Class hatred of Russians toward Ukraine and Ukrainians

While “Putin” complains to Trump and the Pope about drones from Ukraine, Musk quarrels with Trump, and the White House tries to convince Bankova Street that it’s long past time to change the management, a crowd in Moscow, driven by class hatred toward Ukrainians, demands that “Putin” launch a nuclear strike on Kyiv. It is precisely class hatred, since Russians do not recognize Ukrainians as a nation, or Ukraine as a country. Based on this, they call the state of Ukraine someone’s anti-Russia project. Whose exactly – they don’t say, but it’s definitely no longer the Austrian General Staff.

The formula — the state of Ukraine as anti-Russia — was invented in the Kremlin and published in July 2021 in the article “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” under the name of V.V. Putin. In Russia, only a few timid voices oppose this formula — mainly those who defended dissertations on the history of Ukraine, as the very subject of their research is now being erased, and along with it, their diplomas may be nullified. The communists, whom “Putin” accuses of also having invented Ukraine, behave like those Jews who came up with kosher pork.

The reason the Kremlin refuses to recognize Ukrainians as a nation is obvious — a nation has the right to its own state, territory, and, from there, everything outlined in the UN Charter. That’s why their “special military operation” resembles kosher pork — and with them, everything is clear. The more important question is why the majority of Russians so easily accepted Putin’s formula, despite having had at least a hundred years to personally see that Ukraine and Ukrainians exist, and that they are mentally different — even when they speak the Russian language. Ukrainians, even when living in the RSFSR, plant vegetable gardens and orchards near their homes, raise livestock, and are constantly engaged in some enterprise. In short, they behave like the so-called kulaks: they think about tomorrow and, in the eyes of Russians, are just as business-minded and cunning as the Jews.

This everyday and widespread perception of Ukrainians in the RSFSR did not disappear after 1991 — it only became more entrenched. Even then, most Russians regarded Ukrainians as class-alien elements in need of deep reprocessing. It was an instinctive aversion, or at the very least, suspicion — the worldview of slaves toward the world of the self-employed. Instinctive, because only a handful of Russians ever delved into comparing the histories of Ukraine and Muscovy in an attempt to find a rational explanation for this feeling.

Even among those who did, most saw Ukraine only through a romanticized lens — the free-spiritedness of the Zaporizhian Cossacks and Gogol’s Taras Bulba, summarized as: steppe outlaws, but more advanced than those in the Caucasus, and heavily corrupted by Europe. This “corruption” always irritated Russians. In 2014, they were infuriated by the fact that prices in Crimea were listed in dollars. In Russia, the dollar is for the wealthy and only available with a passport, but in Ukrainian Crimea, everyone used it freely — even in villages. A nightmare and a mess that, for the average Russian, provoked nothing but class hatred — because it turned out that people could live differently.

The typical Russian has harbored class-based resentment toward Ukrainians and Ukraine for a hundred years. This resentment exists on its own, regardless of how the Kremlin labels Ukraine — whether as anti-Russia or as some sort of “brotherly nation.” A Russian has never regarded a Ukrainian as his equal, let alone his brother. The well-known appeal by Mayakovsky not to mock Ukrainians is a clear example of how high art, under party orders, attempted to keep this resentment within the bounds of decency.

Ukrainians have always existed — and still exist — for Russians, even when Moscow’s “philosophers” and propagandists deny their existence as a nation. But for Russians, Ukrainians exist not as a separate nation, but as a kind of historical misunderstanding — worthy only of contempt or pity. Soviet ideology unintentionally reinforced this foundation of class-based resentment. Because of it, the Russian finds it easier to deal with Caucasians and Central Asians than with Ukrainians. Easier — because in his eyes, they are savages, and less is expected of savages. With Ukrainians, it’s more complicated: they are clearly not savages, but socio-mental heretics — people who live and think differently.

There are two main approaches — and their combinations — when dealing with heretics: burn them all at the stake, or attempt to re-educate them over time, all while making sure they don’t end up re-educating you. A third option — recognizing heretics’ right to exist — is unacceptable for the Russian as both a slave and an imperialist, because an empire seeks to unify everything. If unification fails, the empire must either buy time through maneuvering or prepare for disintegration. And after the annexation of Crimea, the Kremlin has been seriously preparing for the potential breakup of the Russian Federation. So seriously, in fact, that they even banned the teaching of all languages in schools except Russian and foreign ones — including Chinese. Though in the case of Chinese, it’s hard to say whether it still counts as foreign or has already become internal for Russia.

The Kremlin is well aware of Russians’ resentment toward Ukrainians and has been trying to exploit it since the 1990s, without delving too deeply into its nature. For the Kremlin, it doesn’t matter whether this resentment is social, national, or of some other kind. What matters is learning how to use it to solve the current problems of the Moscow empire.

And one must admit: they’ve succeeded. In ten years, the Kremlin has managed to elevate this resentment from an everyday sentiment to a geopolitical force — transforming it into total hatred. In 2022, protests in Russia against the open (rather than disguised) invasion of Ukraine were far weaker than in 2014 and quickly fizzled out. The chant shouted by a crowd in Moscow on June 2 — “Putin, launch a nuclear missile at Kyiv” — marks the peak of this total hatred and the culmination of the Kremlin’s efforts to prepare Russia for a new wave of mass mobilization. Russians are now no longer ashamed — not only of fighting Ukrainians, but of demanding their complete annihilation, without distinguishing “Malorossy” from “Banderivtsi” The Russian god will recognize his own.

Over three years, the Kremlin managed to solve a complex problem — not to declare the war with Ukraine as a Great Patriotic War, but to conduct it as a crusading jihad against heretics, satanists, and fascists. Although Kadyrov diligently rambled in autumn 2022 about a joint campaign against the “satanists of the West,” his influence on the process was negligible. Much greater influence on transforming class-based resentment into total hatred of Ukrainians came from the head of the Russian Orthodox Church Kirill, the Armenian Simonyan, and the Jew Solovyov. Lenin, it is remembered, criticized Stalin back in 1922, saying that “non-Russians always overdo it when it comes to great-power Russian chauvinism.”

The Kremlin has seemingly successfully handled the empire’s current tasks in the war with Ukraine — but there are nuances.

First and foremost, the social nature of Russians’ hatred toward Ukraine is where the Russian devil hides. A slave has three sacred priorities — his ration, career advancement, and the authority of his master. Cuts to the ration and being lowered in the slave hierarchy demoralize him. But an even greater demoralization is caused by the fall of the master’s authority. A weak-willed master or a liberal inspires in the slave a subversive thought, in Dostoevsky’s style: if God does not exist and the master is weak, then everything is permitted. A beaten master causes panic and a search for a new one — maybe to ally with China or sell the resources and pipelines to Trump. Trump — look at him — he dominates everyone, a real Master, exactly what we need. With him, we could even take on the Chinese, not to mention some Ukraine, Europe, or Japan.

A slave reacts instantly to the beating of his master. One can recall how Russians immediately responded to the Izium-Balakliia operation in 2022 and the withdrawal of their army from Kherson. The reaction to the entry of the Ukrainian Armed Forces into Kursk Oblast was weak since only Sudzha was lost and the offensive quickly stalled. “Things happen in war,” the Russian thought, and did not panic. Only the propagandists panicked because they did not know how he would react. But two collapsed bridges and five burned military airfields on May 31 and June 1 triggered a mass feeling among Russians that the master had been badly beaten, and they genuinely shouted in Moscow, “Putin, strike Kyiv with a nuclear weapon.”

The reaction to Prigozhin’s march was also interesting. It convincingly showed that Russians were not opposed to replacing “Putin” and Shoigu with him, believing that he would find shells and soldiers to take Kyiv in three days. In their eyes, Prigozhin seemed more like a Master than “Putin,” who chats with “Western partners.”

For slaves, concepts like justice, morality, facts, and so on are empty words without concrete meaning. Therefore, discussions with Russians are pointless. The true meaning for slaves lies only in the words of their master and his ability to make them real.

This is the key to the meme about the “mysterious Russian soul.” There is nothing mysterious — it is simply slave psychology. But Europe has never been interested in this topic because, in Christianity, slavery was considered a temporary abnormality. Just 15 years after the discovery of America, monks in Spain raised a fuss and got King Charles to ban slavery in the New World. Apart from the ancient Romans, no one really studied this issue.

That is why Europe never understood the psychology of the collective “Russian person,” and writers like Tolstoy, Leskov, Dostoevsky, and others only stirred up the murky depths without clarifying the issue. Ukrainians — Gogol and Chekhov — were brilliant in their descriptions and analyses but did not move on to systematic generalizations for their own reasons. Nevertheless, the definition of the psychology and behavior of Russians as slaves can be found not only in Lermontov but also in the works of other observers.

The practical conclusion in the current situation of the Russian-Ukrainian war is that only a clear and decisive military defeat of the Russian Federation, demonstrating the weakness of the Master, can trigger a slave rebellion within it and, as a consequence, end the war. Reductions in rations and career problems due to economic sanctions are merely a background to this. Without a spectacular downfall of the Master in the eyes of the slaves, it is impossible to make them move or seek alternatives for him.

The Kremlin, having turned the dislike of Ukrainians into hatred, up to demanding a nuclear strike, has itself created a perfect precondition for this. The Kremlin has forgotten an old truth: empires should not start wars on their own borders that they cannot quickly win. Wars far across the sea or in distant borderlands like Afghanistan are one thing — but not ones that require building fortifications in the Leningrad region. This is a prelude to self-destruction.

Sergey Klimovsky