Putin loves to evoke the family to describe the relationship between our countries. But we have always known our identities are quite distinct
Recently, as someone born in Belarus who has lived in Russia, I have often been asked the same question: why did Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, nations so closely related to each other, develop in such different ways? My answer is very simple: this closeness has been greatly exaggerated by Moscow, and in fact we are all quite different.
I am the last Soviet first-former. My parents took me to school on 1 September 1991, just a few days after the empire essentially disappeared. My father filmed that day’s events with a camcorder, and today we have in our family archive a quite remarkable document: in the video schoolchildren and their parents listen to the teacher’s introduction, getting ready for a new, ordinary Soviet school year, still completely unaware of the fact that the Soviet Union is no more. They are now citizens of a new country, one which will have to start everything from scratch and fight for its own independence, struggling every day to break free from the Kremlin’s clutches.
