Alfyorov meant to flatter Ukraine - what he actually handed Moscow was an amnesty

Alfyorov says something that sounds patriotic on first hearing and is, in substance, pure capitulation to imperial logic. May 2024, an audience, the confident tone of a man paying a nation a compliment. "The creation of Muscovy was a vital necessity for the Ukrainians of the Middle Ages." "The colonization of their lands gave us the chance to become Ukraine." "We were an empire, we digested our nearest neighbors, and that is precisely why we are the largest state in Europe." It sounds like praise. Take it apart bone by bone and it turns out to be an amnesty - issued to someone other than us.

The first sleight of hand. "The colonization of their lands gave us the chance to become Ukraine." This is the standard formula for justifying the Muscovite empire as such. The very same construction with which Moscow rationalizes its "gathering of the lands," with which Rome justified the Pax Romana, with which Britain dressed up the "white man's burden." Alfyorov merely swapped "us" in for "them" and decided the substance changed with the pronoun. It did not. A formula is not laundered by inserting your own people into it. It drags along the entire logic in which the strong have the right to milk the weak.

The second sleight of hand, and a cruder one. He confuses Rus-as-a-trading-system with Ukraine-as-a-country. Rus did not "become" Ukraine. Rus ran the full Arrighian cycle and died - as Genoa, the Netherlands, and Britain died in their roles as hegemons. There was a trade phase in the ninth and tenth centuries: the polyudye, control of the route "from the Varangians to the Greeks," tribute in furs, honey, and slaves. There was a financial phase at the close of the tenth and into the eleventh century: the minting of its own coin, the Lavra as an accumulator of capital, the Rus Justice (Ruska Pravda) as the institutionalization of credit. And there was a terminal crisis in the twelfth century: the internecine wars, the sacking of Kyiv by Bogolyubsky in 1169, the Council of Liubech in 1097 as the legal formalization of the breakup. Capital fled north - to Novgorod, Suzdal, Vladimir - before the Mongols ever arrived. The Mongols merely finished the job.

Ukraine is not the heir of imperial Rus. Ukraine grew from the same soil but as a fundamentally different construction: through Lithuania, through the Cossack republican tradition, through an anti-imperial, bottom-up political experience. Alfyorov assigns modern Ukraine an imperial biography that ended half a millennium before the word "Ukraine" even existed.

And here it is worth pausing on the example that puts everything in its place. Rome died as a political system. Modern Italy arose in 1861 on the same peninsula, with the same Latin at the base of its language - yet it is a fundamentally different construction, not a "continuation of the empire." And, crucially, it was not the Italians who carried off Rome's imperial inheritance. Outside claimants dragged it away. Byzantium declared itself the "New Rome," its inhabitants "Romans" (Rhomaioi), its state Romaic. The Holy Roman Empire pasted the name onto German soil. And Moscow went so far as to proclaim the "Third Rome." The name and the claim went one way, while the actual territory with its people stayed behind and turned into something new and non-imperial - into Italy. This is structurally the same scheme as Kyiv-Rus versus Moscow: the original center expires, its name and its "birthright" are seized by pretender-heirs elsewhere, and the land itself becomes a different political nature. The formula is clean: Rome is to Italy as Rus is to Ukraine. In this logic Alfyorov is a man who has mistaken Italy for Rome and is explaining to Italians that they "were an empire that civilized the barbarians, and that is why they exist."

The third sleight of hand. "To become an empire we had to take resources from the conquered, build fortresses, drain them dry." He is describing the precise mechanics of peripheralization à la Wallerstein - the core drains the periphery - and presenting it as the very condition of Ukrainian existence. He is, in plain terms, legitimizing the "core - buffer - periphery" model, the very one in which Ukraine is held in the role of periphery today. A man who explains why "draining resources from the conquered" was good and necessary forfeits any moral instrument with which to condemn what is being done to Ukraine itself right now. He has sawed off the branch on which the entire decolonial argument rests.

The fourth sleight of hand, the subtlest. "Without the creation of Muscovy there would have been no Ukraine." This is fatalistic teleology: everything that happened had to happen, because it led to "us." But Muscovy was no Ukrainian project and no by-product of Ukrainian greatness. Muscovy was a Horde fiscal agent: a town that rose because it sat on the new Volga route and because Kalita became the collector of tribute for the Horde from all the Zalesian and Rus lands. It is a parasitic cycle that grew out of Kyiv's terminal crisis - exactly as Constantinople grew out of devouring old Rome. Muscovy arose not "for the Ukrainians" but against them. To say it was "a vital necessity for the Ukrainians of the Middle Ages" is to say that a tumor is a vital necessity for the body because it mobilizes the immune system.

Where do all of Alfyorov's errors come from? From a substitution of the frame. He thinks territorially: a large state equals success, borders equal valor, colonization equals development. This is the imperial optic, in which size equals righteousness. The world-systems approach poses a different question: not "which empire was bigger" but "who was the beneficiary and at whose expense." And the moment you pose that question, the romance of "we were an empire, and it was glorious" falls apart. Because behind every empire stands a periphery that was drained dry. This is not a Ukrainian position. It is the position of those who colonized and destroyed Ukraine.

And here is where Alfyorov's thesis turns from an academic error into something far more dangerous. Italy has already sat this lesson - in full, to the bottom. Whoever persuades an entire generation that "we were a great empire that civilized the world, and that is what made us who we are" raises not patriots but a Mussolini. The fasces in the very word fascism, the "Mare Nostrum," the dream of restoring the Roman Empire - all of it grew out of precisely the tone in which Alfyorov explains to Ukrainians what magnificent colonizers we once were. It cost the Italians millions of corpses and a national catastrophe to grasp a simple thing: the romanticization of an imperial past is not pride, it is an incubator of revanchism.

So why does Ukraine need a Mussolini of its own? The question is not rhetorical. Because at this very second Ukraine is bleeding under a state that is the literal, chemically pure embodiment of that optic. Rashism is the terminal stage of the reasoning "we are a great empire, we gathered the lands, we brought order to the savages, and therefore we have the right." Moscow invented nothing new. It simply carried to its logical conclusion the very thesis Alfyorov offers Ukrainians as a compliment. And here the most grotesque thing imaginable occurs: a country under fascist invasion is, through its own historian, nurturing the very germ of the thinking that breeds that invasion. It is like inoculating yourself with the strain of the disease that is killing you right now.

Ukraine has a unique opportunity, paid for at the dearest possible price, to understand from the inside how imperial teleology ends - because that teleology is shelling our cities as we speak. Italy understood its lesson once it lay in ruins. Ukraine has no right to repeat that route - not because we are purer, but because we are the same living land being milked according to the old imperial template, and there will simply be nowhere left for us to fall a second time.

In effect, Alfyorov meant to pay Ukraine a compliment and ended up handing Moscow an absolution. He took the universal formula for justifying conquest and wrote a Ukrainian subject into it, never noticing that the formula is not cleansed by the substitution. Ukraine was not an empire. Ukraine is what survived after the imperial cycle of Rus had run its course, and what then built itself anew on a fundamentally different, non-imperial foundation. That is precisely its historical difference from Moscow. And it is precisely that difference Alfyorov erased in a single careless monologue - standing on the very fork where Italy once turned the wrong way.