expansion had. As a result, it’s sometimes hard to grasp that not every form of colonialism entails the existence of an ocean between the metropole and the colony. And it’s somehow hard to grasp that the coloniser and the colonised can be of the same skin colour – which is exactly what was happening in Eurasia.

What you refer to as the decolonisation of the East can actually be worded differently: the decomposition of the Russian Federation and the emergence of the liberated republics in its territory. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is just the last sign of an internal conflict that’s ripping apart this pseudo-Federation, which is in fact a highly centralised empire based on racist and extractivist governance by Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The end to this war does not lie in Ukraine but in the Russian Federation itself, just as the cause of this war is inside Russia itself. There will be no real end to this war until the Russian empire ceases to exist in its current form. And I’m really surprised that this sounds so far-fetched and totally unrealistic for the Western audience. Everyone is so quick to forget the fact that in the course of the last century, there were already two phases of the collapse of this empire: one after the October Revolution, and the other with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 (which, in fact, was also seen as something totally impossible, and even undesirable, by the Western powers including the White House – just as the dissolution of the Russian Federation is seen now by many). What we’re witnessing now is the third phase of this collapse.

JZ: What is the role of culture and artists in the context of war? As we know, Russia attacks not only civilian targets, but also cultural sites and monuments that represent the strength and national identity of Ukraine. In my opinion, this reminds us of the importance of culture in sustaining the spirit of a nation and beyond.

OR: I would like to answer that in a two-fold way, since at every war culture is enacted by both sides of the hostilities: that of the aggressor and that of the object of the aggression. As I’m located on a latter side, things are quite simple for me and a lot of my colleagues: since 24 February 2022, we have a feeling that our work has just become much more relevant than it ever was, and our greatest privilege is to be able to continue our work that contributes to anti-fascist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist effort. I’m speaking of course primarily of critical artists and the representatives of the socially engaged art scene.

What I find much more interesting is the role of the culture of the aggressor. There’s been a lot of talk recently about the role of Russian culture in the descent of the Russian Federation into an openly fascist monster. There’s no doubt for me that the Russian cultural and artistic scenes are totally complicit with this disaster. This includes the so-called ‘politicised’ segments or Russian contemporary art that had been so cherished in the West despite their total political irrelevance at home. This also includes Western-style mega-institutions which had been simply used as a fig leaf to normalise fascist dictatorship (see Putin’s visit to the opening of V-A-C museum in Moscow just a couple of months before the invasion). However, I think that simply boycotting Russian culture is a step that, however necessary, is not enough. What’s actually needed is a thorough and critical deconstruction of Russian culture as a colonial and imperial construct. This includes the myth of the ‘great Russian culture’ as it circulates in the Western academia and art circles. It should become clear that this myth of ‘greatness’ – that has nothing to do with the actual merits of Russian writers, artists and philosophers – has provided ground for the ideology of Russian supremacy that gave us this war. This is a war that’s grounded on flawed cultural and historical concepts (such as ‘the Russian world’, ‘the great Russian culture’ and so on) and in that sense this is without a doubt a culture war.