Russian Historian Slams Putin

Andrey Aksenov, a Russian historian and author whose history podcast – Zakat Imperii (The Dawn of the Empire) – is popular among listeners in the troubled nation, said Russian President Vladimir Putin is flat out wrong in asserting that Ukraine is part of Russia, Sergey Faldin reported recently for Al Jazeera.

Photo Insert: Russian historian and author Andrey Aksenov claimed that Kyiv is older than Moscow and that the Rus mentioned by Putin is useless fiction.

Aksenov emphasized that Russians bought into the myth created by tsarist Russia, exacerbated by the alcoholic Peter the Great, and now propagated as gospel truth by Putin, who has failed to grasp the reality that Ukraine is older than the tsarist Russian empire and the Russian Imperial Police, which has been engaged in killing the idea of Ukraine as a nation.

“This pattern is as old as the general concept of nationalism, which dates back to the Russian Empire. The state policy back then was that there was the Russian nation, which included three branches: Little Russians, which cover the people living in Ukraine, White Russians in Belorussia and the Great Russians of Russia proper,” Aksenov emphasized.

He claimed that Kyiv is older than Moscow and that the Rus mentioned by Putin is a useless fiction.

“The project of the Ukrainian national intelligentsia was harmful to the state because it presented separatism. So, they (“Great Russians”) banned schools that taught in Ukrainian and banned books in Ukrainian,” he added.

According to Aksenov, Russian and Ukrainian have just 37% cognates, while other European languages have greater affinities with the Ukrainian tongue than Russian.

“Ukraine is not a branch of Russia. It has its own people, nation, and language. As taught in linguistic departments, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. That is not a linguistic, not a philological, distinction. It’s a political one. Nationality cannot be defined. If a group of people consider themselves New Zealanders, they are New Zealanders. If Croats think their language is Croatian and Serbo-Croatian, they are Croatian,” Aksenov concluded.

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