Ukraine war stems from same root as British Empire nostalgia

From nowhere, over the last year the former talent show contestant has churned out one techno-beat rocky-europoppy patriotic track after another.

His biggest hit so far was even played in full on one of the main newsy-propaganda platforms of state TV.

The message was clear: Dronov, as many Russian artists fled the country, had official Kremlin blessing.

The latest Shaman video, “We”, is jaw-droppingly crude. It follows the singer as he struts and lip-syncs through Red Square, his chin jutted out like a totalitarian bust from last century.

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Dronov’s hair has been dyed what one online wag called “Aryan” yellow and cut in to an 80s quiff. He is wearing a collarless black leather jacket open at the chest to reveal a wooden cross. On his sleeve is an armband in the red, white and blue of the Russian tricolour.

The aesthetic is unmistakable. The lyrics too. “God,” sings Dronov, “is with us.” He talks of eternal blood ties, of a free land and of a nation that will never allow itself to be broken.

“They should have done it in the original German with Russian subtitles,” quipped one of the first commenters on YouTube.

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But Shaman has his fans. His tracks are not just piped through state media. He gets hits on video sharing platforms too. Tens of millions of them.

Are Russians really buying Dronov’s chauvinist war-mongering shtick? Some sure are. Others are definitely not. Or that is the story anonymous Youtube comments tell us.

The new Red Square video – released, as it happens, on Hitler’s birthday – has sparked something of a debate on whether today’s Russia is “Nazi” or not.

I get why we keep having that conversation. Faced with an autocratic and nationalist regime we were bound to reach for references from the only history most of us know.

War in Ukraine (Image: free)

But, for me, Dronov’s popularity helps illustrate a wider question that has been whispered since long before last year’s dramatic military escalation.

Is it Putin's war on Ukraine? Or is it Russia’s?

This might sound like “semantics”. After all, Putin and his regime run Russia, which is not a democracy. So what the Kremlin does is done in the country’s name, whether the people agree or not.

But the distinction is important to the Kremlin’s embattled, persecuted real opposition. They prefer to blame the current conflict on a government, not an entire nation.

Western leaders too have sought to draw a rhetorical line between Putin and those he rules. “Our quarrel,” said US President Joe Biden last year in a remark typical of the genre, “is not with the Russian people.”

Ukrainians too have tried to get Russians to disassociate themselves from the regime, and the war, talking of “Putin’s crimes”.

This tactic of highlighting Putin’s agency rather than Russia’s irritates quite a few people in the rest of what used to be the Soviet Union.

This month a US-based Kazakh academic, Azamat Junisbai, explained why.

“Insistence on the ‘Putin's War’ narrative is misleading since it hides the role of Russian imperial revanchism in the war,” he tweeted, in English. “As long as Russian society continues to view itself as a benevolent power that gifted modernity to societies it once controlled and the collapse of the USSR as a tragedy to be reversed, it will continue to be a menace for its neighbours and peace will remain elusive.”

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Prof Junisbai, a sociologist at California’s Pitzer College, thinks Russians will only come to a reckoning with their history as a colonial power after defeat in Ukraine.

The scholar is not arguing that all Russians are “baddies”. His point is more subtle than that: he is saying Russian society is still weighed down by the baggage of past expansionism. And that, without this burden, there would have been no invasion.

I am not going to be able to do complete justice to the arguments between those who call the war Putin’s and those who say it is Russia’s. Both have reasonable perspectives.

But I would add this: Putin is not just a product of imperialism; he is also its creator. His regime has fed off an aggressive, expansive chauvinism that it has also fuelled. And – crucially – it has persecuted those Russians who have long sought to cast light on difficult history, such as the now banned group Memorial.

Imperialist nostalgia is not just a Russian problem. Here in Scotland, and across the UK, we too still have citizens who struggle to come to terms with the bloody, cruel reality of the British Empire.

We also know how easy it is to manipulate such British patriots. There is an entire industry churning out books full of soothing myths about the crimes of our past.

Putin’s regime – with its control of the media and violent intolerance of dissent – has whipped up lots of ordinary Russians in to a frenzy of confusion, hate and fear, especially over the last year or two.

READ MORE: Is Vladimir Putin really trying to resurrect the old Soviet Union?

Have all Russians – to use local jargon– been “zombified”? Is the entire nation in thrall to fake or mythologised history and hyperbolic nationalism?

Of course not. Only this month one prominent politician, the courageous Vladimir Kara-Murza, was locked up for 25 years for challenging the war.

Some big culture figures have railed against the "special military operation". One is 74-year-old megastar Alla Pugacheva, now living in exile with her dissident comedian husband, Maxim Galkin.

It was this prima donna of Soviet pop who a decade ago jettisoned Dronov from Russia’s answer to X Factor. She had been quite supportive of the wannabe, who insisted viewers had not heard the last of him.

Shaman may well be the voice of this war. But he does not sing for all of Russia. Nobody does.