Overcoming imperial trauma

The Adam Mickiewicz sculpture with the Ukrainian flag in Poznań, Poland. Photo: Wirestock Creators

On the first morning, Putin jumped out of my iPhone, just after waking up, before coffee. War and Putin. Disbelief, doubt and confusion contrasted with the Greek spring, with its peace and spectacular weather garnishing the no less awesome view. The Peloponnese, mountains and sea, azure and green, and simple fulfilling activities, such as picking oranges, squeezing lemons, walks through flowery meadows, olive groves. These do not disappear during war but resonate all the more. They all become more “complete” and meaningful but can also induce pain. This war is so close to Poland, impacting people who live among us, occurring in cities for which we still often retain in memory their old Polish names. This is, perhaps counterintuitively, directly significant for the way in which we perceive this war, this brutish, monstrous assault. It reanimates many bygone memories, many dormant ghosts. It is a great shock to our internal world. A return of that feeling which sealed the fates local to this part of Europe most painfully and tragically. A return of the suppressed. I think about all this, standing at the scene of the great theatre in Epidaurus.

Familiar ghosts

The war is in its fourth day. The theatre is completely empty, but this vacuum is marked with a concentrated presence. Something wells up within me and I start to shout, standing alone in the middle of the ancient scene. The insane acoustics lower my voice, multiply it and make it resonate with the void. Fortified, it becomes otherworldly, stemming from an abyssal and gushing wound – the eternal struggle of freedom with tyranny. I feel in this desperate cry of mine the presence of all those who had to face imperial madness in defence of freedom. Against, as Mickiewicz wrote, “the mad hubris of great autocrats”, among which Putin would so like to be counted. Ukrainians today are fully justified to feel like the Greeks resisting the Persians at Marathon, Salamis or Thermopylae.

Yes, dear Ukrainian brothers and sisters, you have this right! And every day of the war, your heroism and suffering confirm this conviction. Your іди на хуй is a translation of the Greek μολὼν λαβέ. Shouting on the stage at Epidaurus I felt that all those ghosts that had loved freedom over tyranny are with you today – and they will ensure that your assailants shall not prevail against you.

Just as I return from Greece I am submerged into our collective unconscious, clouded with a fog black as soot and red like blood. Indeed, Poland is, especially now, its own Hades.  Mobilised, it reverberates with enthusiasm – something which, believe me, I am truly proud of. What emotional resources has this war activated in us Poles and no doubt other Eastern European nations? I will not write about what is already known. Yes, those emotions certainly include empathy, hospitality, solidarity, etc. Of course, we are all conscious of these feelings. But they are merely at the surface of our psychosocial life, which is full of fantasy and fantasies which we have long preferred to remain ignorant of. That which emerges from the depths and reveals itself so wonderfully under the guise of empathy and support is our Russian trauma, our own unburied past.

Russia did not withdraw its troops from Poland as if out of mercy. It was forced to remove itself, still harbouring its imperial aspirations. It was something it never accepted. Russia is not only incapable of change, it has no aspirations to that effect. The cult of Stalin in today’s Russia is a virtue. In its essence, Russia remains as it was, voluntarily. Russia has not atoned for or worked through its past. While this is certainly not true of all Russians, it describes Russian collective memory and identity well. An aggressive, imperial Russia remains a reality of which Putin is only the face.

This is why victory over the USSR has brought us neither satisfaction, nor a sense of justice that meted punishment engenders, and no feeling of security that would be justified in the absence of Russian imperialism. Fear of Russia, a lack of punishment or recompense – all this lives within our collective psyche, thinly veiled on one hand with a sense of belonging to the West and the anti-western “getting up from our knees” on the other.

The Ukrainian war has at last provided all this frustration and suppressed trauma with an opportunity to be satisfied and overcome. This will occur at the hands of the Ukrainian nation, which will punish Russia by breaking its imperial might and disproving its myth of supremacy by laying bare its fragile foundations. This is indeed happening before our very eyes.

Unconscious inevitability

Within the war’s first few days, Ukrainians achieved something which we Poles were never able to do. They proved their efficiency, enthusiasm and romantic zeal. In them that which we have lost has been reborn. Through them, we would like to somehow rediscover all this, something which cannot be achieved without sacrifices and true solidarity with Ukrainians. This is why we want to save them and in doing so, also save and regenerate ourselves. Ukrainians are both us but also others.

War, along with refugees, moves from Ukrainian soil onto the sterile turf of the Polish soul, bringing with it the opportunity for a real turning point within us. It promises that we will regain something through opening ourselves to them, that is ourselves to the Other, the Other possibility within us. I have long been convinced that if anything can change Poland it would be an influx of Ukrainians, let alone fleeing from a common, archetypal enemy. This psychosocial mechanism transcends Poland, also supporting Ukrainians, who are attuned to  our enthusiasm which they ultimately generate. They feel this change that they provoke within us and derive from it the strength to fight and resist.

All this means that Poland, like no other European country, has already been a participant in this war from its first day. This was determined by an unconscious, psychological inevitability. On the most basic, archetypical stratum of the Polish soul, Ukraine’s struggle with the Russian aggressor is a war to split Ruthenia from Muscovy. The goal here on a group-psychological level would not be some new annexation of Ruthenia to Poland, but rather the entry or introduction of Ukraine to Europe.

There is a deep, psychological need to regain Ukraine as a partner and an ally, a neighbouring country freed from the Russian imperial yoke. In other words, on this group-psychological level Ukraine’s victory would lead to an elevation of Poland, just as its conquest by Russia would be Poland’s coup de grâce. A strong, reborn Ukraine allied with and supported by Poland would, on the plane of psychosocial energies, be nothing other than Ukraine “regained” for Poland, leading in turn to a Polish ascent. It was after all the Russian annexation of Ukraine, and its loss to Poland, that made us into a vacuous, sullen and demotivated nation. This gambit is already being played out in our collective unconscious.

This group-psychological match between Russia, Ukraine and Poland occurring alongside the war has very real implications and may prove decisive for the future of the region and beyond. Poland senses this and so it exerts itself. We conduct this war, which might free us from over two centuries of partition, with Ukrainian hands, and, thank God, we arm and support those hands as much as we are able to. This has only just begun, and may only now be resolved, since the mental partition about which I write is deeper and more enduring than a territorial one. The mere thought of this shakes me to the core. Perhaps our own troubled relationship with Europe and European values, flirtations with quasi-Russian authoritarianism, nationalism and xenophobia, underpinned by aggression, prejudice and contempt – are all symptoms of our unresolved contest with imperial Russia. In the hidden but overbearing shadow of which we remain, like a victim dependent on its tormentor.

In other words, we are not Eurosceptic at all. We would truly like to become Europeans, but are restrained by unfinished business with Russia, which colonised, terrorised and debased us over the centuries. Today, Ukrainians provide us with the chance to be released from this burden, provided we become engaged in their struggle, just as we are now and to an even greater extent looking forward. The current situation amounts to an intense national shock therapy. Their war with Putin’s Russia is their, and our, war for ourselves. It is our common war with Russian imperialism, which made this part of Europe desolate not only physically but also mentally. Our energy and aid give us the opportunity to lift ourselves from the stupor that had not been broken even by joining the European Union. To paraphrase the title of a book by Maria Janion – To Europe, Yes, But Only With our Ukrainians!

Victory, together

This is the game played by our collective unconscious in the world today. The stakes could not be higher – being a true subject within Europe, freedom from the spectres that consume us. If Ukraine loses, that is, loses mentally, or should it win, but without us at its side, we will never recover within the EU. We will never return to the path of democratic rule of law. Russia will not have to arrive here for us to become like it in the long run.

To recover, our collective psyche must defeat Russian imperialism. Win alongside Ukraine. This has nothing to do with Russophobia. The goal is to break Russian imperialism, which would also offer an opportunity to Russia and Russians. Though it is not for us to judge whether our “Muscovite friends” will accept this opportunity.

It is not by accident that I once again make reference to Adam Mickiewicz. I do this because it seems to me that no one else can explain this war to us. No one but Mickiewicz, not political science, sociology or cultural criticism. While this may seem farfetched, one only has to read his “Ordon’s Redoubt” to understand that nothing has really changed since the beginning of the 19th century. Our social health and development are still conditional upon resisting and overcoming the spectre of Russian imperialism. That this imperialism today is nothing but a spectre has been demonstrated most clearly by this war, but as it turns out, in its spectral form it is no less monstrous and malevolent.

Only Mickiewicz explains this war, only Mickiewicz conveys the enormity of its menace, the height of its stakes, not only geopolitical, but also mental. Mickiewicz is Eastern European romanticism written in Polish, though his “Ordon’s Redoubt” resounds equally well in Ukrainian. This romanticism was politically established alongside the Spring of Nations’ democratic protest against the imperial tyranny of the tsarist knout. In its essence, this war ought to have been fought in the 19th century. It has been taking place since the November Uprising.

This is why Western Europe will never fully comprehend this war, just as it never understood Polish insurgent upheavals. The West is currently showing extraordinary and laudable determination in this war, though it is also partially responsible for causing it. This responsibility derives from the maintenance of “pragmatic” relations with Putin’s regime in recent decades, which moreover, was part of a very long tradition of not “provoking” Russia, “understanding” its otherness, etc.

I am unable to understand the deference and awe that the West has for Russia, about which much has been said and written. Could this perhaps have reached its peak now, to decline? If only… But this is dependent also on the processes that transpire in the western unconscious. After all, the core of Western Europe has an imperial past. It is no surprise, then, that their own repressed and not adequately addressed imperial trauma is manifested in an equivocal relation to imperial Russia. Unlike in Eastern Europe, which is marked with tragic, anti-imperial upheavals and abortive attempts at winning social sovereignty, in Western Europe the dominant trauma is that of a loss of imperial potency and significance. Eastern Europe is democratic in spirit, though, in the face of recurring failure, has fallen victim to the social swamp we experience currently, punctuated with less frequent explosions of enthusiasm for independence. These spectral, shattered western empires, colonised by American capital, terrified of refugees, concerned with China, placated with obscene satiety and safety, unconsciously favour Russia, which still flexes its imperial muscle, demonstrating its vulgar contempt for all to see.

While disgusted by Russian aggression, the West is also full of unconscious jealousy and admiration. In this context, the western split between an imposition of truly severe sanctions, necessitated by Putin’s war crimes, and its hesitance and reserve towards Ukraine’s European aspirations, is significant.

Thinking about this I reach truly radical conclusions. If the ideal of a unified, cohesive and free Europe is to win, Western Europe has to unequivocally stand with Ukraine and accept it into the fold, finally and fully abandoning its sympathies for the Russian empire. If this does not happen, Europe will never ascend again. It will reveal itself to be a living corpse, a pitiful fool no longer able to understand anything significant.

I think about all this with great concern, with a growing suspicion that the game was rigged from the start against Ukraine. Perhaps (hopefully) the West has already sealed Putin’s fate. However, it is still unable to revise its post-imperial pro-Russian sympathies and reject them once and for all. If they do not do this, their inclinations could return after Putin’s removal, but as long as this war is ongoing, a chance remains. This is a critical time and an opportune moment, a last chance for a spectacular break and recovery, not only for the East, but also the West.

Spectre of tyranny

Such are the thoughts born within the Polish Hades. I take responsibility for them not without confusion, but the Ukrainian war leaves me no other choice – its influence is so overpowering that one loses solid ground on which to stand. And yet it is hard to reject the disquieting thought that I am being carried away by East European paranoia which I dread. The explosion of mania, a reaction to powerlessness in the face of Russia’s bombs, rockets, war crimes, and scandalous and beastlike determination to kill Ukraine. Moscow wants to blow it all up and extinguish it.

Maybe these thoughts are just some war delirium, delusions and vain hopes, because the spectre of tyranny, of Eastern empire will win again and triumph over life. Perhaps in Eastern Europe the spirit of freedom and democracy will never prevail over this spectre and even the West’s potential awakening will not succeed in helping us in this. How absurd are imperial violence and war, to which this spectre leads. Unhealthy ambition, misplaced pride and a sick soul. Maybe nothing can be done about them?

I am in Greece again. It is the last day before returning; I reminisce. In Kameni Chora, a village on a slope of great lava rocks, we visited a volcano. We drove up a winding road between volcanic peaks, through fertile, though lunar-like craters. There is a cosmic, archaic, otherworldly aura. A place of burnt out beginnings; a great and eternal peace at the site of the world’s primordial explosion. Walking in this thundering silence over volcanic gravel and slippery, mossy stones, we climbed the Methana Volcano. The summit has a tiny church and a fascinating view. The Saronic Islands in the misty sea. Aegina, Agistri and the tiny isles of the Peloponnese are scattered on the sea like the remains of some monstrous, archaic creatures.

Why is the world so frightful? Faced with an insane Putin and a foolish West, which, suddenly startled, is trying to wake up. What a ditch, cesspool, sewer we are in – I shudder to think. Why, why cannot the whole of humanity meet atop here at least for a moment? Meet and fall silent, become quiet and feel that such power, strength, rule, suffering, stupidity and pointless stubbornness are not necessary. It is terrible, so terrible. Terrible… And it would suffice to stand on Methana for a moment, drive through Kameni Chora and stand on a volcanic crater. What a bewildered animal man is today. Everyone, not just Putin. Indeed, Putin is an everyman. He is a paranoid admirer of his own grandeur, much like each and every one of us. Standing on the volcano, I understood. I understood this.

Translated by Hugo Lunn

Piotr Augustyniak is a Polish philosopher, essayist, journalist and academic lecturer. He specialises in issues at the borders of human philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of religion and the theory of modernity.

history, imperialism, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, War