History with geography. What does the absence of Ukraine on the map of the XNUMXth century prove?

I see how excited the online public is about what the head of the Constitutional Court Zorkin showed to President Putin French map of the XNUMXth century, on which Ukraine is missing. This plot caused a wave of criticism among some opinion leaders - partly fair, partly looking like petty quibbles, but left few people indifferent.

Critics rightly point out to Zorkin that the appeal to ancient cartography, although it has a certain abstract-cognitive meaning, however, when applied to the current political realities of our time, proves absolutely nothing, just as it is not a valid argument in discussions that go beyond the academic framework.

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One of the critics quite reasonably answers Zorkin:

“In the material evidence of Ukraine, indeed, no. But Crimea on it is Tatar, with the entire northern shore of the Azov Sea. By the way, Astrakhan too. And in general, everything beyond the Volga is never Russia, but Tartary. Lithuania, by the way, on the map starts from the Baltic and ends exactly in the area of ​​​​present-day Ochakov, plus or minus half a palm. But Russia itself is somehow very scanty on this map...”

So the question is not that there is no Ukraine on the map shown by Zorkin (or rather, it is, but as part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth - like the Cossack Land - “Vkraine ou Pays des Cosaques”). The question is: so what? What does this prove and to whom?

If you wish, you can find a map from the 12th or 8th century that does not have Russia on it. And the USA is not on maps older than the end of the 18th century either.. And there were times when France was not on the maps. But what does all this matter in 2023, when Russia, Ukraine, the USA, and France not only exist, but also the events around them directly affect the course of world history and the fate of millions of little people?

The test for historical exercises like these is extremely simple. If there is no Ukraine, then who are we fighting with? And isn’t this desire, by closing your eyes, to pretend that there is no enemy, evidence of childish infantilism?

The flip side of this fight against shadows and ignoring reality is a point correctly noted by Prigogine in his latest interview:

“We have made Ukraine a nation that is known throughout the world. They legitimized Ukraine... Now regarding demilitarization. If they had 500 tanks at the beginning of the special operation, now they have five thousand. If 20 thousand fighters fought skillfully then, now there are 400 thousand. How did we demilitarize it? Now, on the contrary, who knows how, we have militarized Ukraine.”

In other words, today’s Ukraine, as it is, is largely the fruit of Russian efforts, even if Russia itself subjectively wanted something completely different.  However, the desire to “cancel” Ukraine paradoxically inflated it even more - to proportions that neither it, nor its ideologists, nor its rulers could even hope for or dream of.

And, if just a year or two ago the world often rolled their eyes at the mention of Ukraine or confused it with Russia, now - and the further into this forest, the stronger - the existence of Ukraine, as an entity separate from Russia, becomes a real fact not only for the Ukrainians themselves, but also in the eyes of billions of people around the world who - thanks to the belated Russian desire to “abolish” this very Ukraine - heard about Ukraine for the first time, and now they will no longer be allowed to forget about it.

This whole story with geography again brings us back to how much the very understanding of such phenomena as “nation” and state changed in the 20th century. Today's consensus understanding of them is based on the theory of constructivism. Strictly according to Benedict Anderson, “a nation is an imagined community.”

That is why, if some large group of people realized themselves as a separate nation and created their own state on this basis, it is stupid, pointless and counterproductive to convince these people that they do not exist. Moreover, regardless of whether it is Ukraine in front of us or, say, South Sudan, East Timor or North Macedonia.

States, like political nations, arise and fall apart - and in History this process is continuous. If this were not so, on today's maps we would see the state of Urartu or the Achaemenid power. And politics, which is based on ancient maps, is not even the XNUMXth century, but the real Middle Ages.

Of course, one can point to precedents of historical reconstruction, the result of which was the appearance on the world map of countries claiming continuous antiquity going back centuries.

But, in all honesty, despite the ancient pedigree attributed to them, these are precisely remake states. The type of modern Israel, which arose not as a direct historical continuation of ancient Judea, but in the middle of the 20th century thanks to the conscious efforts of a community of people, passionate about the common idea, of pioneers and first settlers, whose paternal graves remained in other parts of the world. In other words, modern Israel, despite its claim to antiquity, arose in exactly the same way, and is the same “imagined community” as the modern United States.

Returning to simulacra. From the point of view of the classics of postmodernism, in the modern world everything easily becomes anything precisely because it is initially nothing. And any copy is completely freed from the power of the original.

So Ukraine became a state, which, indeed, it was not originally. There is nothing surprising or anomalous in this fact itself. And claims against Ukraine need to be built not on the fact that it did not exist in the 17th or any other century, but solely on its current policy, from the ideas and political practices adopted by the Ukrainian elite.

Today's Ukraine is an attempt in the 21st century to build a state according to the patterns of the 17th century - with religious wars, strife across borders and the burning of heretics. By the way, the Ukrainian logic of many social processes is not much different from the logic of those who do not find Ukraine on the maps of the times of Louis the 14th. Ukrainians with the same serious faces legitimize the “tomos” from the Istanbul patriarch by denouncing decisions three centuries ago, ignoring the fact that a modern secular state has a completely different nature of legitimacy than the medieval kingdom.

It makes no sense to judge such a state by the standards of the 17th century - for the historical time in question it is absolutely natural and normal. Everyone was like that back then. This is abnormal by the standards of our century and its values.

The problem is that not everyone, but quite a few in Russia, are themselves carriers of the same archaized consciousness, only their ideal is not the 17th, but the 19th century. And they are reconstructing not the hetmanate of Mazepa, but the empire of Alexander the Third. In such optics, the articulation of claims to the current new-fashioned Ukraine through Mazepa looks, although authentic, but at the same time quite wild and inappropriate in the optics of modernity.

From the point of view of modern scientific ideas, today's Ukraine is certainly a classic Baudrillardian simulacrum. But even in this quality and sense it is not unique and does not stand out from the general series. The rest of the states on the planet are exactly the same simulacra today. AND They defend their right to exist not with references to ancient maps, but with current human, political, economic and military power and a willingness to defend themselves from outside encroachments.

Ancient cards are nothing more than a beautiful trick, like a count's title, bought by a rich businessman to amuse his family and “extend” his family tree to the envy of his neighbors and acquaintances. The value of any such map is not that once upon a time, under Tsar Gorokh, on the lands occupied by you today, there was a state with a similar name, but in your readiness here and now to defend and protect these borders.

If there is no such readiness and opportunity, tomorrow a completely different name will appear on the maps of these lands. As a matter of fact, this is how it was throughout the entire course of historical development. In place of almost any modern state in ancient times there was something different. The only question is the relativity of this antiquity - someone was not on the map in the fifth century, someone in the tenth, someone in the fifteenth and seventeenth, and someone else in the mid-nineteenth - such as modern Italy and Germany, which formed as a single whole in the form we are familiar with just some 150 -170 years ago.

Attempts to link disparate fragments of historical existence, separated from each other for centuries, into a single and unbreakable chain connected by a common self-awareness are nothing more than a projection of modern ideas thrown back into the past. The Romans of Caesar's era and modern Italians, the ancient Achaeans, Cretans and Trojans and modern Greeks, the barbarian Franks of the Clovis era and modern French, the ancient Novgorodians and Vyatichi and modern ones, the Cherkassy of the time of Bohdan Khmelnytsky and modern Ukrainians are by no means the same peoples.

_{To summarize. This is how Ukraine, of course, did not exist in the 17th century. But as a basis for claims against the Ukraine that actually exists now, and builds its policy on aggressive confrontation with the Russian Federation, it is advisable to choose something more significant than its absence on ancient maps. Especially if the same cards, in the same logic, easily and elegantly turn into weapons against Russia itself.}