And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far/Ancestral voices prophesying war

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan, 1797/1816

Near the beginning of Leo Tolstoy’s great Russian novel War and Peace, a character observes that the British are so mercantilist in their conduct of foreign affairs. The year is then 1805, but the villain of the peace on this occasion turns out to be the Emperor Napoleon whose French army invades Russia in 1812. As the saying goes, the rest is history. Writing in the Soviet period between 1928-40, also on epic scale about an earlier historical period, Mikhail Sholokhov would later become known as “the Red Tolstoy” for his four-volume novel The Quiet Don. Although doubts have been raised about Sholokhov’s authorship of what is generally regarded to be one of the great masterpieces of Soviet realism, these are not considered here. For the immediate contemporary interest of The Quiet Don quartet lies in the novel’s depiction of conflict between Ukrainian and Russian peoples in the aftermath of World War 1 and the Bolshevik Revolution. In some respects what became a civil war anticipates the crisis in relations between Russia and Ukraine which has unfolded since 2014.(1) However, this crisis is not just about Russian hegemonic aggression and Ukrainian sovereignty, it is about how European (including British) neo-mercantilism took precedence in the conduct of diplomacy with Russia and other nations in the “Post-Soviet Space” during the early 21^st century.(2/3) What one commentator called “Putin’s Khanate” has become a geopolitical problem which is partly of the West’s creation.(4) Tragically, once again all is not quiet on the eastern front; although since this blogs was first posted, Ukraine’s allies have done much to support a country on, to use some words of Winston Churchill, “the frontline of freedom.”(5/6/7)

1. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/cossack-against-cossack
2. https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/2021-11-30-french-german-approaches-russia-marange-and-stewart.pdf
3. https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/12/uks-kleptocracy-problem
4. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2014-04-07/putins-khanate
5. . On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians – Wikipedia
6. https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/ukraine-was-created-by-lenin-stalin-and-khrushchevv
7. https://www.raabcollection.com/winston-churchill-autograph/winston-churchill-signed-sold-churchill-amidst-blitz-1940–front-line