To the Editors:
In his review of Georgios Varouxakis’s The West [NYR, December 18, 2025], Yuri Slezkine makes assertions that should unsettle anyone concerned about the fate of liberal democracy. Most troubling are these: that historic Russia is a largely passive entity against which “the West” defines itself; that Ukraine—a country fighting for its existence as a free society—is a “radical ethnocracy” whose leaders are busy homogenizing a multicultural, multireligious country according to the slogan “Army, Language, Faith”; and, finally, that it’s “bogus” to claim that Russia threatens people beyond its borders.
A long-term historical view quickly reveals the first proposition as wrong. However we understand “the West,” Russia was just one of many factors against which it was defined. Fundamental are events that precede Varouxakis’s analysis, above all the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Only after that did “the West” arise as an idea uniting peoples and states. This basic variant has never disappeared; witness the “pro-Western” anti-Islamic rhetoric of Europe’s far right—this is “the West” of which Russia is an integral part.
In general, Russia’s place has been ambivalent. If Bolshevik Russia once focused the West’s efforts at defense, “Western” science and culture are unthinkable without Russian contributions. Militarily the West has often relied on Russia to restore peace: against Napoleon, against the kaiser, against Hitler.
From a short-term perspective, the vital fact is not that “the West” cohered against Russia, as Slezkine asserts, but that Vladimir Putin depends upon a particular image of the West—the liberal one—as his country’s necessary enemy, without which he and his cronies would have to seek asylum elsewhere (presumably in “the East”). Without the West as enemy they cannot justify their country’s ghastly casualties.
In sum, Slezkine finds nothing redeeming in any manifestation of the West; according to him, only two things have remained constant in people’s understanding of this concept: “the threat from Russia on the outside and the fear of decay on the inside.” Varouxakis, by contrast, considers one special variant of “the West” morally indispensable. Toward the end of his book—which probes many meanings of the term, from nineteenth-century France, through interwar Germany, the cold war, and beyond—Varouxakis cites a journalist imagining himself huddled in a bomb shelter in Kyiv: he desperately hopes that “the West” does “retain some sense of a historic identity and purpose in the world.” This West aspires to “liberal democracy with constitutional guarantees of what cannot be done to individuals or minorities, the rule of law, freedom of choice, meritocracy, toleration of different religions as well as of those who profess no religion.” Such values, Varouxakis concludes, are to be defended against “alarming alternatives,” foremost of which is Putin’s Russia.
To say the least, Slezkine does not endeavor to see things from the view of people sheltering from Russian missiles; perhaps that explains why he gets Ukraine so wrong. Far from an ethnocrat, Volodymyr Zelensky won the presidency of Ukraine by opposing the slogans of ethnonationalism and embracing his country’s diversity. He spoke Russian throughout his campaign. If Ukraine holds out, it will continue to harbor multifarious culture and remarkable political regionalism. When one travels the country, as I did recently, one witnesses a panoply of houses of worship and hears several variants of Ukrainian as well as other languages, especially Russian. A patriotic Russian-speaking Ukrainian soldier told me his unit is trilingual (Ukrainian, Russian, and English). From 2017 the state has required teaching in Ukrainian in all schools, but if one considers an official state language as a criterion, then many multiethnic democracies would qualify as ethnocracies. Ukraine is a political nation.
Beyond easily demonstrable untruths about Ukraine, what’s unfortunate about Slezkine’s historical analysis is its failure to ponder cause and effect, even at a superficial level. He says that Russia is loathed and provokes anxiety. Why? The largest country on earth seems oddly inert: its only effective power is to unite the West against it. If one puts Russia in broader context, answers quickly emerge: it’s in the nature of empires to be hated, and Russia is one of the world’s few surviving imperial states. (By “imperial” I mean direct political rule over several nations.)
Yet Russia’s twin historical empire, Germany (once the Holy Roman Empire), tells us there is even more to the story. If these two states have generated special fear and contempt among Europeans for generations, that is because of their unwillingness to recognize others on their peripheries—Czechs, Ukrainians, Poles, many others—as sovereign; instead, Moscow and Berlin resolved to make these others “ours” by all means possible. The people in Bucha or Lidice or hundreds of Polish villages had to be wiped from the Earth because they lived on the imperial nation’s “holy” territory yet claimed to be not of the nation.
Blue-water empires engaged in ghastly policies, but when demands emerged in the colonies for self-determination, Britain or France shed their imperial possessions without reducing or questioning their own senses of peoplehood. This was not an option in the German or Russian imaginations, where the nation was thought to include vast contiguous territories absorbed into the respective empires over centuries. The two states developed in a way that made it impossible to say where the nation ended territorially and where the empire began.
The peculiar loathing elicited by these two land empires can be seen in the fate of the Russian and German languages. Soon after February 2022, millions of Russian speakers quietly switched to Ukrainian. The move was completely voluntary, involving people who had lived in and loved Russian culture.* The crimes of Putin’s troops disturbed them so viscerally that the language itself seemed infected, making its speakers seem allies of the killers. Similarly, Eastern Europeans who had once spoken accentless German and reveled in German culture refused to utter a syllable in the German language after World War II. Somehow the words themselves seemed spoiled. Note the difference from other colonial contexts: Irish and Indian patriots write poetry and prose in English, Brazilians in Portuguese, and so on.
A further strike against “the West,” in Slezkine’s view, is that Ukraine, the supposed ethnocracy, is one of the last places claiming to defend Western civilization. The truth is different. When you talk to people in Kyiv you hear that they are protecting their life as a people, no matter what language they speak. In other words, they are resisting genocide. If you ask about Western values, people chime in with Varouxakis—of course! Having suffered pain inflicted by Europe’s land empires, Ukrainians value the Western institutions that guard human rights. The West promises an alternative to the barbarism of Bucha; its liberal variant emerged not so much against Russia as through pained efforts to create European unity in the shadow of Nazi Germany and under the threat of Soviet expansion. What that means practically is that Ukrainians want to join the European Union and NATO.
These were wishes they began to state forcefully some twenty years ago, which explains why Putin’s Russia cannot tolerate Ukraine’s independence: it reminds Russians that there is a viable “Western” alternative to his kind of rule just across the border. Readers of the Western press know that Russia’s threat to Europe is not “bogus”; only those in the thrall of an imperial mindset—for whom the West is by definition anti-Russian—could doubt this basic fact. The question is: How does one break the imperial spell among Russians? In the best times of East–West conciliation, the 1990s, even Russian liberals could not imagine Ukraine as an independent entity.
The parallels with Germany’s own departure from imperial thinking do not inspire optimism about an easy transition. After two wars costing millions of lives, that country was divided and lost a third of its territory, but Germans of the 1950s still fondly recalled the imperial past and like many Russians considered themselves victims of history. By 1960 cold war Western Europe came to the rescue with welfare and prosperity, the likes of which few had dreamed of, and Germans suddenly had the leisure and affluence to begin seeing their restless history as others did, including their many victims in the East. Once Germans stopped chastising the West for its “decay,” they helped make Germany a place that has attracted people from everywhere: whether tourists, migrants, students, or people fleeing Trump and Putin. But the first step was the utter defeat not just of the German Reich but also of the very idea of Reich—of empire—as something worthwhile. That is a word with no good historical connotations.
John Connelly
University of California, Berkeley
To the Editors:
In his sweeping review of Georgios Varouxakis’s new book, The West: The History of an Idea, historian Yuri Slezkine claims that “Israel and Ukraine, and before them the National Party’s South Africa, [are] radical ethnocracies strongly at odds with the liberal values most Western governments profess.” His footnote elaborates that Ukraine is supposedly attempting “to transform a multinational, multicultural, and multiconfessional society into a state of ‘Army, Language, Faith.’”
Slezkine rests this argument on Petro Poroshenko’s 2019 campaign slogan—one rejected decisively by Ukrainian voters, who elected Volodymyr Zelensky in a historic landslide. Yet Slezkine makes no mention of how Ukraine’s fitful internal politics have been reshaped under the extraordinary pressure of Russia’s ongoing assault since 2022 (and arguably since 2014). Instead, Ukraine is presented as if in a vacuum, a state irrationally embracing a path of “radical ethnocracy,” despite abundant evidence of its continued pluralism—from its Jewish Ukrainian president to the prominent inclusion of representatives of the Sunni Muslim Crimean Tatar community in the Zelensky administration to its booming literary, music, and arts scenes, where Russophone poets and novelists coexist with Ukrainian-language rappers. (The 2024 Shevchenko Prize in Music, the top culture prize in the country, was awarded to the pop star Jamala’s QIRIM, which reimagines traditional Crimean Tatar folk songs in the grandiose musical idioms of Hollywood soundtracks.)
It is especially striking that Slezkine, who once wrote incisively about Russian colonial policies toward its “small peoples” of the Arctic, overlooks the openly colonial character of Russia’s current war. Putin’s invasion has disproportionately mobilized Russia’s own Indigenous minorities—these long-subjugated communities—to serve and die on the front lines, even as the Russian kleptocracy consolidates control over their resource-rich homelands. In April, representatives of the Indigenous Small-Numbered Peoples of the North, Siberia, and the Far East issued “The Orcas Island Declaration,” condemning the Putin regime’s “colonial policies both within the country and beyond its borders” and identifying the full-scale invasion of Ukraine as the latest intensification of that expansionism.
Drawing dubious parallels between Ukraine—fighting for its survival against a nuclear-armed imperial aggressor—and Netanyahu’s Israel, which is pursuing apartheid, or South Africa’s long-defunct National Party obscures more than it clarifies. The New York Review might therefore consider commissioning analyses from Russian voices less invested in grievance and historical revisionism. If, as Slezkine asserts at the outset, “the West” owes its existence to Russia, then it is long past time to ask what, exactly, Russia believes the world owes it in return—and why Ukrainians should be forced to pay for it with their lives.
Maria Sonevytsky
Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
I am grateful to John Connelly and Maria Sonevytsky for providing excellent illustrations of Varouxakis’s thesis regarding the West’s uncertainty about its own nature and its need for Russia as an external threat. Connelly’s is particularly helpful.
In his account, “twin historical empire[s]…have generated special fear and contempt among Europeans for generations.” Germany was vanquished, cured of “imperial thinking,” and reborn to become a haven for migrants, students, and others. Russia continues its war on free societies (aka “liberal democracies”). The free Ukrainians, endowed with “a panoply of houses of worship” and blessed with an extraordinary combination of diversity and unanimity, have been—for “some twenty years”—clamoring to join the economic and military alliances that protect the “institutions that guard human rights.”
How does one achieve such a degree of moral clarity and conceptual innocence?
First, misrepresent the piece under discussion. The West did not define itself against an “oddly inert” Russia; Varou-xakis’s argument, which I summarize, is that the term “West,” in reference to a cultural community with a common history, took hold in the mid-nineteenth century because Russia, which obviously did not belong, made “Christendom” and “Europe” unfit for the purpose. One reason Russia had become plausibly European was its westward expansion and its performance as Europe’s “policeman.” Connelly’s confusion is evident in his claim that Russia is an “integral part” of the West championed by Europe’s far right. In fact, and in perfect agreement with Varouxakis’s thesis, conservative nationalists in Europe and the US praise Russia as a Christian and possibly European, but not Western, country. No one on either side thinks of Russia as part of the West.
Second, when dealing with the devil, cross yourself, close your eyes, and recite the Lord’s Prayer. The key to studying Russia is to stay away and know as little as possible. How do we know that Russia is poised to march into NATO territory, absent anything—official pronouncements, ideological justifications, expert advice, military capability, suggestions of any conceivable benefit—pointing in that direction? By reading “the Western press,” Connelly tells us. The Western press learns about Russia from experts who ward off corruption by evidence. The use of the word “ghastly” twice in the same letter adds an extra layer of protection.
Third, bolster the melodrama with some sandbox theorizing. “Blue-water empires” that project their power globally are not as bad as the contiguous land ones because they have an easier time separating themselves from their subordinates (one might add that racism has proved particularly effective in this regard). By a happy coincidence that would not surprise Varouxakis, most of them are Western (Connelly mentions Britain and France). Were the Byzantines, Ottomans, Mongols, Mughals, Abbasids, and Tang, among others, as bad as the evil twins, or should we look forward to receiving some bonus criteria? Was the “white man’s burden” in the Philippines less “ghastly” than Manifest Destiny in the Dakotas? The blue-water theory suggests a “yes” answer, but let us not rush to conclusions, since the Sioux, like Irish and Indian patriots, write prose and poetry in English. Imagine what Irish and Indian patriots would have done to the innocent world language had the British staged massacres and caused famines on their lands.
Ignorance of more or less evil empires is but one means of transcending “imperial thinking.” Equally important is knowing almost as little about the country you presume to speak for. Connelly’s Ukrainians may have begun to state their NATO aspirations “forcefully” some twenty years ago. Actual Ukrainians, when polled on the subject before the Maidan Revolution of 2014, consistently opposed NATO membership (roughly 20 percent supported the idea at the time of the April 2008 Bucharest Declaration that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO” and as few as 13 percent did in 2012–2013, on the eve of the civil war). According to a 2009 poll by Ukraine’s Razumkov Centre, 49.2 percent of Ukrainians (73.4 percent in southern regions, including Crimea) wished for a restoration of the Soviet Union. (Connelly’s evil empire may have been unwilling to recognize others on its peripheries as sovereign; the actual Soviet Union was the world’s first ethno-territorial federation committed to promoting and institutionalizing ethnic differences.) If Connelly had joined me in the winter of 2022–2023, about one year after the Russian invasion, in order to talk to the Ukrainian refugees crossing the Russian-Latvian border (in both directions), he would have heard some stories and opinions that fit his script and many more that did not. But why take the trouble? A detour from the propaganda itinerary might have interfered with the moral clarity and conceptual innocence of a scholar untainted by imperial thinking and local expertise.
I am not going to argue with Connelly about who feels more empathy for the enormous suffering caused by the Russian invasion or who “endeavors” more resolutely to understand the daily realities of Ukraine’s agony. What is at issue is one sentence and a related footnote, in which I characterize Ukraine’s official ideology. I am happy to elaborate.
Ukraine is an ethnocracy insofar as state institutions and the country’s raison d’être are identified with the Ukrainian nation, understood as a community of language, culture, and historical experience. “Ukraine is for Ukrainians” in the same way Israel is a Jewish state (and Sweden is not for Swedes). Those who do not qualify are divided into national minorities (Hungarians, Romanians, and Crimean Tatars, among others) and self-described Ukrainians who speak Russian and/or reject the ethnonationalist orthodoxy (the two latter groups are concentrated in eastern and southern regions but do not fully overlap). This system (institutional and rhetorical) was established in the 1990s, expanded in 2005–2010 under President Viktor Yushchenko (at a high school graduation I attended in my grandmother’s native city of Chernihiv in 2007, everyone present was speaking Russian, but the speeches had to be in Ukrainian), radicalized dramatically after the Maidan Revolution, and made an article of faith after the Russian invasion. Schooling in minority languages, inherited from the Soviet period, has been limited to early grades, much to the dismay of Hungary and Romania. A study of Ukraine’s social science textbooks conducted in 2010–2011 revealed (to the surprise of no one familiar with Russian and Ukrainian historiography and folk traditions) that the most negatively represented minority was Crimean Tatars. The official campaign to honor and promote them, highlighted by Sonevytsky, began in earnest after the loss of Crimea and most Tatar citizens. Russian, claimed as a native language by about one third of the population and as a home language by about 50 percent before the Maidan Revolution, has been eliminated from public life.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, still known to most Ukrainians under his birth name of Vladimir Zelensky, seemed to offer an alternative. Visiting Donetsk with his comedy show on April 18, 2014, one month after the annexation of Crimea, eleven days after the proclamation of the Donetsk People’s Republic, and five days after the beginning of the civil war (officially known as Ukraine’s “Anti-Terrorist Operation”), he told a local newspaper (in Russian):
I would like for us to speak the same language, the one we’re speaking right now, so we’d understand each other. We cannot possibly be against the Russian people because we are the same people…. How can we not love them? We’re not idiots! We read the same books.
Five years later he won the presidency by promising to reverse his predecessor’s radical ethnonationalism (as well as by courting the oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who financed his campaign and is now awaiting trial for fraud and money laundering, and the entrepreneur Timur Mindich, who introduced him to Kolomoyskyi and is now in Israel hiding from a corruption probe). But he did no such thing, changed course in 2021, and, soon after the Russian invasion, embraced the ideology of the collective guilt of all things Russian and stopped speaking his mother tongue in public. Some Ukrainians followed his lead. “The move was completely voluntary,” writes Connelly.
In a play by Gogol, a Ukrainian genius who happened to be a Russian writer, a clueless visitor to a provincial town is mistaken for an inspector general. “The noncommissioned officer’s widow lied when she told you I flogged her,” the town’s mayor tells him. “She lied to you, I swear to God! She flogged herself.” The article Connelly cites in support of his claim that millions of uncoerced Russian speakers “quietly switched to Ukrainian” reports that during a study conducted in Kharkiv in August 2022, most participants responded to the moderator’s Ukrainian in Russian,…argued that the state should not pressure Russian-speaking citizens to switch to Ukrainian, and some even questioned the very need to expand the use of the titular language in society.
Kharkiv is the second-largest city in Ukraine and one of many predominantly Russian-speaking towns in the country’s east and south. The political parties that used to represent them have been banned, Russian-language schools and media outlawed, the teaching of Russian language and literature discontinued, broadcasting of music by most Russian performers forbidden. Libraries are getting rid of Russian books; books printed in Russia have been proscribed (as a bookstore manager in downtown Odesa explained to me in the fall of 2019, more than two years before the Russian invasion); Gogol is taught in Ukrainian translation. Parents are not allowed to give their children Russian names (it must be “Volodymyr,” like it or not), and store clerks must initiate all conversations in the “state language.”
Bad Ukrainians must not be allowed to worship false idols. In the predominantly Russian-speaking city of Odesa, where Pushkin wrote some of the best-loved lines in the Russian language (chapters 1 and 2 of Eugene Onegin), his monument has been boarded up in preparation for dismantling. Some Review readers may remember “Pushkin’s bronze head with a pale reflection of moonlight on top” as a symbol of “indescribable beauty” in Isaac Babel’s short story “Di Grasso.” But who needs Babel, “glasses on his nose and autumn in his soul”? His monument is also slated for removal, as are Anna Akhmatova’s and Mikhail Bulgakov’s in Kyiv. But of course we needn’t try to imagine Odesa without Babel’s “paunchy, bubbly” Jews or Kyiv without the magnificent and terrifying image of “the City” in Bulgakov’s The White Guard. There’s liberal democracy to worry about.
Bad Ukrainians are irrationally attached to outdated holidays. Orthodox Christmas, which most Ukrainians have traditionally celebrated according to the Julian calendar, has been moved to fit the Gregorian (“European”) schedule. Victory Day, which used to stand for the Soviet Union’s victory over the Nazis, has been moved, renamed, and reinterpreted in accordance with EU practice. The old holidays have been made workdays. The Kyiv government’s glorification of World War II–era Ukrainian nationalist organizations and their leaders and chants (“Glory to Ukraine, Glory to the Heroes,” “Ukraine Above Everything”) was repeatedly mentioned as casus belli by Donbas separatist insurgents, who were brought up to associate them with the fascist enemy their grandfathers had defeated.
Bad by definition are thousands of Ukrainians charged with “collaboration,” 200,000 soldiers away without leave, two million draft evaders, and untold numbers who would like to stay home on their traditional Christmas Day.
Imagine—to take one of Connelly’s analogies—a revolutionary regime in Dublin that has banned English-language music, media, and education and switched to teaching Dubliners in translation on the grounds that Irish people should speak Irish and not the language of colonial occupiers responsible for atrocities going back centuries. Connelly and Sonevytsky are of course free to express their allegiance to the cause, but please, spare us sermons about diversity, European values, and the panoply of houses of worship.
Sonevytsky ends her letter by charging me with historical revisionism. She does not say which orthodoxy we ought not to revise, but her equation of “the West” with “the world” in her final sentence suggests an answer with a rich history described by Varouxakis. She calls for contributions from less discordant “Russian voices,” but Connelly shakes his head ruefully. Using Germany as a precedent (the twins are identical), he explains that only an “utter defeat”—not just of the idea of empire but of the Russian Reich itself—will release Russians from the “imperial spell.” This should presumably be accomplished by the blue-water, boundary-respecting nonempire from which he gazes down on the world. While we wait, he’ll keep applauding the sacrifice of Ukraine.
English (US) · 