Why Russians hate both what's theirs and what's not

Since you perceive your own as someone else's-that is, distant, desolate, depopulated-you justify the need for constant expansion into something else's.

This is the absence of perception of what is yours as yours, that is, as a small corner of the vast universe that needs your care.

And when you perceive anything of yours as alien, desolate, devastated, when you cannot take care of it, cannot grow and nurture your garden, then you have no respect for that which is alien to other people, which is “yours.” 

Hatred of one's own gives rise to hatred of the other, and instead of caring for one's own, this necrophiliac urge to seize what is not one's own, to expand into what is not one's own, is born.

Because if there is no difference between one's own and another's, then no one has the right to their own, and any sense of their own must be destroyed.

The Ukrainian peasants who were destroyed by the Holodomors were enemies of Russian communal Bolshevism precisely because they had a keen sense of their own. And for this sense of belonging and concern for one's own, Bolshevik propaganda coined the epithet “bourgeois-nationalist,” realizing that it was both a question of identity (“nationalist”) and a question of property-property as a circle of concern (“bourgeois”).

By the way, in many cultures this image of caring for existence — both divine and human — is embodied in the image of the garden. The image of the garden is also important for Ukrainian culture, from Skovoroda to Shevchenko and beyond.

Respect for the other can only grow when there is care for one's own, Voltairean nurturing of one's garden, cultivation of what one stands on.

Therefore, perhaps, culture is first and foremost a concern for the existence that is entrusted to us.

That is why culture implies this balance between one's own and the other: respect for the other through caring for one's own, and understanding that the other is also one's own for someone else.

Source

About the author. Volodymyr Yermolenko, writer, head of PEN Ukraine

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