When Russian troops first massed on the borders of Ukraine, no man of good will would call what was about to unfold a "civil war." That term belonged exclusively to the vocabulary of Kremlin propaganda, bent on denying Ukraine’s statehood and portraying the nation as a victim of Western manipulation which had been induced to rebel against its big brother, Russia. Once the Kremlin had cast the conflict in these terms, obviously those who supported Ukraine in its resistance to the invasion had to counter Russian propaganda by pointing to Ukraine’s national sovereignty and its European aspirations which the Kremlin had moved to excoriate by the force of arms.
As Russia’s war on Ukrainian soil acquired more and more the character of genocide, however, the Kremlin propagandists’ emphasis began to shift. The stubborn enemy needed to be dehumanized. Ukraine was no longer a younger brother, but now a stronghold of Nazis and Satanists, suppressing Christian churches, dealing in arms and drugs, promoting poisonous LGBTQ+ ideology, and in every way flaunting the corruption with which the unscrupulous West had contaminated its body politic. To exterminate the vipers that had made their nest on the territory of its obstreperous neighbor, Russia was compelled to start what the propagandists would increasingly describe as a holy war.
Now, nearly three years into the war, a supporter of Ukraine who accurately sees it as the victim of neo-Soviet imperialism may ask himself dispassionately — without worrying that he might be echoing Kremlin propaganda in its earliest phase — whether this war is really not a civil war, and Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is not fratricide.
There is more to this view than the fact that the two nations are inextricably bound together by the ties of custom, religion, and language. It was so in the American Civil War, it was so in the divided Vietnam, the divided Korea, and the divided Germany. From Cuba to Afghanistan, we witness many a nation at war with itself, ever reminding us of the Biblical story of Cain and Abel. It is so today in the impending conquest by Communist China of its compatriots in Taiwan. And, most significantly and incontrovertibly, it was so in Russia some hundred years ago, when just such division pitted the legitimist Whites against the despotic Reds, the Bolsheviks who in 1917 had overrun the nascent democracy and usurped power. That was Russia’s first civil war. One may argue that the present war in Ukraine is the second.
Just a few days ago, Maximilian Andronikov, callname "Cesar," one of the leaders of the Freedom of Russia Legion — Russian nationals fighting on the side of Ukraine – issued a statement in which he called on all "responsible Russians" like himself to take up arms against the war’s instigator, "Kremlin dictatorship." For his role in the Resistance to neo-Soviet imperialism Andronikov has been likened to Charles DeGaulle. Objectives similar to the Legion’s are being voiced by the Russian Volunteer Corps, another military formation of Russian nationals fighting against "Russian fascism" in Ukraine.
Add to these combatants the millions of Russian-speaking and Russian-educated Ukrainians in the civilian population of the country and its armed forces, and a stark picture begins to emerge. Even the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army appointed to the post last February by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, is an ethnic Russian who was born near Moscow, grew up in Soviet Russia, graduated from a Soviet military academy, and first smelled gunpowder in Afghanistan.
Contrary to Kremlin propaganda, the Ukrainians fighting Russia are not fascists, but, if anything, antifascists. Their antifascist Resistance, they hope, will eventually cleanse Russia of neo-Soviet contagion. However, even if these combatants were card-carrying Nazis, the history of the Russian emigration after the Bolshevik coup of 1917 shows that most exiles saw Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia in 1941, as a providential chance for a rematch of the 1918-1922 civil war which their side had lost. This included émigré writers of genius like Ivan Shmelev, while even the Nobel laureate Bunin, who usually referred to Hitler as a "nincompoop," initially had hopes for a collapse of the Soviet regime in the war. It’s another matter that the Nazis had no intention of restoring constitutional monarchy in a conquered Russia and the exiles' hopes were in all other respects delusory. The point is that those who see the Kremlin as the crucible of evil for all humanity will have few qualms when it comes to extirpating it.
The legitimist cause in the first Russian civil war foundered on a lack of military support from the West, although Soviet history books used to frighten schoolboys with tales of the "14 Interventionist Powers" that allegedly invaded Russia to help the Whites defeat the Reds. In the present, second civil war being prosecuted by Ukraine, the West’s support of the legitimist cause has been far more substantive, notwithstanding that there are no "boots on the ground." Still, the parallel with the help for Ukraine, coming in dribs and drabs and costing the average European the equivalent of a monthly cup of coffee brings to mind the mythical "14 Interventionist Powers" and the good cause the West once betrayed.
Ukraine is now 1000 days into the war. Were it viewed in the West not solely as the country’s existential struggle, but also as a civil war — with objectives broadly in line with those of the Freedom of Russia Legion — perhaps the West’s support would increase to enable Ukraine to actually win. It’s less about Ukraine, the American taxpayer could then reflect, than about the totalitarian ogres in the Kremlin, bent as ever on world domination, and about their whole "evil empire," in Ronald Reagan’s unforgettable phrase. So let us allow Ukraine to cleanse fraternal Russia of this neo-Soviet contagion and, in so doing, make America great — and the world sane again.
Andrei Navrozov is a British writer and poet. He was born in Moscow, in 1956, and is the grandson of Playwright Andrei Navrozov, as well as the son of writer and translator Lev Navrozov.
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