In Kursk, Putin is learning that historical revanchism cuts both ways

As Ukraine’s offensive into Russia’s Kursk Province continues apace, Ukrainians may decide to celebrate the liberation of their former capital.

No, not Kyiv — Russians failed to “liberate” that city in 2022. The capital in question is Sudzha, a seemingly insignificant town of about 6,000 inhabitants located a few miles from the Russian Federation’s border with Ukraine.

Sudzha was the short-lived capital of the Soviet Ukrainian government in late 1918. And the neighboring city of Belgorod subsequently had that status for a few weeks, until Vladimir Lenin’s puppet Bolshevik Ukrainian regime finally based itself in Kharkiv, which served as Soviet Ukraine’s capital until 1934.

According to Russia’s 1897 census, 61 percent of Sudzha’s residents identified themselves as Ukrainian. By 2020, that number had shrunk to 1 percent.

The Bolsheviks’ choice of Sudzha as their capital was thus not arbitrary. The town was Ukrainian. More than that, in the second half of the 17th century it had served as the capital of a Ukrainian Cossack military-administrative unit. So, Sudzha as Soviet Ukrainian capital made perfect sense. It was Ukrainian and had been Ukrainian, it had a Cossack tradition and it could easily serve as a Ukrainian springboard for the subsequent Russian invasion — er, liberation — of Ukraine.

Belgorod also made political sense, as a good portion of the region’s population — up to 70 percent in one district — identified themselves as Ukrainian in the 1897 census.

Whatever reasons Ukraine had for launching its own “special military operation” into Kursk Province, it’s likely that President Volodymyr Zelensky and his army commander, Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, were fully aware of Sudzha and Bilhorod’s historical connection with Ukraine. It must have occurred to them that, technically, they could turn the table on Putin and claim they weren’t invading Russia, but “liberating” Ukraine’s age-old territories.

And why not? If Putin can claim to “liberate” the Crimea, which Imperial Russia occupied in the late 18th century, why can’t Zelensky liberate a town that served as an outpost of Ukrainian Cossackdom a century earlier?

Zelensky is unlikely to play this card, but the mere fact that he could testifies to the potentially incendiary consequences of mixing history with politics. Putin opened this Pandora’s box by invoking history — to the applause of some naive Western policymakers and analysts — in justifying Crimea’s annexation in 2014 and his full invasion in 2022.

Not only is there no end to historical arguments — for the simple reason that no historical interpretation of anything can ever be final — but revanchist arguments grounded in historical interpretations always have a boomerang effect.

Accept for the sake of argument Putin’s implicit claim that current states should be no larger than their ancient predecessors (and disregard the squishy nature of the adjective “ancient”). Putin thinks that, by this logic, Ukraine is in trouble.

In fact, Ukrainians can counter by saying that their historical roots go back to Kyivan Rus’, a sprawling polity established over a millennium ago by Viking invaders who intermarried with the local proto-Ukrainian tribes, and that, in fact, Russia is in trouble. For the Russian Federation is the product of Muscovite imperial expansion. Were today’s Russia to be as large as ancient Muscovy, it would be reduced to a tiny piece of real estate with the Kremlin as its core.

Seen in this light, Sudzha isn’t just a curiosity. It’s a wrecking ball directed at Putin’s historical house of cards.

And it’s not just Sudzha, of course. The exclave of Kaliningrad would have to go back to the Germans. The Kuril Islands would have to be returned to Japan. Crimea would be Turkey’s. Siberia would revert to the Siberians. Viktor Orbán’s Hungarians would have to mount their steeds and go back to their Asian homeland. And most of Muscovy would have to be returned to the Mongols.

And that’s just Eastern Europe. Things would be no less jolly in Western Europe. Just who owns Alsace-Lorraine — or is it Elsass-Lothringen? — and would the Papal States be back in business?

All of this sounds fantastic, but only if one ignores Russia’s non-Russian regions and peoples. It took two genocidal wars in the 1990s-2000s for Moscow to crush the Chechens, but in return they now enjoy near-independence. Other non-Russians in the North Caucasus have also expressed dissatisfaction with Moscow’s rule. So too have the Bashkirs, Tatars and others. They may be quiescent at the moment, but if and when Putin’s regime begins to crumble — as it will when he departs the political stage — the non-Russians will base their claims for freedom, autonomy and independence on the same kinds of historical arguments Putin is fond of using.

Russia’s response to the non-Russians will be to crack down and shed blood and then to disintegrate. What will the West’s response be? At the very least, it should be radically different from that in 1990-1991, when the West ignored non-Russians and then expressed shock when they caused the USSR to fall apart.

With a little luck, Ukraine’s former capital may help the West learn and prepare for the post-Putin world.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”