One of the mistakes made by the Russian authorities, who expected to gain the support of the local population after invading Ukraine, stems from their failure to understand Ukrainian identity and the fact that identity cannot be imposed as an ideological construct. What identity is and how Ukrainian identity differs from Russian identity is explained by Nikolai Karpitsky in the latest article from the “Dictionary of War” series on PostPravda.Info.
Identity
Identity is a sense of unity or sameness with something – an element of self-awareness as a person, based on one’s understanding of oneself and one’s relation to others. Different levels of identity coexist within self-consciousness:
- Personal identity – an answer to the question “Who am I?”; an awareness of oneself and one’s place in the world, formed through life experience and inner self-determination as an individual.
- Social identity – an awareness of belonging or connection to a community, culture, or tradition; it can be cultural, religious, professional, ideological, ethnic, national, civic, etc.
With the rise of nationalism in the 20th century, ideological appeals to ethnic and national identity were used to justify political claims that led to World War II and many other armed conflicts, including the Russo-Ukrainian war that began in 2014.
Civic and Archaic Social Identity
An archaic form of social identity is identifying oneself with a community of relatives, friends, or fellow villagers – that is, with the circle of people one can personally interact with. Based on this, different types of local identities are formed, connected to real communities – one’s village, one’s local community. These communities are “real” in the sense that people within them can directly interact with each other, unlike “imagined communities” (in the terminology of Benedict Anderson), in which people only mentally perceive themselves as part of one group but never actually meet each other. Such communities exist only in people’s consciousness, and to recognize identity with them, people need some marker of commonality – a shared religion, language, culture, nation, citizenship, social class, territory, customs, ethics, and so on.
In earlier times, belonging to a social class or religion was more important than ethnic affiliation, so nations and territories played a minor role in social identity. The formation of civic identity began when a sense of responsibility for one’s city or country became more important than loyalty to one’s class, lord, or king. The feeling of responsibility for one’s country as a whole led to the emergence of new civic nations. However, the process of their formation differs from country to country – in some, they are already established, while in others, they are only beginning to emerge.
The Soviet People – An Ideological Construct
Among the largely uneducated population of Tsarist Russia, local identity predominated. For most people, it was only important that those around them spoke a familiar language, followed familiar customs, and practiced the same religion. Identification with Russia as a whole was understood in an imperial context – as identification with the territory controlled by the Tsar’s authority.
For the Communists, the foundation of the state was territory and power, and it was no longer important which nations inhabited those territories. This defined the project of creating a new community – the Soviet people – united only by territory and state power. The collapse of the Soviet Union showed that identification with the Soviet people was based on ideology rather than genuine identity, and that the Soviet people were merely an ideological construct.
The Difference Between Identity and Ideology
Social self-identification can take either an ideological or a personal form – and only in the latter case does it become the foundation of true identity. Unlike ideology, identity always has a personal character. Ideology creates a system of ideas that motivate people to act in the interests of power or a group seeking power. An ideological framework requires a person to accept these ideas as their own, regardless of personal life experience or self-determination. A person who refuses to accept or critically reinterprets these ideas is perceived as a hostile element toward that ideology.
In contrast, identity is formed on the basis of one’s own life experience, with ideas serving as a means of understanding that experience. Therefore, there is no requirement to accept a fixed set of ideas as mandatory. On the contrary, one can constantly reinterpret them to gain a deeper understanding of oneself. For this reason, national or religious identity fosters personal development and creative self-realization, while national or religious ideology, on the contrary, suppresses individuality.
Since ideological self-identification is externally imposed and coercive, people usually abandon it easily when the political situation changes, and such rejection has no fundamental impact on their personality. A historical example of this is the abandonment of identification with the Soviet people. However, one cannot abandon one’s own identity without a complete transformation of the self.
The Ideological Understanding of National Identity
The collapse of the Soviet Union marked the beginning of the formation of new civic nations in Russia and Ukraine. However, the establishment of a dictatorship in Russia interrupted this process. The current regime in Russia imposes on its citizens a contradictory identification with their country, which combines two distinct ideological orientations.
First, it presents Russia not as a state with historically defined borders, but as any territory that is or has ever been governed by central Russian authority. Second, it promotes an aggressive nationalist myth of a “triune people” sharing a single root – implying that Ukrainians and Belarusians have no right to exist independently of Russia. The first ideological stance is internationalist, while the second is nationalist and chauvinistic. This duality allows Russian propaganda to attract people with opposing ideological beliefs.
In line with the nationalist orientation, the Russian leadership seeks to impose a Russian identity on Ukrainians – declared as one of the goals of the military invasion of Ukraine, under the slogan of “denazification.” Some residents of the occupied territories of Ukraine declare support for Russia from the opposite ideological position: they identify not with Russians as a people, but with the territory controlled by Moscow. However, this ideological identification has failed to create a genuine Russian identity among them – neither during the Soviet period nor now.
The Russian propaganda system projects its own ideological understanding of national identity onto Ukrainian public consciousness. According to this view, Ukrainian identity is an ideological construct imposed by the West to set Ukraine against Russia. In reality, Ukraine is united by a shared cultural and historical experience – including a negative colonial past – which precludes any acceptance of a Russian identity. After Russia’s full-scale invasion, the process of identity formation based on a new Ukrainian civic nation accelerated. However, it remains uneven, and in many regions – particularly in eastern Ukraine – an archaic local identity persists alongside Ukrainian identity, rooted in attachment to one’s city or village rather than to the country as a whole. This circumstance has also been used to sustain the false myth that residents of eastern Ukraine predominantly possess a Russian identity.
