Abstract:
The goal of this book is to launch a discussion of the crisis in Russian studies
following the 2014 European crisis and Russian-Ukrainian war which has yet
to be acknowledged by historians and political scientists in Russian and
Eurasian studies. The book analyses the crisis through five perspectives. The
first is how Western historians continue to include Ukrainians within an
imperial history of "Russia" which denies Ukrainians a separate history. The
second perspective is to counter the common narrative of Crimea as "always"
having been "Russian" which denies that Tatars are the indigenous people of
Crimea – not Russians. The third perspective focuses on academic orientalist
approaches to writing about Ukraine and the Russian-Ukrainian war. The
fourth perspective downplays Russian nationalism (imperialism) in Vladimir
Putin’s Russia and completely ignores the revival of Tsarist and White émigré
Russian nationalism that denies the existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians.
Meanwhile, academic orientalism exaggerates the influence of Ukrainian
nationalism in post-Euromaidan Ukraine. The fifth perspective counters the
claim of Putinversteher (Putin-Understander) scholars of a "civil war" taking
place in Ukraine through extensive evidence of Russian military aggression
and imperialism. Finally, these five factors taken together show Russian
studies will be unable to escape its crisis if it cannot come to understand how
the source of the Russian-Ukrainian war lies in Russian national identity and
its attitudes towards Ukraine and Ukrainians and why therefore the chances
for peace are slim.
