By Prof. Geoffrey Roberts, H-Net (Humanities and Social Sciences Online), 1/24/23

Geoffrey Roberts is an historian, biographer, and political commentator. A renowned specialist in Russian and Soviet foreign and military policy and an expert on Stalin and the Second World War. He is Emeritus Professor of History at University College Cork and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy.

There is a serious danger that the ‘decolonization’ of Russian history being sought by some within the Russian Studies community will be used as a vehicle for anti-Russian political ends rather than the academic goal of seeking to foster a deeper understanding of the past in all its complexity.

Alexander Hill goes too far when he places David Marples among those western academics “all-but calling for the dismemberment of Russia”. But having read Professor Marples’s piece on ‘The Rationale of Russia’s ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine’ (https://www.e-ir.info/2022/12/22/opinion-the-rationale-of-russias-special-military-operation-in-ukraine/), I can see why Dr Hill would make such a claim.

According to Marples, Russia is an authoritarian terrorist regime, bent on ethnocide and the complete destruction of the Ukrainian state. Putin is conducting a barbaric war in Ukraine with goals that preclude diplomacy or the possibility of peace negotiations to end a conflict that has already claimed the lives hundreds of thousands of people, destroyed Ukraine’s economy, and forced millions of its citizens to become refugees. The only choice, writes Marples, is to fight the war to the bitter end, even if that results in ‘political and social chaos’ in nuclear-armed Russia.

With that mindset, it makes perfect sense to seek Russia’s dismemberment, or, better still, the extirpation of the Russian state, just in case its people decide to elect another Putin.

Marples’s critical fire is directed against western academics seeking to understand the Ukraine conflict from the Russian perspective, scholars like myself, who believe the war is limited and defensive, and that a ceasefire, peace negotiations and some kind of a settlement will be extremely difficult but not impossible to achieve – a settlement that would preserve Ukraine as an independent, sovereign state (albeit at the cost of lost territory), satisfy Russia’s security demands, and, not least, avert calamitous escalation into an all-out NAT0-Russia conflict. Similarly minded scholars also think the war could have been avoided by (a) implementing the Minsk agreements on the reintegration of rebel Donbass into Ukraine as regionally autonomous provinces and (b) significant western concessions to the Russian security proposals of December 2021.

Marples namechecks John Mearsheimer, Marlene Laruelle, and Alexander Hill, and I am glad to add my name to those he identifies as advocates of the view that Russia sees itself as fighting a defensive war provoked by Ukraine and the West. (See G. Roberts, “‘Now or never’: The Immediate Origins of Putin’s Preventative War on Ukraine’” https://jmss.org/article/view/76584/56335)

Marples’s response to our views is a series of dubious assertions that read more like propaganda talking points than scholarly analysis. His article displays little or no awareness that each and every one of his assertions is disputed by other scholars who read the evidence differently.

Take, for example, the vexed question of Putin’s attitude to Ukrainian independence and sovereignty. Marples asserts that Putin “has never recognised Ukrainian independence or the very concept of Ukraine as an independent state”. The problem is that Putin has done just that on numerous occasions.

“We respect the Ukrainian language and traditions. We respect Ukrainians’ desire to see their country free, safe and prosperous”, writes Putin in his now notorious essay ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, “I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia [which] has never been and will never be ‘anti-Ukraine’. And what Ukraine will be – it is up to its citizens to decide.” (“On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, 12 July 202.1 http://www.en.kremlin.ru/misc/66182.

Unable to prove his point directly, Marples resorts to arguing around it, highlighting statements showing that Putin wants to limit Ukrainian sovereignty and independence. About that he is right. Putin has repeatedly said that Ukraine’s 1991 borders were an artificial construction of the Bolsheviks and their communist successors. He has been adamant that he won’t allow Ukraine to become an anti-Russia and nor will he stand for political and ethnic discrimination against Russian-identifying Ukrainians. He has also characterised Ukraine as a corrupt state controlled by criminals, oligarchs and ultra-nationalists who have shamelessly exploited the Ukrainian people and turned the country into a western catspaw against Russia, And, of course, he has vowed never to return to Ukraine the occupied and incorporated territories of Donets, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia.

Clearly, Putin envisages a severely circumscribed version of Ukrainian sovereignty (which he sees as advantageous to Ukraine as well as Russia), but his views are not incompatible with an independent Ukraine exercising a meaningful degree of freedom in foreign and domestic policy. Limited sovereignty is and has been the fate of many states. Ireland would never have been allowed to separate from Britain had its independence threatened British security. Finland, having side with Nazi Gemany during the war and lost a lot of territory to the USSR, had to aligned itself Moscow during the cold war. The United States would not countenance Canada or Mexico doing anything that imperilled its security. In 1962 the US was prepared to obliterate Cuba and start a third world war if Soviet nuclear missiles were not removed from that independent sovereign state. In 2003 the British and American pre-emptively attacked Iraq, supposedly to stop Saddam Hussein from acquiring nuclear weapons. China would go to war to stop Taiwan over-exercising its sovereignty. Limited sovereignty is the norm in the current system of international relations. Not even the greatest of powers exercises unbridled sovereignty: the US was forced to shelve it plans to invade Cuba and remove its rockets from Turkey in order to rid Soviet missiles from its doorstep.

Marples seems to prefer a forever war to win Ukraine’s complete and unrestrained independence. He may well get his wish as far as the war is concerned. But I fear the result will be the further destruction and dismemberment of Ukraine.

The tone of Marple’s furious philippic contrasts markedly with the measured discourse of this thread. De-colonising Russian Studies is a complex topic of discussion in which there are some sharply opposed views, but all the contributors (including Marples himself) have treated each other with respect and scholarly decorum.

I have nothing against scholars taking a political stand on the Russia-Ukraine war – I have done so myself (https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2022/07/13/ukraine-must-grasp-peace-from-jaws-of-unwinnable-war/). I understand the depths of emotion stirred by the war. But I feel strongly that our primary mission as academics is to throw light on the subject, not add heat to the already intense polemics.