Invasion of Ukraine A Systems Perspective

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Ukraine History

Started: 04/23/23 Updates: 05/01/23, 05/02/23, 05/03/23, 05/04/23, 05/05/23, 05/06/23, 05/11/23, 05/14/23, 05/15/23, 05/24/2023, 05/25/23

Capturing 1000+ years of the history of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people is very difficult. It requires years of education that happens to children and young adults in Ukraine. However, we are in the middle of a horrible war and the people of the world need some understanding of the history of Ukraine and its' people. I am disappointed that the world media has not produced various movies about the 1000+ year history of Ukraine. I hope this is not because of the influence of Russian propaganda since the end of World War II.

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Maps of Ukraine and Russian Federation

The maps of Ukraine and the Russian Federation are provided for context. The map of Ukraine shows the borders defined in their constitution and they were supposed to be guaranteed when Ukraine gave away their nuclear weapons and essentially demilitarized between 1994 and 1996. In 2014 Russia invaded and annexed the Autonomous Republic of Crimea because of newly found gas and oil reserves 2014 War Background. They annexed other areas of Ukraine to establish a land bridge to the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. This war is about gas, oil, and empire.

Map of Ukraine - Nation State

Ukraine 24 Oblasts and Autonomous Republic of Crimea

See sections Territorial Structure of Ukraine and Maps Of Ukrainian Lands.

Central Region (Northern Region)
  1. Cherkasy Oblast
  2. Chernihiv Oblast
  3. Kirovohrad Oblast
  4. Kyiv Oblast
  5. Poltava Oblast
  6. Sumy Oblast
  7. Vinnytsia Oblast
  8. Zhytomyr Oblast

Southern Region

  1. Dnipropetrovsk Oblast
  2. Kherson Oblast
  3. Mykolayiv Oblast
  4. Odesa Oblast
  5. Zaporizhia Oblast
  6. Autonomous Republic of Crimea

Eastern Region
  1. Donetsk Oblast
  2. Kharkiv Oblast
  3. Luhansk Oblast

Western Region

  1. Chernivtsi Oblast
  2. Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast
  3. Khmelnytskyi Oblast
  4. Lviv Oblast
  5. Rivne Oblast
  6. Ternopil Oblast
  7. Volyn Oblast
  8. Zakarpattia Oblast

Map of Russian Federation - Empire

Russia - Republics

Russia - Republics

  1. Adygea
  2. Altai
  3. Bashkortostan
  4. Buryatia
  5. Dagestan
  6. Ingushetia
  7. Kabardino-Balkaria
  8. Kalmykia
  9. Karachay-Cherkessia
  10. Karelia
  11. Komi
  12. Mari El
  13. Mordovia
  14. Sakha
  15. North Ossetia-Alania
  16. Tatarstan
  17. Tuva
  18. Udmurtia
  19. Khakassia
  20. Chechnya
  21. Chuvashia

Russia - Oblasts

Russia - Oblasts

  1. Amur Oblast
  2. Arkhangelsk Oblast
  3. Astrakhan Oblast
  4. Belgorod Oblast
  5. Bryansk Oblast
  6. Chelyabinsk Oblast
  7. Irkutsk Oblast
  8. Ivanovo Oblast
  9. Kaliningrad Oblast
  10. Kaluga Oblast
  11. Kemerovo Oblast
  12. Kirov Oblast
  13. Kostroma Oblast
  14. Kurgan Oblast
  15. Kursk Oblast
  16. Leningrad Oblast
  17. Lipetsk Oblast
  18. Magadan Oblast
  19. Moscow Oblast
  20. Murmansk Oblast
  21. Nizhny Novgorod Oblast
  22. Novgorod Oblast
  23. Novosibirsk Oblast
  24. Omsk Oblast
  25. Orenburg Oblast
  26. Oryol Oblast
  27. Penza Oblast
  28. Pskov Oblast
  29. Rostov Oblast
  30. Ryazan Oblast
  31. Sakhalin Oblast
  32. Samara Oblast
  33. Saratov Oblast
  34. Smolensk Oblast
  35. Sverdlovsk Oblast
  36. Tambov Oblast
  37. Tomsk Oblast
  38. Tver Oblast
  39. Tula Oblast
  40. Tyumen Oblast
  41. Ulyanovsk Oblast
  42. Vladimir Oblast
  43. Volgograd Oblast
  44. Vologda Oblast
  45. Voronezh Oblast
  46. Yaroslavl Oblast

Russia - Territories

Russia - Territories

  1. Altai Krai
  2. Kamchatka Krai
  3. Khabarovsk Krai
  4. Krasnodar Krai
  5. Krasnoyarsk Krai
  6. Perm Krai
  7. Primorsky Krai
  8. Stavropol Krai
  9. Zabaykalsky Krai

Note that Russia is called the Russian Federation. That is a critical element in understanding because what we in the USA call Russia is not a nation state but Russia with a collection of republics. This is key to providing insight into the Russian peoples mental model of themselves and how they relate to the world. Federations are based on the consent of states whereas empires are based on force and conquest, where the center dominates. Empire allows more diversity but a federation requires more homogeneity between its member states. A federation can be an empire and an empire can be in the form of a federation.

Systems Assessment: The reality is that Russians may call themselves a federation but in terms of actual behavior they are an empire. They use extreme force to maintain and now grow the empire. If this sounds all too familiar, it should. This is the story of Star Wars the first 3 movie installments. This reference is not meant to trivialize what is happening. To the contrary this is meant to sensitize the people of the world to what has been been happening with the Russian Empire (Federation).

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Key Historical Observations

This section starts with key observations grouped by theme areas associated with this systems assessment. This is based on a Yale Course - The Making of Modern Ukraine [2], The Kyiv Independent - Ukraine's True History [2] and or other areas on this website [5].

How to View The Russian Ukrainian War

Decolonization After World War II

Ukraine and Ukrainian People Through the Centuries and the Empires

Succession Problems

Before Kievan Rus' (before 882) [2]

Kievan Rus' [2]

Mongol Invasion [2]

Muscovite

Significant European Empire Impacts

When do Ukrainians Claim Ukraine Started and the Russian Empire Started

World Wars I and II Impact

Russia Attacks Ukraine in 2014 [4]

Russia Attacks Ukraine in 2022 [2]

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Key Observations About Russian Empire

Feudalism: The dominant social system in medieval Europe, in which the Nobility held lands from the Monarch (Crown) in exchange for military service, and vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles, while the peasants (villeins or Serfs) were obliged to live on their lord's land and give him homage, labor, and a share of the produce, in exchange for military protection. 9th - 15th century to 1790s  in France.

Autocracy: A form of government in which absolute power over a state is concentrated in the hands of one person, whose decisions are subject neither to external legal restraints nor to mechanisms of popular control (except perhaps for the implicit threat of a coup detat or other forms of rebellion). 1500 - 1850s. In earlier times, the term autocrat was coined as a favorable description of a ruler, having some connection to the concept of - lack of conflicts of interests - as well as an indication of grandeur and power. This use of the term continued into modern times, as the Russian emperor was styled - Autocrat of all the Russias - as late as the early 20th century. In the 19th century, Eastern and Central Europe were under autocratic monarchies within the territories of which lived diverse peoples.

Democracy: A system of government in which the people have the authority to deliberate and decide legislation (direct democracy), or to choose governing officials to do so (representative democracy). Who is considered part of the people and how authority is shared among or delegated by the people has increased from the concept of nobility or land owners to all the people all the time at different rates in different countries. Features of democracy include freedom of assembly, association, property rights, freedom of religion and speech, citizenship, consent of the governed, voting rights, freedom from unwarranted governmental deprivation of the right to life and liberty, and minority rights.

The following table shows the social categories and the key differences between the various empires and centuries. The key observation is that Europe eventually abandoned absolute rule from a single monarch while Russia did not abandon the approach of absolute rule.

Social
Categories

Pagans
pre 882

Kievan Rus'
882 - 1240

Muscovite Russia /
Russian Empire
1147 - 1917

Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth /
Poland (Re Publica)
1569 - 1918

Zaporozhian Cossacks
1492 - 1648 to present

Monarch Warlord Monarch: selects the nobles Monarch: selects the nobles Republic, Nobles select the monarch Military: Democracy
Noble Military Nobles: Military own the land Nobles: Military own the land Nobles: (Inheritance) own the land Noble: free men
Serf Slaves Serf: Bound to the land and work the land Serf: Bound to the land and work the land Serf: Bound to the land and work the land Former Serf: free men
Peasant Slaves Peasant: Rent the land and work the land Peasant: Rent the land and work the land Peasant: Rent the land and work the land Former Peasant: free men
Merchant Merchants trade Merchant: Rent from the nobles Merchant: Rent from the nobles Merchant: Rent from the nobles Former Merchant: free men

As Russia transitioned from the Russian Empire to the Soviet Union, the basic approach to power and government did not change, only the names changed. Those inside the Russian system that were oppressed by the Russian system post 1917 did not refer to Russia or the Soviet Union, they called it Communist Russia or just Communism with the implication that the source is Russia. The Communists behaved just like the previous century monarchs (now communist dictators) and nobles (now party leaders). Russia engaged in a massive propaganda campaign when they used the term Soviet Union. It was a way to deal with the masses so that they did not know that the monarch and noble system was still in place. The difference was in name only. The monarch was replaced by the dictator and the nobles were replaced with party leaders that were extreme supporters of communism. By the 1980's the masses within the Russian empire started to see through the propaganda and the system collapsed. The old despotic system momentarily disappeared but soon a new story was developed to reestablish the old system once again based on capitalism, a dictator, and oligarchs. The names changed but the system is the same - Despotic.

Muscovite Russia /
Russian Empire
1147 - 1917

Communist Russian Empire
1917 - 1991

Capitalist Russian Empire
Circa 2014 - present

Monarch: selects the nobles Dictators: Party Leaders select the dictator Dictator: Putin
Nobles: Military own the land Party Leaders: extreme supporters of communism Oligarchs: pay protection money to dictator
Serf: Bound to the land and work the land People: bound to the factory or land People: workers
Peasant: Rent the land and work the land
Merchant: Rent from the nobles

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Systems Assessment Of The Russian War Against Ukraine

A key observation is that Capitalism does NOT lead to Democracy and freedom. A 1000+ year old system can coexist with Capitalism. Another key observation is that Capitalism and massive trade between countries does not stop wars of aggression. The only thing that stops wars of aggression is the Democratic system that replaces its leaders every few years before they can consolidate massive power using the old techniques of corruption, terror, and despotism.

We in the United States of America view things from our perspective like all other people. Our perspective of country and a nation state is the USA, which is only a few hundred years old. Ukraine and the Ukrainian people are over one thousand years old. They have survived all the struggles of Europe. The history of Europe is embodied in Ukraine.

What happens in what we consider Europe is amplified in Ukraine and that is why Ukraine is European. They pass through the same struggles and phases. Russia comes from the city of Muscovite, which came hundreds of years after the Ukrainian start. Russian propaganda after World War II claimed that Russia started with Kievan Rus' but that is incorrect. There is a huge split that happened between Ukraine and what would eventually become Russia in a few centuries because of the Mongol invasion. The people in the city of Muscovite were under the Mongol rule for centuries and that is not the case for the cities that were and are part of Ukraine and Poland. This had a profound affect on Russia, it is still deeply suffering from this affect, and can be pointed to as one of the possible reasons for their horrific invasion of Ukraine. In many ways the sad truth is that the Russians are the lost tribe of Ukraine and they need to come home in peace and reject their urges for empire, subjugation, and despotism. This is the challenge for the Russian intellectuals in this century. The idea of inland empires and empires in general failed 100 years ago.

History is moved by cause and effect. At some point when people are oppressed beyond some tolerance level they rebel. They remove despotic rulers. They remove puppet rulers. They fight back when they are attacked. This is where we are with Ukraine in 2023. While Russia wants Ukraine to surrender and accept Russian rule, Ukrainians are fighting for their survival as a people and as a nation state.

History is written by the victors - Winston Churchill. However, that ignores time and the fact that we live in a world that is a natural system. Like all systems our natural system corrects to always achieve stability. The temporary despotic victors may offer a false history but eventually, as the natural system self corrects, the truth or true history will surface. The natural system is based on freedom and liberty not subjugation and despotism.

Cause and Effect Scenarios

We study history and apply the systems perspective in an attempt to develop different scenarios and possible outcomes. These systems models are based on cause and effect and they set policy. This is constantly performed by nations and empires in peace time, before wars or revolutions, during wars or revolutions, after wars or revolutions, and when peace returns. However, everyone knows that history is unpredictable. For example, no one predicted that the new generation in Ukraine would demand to join the EU, remove the Russian puppet leaders, and fight the Russians. Is it because those tasked with this analysis did not know the full history of Ukraine? No, they knew the full history of Ukraine, they just miscalculated the effect of the Russian empire on the Ukrainian people in the 21st century. People are unpredictable and once the people rise up nothing can stop them, even extreme force.

Currently Ukraine is fighting a defensive war. NATO and the US has told Ukraine in no uncertain terms that they should not use NATO weapons on Russian territory. The strategy is based on the scenario that the Russian people, if they suffer enough economic hardship and war casualties, they will replace their current rulers and the new rulers will stop the war against Ukraine. This policy attempts to preserve Russia and allow it to eventually re-enter the world in peace.

In the US there is a vocal movement from the Republican party to potentially walk away from this war. The negative implications are enormous but more for the US than for Ukraine. Ukraine has shown that it does not need the US because its people have decided to fight. They will fight without the US and they will fight without NATO because they have done this multiple times in their 1000+ year history. In the US the implications are withdraw from NATO followed by cuts in the defense budget. Russia is emboldened to continue its empire expansion that Putin has repeatedly disclosed. This puts Europe and NATO on alert for more aggression to come from Russia.

In the unlikely scenario of the US walking away from this war, Ukraine no longer has any incentive to fight a defensive war. A possible scenario is that Ukraine may launch an offensive war and target Moscow directly using massive numbers of troops that capture Russian equipment and Russian soldier sympathizers as they march on Moscow. This scenario of a Ukrainian offensive is known by everyone. That is why Russia keeps making the Nuclear Threat. The current Russian power structure knows that if Ukraine launched an offensive war based on sheer numbers of loyal troops they just might win the war not only in Ukraine but in Russia and change the current nature of Russia.

Keep in mind that this war started because gas and oil was found in Crimea. Ukraine was 1 year away from being independent from Russian gas and oil. Exxon was involved in developing the Russian oil fields in Russia (not Crimea) but walked away empty handed when the oil project was unilaterally terminated in October 2022 after President Vladimir Putin expropriated its properties valued at approximately $4 billion dollars. [6] Royal Dutch Shell plc and Exxon Mobil Corp. were chosen in August 2012 by the Ukrainian government to lead the development of the Skifska (Crimean gas and oil), with exploration due to begin in 2015. On February 20, 2014 Russia invaded Crimea and on March 18, 2014 it annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine. Shell pulled out of talks about developing Skifska in January 2014 and Exxon Mobil said in early March 2014 it was putting its involvement in the project on hold. [7]

This is all terrifying for all involved but it must be disclosed so that we do not wake up one day to find a very broken world.

References:

[1] Ukraine's True History, Transcript and Video, Kyiv Independent funded by Institute for War and Peace Reporting within the program Ukraine Forward: Amplifying Analysis, program is financed by the MATRA Programme of the Embassy of the Netherlands in Ukraine, May 2023. webpage https://kyivindependent.com . https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=3DPLmOj0Ur_xinSqXya8tNipG1lnrbDYTMBU  Accessed May, 2023.

[2] The Making of Modern Ukraine, Transcript and Video, Yale University, Timothy Snyder, September 03, 2022. webpage https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_ Accessed May, 2023.

[3] The Vikings: The Rise and The Fall, National Geographic, June 23, 2022. webpage https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15518830 Accessed May, 2023.

[4] See section  2014 War Background.

[5] See section Ukraine History.

[6] Reuters, Exclusive: Exxon exits Russia empty-handed with oil project 'unilaterally terminated', October 12, 2022. webpage https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exclusive-exxon-exits-russia-empty-handed-with-oil-project-unilaterally-2022-10-17 Accessed May, 2023.

[7] Crimea: the Oil and Gas Story, Rigzone, April 14, 2014. webpage https://www.rigzone.com/news/oil_gas/a/132554/crimea_the_oil_and_gas_story/?pgNum=1 Accessed May, 2023.

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Kyiv Independent History of Ukraine - Ukraine's True History

A new series on the history of Ukraine has been started by the Kyiv Independent. The series is funded by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting within the program: Ukraine Forward: Amplifying Analysis. The program is financed by the MATRA Programme of the Embassy of the Netherlands in Ukraine. The links are on the Kyiv Independent website and YouTube.

Editor's Note: This is episode 1 of "Ukraine's True History," a video and story series by the Kyiv Independent. The series is funded by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting within the program Ukraine Forward: Amplifying Analysis. The program is financed by the MATRA Programme of the Embassy of the Netherlands in Ukraine. Subscribe to the series' newsletter here.

Videos

  1. https://kyivindependent.com/10-popular-misconceptions-about-ukrainian-history-debunked
  2. https://kyivindependent.com/russias-centuries-long-quest-to-conquer-ukraine
  3. https://kyivindependent.com/how-russia-has-attempted-to-erase-ukrainian-language-culture-throughout-centuries
  4. https://kyivindependent.com/who-does-crimea-really-belong-to
  5. https://kyivindependent.com/how-russia-steals-and-rewrites-ukrainian-history-to-justify-its-claims-in-ukraine
  6. https://kyivindependent.com/ukraines-true-history-how-nationalist-movements-paved-ukraines-way-to-freedom

Transcripts

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  1. 10 popular misconceptions about Ukrainian history
  2. Russia's centuries-long quest to conquer Ukraine
  3. How Russia has attempted to erase Ukrainian language, culture throughout centuries
  4. Who does Crimea really belong to?
  5. How Russia steals and rewrites Ukrainian history to justify its claims in Ukraine
  6. How nationalist movements paved Ukraine's way to freedom

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10 popular misconceptions about Ukrainian history

by Asami Terajima and Iryna Matviyishyn April 11, 2023 11:30 PM 14 min read

Editor's Note: This is episode 2 of "Ukraine's True History," a video and story series by the Kyiv Independent. The series is funded by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting within the program Ukraine Forward: Amplifying Analysis. The program is financed by the MATRA Programme of the Embassy of the Netherlands in Ukraine.

[SOURCE]
https://kyivindependent.com/10-popular-misconceptions-about-ukrainian-history-debunked

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=3DPLmOj0Ur_xinSqXya8tNipG1lnrbDYTMBU

Ukraine through its long and turbulent history gained independence in 1991. The country's long history before and after independence has seen Ukrainians enduring wars, revolutions, occupations, and a fraught relationship with its neighbor, Russia. Understanding Ukraine's origins becomes even more complex as Russia has been on a centuries-long quest to distort Ukrainian history in an attempt to justify its brutal invasions. While most of the Kremlin's disinformation campaign is dismissed by Ukraine, the West, and many around the world, the wide net that Russia's false narratives have cast globally have allowed historical misconceptions to arise. The Kyiv Independent has put together 10 common historical misconceptions about Ukraine that can still be commonly heard today.

Myth 1: Crimea has 'always been Russian'

According to this myth, Crimea has always been Russian, and by annexing the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, Russia was correcting a historical mistake. Despite Russia's claim that Crimea has "always been Russian," the majority Muslim indigenous population of Crimea, Crimean Tatars, settled in the peninsula centuries before the Russian Empire conquered it in the 18th century. After violating a peace treaty with the Ottomans in 1783, the Russian Empire illegally annexed Crimea for the first time. Russia ruled the peninsula for around 150 years until the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917.

This graphic shows how Crimean Tatars dominated the population of Crimea, a Black Sea peninsula currently occupied by Russia, in the 1760-1770s. (Screenshot)

During the Soviet Union, the Crimean Tatar population in Crimea faced repressions, persecution, and deportations. Ukraine estimates that over 230,000 people were deported starting in 1944, mostly to Uzbekistan. The deportation of the Crimean Tatars, in which over 100,000 people perished as a result of starvation and disease, is recognized as genocide by Ukraine and several other countries. It was only in the mid-20th century, following the ethnic cleansing of the Crimean population, that ethnic Russians became the majority in Crimea. The Turkic indigenous population became a minority due to the forced resettlement of Russians into the area and the suppression and assimilation of the local culture and language. In 1954, the Soviet authorities transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (modern-day Ukraine). The Soviet authorities listed "the commonality of the economy, territorial proximity, and close economic and cultural ties between the Crimean region and the Ukrainian SSR" as the reasons. However, the circumstances of the transfer are still a topic of debate today. One theory suggests that then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev may have transferred the peninsula to mark the 300th anniversary of the Pereiaslav Agreement, which Russia frames as a treaty of union between Russia and Ukraine. Another theory states that Crimea was transferred from Moscow to Kyiv because the peninsula, now emptied of its indigenous population, had become severely depopulated and economically stagnant. Soon after the transfer, Ukraine's Soviet Socialist Republic was tasked with constructing the North Crimean Canal, which connected the Dnipro River with the dry peninsula. After launching its war against Ukraine in 2014, the Kremlin has attempted to legitimize the annexation of Crimea with Russian propaganda claiming that it was taking back the peninsula that it had given as "a gift" to Ukraine. But as the facts show, Russia only controlled the peninsula for a fraction of its history. "Less than 6% of Crimea's written history (from the 9th century BC to date) belongs to the Russian chapter," Orysia Lutsevych, a research fellow at Chatham House, said.

Russia's annexation of Crimea

Myth 2: Ukrainians, Russians are 'brotherly people'

In a comment that immediately caused a backlash from Kyiv, French President Emmanuel Macron said in April 2022, just over a month after the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, that Ukrainians and Russians were "brotherly people." As such, Macron didn't see the term "genocide" as an appropriate term to describe Russia's actions in Ukraine. Macron's statement showed the wide reach of the Kremlin's propaganda as Russia continues to use its imperialist narrative to assert that Ukraine is part of a larger so-called Russian world. This screenshot from the video shows how the development of Ukrainian and Russian people from the 13th century took different paths. Ukraine has been defied by its Zaporizhzhian Cossaks (15th-18th centuries) path, while Russia has continuously opted for autocracy. While Ukraine and Russia share some linguistic proximity and can both trace their history back to Kyivan Rus, a loose confederation of East Slavic proto-states, it is historically incorrect to assume they are from one nation. After the fall of Kyivan Rus, destroyed in the mid-13th century by a successful Mongol invasion, Ukraine and Russia spent over 400 years apart developing major linguistic, cultural, and political differences. Most of modern-day Ukraine fell to the Russian Empire in the 18th century and was later forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in the 20th century. Russia spent those 300 years or so suppressing the Ukrainian language and culture, crushing numerous attempts by Ukraine to break free. Russia uses a twisted interpretation of the historical ties between Ukrainians and Russians to propagate the idea that Ukraine is an appendage to Russia. But while Ukrainians and Russians evolved from similar origins, their culture, language, and history have always been distinct.

(From left to right on the top) Ukrainian writer and poets Vasyl Stus, Ivan Franko, Taras Shevchenko, and Lesia Ukrainka, as well as (on the bottom) Ivan Bahrianyi and Hryhoryi Skovoroda are shown on the graphic. (screenshot)

Myth 3: Ukrainian culture is undeveloped

In the days leading up to the February 2022 full-scale invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed in his infamous speech that Ukraine was not a "real" country, describing it as a fiction created by Russia. Russia has long tried to spread the false narrative that Ukrainian culture is undeveloped and has claimed well-known Ukrainian figures such as writer Mykola Gogol and avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich as their own. As part of that imperial propaganda, Russia often portrays Ukrainian culture as poor and provincial. The narrative that it was Russia who brought culture to Ukraine is another common myth used by the Kremlin. No matter what Russia claims, Ukraine holds a rich cultural legacy. Ukrainian 19th-century poets Taras Shevchenko and Lesia Ukrainka, and writer Ivan Franko are well-known in Ukraine and abroad. In the early 20th century, Ukraine saw another cultural revival, with writers Mykola Khvylovy, Valerian Pidmohylny, movie director Les Kurbas, painters Mykhailo Boychuk and Ivan Padalka, and many more, creating works cherished by Ukrainians today. They have been known as the Executed Renaissance, as most of them were shot by the Soviet regime during the Great Terror in Sandarmokh. Oleksandr Dovzhenko, who was able to survive the Great Terror, was recognized internationally, even under the eyes of the brutal Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Known as the father of Ukrainian cinema, his work inspired a 1960s movement known as "poetic cinema," which left a mark on the industry for decades to come.

A photo of Ukrainian children who suffered from the Holodomor famine in 1932-1933. (National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide)

Myth 4: Holodomor was caused by poor harvests

Holodomor, a man-made famine created by the Soviet government of Joseph Stalin, killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932-1933. Most estimates say the death toll was nearly 4 million, but some scholars say it may have been higher as much as 10.5 million. Holodomor, which combines two Ukrainian words that together mean "death inflicted by starvation," also affected Kazakhstan, parts of Russia, and the North Caucasus but Ukraine, despite being known for its nutrient-dense black soil, was hit the worst. The Stalin-led government confiscated property from Ukrainians, most of whom were small-scale farmers, and forced them to work on collective agricultural lands as part of collectivization. The more affluent farmers, known as kulaks or kurkuls, were targeted during this period in order to speed up the expropriation of farmland and were often "declared enemies of the state who deserved to be eliminated as a class. Thousands were thrown out of their homes and deported, according to the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC). In 1932, the Soviet authorities demanded Ukrainian villages produce impossibly high quotas, and when the goal couldn't be reached, they confiscated the rest of the food products, including meat, potatoes, and even seeds. The Soviet police and military searched through homes, and a newly-issued decree forbade starving Ukrainian farmers from fleeing their regions to search for food, according to HREC. Though the horrific scale of the famine has been confirmed by eyewitnesses, documents, archival photos, and diaries, the Kremlin claims that the consequences of Holodomor are exaggerated.

Amid war, Ukraine commemorates victims of another tragedy: Holodomor (PHOTOS)

Supporters of this myth claim that the famine happened by coincidence, blaming unusual weather conditions that led to poor harvests or accusing Ukrainian villagers of sabotage. Many historians say Holodomor was a genocide led by Stalin in part to erase Ukrainian national identity. Nearly a century afterward, 26 countries, as well as the European Parliament, officially recognized Holodomor as genocide. This graphic shows the scale of the losses that Ukrainian soldiers fighting in the Soviet army suffered in contrast with the casualties from other countries. (screenshot)

Myth 5: Russians liberated Europe from Nazis

The myth has it that the Soviet Union undertook a key role in defeating Nazi Germany and "liberating" European countries from their German occupiers. Russians equate themselves to the "Soviet liberator," decreasing other nations' role in the fight while also denying the Soviet Union's role in the suppression of the peoples they "freed from Nazism." Russia has recently intensified its censorship to enforce this narrative. In April 2022, the Russian parliament adopted a law banning citizens from denying "the decisive role of the Soviet people in the defeat of Nazi Germany, as well as the humanitarian mission of the USSR in the liberation of European countries. While Russian propagandists continue to claim that the Soviet army was the "liberator" instead of an occupier who came to battle Nazism, it was the Nazi-Soviet Pact that divided Europe between the two, enabling Nazi Germany to start World War II. With the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed days before World War II in 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland 17 days apart. The Soviet Union also fought a brutal war against Finland and occupied Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as parts of Poland and Romania in 1939-1940. After being attacked by Nazi Germany in 1941, the Soviet Union, along with the Allied forces including the U.S. and the U.K. defeated the Nazis and ended the war in Europe. While the Soviet army consisted of around six million Ukrainian soldiers, modern Russia has tried to frame it as its own personal victory. And even though the Nazis were expelled from Europe, the Soviet Union installed and maintained puppet regimes in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, suppressing public dissent by brute force. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky honors the victims of the Holocaust killed in Babyn Yar, among the deadliest single massacre of Jews in World War Two, in Kyiv on Sept. 29, 2022. (Ukrainian President's Office)

Myth 6: Ukrainian nationalists are 'Nazis'

Labeling enemies as Nazis has been a common practice in Russia, which has sought to build up hatred towards Ukraine to justify its brutal full-scale invasion. The Kremlin's groundless narrative about Nazism in Ukraine is dismissed as totally absurd. Ukraine is led by a Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who has said he has family members who were killed during World War II. The country is believed to have been home to one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe, with estimates as high as 2.7 million, before World War II. A 2018 Pew Research Center research showed that only 5% of Ukrainians said they are not willing to accept Jews citizens of their country, the lowest number among all countries in Eastern and Central Europe. When the February 2022 invasion began, about 350,000 Jews lived in Ukraine, according to Chabad, one of the world's largest Jewish organizations worldwide. In addition, far-right extremist groups have no representation in politics in modern Ukraine, unlike in other countries, where there has been a resurgence of the far-right, especially across Europe.

This graphic shows the results of a 2018 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center on the percentage of adults who would not be willing to accept Jews as citizens of their country. (screenshot)

Myth 7: Moscow is the rightful successor of Kyivan Rus

Kyivan Rus, the first East Slavic state that arose in the 9th century. It covered territories of modern-day Ukraine, Belarus, and some of Russia. However, none of these nations existed as such at that time. Kyiv was the capital of the rapidly rising state, which during the 10-11th centuries became the largest in Europe until the Mongols conquered it in the 13th century. Despite Kyiv's dominance at the time, Russian historians and officials have claimed that Moscow is the legitimate successor of Kyivan Rus, with some claiming that the capital was moved first to Vladimir and then to Moscow. No capital was ever moved. Kyiv remained the most important city of Kyivan Rus until the state was ruined by the Mongols in 1240. Some of the historical heritage of Kyivan Rus is preserved in Kyiv today, such as the St. Sophia's Cathedral and the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra.

Protestors hold up a long Ukrainian flag to show their support for Ukraine's integrity in the southern port city of Odesa on Feb. 21, 2022. (Oleksandr Gimanov/AFP via Getty Images)

Myth 8: Ukraine is a divided country: Nationalistic west vs. pro-Russian east

Despite many Ukrainians being bilingual in Ukrainian and Russian, the myth about a hard divide between a Ukrophone west pitted against Russophone east of the country has spread dangerously far. When invading Ukraine, the Russian leadership justified it as the perceived need to protect the Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the east and south of the country. The cliche of "extremely nationalistic" western Ukraine and "pro-Russian" eastern and southern Ukraine is also repeated in the West, adopting the Kremlin's propaganda. According to a 2022 poll, 20% of Ukrainians consider the Russian language as their mother tongue. The number of those speaking Russian is known to be much higher, with experts giving a range from 35% to 50%. Despite that, Ukraine's main pro-Russian political party Opposition Platform gained only 13% of votes in the 2019 parliamentary election.

Ukraine's struggle for independence

In 2022, Ukrainian opinion polls showed that over 90% of the country's population supports the government and believes that Ukraine can win the war against Russia, erasing any illusion of a strong pro-Russian sentiment. And while one could have encountered some people with pro-Russian attitudes in eastern Ukraine before the full-scale invasion, many have turned away from Russia completely after Moscow's forces began destroying their hometowns such as Mariupol and killing tens of thousands of people. British-American historian Robert Conquest said in his edition of "The Great Terror," published in 2007, that "the whole range of Soviet regime's terrors" killed at least 15 million people, which included the death figure from Holodomor.

Myth 9: Communism is good

More than 60% of Russians saw it as a "great misfortune that the Soviet Union no longer exists, according to a 2019 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. Despite the Soviet nostalgia for the country without democracy and market economy, the idea of a so-called classless society where everyone gets equal labor benefits proved to be impossible. Poor leadership is considered to be among the reasons for its failure. Fiscal mismanagement, lack of a competitive market that spurs development, and vulnerability to external events, such as the March 1986 oil price drop, killed the Soviet economy. Despite everything, some still believe that communism is a good way to abolish hierarchy when put into practice. But communism instead allowed a ruling class to enjoy a higher standard of life while ordinary people were forced to work hard to sustain themselves. History has effectively shown that the practice of communism eventually led to the abuse of power. British-American historian Robert Conquest said in his edition of "The Great Terror," published in 2007, that "the whole range of Soviet regime's terrors" killed at least 15 million people, which included the death figure from Holodomor. Today, China, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam are the only existing communist states worldwide, with all of them parting ways with communist economic theory and opting for a market economy. The one feature they do keep is the suppression of free speech and the lack of popular representation.

The Kremlin insists that Ukraine is merely a political project of the West. (screenshot)

Myth 10: Ukraine is a puppet state controlled by the West

The Russian propaganda narrative often describes Ukraine as a puppet state, claiming that the West is using Ukraine to target Moscow. Putin has used this narrative to convey his imperial ambitions of conquering the neighboring country. Contrary to the claims, Ukraine is an independent state not controlled by the U.S., European Union nations, or foreign entities. The soon to be 32-year-old country is led by a democratically elected president and parliament. If anything, Ukraine has shown how it can even influence Western leaders' decisions throughout the course of the full-scale invasion. Fiercely defending their nation against Russia's brutal war, Ukrainians' resistance has forced countries like the U.S. and Germany to finally green light the transfer of heavy weaponry after months-long turn-downs.

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Russia's centuries-long quest to conquer Ukraine

by Igor Kossov April 25, 2023 6:27 PM 10 min read

Editor's Note: This is episode 2 of "Ukraine's True History," a video and story series by the Kyiv Independent. The series is funded by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting within the program Ukraine Forward: Amplifying Analysis. The program is financed by the MATRA Programme of the Embassy of the Netherlands in Ukraine.

[SOURCE]
https://kyivindependent.com/russias-centuries-long-quest-to-conquer-ukraine

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=3DPLmOj0Ur_xinSqXya8tNipG1lnrbDYTMBU

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022 shocked many around the world. But anyone who paid attention to Ukrainian history would have seen it coming. Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered several excuses for the invasion. One was to kill all the supposed "Nazis" in Ukraine. Another was to eliminate Ukraine's supposed military threat to Russia. But the true reason was to annex Ukraine as a territory that Putin believes has always rightfully belonged to Russia. In speeches that recalled imperial times, Putin claimed that Ukraine's independence was a mistake that he intended to correct. This meant conquering Kyiv, toppling the elected government, and destroying the Ukrainian national identity. Putin's twisted vision isn't new. Russia has been doing this for close to 400 years. In the 17th century, Russia violated its treaty with the independent Ukrainian communities known as the Cossacks to seize control and partition their burgeoning country. A century later, Russia massacred thousands of Ukrainian civilians, betrayed the Cossacks, and eliminated the last traces of their independent rule. During the 1900s, Russia actively suppressed the Ukrainian language and culture throughout the empire. In the early 20th century, Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks, Russia's dominant political faction following the October Revolution, led multiple bloody invasions of the nascent Ukrainian nation to bring it under Soviet control. Independence Square in Kyiv on Feb. 20, 2014 during the bloodiest days of the EuroMaidan Revolution, when around 100 protesters were killed. Vincent Mundy/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Over the past 30 years of Ukrainian independence, Russia has tried to rule Ukraine through proxy politicians. When that stopped working following the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution, Russia invaded eastern Ukraine and annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, and greatly scaled up its invasion in 2022. Russia has never ceased its assault on Ukrainian independence. This is just the latest episode. And this time, Ukrainians are determined to put it to an end. A soldier nicknamed Raven fighting in Mykolaiv Oblast in October, said, "we will not allow what our grandfathers allowed to come to pass when they let us be subjugated."

From Kyivan Rus to the Cossack Hetmanate

Ukraine's capital Kyiv was once the heart of Kyivan Rus, the most powerful medieval state in Eastern Europe. It was ruled by the Rurik dynasty, believed to be founded by Norsemen who traded and raided along the rivers of the region. Internal strife would gradually tear the Kyivan Rus apart until a Mongol invasion in the middle of the 13th century finally destroyed it. It left behind successor states, such as Galicia-Volhynia, which Poland absorbed in 1349. Another successor state would become the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, the center of the future Russian Empire.

Principalities of Kyivan Rus in 12th-13th century. Screenshot from the video. Illustraition by Alina Radomska.

Over the centuries, the Ukrainian steppes began to be settled by Cossacks, groups of militarized people who drifted into the region over the centuries to freely live off the land and raid their neighbors. Many peasants drifted to the Ukrainian region, seeking a freer life. The Cossacks were known for their militance, but also for their fierce commitment to independence, democracy and egalitarianism. This was a contrast from many surrounding empires with powerful nobility that kept their serfs in subjection. By the 1600s, Cossacks in the region created a semi-autonomous proto-state called the Zaporizhian Sich, which was surrounded by several powers the Tsardom of Russia, the Crimean Khanate, the Ottoman Empire, and the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth. They all fought one another at different times in a series of shifting alliances.

The rise and fall of the Hetmanate

In the 1600s, the Zaporizhian Sich was under Polish rule, which the Cossacks resented. Eventually, a strong Cossack leader arose Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Khmelnytsky led the Cossacks to victory against the Polish forces, establishing the Cossack Hetmanate, a Ukrainian Cossack state in the area of what is today central Ukraine. To protect his newly created state against Poland, Khmelnytsky decided to court the protection of the Tsardom of Russia, with the two sharing the Eastern Orthodox fate. Under the treaty of Pereislav of 1654, the Hetmanate pledged allegiance to the throne of Moscow in exchange for military protection. But it quickly became clear that the two sides understood the agreement very differently.

The map of the Hetmanate in 1645 and Bohdan Khmeltytsky (L) and Russia's tsar Alexis (R). Illustraition by Alina Radomska.

Khmelnytsky believed that his Hetmanate was going to be an independent power under Moscow's protection. Moscow saw it as a territorial acquisition. Moscow began sending military governors to Ukraine, tried to collect taxes, and undermined the independence of the Ukrainian church. Moscow would send a noble to oversee local elections in Kyiv and told Ukraine that Tsarist warlords would take over the functions of government. Moscow also bribed military officers to rise up against the Hetmanate. Moscow even made a truce with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, under which Ukraine would become a commonwealth protectorate. Soon, the Ukrainian Cossacks clashed with Russian forces. The Cossacks prevailed at the Battle of Konotop in 1659. However, again, their leaders were unable to capitalize on their military victory. Outmaneuvered politically by Moscow, Khmelnytsky's son signed the Articles of Pereislav, which limited the Cossacks' independence. Less than a decade later, Moscow and Poland would divide control of the proto-Ukrainian state amongst themselves along the Dnipro River.

Catherine the Great destroys Zaporizhian Sich. Illustraition by Alina Radomska.

The end of the Cossack Powers

After decades of instability, known as the Ruin, the Hetmanate found another strong leader: Ivan Mazepa. Under his rule, which lasted from 1687 - 1708, Ukrainian culture flourished. Kyiv's golden domes bear witness to his legacy. Then came the Great Northern War between Russia and Sweden. Mazepa fought for the Tsar, but after disputes with Peter I of Russia, Mazepa and some of his Cossacks switched sides. Russia's Peter I ordered revenge. In November 1708, his forces smashed into hetman's fortified capital of Baturyn, located in modern-day Chernihiv Oblast. Once inside, the imperial troops executed up to 15,000 people, including civilians, among them women and children. Many were quartered, broken on the wheel, or impaled on stakes. Sweden's King Charles XII and Mazepa were crushed at the Battle of Poltava. This was the beginning of the end for the Hetmanate. The true death of the Cossacks came after the coup of Catherine II. She asserted imperial autocracy, cracking down on the Cossacks' self-governance. In the region of Sloboda, which ran from modern-day Sumy to Kharkiv oblasts, Cossack regiments were reforged into Russian imperial army units. In 1764, the Cossack system was abolished and replaced with Russian institutions. The authority of the Cossack Hetmanate was liquidated, and the last Hetman of the Zaporizhian Host was ordered to renounce his authority to a Russian governor-general. Subsequently, Moscow also eliminated the autonomous Cossack way of life. The final blow landed in the 1770s after the Cossacks helped Moscow defeat the Ottoman Empire. Russian troops surrounded the Sich, surprising the Cossacks. Faced with overwhelming firepower and a threat to their families, they were forced to surrender. This was the end of the Cossack Hetmanate.

In 1876, Russia's Emperor Alexander II issued a decree banning the use of the Ukrainian language in print except for reprinting old documents.

Suppression of national identity

The notion of a Ukrainian national identity emerged in a big way in the 19th century, inspired by other national movements in Europe. Moscow began suppressing the Ukrainian language and identity, afraid of separatism. Top writers and intellectuals were imprisoned or exiled. That included Ukraine's most famous author and artist, Taras Shevchenko. The Russian Empire banned the publication of scholarly, religious, and educational books in Ukrainian in 1863. Tsar Alexander II then banned the printing and import of Ukrainian language publications altogether in 1876 with the Ems Decree. The exodus of Ukrainian cultural figures to more liberal Austria-Hungary, where no ban on the Ukrainian language and culture existed, allowed Ukraine to preserve its national identity. Meanwhile, Russia actively tried to undermine Ukraine, referring to it as "Malorossiya" or "Lesser Russia," which is how Putin views much of Ukrainian territory today. Malorossiya, which means little, lesser, or minor Rus, is a term that began appearing in the 13th century, referring to Galicia-Volhynia. The term began to resurface in the 17th century to refer to geographical or ecclesiastical subdivisions within the area of what is now Ukraine. After the Pereiaslav Treaty, Moscow began using it to refer to the Cossack Hetmanate to back its claim on the entire region. Putin's Russia, fond of historical revisionism, has been trying to bring back the term. Following the February Revolution in Russia, Ukraine announced the creation of the Ukrainian People's Republic. Hovewer, Ukraine's independence was short-lived. Soviet Russia successfully conquered Ukraine by 1921.

The 20th century

In the early 20th century, the Russian Empire was crumbling, facing military, economic, and political setbacks. In 1917, amid the ongoing World War I, Russia faced two revolutions. Ukrainians saw it as an opportunity for independence. Between 1917 and 1921, the land that is now Ukraine was fought over and controlled by more than half a dozen armed factions. Kyiv faced two successful waves of assault from Russia during this time. Eventually, Ukraine was swallowed by the Soviet Union. Ukrainian People's Republic was created in 1917 which proclaimed its independence the following year. Ukrainian officials gathered a parliament (Central Rada), elected a leader (historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky), and sought international recognition. After a failed Bolshevik uprising in Kyiv in early 1918, Russia began a military campaign against Ukraine. The officer in charge of the invasion was Mikhail Muravyov, who tortured the inhabitants of each new city he conquered. The rest, he let his men loot. Ukrainian forces, mostly students, were able to delay the swiftly advancing Russian troops in the Battle of Kruty, about 120 kilometers northeast of Kyiv. Despite the Bolsheviks winning the battle and sacking Kyiv, Ukraine was able to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers and soon, together with the German army, pushed the Bolsheviks out of Ukraine. While in Kyiv, German forces didn't oppose a coup led by Pavlo Skoropadskyi, who was proclaimed the new hetman, meaning the military leader of the Ukrainian State. Skoropadskyi's reign proved unsuccessful. After Germany's defeat in World War I, he himself was deposed by the reemerged Ukrainian People's Republic led by Symon Petliura. The following year, Soviet Russia swept in once more, finally bringing Ukraine, poisoned by internal fighting, under its control. After taking power, the Soviet regime first promoted Ukrainian culture to appease the hostile population, yet later turned to terror in fear of popular uprising. In the 1930s, Ukrainian writers Valerian Pidmohylny, movie director Les Kurbas, and painters Mykhailo Boychuk and Ivan Padalka were tortured, imprisoned, and executed. They have been known as the Executed Renaissance, as most of them were shot by the Soviet regime during the Great Terror in Sandarmokh.

21st century

Moscow's designs on Kyiv continued into the 21st century. After Ukraine became independent, Russia tried to maintain control through proxy politicians. These included pro-Russian lawmaker and oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk and former President Viktor Yanukovych. This failed. In 2004, Yanukovych's fraudulent election victory was resisted by the Orange Revolution, a series of protests that annulled a rigged runoff vote in his favor. Yanukovych would run again in the 2010 presidential election and prevail against his main opponent Yulia Tymoshenko. Yanukovych's Party of Regions, which had a collaboration agreement with Putin's party United Russia, would be a powerful force in Ukrainian politics for years. In 2013, when Yanukovych defied the popular will and refused to sign an association with Europe, people rose up again in the EuroMaidan Revolution. No matter what Russia wanted, Ukraine was pulling away toward Europe. In the end, Putin was left with one option to cling to what he sees as Russia's imperial possession: a direct invasion that began with the occupation of Crimea and eastern parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in early 2014. When the nine-year occupation of Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk failed to shake Ukraine's Westward course, Moscow gave up all pretense and launched a full-scale ground war to destroy and conquer Ukraine.

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How Russia has attempted to erase Ukrainian language, culture throughout centuries

by Daria Shulzhenko May 10, 2023 12:17 AM 10 min read

Editor's Note: This is episode 3 of "Ukraine's True History," a video and story series by the Kyiv Independent. The series is funded by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting within the program “Ukraine Forward: Amplifying Analysis.” The program is financed by the MATRA Programme of the Embassy of the Netherlands in Ukraine.

[SOURCE]
https://kyivindependent.com/how-russia-has-attempted-to-erase-ukrainian-language-culture-throughout-centuries

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=3DPLmOj0Ur_xinSqXya8tNipG1lnrbDYTMBU

Russia has not only killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians and ruined much of the country's infrastructure since the start of the full scale invasion; It has also aimed at destroying the core of Ukrainian identity --- language, and culture --- in the territories it has occupied. Businesses and institutions there were have been forced to switch to Russian, while the Russian curriculum has been imposed in schools. The Kherson Fine Arts Museum and the Arkhip Kuindzhi Museum in Mariupol, among others, were emptied of their priceless cultural assets during Russian occupation. Ukraine's Culture Ministry said Russia has committed over 1,271 crimes against Ukraine's cultural heritage since it scaled up its assault against Ukraine in February 2022. As many as 473 cultural sights, including historical churches and theaters, have been destroyed by Russia's shelling and missile strikes over the year of the all out war, according to the ministry. But Russia's attempts to destroy the Ukrainian language and culture did not start in 2022. They trace back to the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union when Moscow consistently banned the Ukrainian language, restricting, persecuting, sentencing, and even executing Ukrainian artists, writers, and poets. "The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union did not deny the existence of Ukrainians as a separate ethnic group. They denied the existence of Ukrainians as a separate nation," says Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak. "Because a nation has to have its own politics and its own culture."

Russian Empire

Russia has been trying to silence Ukrainian culture and language for the past 400 years when parts of what is now Ukraine fell under Russian influence. "Oppressions lasted for several centuries, from the first restrictions during the reign of Peter the Great to the actual actions of the Russian regime today," says Deputy Head of National Remembrance Institute, historian Volodymyr Tylishchak. As of the beginning of the 18th century, the Ukrainian cultural sphere was "as developed as the one in Poland, Lithuanian or Czechia," says another historian Kyrylo Halushko. "There was book printing, [great] literature, and universities such as the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy," Halushko says. "Of course, Moscow did not like that," he adds. Aside from conquering Ukrainian lands, the Russian Empire --- proclaimed in 1721 under Peter the Great (or Peter I) --- sought to eliminate the Ukrainian identity, suppressing Ukrainian culture and language.

A year before the proclamation, in 1720, Peter the Great issued a decree against the use of the Ukrainian language in religious texts and books. It was one of the first major steps toward banning the use of the Ukrainian language in public life. In 1729, Peter II ordered the rewriting of the state regulations and decrees from the Ukrainian language into Russian. Shortly after coming to power, Russian Empress Catherine II banned teaching in the Ukrainian language at the most prominent center of Ukrainian culture, the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. She also liquidated two autonomous Ukrainian entities --- the Zapirizhzhian Sich and the Cossack Hetmanate.

Later, Catherine II ordered all the churches across the empire to conduct services only in the Russian language and made Russian compulsory for all schools. In 1786, the Russian language became the only language of teaching at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. "Catherine II decided to dissolve the Ukrainian ethnicity among other ethnic groups, to deprive Ukrainians of their national characteristics and identity and, ultimately, to destroy it completely," wrote Ukrainian political scientist Oleksiy Volovych. But more severe measures followed in 1863 when the Imperial Interior Minister Pyotr Valuev issued a decree eliminating the publishing of books in Ukrainian. The document said, "no special Little Russian language (meaning Ukrainian) ever existed, does not exist, and shall not exist."

The 1876 Ems Ukaz (Decree) issued by Emperor Alexander II only intensified the restrictions, banning imports of works in Ukrainian along with "stage performances, texts for sheet music, and public readings" in Ukrainian. Hrytsak says both Valuev Decree and Ems Ukaz were "largely unprecedented." "Russia declared the Ukrainian language as its enemy," he says. "The language as such was not banned. People could speak it in the villages or sing songs," he continues. "It was (Russia's) way to not make it the language of public life and literature." It was also Moscow's attempt to oppress the emerging spirit of Ukraine's national revival, or "the dangers for the state activities of Ukrainophiles," as stated in the Ems Ukaz. Both documents were issued after a new generation of Ukraine's cultural figures formed a secret Kyiv based society --- the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, which ignited the long battle between Ukrainian "intelligentsia" and Moscow authorities.

Among the brotherhood's members were acclaimed Ukrainian authors Mykola Kostomarov and Panteleimon Kulish. Ukrainian writer and poet Taras Shevchenko, who became a symbol of the Ukrainian national movement in the 19th century, was even convicted for influencing the members of the society. The brotherhood survived for less than two years. Soon after it was exposed, many of its members were either exiled or jailed, while some of their works were banned in the Russian Empire. Hrytsak says both the foundation of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius and the publication of Shevchenko's iconic collection of poems titled "Kobzar" have greatly intensified Moscow's "hostility" towards the Ukrainian language. "Because that showed that it was not just a language," Hrytsak says. "There was a certain political idea behind it." "Certain national ideology, which was separate from the Russian one, began to form in the times of Shevchenko," says Halushko. That meant that "wherever there is the Ukrainian language --- there must be Ukraine," he adds.

Soviet Union

Ukraine tried to escape Russia's dominance after its empire collapsed in 1917. It was during the Ukrainian War of Independence (1917-1921) that the Ukrainian language was used for printing and in educational institutions. But the formal ending to the Russian Empire did not mean its imperial narratives had disappeared:

In 1922, Ukraine (apart from its western regions) was once again absorbed by Moscow into the newly formed Soviet Union. It became the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Just like imperial Russia, Soviet authorities did not deny Ukrainians as people. But they fiercely opposed Ukraine's right to be a nation. To strengthen its power over Ukraine, as well as to show the West that any nation had its right to self determination within the Soviet Union, the new regime initially launched a policy of so called "korenizatsiia" or indigenization ("Ukrainization" for Ukraine), which appeared to be quite liberal but temporary. It allowed schools and other educational facilities to switch to the Ukrainian language. Books, newspapers, and even films in Ukrainian were also freely produced. At the same time, Soviet authorities wanted to present Ukrainian culture as "rural, outdated," according to Halushko. Tylishchak says Ukraine's achievements and culture were deliberately simplified. "In movies, for instance, there are many examples when Ukrainians are shown as silly villagers who sing funny songs," Tylishchak says.

In 1933-34, however, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin canceled "Ukrainization," as the authorities feared it could threaten their regime. Its end was accompanied by brutal repressions. The lives of numerous Ukrainian cultural figures were destroyed for their pro-Ukrainian stance. They became widely known as the Executed Renaissance. The spring of 1933 is believed to be the start of the Soviet Union’s mass destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. On May 13, 1933, Ukrainian writer and intellectual Mykola Khvylovyi shot himself. In his suicide note, he spoke of the terror gripping Ukraine and criticized the Communist Party. "His slogan 'Get away from Moscow!' related exclusively to the literary process, that Ukrainian culture should be oriented to Europe, not Russia," Tylishchak says.

Repression peaked in 1937 when numerous Ukrainian cultural figures such as writers Valerian Pidmohylny, Mykola Kulish, and Hnat Khotkevych, painters Ivan Padalka and Mykhailo Boychuk, were executed during the so called Great Purge. Renowned Ukrainian playwright Les Kurbas, the founder of the avant-garde Berezil Theater that staged plays in Ukrainian, was also shot. "The theater's fate was tragic as well," says Tylishchak. "It was destroyed because it offered new forms of theatrical art." According to Tylishchak, everything that did not correspond to the canons of Russia's propaganda back then was declared "bourgeois nationalism." "Every Ukrainian artist, every Ukrainian scientist, and intellectual was constantly in danger of being accused of ‘Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism,’" Tylishchak says. "It was one of the most terrible accusations in the Soviet Union."

Stalin's death in 1953 and the start of Nikita Khrushchev’s rule marked at least some easing of Soviet censorship of the Ukrainian language and culture --- the so called Khrushchev Thaw. Tylishchak says there was a "new push for development" of Ukrainian culture in the 1960s when new "brilliant artists, poets, and writers appeared." This new generation of creative Ukrainian youth who opposed the Soviet authorities was known as the Sixtiers. Famous writers Ivan Drach, Mykola Vinhranovskyi, Vasyl Symonenko, and painters Alla Horska and Liubov Panchenko were among its representatives. "It wasn't a mass movement," says Tylishchak. "But the new impulse that Ukrainian culture received in the 1960s allowed it to survive (future) repressive politics," he adds. Tylishchak says that "unfortunately," many of them ended up in Russian exile, "just like Vasyl Stus," a prominent Ukrainian poet who died in detention in 1985. According to the historian, the Sixtiers also "gave an impetus" to the generation that regained Ukraine's independence in 1991.

Same old imperialism

Russia's centuries long attempts to erase Ukrainian culture and language have also affected a newly independent Ukraine: For many years, Ukraine's television, along with music and other industries, were mainly Russian speaking. The country's biggest newspapers were also published in Russian, not to mention streets and monuments named after Russian leaders across Ukraine. A major shift started during the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2013-2014. It ended with Ukrainians ousting the pro-Kremlin regime and choosing its own future with freedom of speech and democratic values instead. Modern Russia, on the other hand, was built on the ashes of the Soviet Union and hasn't refused the imperial ideas of its predecessors. Those views have only radicalized under its current dictator Vladimir Putin. Led by Putin, Russia occupied Crimea in March 2014. It soon invaded Ukraine's east, occupying parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.

According to Hrytsak, the "radical change in rhetoric" appeared in 2021, when Putin published an article on the Kremlin's website claiming that Ukraine “has never existed” and that "Ukrainians and Russians are one people, one whole." In February 2022, Russia launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine, bombarding cities all across the country. Parts of Ukraine were occupied by Russian troops as well. The all out invasion would soon prove that neither Russia's goal nor its methods have changed throughout the centuries. "It wants to destroy the Ukrainian nation as such," says Tylishchak. "To do so, Russia destroys Ukrainians physically, as we saw in Bucha and Borodianka, and tries to assimilate Ukrainians who ended up in occupied territories," he adds.

A month into the all out Russian invasion, Russian troops began confiscating and destroying Ukrainian history and fiction books "that do not correspond with the Kremlin propaganda" in the libraries of then occupied parts of Sumy, Chernihiv, as well as Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts. According to Ukraine's Defense Ministry Intelligence Directorate, they had "a whole list of forbidden names," including Ukrainian Hetman Ivan Mazepa and controversial nationalist leader Stepan Bandera. In Melitopol, an occupied city in Ukraine's southeastern Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Russian troops have seized all of Ukrainian literature from the local libraries, the Ukrainian military's National Resistance Center reported. Ukrainian children's writer and poet Volodymyr Vakulenko was killed during the Russian occupation of a village near Izium, Kharkiv Oblast. Artist Panchenko died after a month of starvation in occupied Bucha, Kyiv Oblast. In occupied Nova Kakhovka, Kherson Oblast, Russian troops have erected a monument to Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin. They have been stealing art collections from local museums and renaming the streets after Moscow leaders and their propaganda slogans.

"It's a cultural genocide against Ukraine," says Hrytsak.

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Who does Crimea really belong to?

by Francis Farrell May 24, 2023 1:14 AM 12 min read

[SOURCE]
https://kyivindependent.com/who-does-crimea-really-belong-to

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=3DPLmOj0Ur_xinSqXya8tNipG1lnrbDYTMBU

Russia's war against Ukraine began in Crimea. In February 2014, as the pro-Russian regime in Kyiv was killing protesters on the barricades of the EuroMaidan Revolution, thousands of Russian troops without insignia began occupying strategic locations and military bases in the Crimean Peninsula. Within a month, Russia had illegally annexed Crimea on the back of a sham referendum at gunpoint, and unrest led by Russian-led militants had begun in eastern Ukraine.

The fact that Russia decided to launch its war against Ukraine in Crimea isn't surprising. Crimea has long been a cornerstone of the Russian imperial narrative, with the country's centuries-long propaganda placing Russia as the "rightful historical owner" of the Ukrainian peninsula. The annexation of Ukrainian territory was widely supported by those living in Russia, with Russian President Vladimir Putin's approval ratings skyrocketing to over 80% in the months after the start of the war. Basic principles of territorial sovereignty and a rules-based international order make a strong case for Crimea to remain an inseparable part of Ukraine. However, since annexation, Russian propaganda has successfully spread the narrative of Russia's "return" of a "historic Russian land" among the international public, with many Western leaders soon abstaining from asserting that Ukraine must get the peninsula back.

This chapter of Ukraine's True History will explore the historical context that led to Crimea as it is today and answer why Russia doesn't have a "historic right" to annex Ukrainian Crimea.

From diversity to ethnogenesis

With its prime geographic position on the Black Sea, the crossroads between the Eurasian steppe, and the Mediterranean trading routes, the Crimean Peninsula has been inhabited by dozens of ethnic groups over its long history. Several of Crimea's major cities today, including coastal cities Feodosia and Kerch, have origins in ancient Greek colonies established on the coast of the peninsula from the 7th-5th centuries BCE, eventually joining together as the Cimmerian Bosporan Kingdom, which would go on to become a client state of the Roman Empire. Meanwhile, the interior of Crimea was populated by the nomadic Scythians, which resided in the vast steppes of what is now southern Ukraine and Russia. Over the centuries, the peninsula would be occupied by many nomadic people who passed through the area, including the Goths, Cumans, Huns, and Khazars, and was later contested between the Byzantine Empire and the Grand Princes of Rus in Kyiv.

In the same cataclysm that brought about the fall of Kyivan Rus, the Mongol invasion of Europe in the 13th century also swept through Crimea. For two centuries, the Mongol successor state known as the Golden Horde ruled most of the peninsula, while the coastal settlements were colonized by Genoese traders. It was during this time that a new nation began to form in Crimea in a process known as ethnogenesis. Descendants of the many different nations that inhabited the peninsula began to congregate, united by the Muslim faith and a Turkic language similar to that spoken by the Cumans and the Khazars.

When the power of the Golden Horde in Europe disintegrated in the 15th century, this new indigenous people group, who came to be known as the Crimean Tatars, quickly established their own state. Ruled by the House of Giray from its capital in Bakhchysarai, the Crimean Khanate would come to be a formidable force in Eastern Europe, dominating the steppes of southern Ukraine and leaving tangible cultural heritage sites across the Black Sea coast.

Imperial conquest

The history of the Crimean Tatar nation is woven tightly with the history of Ukrainian proto-states, as the trajectories of both were defined by their encounters with larger, more powerful outside empires competing for land and resources. During this time, the Crimean Tatars both competed and cooperated with the emerging Zaporizhzhian Cossacks, a loose confederation of Ukrainian people that inhabited much of modern central and eastern Ukraine, conducting raids and military campaigns from their forts along the Dnipro River. Although the Ukrainian Cossacks and the Crimean Tatars often fought on different sides, they also traded extensively and sometimes formed alliances, such as when Cossack leader Petro Doroshenko allied with both the Crimean Tatars and the Ottomans against Poland and later the Russian Empire in the mid-17th century.

Ultimately, both the Crimean Khanate and the Cossack Hetmanate were annexed into the Russian Empire around the same time, in the late 17th century, during the conquering reign of Russian Empress Catherine II. With Ukraine's neighboring great powers, Poland and the Ottoman Empire, significantly weakened, the counterbalance that had kept Russian expansion at bay was no more.

It was with the arrival of Catherine's Russia in 1783 that the erasure of indigenous Crimean Tatar history began, hand-in-hand with the repression of its people. Assuming an image of the restorer of Western civilization in the area, Catherine founded completely new cities along the Black Sea coast, often opting for anachronistic Greek-sounding names such as Sevastopol, Odesa, and Kherson. It was then that these Crimean Tatar lands, together with much of southern and eastern Ukraine, were dubbed "Novorossiya" ("New Russia"), a term used prominently by Vladimir Putin and Kremlin propaganda to justify the conquest of parts of Ukraine since 2014. According to American historian Brian Boeck, "grafting 'New Russia' onto the Russian Empire required re-imagining this space as Russian, and the consolidation of tsarist authority relied on settlement."

In the century after their annexation, the indigenous Crimean Tatar lands were subject to a policy of active colonization and demographic degradation. With tens of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian settlers and serfs resettled to the peninsula, Crimean Tatars were expelled from their lands and homes and marginalized from the new ruling government and society built from scratch in the Russian imperial mold. These processes accelerated greatly after the end of the Crimean War between the Russian Empire and the alliance of Ottoman, French, British, and Sardinian troops in 1856. The Crimean Tatars were uprooted by the war from their homelands in the interior, and many of them ultimately fled permanently to the Ottoman Empire. In a Russian Empire census carried out in 1850, Crimean Tatars still made up the vast majority of Crimea's population at 77.8%, but by 1897, this figure was down to 35.5%.

Thus began the only historical period of brutal Russian rule in Crimea.

Erasing a nation

For both the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar nations, the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917 allowed a brief window into which modern states could be founded. In Crimea, this movement began with the first congress of Crimean Tatar Muslim leaders in March 1917. In July, a new Crimean Tatar political party was formed, advocating for independence. By December, while the Bolshevik revolution was sweeping through Russia, the first sitting of a new Crimean Tatar parliament was held in Bakhchysarai, the old capital of the Crimean Khanate.

Known as the Qurultai according to the Turkic tradition, the body declared the formation of the Crimean People's Republic, complete with its own constitution and government structure. Simultaneously, successive Ukrainian independence movements also exploited the power gap between Russia and Germany to found their own state projects, the most significant of which was the Ukrainian People's Republic. With aligning goals of national self-determination and independence from the empire, the two fledging states recognized each other and held numerous negotiations during the early revolutionary period, with both sides open to further integration. "The Ukrainians' federal approach and innovative emphasis on national minority rights could have led to closer cooperation, but a loose arrangement seemed fine," according to British historian and University College London professor Andrew Wilson, who authored a 2021 paper on the respective interpretations of Crimean Tatar history by Russia, Ukraine, and Crimean Tatars themselves. Though control of Crimea changed hands several times during this time, ultimately, both the Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian states were once again swallowed by Russia, with the exception of parts of western Ukraine.

As with Ukraine, the early Soviet regime did give some support to Crimean Tatar culture and minority rights, but this was soon reversed under the Russification-driven policies of Joseph Stalin after he assumed full power in the late 1920s. After years of famine and political repressions in the early Stalin era, by the outbreak of World War II, Crimean Tatars only consisted of 19.4% of the population, with almost half of the peninsula's 1.1 million residents by then being ethnically Russian. Soon, in one of the most brutal episodes of ethnic cleansing of the war, the population of Crimean Tatars in Crimea was reduced to zero.

Soviet authorities, using contrived allegations of an entire people collaborating with Nazi Germany, forcibly deported the entire Crimean Tatar population of over 200,000 to Central Asia in 1944. The collective trauma of the deportation and following decades, known to Crimean Tatars as Sürgünlik ("exile"), had a lasting impact on the people's attitudes toward Moscow. Around 6,000 are understood to have died during the journey itself, and many tens of thousands more from the conditions in the settlements they were moved to, much akin to prison camps. Estimates vary as to the exact figure, but even according to the estimates of the NKVD, Soviet Interior Ministry, 27% of the entire Crimean Tatar population died either from the deportation itself or from malnourishment, disease, or exposure in the years after arrival. Upper historical estimates put the figure at closer to 46%. From that point, Soviet historiography made a new concerted effort to minimize the Crimean Tatars' role in the history of the peninsula.

In this narrative, the indigenous status of Crimean Tatars was dismantled. Instead, the nation was depicted as only one in a series of conquering tribes that had settled in the area. "The general line was now to fight against the 'idealization' of 'Tatar' history," says Wilson, "and assert that the Crimean lands, even in primordial times, belonged to the Slavs and the Russians and their ancestors, the Scythians." In 1954, in a decision that has been decried as illegal by Russian propaganda narratives since 2014, Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev authorized the transfer of Crimea, including the naval city of Sevastopol, to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This decision, formally marking the 300th anniversary of the 1654 Treaty of Pereiaslav between Ukrainian Cossacks and Russia, was also motivated by economic rationality and was enshrined in law both by the Supreme Soviet and in the constitutions of both the Ukrainian and Russian SSRs.

Crimea and independent Ukraine

The path of Crimea towards being part of an independent, democratic Ukraine begins a few years before the end of Soviet rule, with the return of the Crimean Tatar people from exile in Central Asia to their homelands. After decades of activism in a harshly authoritarian environment, Crimean Tatars began to return in the late 1980s after over four decades of being displaced. At the height of Soviet ruler Mikhail Gorbachev's liberalizing reforms, over 200,000 Crimean Tatars were able to return to the peninsula, but in most cases, they had no home to return to. The Crimean Tatar-owned land has long been expropriated by incoming Russian settlers, and many villages have completely been ruined and abandoned.

In late 1991, with the Soviet Union in its death throes, the Verkhovna Rada, which governed all of the Ukrainian SSR at the time with increasing independence from Moscow, declared Ukraine to be an independent sovereign state. In a nationwide referendum conducted in December, Crimea voted in favor of Ukraine's declaration of independence, with 54% of Crimean voters supporting the move.

In a 1994 agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia committed to respect Ukraine's territorial integrity and sovereignty and refrain from using or threatening to use force against Ukraine. In turn, Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal, the third-largest at that time. The Budapest Memorandum commitments were violated together with the core principles of the United Nations Charter 20 years later.

Upon his election in 2010, Ukraine’s pro-Kremlin President Viktor Yanukovych signed the Kharkiv Pact, extending Russia's lease on the base of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea, in exchange for gas discounts for Ukraine. Russia has quartered its fleet in Sevastopol since Ukraine's independence, with the existing lease permitting Russian troops to be stationed in the city until 2017. The troops weren't permitted to leave the city without Kyiv's consent. In the winter of 2013-2014, Yanukovych ordered the beating and shooting of protesters on Independence Square in Kyiv in what became known as the EuroMaidan Revolution. Meanwhile, there were also pro-Ukrainian protests in Crimea, particularly in the capital city of Simferopol, where the Crimean Tatar community played a large role. These pro-EuroMaidan protests were often met with counter-demonstrations by pro-Russian groups, resulting in tensions and occasional violence.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea

History repeats itself

When Russian troops illegally occupied Crimea just a week after the end of the EuroMaidan Revolution, Russian propaganda began attempting to justify the war. In a sham referendum in March 2014 that would come to be repeated in four more regions of Ukraine in 2022, Moscow reported 97% of the population in Crimea requested to join Russia. The sham vote was condemned and declared invalid by the UN General Assembly later that month.

The referendum itself wasn't enough, though. "For Russians, Crimea cannot be 'ours' without also being 'not theirs,'" writes Wilson. With the annexation came a new wave of state-sponsored history, revising and minimizing the indigenous status of Crimean Tatars. Russian historian Sergei Cherniakhovskii called the annexation a "Reconquista" and denied that Crimean Tatars were a majority on the peninsula when conquered by Catherine II.

Having occupied Crimea, Russian authorities began a campaign of intimidation and harassment against Crimean Tatars, including arbitrary arrests, torture, and kidnappings. Just as the Crimean Tatars were accused of being Nazi collaborators, now, many are imprisoned by Russia on fabricated charges of Islamic extremism. Russian authorities have also targeted Crimean Tatar media outlets, shutting down television channels and newspapers and banning the Mejlis, the representative body of the Crimean Tatar people. Simultaneously, Russia has followed two other key points in the Soviet playbook since annexation: demographic manipulation and distortion of history.

In addition to the many Ukrainian-identifying people who left Crimea after 2014, around 40,000 Crimean Tatars applied for the status of internally displaced persons, with the real number of those displaced likely significantly higher. According to former Meijlis Head Mustafa Dzhemilev, between 850,000 and one million Russians moved into Crimea from Russia between 2014-2018.

Returning home

President Zelensky has repeatedly made it clear that Ukraine intends to liberate all occupied territories, including Crimea. Nine years of Russian occupation, relentless revisionist propaganda, and the skewed demographic balance will make reintegrating Crimea one of the toughest challenges for post-war Ukraine. Nonetheless, legally, Crimea belongs to Ukraine. No amount of propaganda about historical lands, Soviet transfers, or the supposed "will of the people" can change the fact that forcibly annexing territory is illegal in all understandings of international law and completely unacceptable in the 21st-century world order. But more importantly, Crimea's place as an integral part of sovereign Ukraine is a matter of historical justice for the Crimean Tatars, whose bloody and tragic experience of Russian colonialism has aligned their future path with Ukraine. It is upon these two pillars that Crimea's status as a rightful part of Ukraine firmly stands.

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How Russia steals and rewrites Ukrainian history to justify its claims in Ukraine

by Oleg Sukhov June 13, 2023 11:43 PM 11 min read

[SOURCE]
https://kyivindependent.com/how-russia-steals-and-rewrites-ukrainian-history-to-justify-its-claims-in-ukraine

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=3DPLmOj0Ur_xinSqXya8tNipG1lnrbDYTMBU

Appropriating and rewriting foreign history has been a key aspect of Russia's imperialist narratives. This is especially true about the history of Ukraine, which Russia has sought to subjugate for centuries. Crediting Russia as being the sole successor of the medieval Kyivan Rus and laying claims to all of the lands it controlled, erasing histories of Ukrainian cities such as Kharkiv and Odesa and justifying attacks on them while also labeling artists and scientists who lived in Ukraine as being actually Russian is part of Moscow's ongoing quest to erase Ukraine, its history and culture.

"They can't exist without stealing history from other peoples," Vadym Poznyakov, an activist who spearheads a campaign to dismantle monuments to Russians in Ukraine, told the Kyiv Independent. "They can't exist without Ukrainian history."

This imperialist way of swallowing neighboring countries and rewriting their histories has been part and parcel of Russia's attempts to justify its aggression against Ukraine for centuries. Russia's recent annexation of Ukrainian territories, as well as the methodical brainwashing of Ukrainians in occupied regions and foreign observers covering the war to believe that Russia has a justification for annexation and murder, has been ongoing for many years.

Taras Honcharuk, a historian based in Odesa, told the Kyiv Independent that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is using this narrative about "historic Russian lands" and ethnic Russians in Ukraine in the same way as Adolf Hitler used his narrative about "Greater Germany."

Russia's mythical Kyivan Rus

A lot of Russian historical narratives revolve around Kyivan Rus, a state that existed in the territory of modern-day Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus in the 9th to 13th centuries. In Russian historiography, the Kyivan Rus is often portrayed as the forerunner of what would become Russia, while Ukraine and Belarus are depicted as marginal offshoots of this medieval state. Russian rulers are portrayed as the direct successors of the princes of Kyiv - such as Volodymyr I, Yaroslav the Wise, and Volodymyr Monomakh. Rus, a word of Scandinavian origin, initially meant the whole territory of Kyivan Rus, but later Russia monopolized the use of the words "Russky" (an inhabitant of Rus) and Rossia (the Greek version of the word "Rus"). This allowed Russia to claim the mantle of the only legitimate successor of the Kyivan Rus and, thus, all of its territories. In fact, the Kyivan Rus was an entity founded by the so-called Varangians (Scandinavian people, speakers of Old Norse) and populated mostly by Slavic, Baltic, and Finno-Ugric tribes. It gave rise to the Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian nations and languages.

The core territory of the Kyivan Rus was in modern-day northern Ukraine. One of the successors of the Kyivan Rus - the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia (in modern-day Ukraine) - was competing with the Principality of Vladimir-Suzdal (in modern-day Russia) for predominance in the 13th to 14th centuries. Another successor of the Kyivan Rus was the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was ruled by a Lithuanian elite but dominated by the Ruthenian (Old Ukrainian/Belarusian) language and culture in the 14th to 16th centuries. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a Westernized and more liberal alternative to the Grand Duchy of Moscow's despotism. Starting from the 14th century, Ukraine and Russia have gone their separate ways, witnessing the development of separate languages, cultures, and histories. Determining who exactly is the main modern successor of the Kyivan Rus is difficult - but some historians argue that it's either all three East Slavic countries - Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus - or none of them.

Malorossia - a case study of derogatory naming

Starting from the 14th century, Russia used the term "Malorossia" (Little Russia) to refer to Ukrainian territories. Russia itself was referred to as "Velikorossia" (Great Russia), and Belarus meant "White Russia." Although the term "Malorossia" or "Little Rus" initially meant just a geographically smaller offshoot of the Kyivan Rus, it became part of Russian imperial discourse and a derogatory term signifying Ukraine's colonial status vis-a-vis Russia. The term Malorossia went out of use after the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917. Currently, Russian imperialists are trying to revive this term.

Another term often used by Russian propaganda is Novorossia (New Russia), which refers to southern Ukraine. The term emerged in the 18th century when the Russian Empire annexed this territory. Historically this territory had been known as Desht-i-Qipchaq, or Dyke Pole (Wild Fields), and had been populated first by numerous Iranian and Turkic peoples, Greek colonists, and later Crimean Tatars and Ukrainian Cossacks. The Zaporizhian Sich, a Cossack republic, was located along the lower Dnipro River in the 16th to 18th centuries. However, Russian propaganda overlooks these ancient layers of history and portrays this territory as "historic Russian land."

Russian imperialists - such as Igor Girkin, the Russian intelligence officer who helped launch the invasion of Ukraine's Donbas in 2014 and was found guilty of downing the MH17 passenger plane - have claimed that so-called "Novorossia" and "Malorossia" are "historically Russian." They have routinely used the terms "so-called Ukraine" and "former Ukraine" to refer to the Ukrainian state.

The not so 'historically Russian' Odesa and Kharkiv

Odesa, Ukraine's largest port city, has been a cornerstone of the Kremlin's imperial narrative. Russian propaganda has long claimed that Odesa is a historically Russian city. In reality, it's much more complicated. Ancient Greeks founded the first settlements in the territory of modern-day Odesa in the sixth century B.C.E. In the 14th century, the town of Hadzhibey was founded in the same territory. The Golden Horde, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Crimean Khanate ruled it. In 1764, the Ottoman Empire also built the fortress of Yeni-Dunya in Hadzhibey.

Russia tends to ignore the history of cities before their annexation by the Russian Empire. "They believe that the date of a city's foundation is when Russia came there," Odesa-based historian Honcharuk told the Kyiv Independent. "But cities in southern Ukraine were founded in the places where Tatar and Zaporizhian Cossack settlements had existed." Moreover, Odesa has been developed by numerous ethnic groups. After Russia conquered Hadzhibey in 1789, a new city called Odesa was built there by a multicultural team, including Jose De Ribas, an Italian-born officer of Spanish-Irish descent, and Francois de Wollant, a Flemish engineer. The Duke of Richelieu, the future French prime minister, ruled Odesa as governor in 1803-1814. He is credited with Odesa's transformation into one of the empire's biggest and most advanced cities. In the 19th century, Odesa was a multicultural melting pot, with Ukrainians, Russians, Greeks, Italians, French, Germans, Poles, Jews, Albanians, Bulgarians, and Moldovans living side by side. By 1939, the Jews became the largest ethnic group in Odesa, accounting for 33 percent of the population. Ukrainians have also played a major role in Odesa's history. Zaporizhian Cossacks raided the Black Sea coast many times in the 16th to 18th century and captured Hadzhibey jointly with Russian troops in 1789. Currently, ethnic Ukrainians form a majority in Odesa.

Russian propaganda has also argued that Kharkiv has always been a Russian city. According to this version, Kharkiv was founded by Russia in the 17th century. However, long before the modern city of Kharkiv emerged, Alan, Khazar, Cuman, and Slavic cities existed in and near Kharkiv from the 8th through 13th centuries. When the Russian Tsardom built the Kharkiv Fortress in the 17th century, Kharkiv became a key center of Sloboda Cossacks - Ukrainians who moved from western Ukraine to the territory of modern-day Kharkiv Oblast. Kharkiv-born activist Poznyakov argued that Kharkiv has had a rich Ukrainian cultural tradition, with many Ukrainian writers and artists. He dismissed Russian imperialists' argument that Kharkiv is a Russian city as absurd. "There was a large Jewish community in Kharkiv," he said. "But nobody is saying that Kharkiv should be part of Israel." Kharkiv is considered the birthplace of modern Ukrainian theater, with the avant-garde Ukrainian Berezil Theater being founded by director Les Kurbas in Kharkiv in 1922. The theater was closed by the Soviet regime in 1933, while Kurbas was executed in Sandarmokh during Russia's Great Terror.

Ethnic cleansing in Crimea

Another favorite myth of Russian propaganda is that Crimea is a "historically Russian land." It has been used to justify the illegal annexation of the peninsula in 2014. The myth is partially based on the fact that ethnic Russians currently form a majority in Crimea. Like in other cases, the history of Crimea is much more nuanced than Russian mythology.

Crimea had been populated by Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Greeks, Goths, Italians, Armenians, and various Turkic tribes for thousands of years before the Russian Empire annexed it in 1783. The Greeks, who have lived on the peninsula since the 7th century B.C.E., dominated it much longer than Russia. However, Russia eventually erased the peninsula's Greek legacy. After occupying Crimea in 1774 and before formally annexing it in 1783, Russia forcibly deported most of the Greeks living in Crimea to the territory of modern-day Donetsk Oblast. Russia claimed that it was protecting Greek Christians from Muslim Tatars and Turks. But many Greeks resisted the deportation, and some even had to convert to Islam to escape the resettlement. The Soviet Union later continued this policy, launching a wave of repressions against Soviet Greeks in 1937-1938 and deporting many of the Greeks living on the Black Sea coast, including Crimea, to other parts of the Soviet Union in the 1940s.

Crimean Tatars were another nation that had settled in Crimea before the Russians. The Muslim Crimean Khanate, with a majority Crimean Tatar population, controlled the peninsula from the 15th until the 18th century. It was a vassal of the Ottoman Empire. The Crimean Tatars remained the largest ethnic group in Crimea until the late 19th century, accounting for 35.6 percent of the population in 1897. But - just like with the Greeks - the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union tried to erase the Crimean Tatar legacy. In 1944, the Soviet leadership accused the entire Crimean Tatar nation of collaborating with the Nazis and deported around 190,000 Crimean Tatars from Crimea to other parts of the Soviet Union, mostly Uzbekistan. Tens of thousands died as a result of the harsh conditions of the exile.

Crimea was transferred from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, a constituent part of the Soviet Union, to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954. The peninsula became an internationally recognized part of Ukraine in 1991, with Russia recognizing it to be part of Ukraine under the Budapest Memorandum in 1994 and under bilateral treaties in 1997 and 2003. This did not prevent Russia from illegally annexing Crimea in 2014.

Cultural figures and monuments

Russia also has a tendency to consider anyone who has anything to do with the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union to be Russian.

Russia has appropriated writer Mykola Gogol as one of the main representatives of classical Russian literature, based on the fact that Gogol lived in St. Petersburg and wrote in Russian. The reality is more complicated: Gogol was an ethnic Ukrainian born in Sorochyntsi, a village in modern-day Ukraine, and most of his books were set in Ukraine and about Ukraine.

Writer Mikhail Bulgakov is also a complicated case. He is usually considered a Russian writer because he wrote in Russian and lived in Moscow during the latter part of his life. Moreover, he is often accused of having been a "Ukrainophobe" since he sympathized with Russian imperialism and was an opponent of the Ukrainian People's Republic, a Ukrainian state founded during the Russian Civil War of 1917-1923. However, Bulgakov was born in Kyiv and lived there during the first part of his life, and some argue that he can be considered to be part of Ukrainian culture.

Serhii Korolov, the engineer who led the Soviet Union's space program and sent the first man to space in 1961, is also often considered to be Russian. However, he was born in the Ukrainian city of Zhytomyr, and his mother was Ukrainian.

Igor Sikorsky is also usually considered to be a Russian aviation engineer. However, he was born in Kyiv and studied and worked in Kyiv, where his first planes were built. Sikorsky, then 30 years old, emigrated to the U.S. in 1919, where he founded the Sikorsky Aircraft company. He never visited the Soviet Union.

From officials to individual activists, Ukrainians have been campaigning to spread awareness about the nuances of the national identification of cultural figures who lived in Ukraine. As a result, museums across the world have recognized Kyiv-born Kazimir Malevich, Kharkiv Oblast-born Illia Repin, and Mariupol native Arkhip Kuindzhi, among others, as Ukrainian rather than Russian artists.

Russia is also using monuments to Russian cultural figures as a tool in its imperialist expansion. As a result, there used to be thousands of monuments to Russians in Ukraine, with the most widespread ones being Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin and writer Alexander Pushkin. However, Ukraine began a campaign to dismantle monuments to Lenin and other communists after the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution and a drive to get rid of monuments to other Russians after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. “Monuments are a marker of the Russian world,” Poznyakov said. “They are used to identify ‘Russian’ territory.”

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How nationalist movements paved Ukraine's way to freedom

by Alexander Query and Iryna Matviyishyn July 7, 2023 6:50 PM 11 min read

[SOURCE]
https://kyivindependent.com/ukraines-true-history-how-nationalist-movements-paved-ukraines-way-to-freedom

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=3DPLmOj0Ur_xinSqXya8tNipG1lnrbDYTMBU

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many in the West, and in the Kremlin too, expected the Ukrainian state to crumble in weeks, if not days. The government would flee, the state would be carved up - some lands absorbed by Russia, the rest perhaps being made into a Moscow-dominated puppet state. The war might continue, but it would be an insurgency in an occupied country, so the experts said. They were wrong, and part of the reason they were wrong is that they had so little knowledge and understanding of Ukraine's history and its long battle to shrug off the shackles of Russian domination. Indeed, the Kremlin's own denial of Ukrainian agency and statehood are as much the reasons for its failure to carry out regime change in Ukraine as its poor logistics and overly ambitious military plans.

At its heart, Ukrainians' fierce resistance to Russian invasion was built from the strong nationalist movement in the country. Nationalism, of course, carries many negative associations in Western democracies with fascism. But Ukraine's nationalism is, first and foremost, an expression of the right to self-determination, not a far-right ideology, according to experts and researchers. The present war is the latest stage of a long-running fight for freedom in Ukraine that can hardly be understood without a close look at the nationalist movements in the country throughout the 20th century, Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko told the Kyiv Independent. "We can't understand today's resistance without (knowing about) the whole bunch of other resistances that existed in Ukraine," he said.

For Myroslav Shkandrij, professor of Slavic Studies at the University of Manitoba, and a leading expert on the topic, the Soviet narrative is mainly responsible for the flawed vision of Ukraine's historical fight for independence. "The Soviet narrative since World War II has been focused on linking Ukraine and Ukrainians' desire for independence and freedom to the atrocities of World War II," Shkandrij told the Kyiv Independent. But within Ukraine, the struggle for independence has been a long one over many generations and is a struggle for freedom, he said. "So Ukrainians see nationalism in a positive light," Shkandrij added.

Nationalism in Ukraine, historically and traditionally, was always associated "with freedom, with democracy, with national liberation," adds leading U.S. historian Alexander J. Motyl. "True nationalism is about the state of a nation," Motyl told the Kyiv Independent. "If you read the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, that could have been written by Ukrainians."

First state, and the Martyrs of Kruty

"Wars are nation builders," Motyl said. "A war forces people to choose sides because once you're invaded, you need to choose a side." Ukraine's first attempt to exist as an independent state in modern times came at the end of the World War I, when Ukrainians saw a political window of opportunity after the 1917 February Revolution in Russia, which led to the abdication of Emperor Nicholas II. Mykhailo Hrushevsky, a key figure in the Ukrainian national movement, was elected as the head of the newly-formed Ukrainian Central Rada in Kyiv. The Central Rada was an organization and culture committee that took on more and more power, and soon gained authority over a good part of today's Ukraine. In Russia, the newly formed Provisional Government recognized this Ukrainian "regional government" at first.

Soon, another revolution struck Russia. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, took power in Moscow. The Bolsheviks grew increasingly intolerant of the Ukrainian state, even though it remained aligned with Russia. In January 1918, the Bolsheviks entered Ukraine and moved on to Kyiv after proclaiming in Kharkiv the creation of the Ukrainian People's Republic of Soviets, a communist puppet state. The Central Rada didn't have enough troops to stop the Bolshevik takeover. But Ukrainians' heroic resistance to Moscow domination was still to be seen, such as at the Battle of Kruty - a small town in Chernihiv Oblast to the east of Kyiv. There, a detachment of roughly 400 Ukrainian students and cadets engaged a much larger Bolshevik force. Half of the Ukrainian cadets were killed in the battle, and another 27 were shot after being captured as revenge for their resistance. They would become celebrated as the first martyrs for the cause of national independence. Despite losing the battle, the students and cadets were able to slow down Russian advances, allowing Ukraine's Central Rada to sign an armistice and alliance with the Central Powers. A month later, with the help of Germany and Austria-Hungary, Ukrainians were again in control of Kyiv.

Different brands of nationalism

Despite retaking Kyiv, and holding it for nearly a year, the period that followed, known as the war for independence, saw Ukrainians and Poles at each other’s throats over control of Galicia while Kyiv was being attacked by the Bolsheviks - all against the backdrop of Ukraine's own civil war. The years of fighting left Ukraine devastated until representatives of Russia and Poland signed a peace treaty in 1921, leaving Ukraine without a state of its own, and control of Ukrainian lands carved up between Bolshevik Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania.

Despite the defeat, these years were formative for the diversity of the Ukrainian nationalism movement, said Shkandrij. "There were Marxists and Socialists in 1917-1921 who fought for independence," he said. "They were called nationalists, even though they were Marxists and communists, in fact, and social democrats." It would also see the beginning of Ukraine's organized nationalist movement, which started in 1919 with veterans from these wars who joined the ranks of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

"If you look at the Ukrainian organized nationalist movement from 1919 to 1955, for most of the period, except for two years when it flirted with fascism, it was essentially authoritarian or moralist, democratic or apolitical for about 33 years," Motyl said.

Demonizing Bandera

People usually associate Ukrainian nationalism with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, or OUN, and its military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, known by its Ukrainian acronym of UPA. The groups formed in the southeastern part of interwar Poland, today's western Ukraine, according to US historian Trevor Erlacher. And the first name that comes to mind when discussing this period is that of Stepan Bandera (1909-1959), one of Ukraine's most controversial figures, who is celebrated or hated - depending on who's talking.

Motyl believes that's because Bandera was both made into a symbol of the nationalist movement by the Ukrainians and because he was a threat to the Soviets, which made him very easy to demonize. However, his influence over modern-day nationalism and Ukrainian society has been greatly exaggerated by Russia to discredit post-EuroMaidan Ukraine, scholars argue. "Nobody cares about the real Bandera," Yermolenko said. "Nobody reads his texts anymore, nobody believes in this hierarchical and far-right ideology, which existed in the 1930s." That's not Ukraine's current ideology, he said. "Ukraine's current ideology is much more horizontal, dependent on specific communities, specific people, much more decentralized, much more self-organized." And it's clear that people who call themselves Banderites do not share his ideologies and probably have never read any of his writings, Yermolenko said. "It's like wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt without knowing who Che Guevara was. It's just because it looks nice, and Bandera is a symbol of the underground resistance to the Soviets."

OUN and UPA

The groups associated with Bandera, the OUN, and its military wing, the UPA, themselves have a controversial legacy. The OUN was founded in 1929 and attracted students and veterans from the Ukrainian Galician Army who wanted to fight oppression from Poles and Soviet Ukraine. The organization was first led by Yevhen Konovalets, who was a veteran of the war for independence in Ukraine between 1917 and the early 1920s. After the Soviet secret police killed him with an exploding chocolate box in 1938, the organization in 1940 split into two factions: the OUN-B, led by Bandera following his release from a Polish prison in 1939, and the OUN-M, led by Colonel Andrii Melnyk.

In February 1941, the larger and more violent faction, the OUN-B, made a deal with leaders of German military intelligence to form two battalions of special operation forces, Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy, director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, says. One battalion was among the first German troops to enter Lviv on June 29, 1941. The next day, Bandera proclaimed Ukraine's independence. But Germany had other plans for Ukraine, and the Nazis turned on the Bandera faction, arresting its members and Bandera himself, whom they told to denounce his proclamation. Bandera refused and was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany, where he spent most of the World War II. Two of his brothers were arrested and died in Auschwitz.

The OUN-M tried to take advantage of the situation by setting up expeditionary groups in central and eastern Ukraine, but by early 1942 the Germans had started to hunt them down. The OUN-B and the UPA would later face three enemies, the Germans, the Poles, and the Soviets.

Volyn Massacre

Erlacher argues that the OUN-B was an example of fascism as an organization with followers "who commit mass violence in the name of national rebirth," referring to the ethnic cleansing of Poles in Volhynia. In the spring and summer of 1943, UPA members massacred thousands of Poles throughout Volhynia in Nazi-occupied Poland, an area that is now part of western Ukraine. Some Ukrainians were also killed by Poles in retaliation, but most of the victims were Poles. Plokhy estimates that the number of Ukrainians killed may vary between 15,000 and 30,000, while the estimates for the Polish victims vary between 60,000 and 90,000. In 2016, Poland's Parliament recognized the killings as genocide, a term that Ukraine denies.

Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, a Bandera biographer and historian at the Free University of Berlin, said in an interview with Deutsche Welle that he had found no evidence that Bandera, who was in a German concentration camp at the time, supported or condemned "ethnic cleansing" or killing Jews and other minorities. It was, however, important that people from OUN and UPA "identified with (Bandera)," he said.

Bandera never returned to Ukraine after being imprisoned by Nazi Germany in 1941 and released in 1944. He was killed in 1959 by the KGB. His name has since been heavily weaponized by Russian propaganda, and he became Moscow's favorite boogeyman when calling for Ukraine's so-called "denazification." The UPA and Bandera were turned into symbols by the Soviets because they resisted, according to Motyl. The UPA had close to 100,000 soldiers in 1944 and was fighting behind the Soviets' line, disrupting the Red Army communications. "They were a formidable military force through 1947-1948," Motyl said. "And at some point, again, within the popular discourse in Ukraine, but also amongst the members of the old and new part, they began referring to themselves as Bandera people." So it made sense for the Soviets to focus on Bandera's movement, as it was a threat, according to Motyl. The Soviets were very fearful of what he was doing because he maintained relations with the movement in Ukraine until 1954-1955, despite being abroad.

Pogroms

In Russia, Ukrainian nationalism is associated with anti-Semitism, and the Kremlin's propagandists often point to the Lviv pogrom of 1941, an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence that began on the afternoon of June 30 and ended on the evening of July 1. Instigated by the German occupiers, the wave of violence saw the spontaneous participation of the non-Jewish local civilian population and officers of the newly formed OUN-B. The discovery in city prisons of the bodies of Soviet prisoners, victims of mass shootings committed by the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), the forerunner to the KGB (Soviet Security Service), during the first days of the war, was used by Nazi propaganda: Lviv Jews were blamed for the NKVD shootings, which resulted in the pogrom.

For Motyl, however, calling the nationalist movement anti-Semitic is a crude generalization, as it wasn't anti-Semitic in its ideology and practice. "Obviously, there were anti-Semitic Ukrainians," he said, adding that some Ukrainian nationalists collaborated with the Nazis. But for many Ukrainians, the issue wasn't racial but rather political, Motyl said. "The question was: Are they, or are they not, loyal to Ukraine?" "The (nationalists) weren't out to exterminate, they were out to combat their political enemies," he said while acknowledging the presence of anti-Semites in the ranks of the OUN. "To put it a little crudely, but not inaccurately: Ukrainians were peasants and Jews were kind of the middle class and the upper class were either Poles or Russians," he said. When the peasant class rebels, it tends to attack the middle class first, before the larger authority, Motyl said, which explains the animosity against some of the Jewish population at the time.

A very Ukrainian phenomenon

Ukraine's nationalist heroes are thus no angels, but their main defining and uniting feature is their unbreakable commitment to the struggle for an independent state, scholars agree.

Ukrainians will generally choose heroes that are strong, forceful, and that don't break easily, Shkandrij explained. "That's why Bandera, as an unbreakable force, a person who never gave up - that's why they would find that fight attractive."

For Yermolenko, this heritage is important because it created a kind of warrior image, even though it might now be associated with fascism in Western societies. "(But) I think it is wrong to associate this image of the warrior and warrior ethics with fascism," Yermolenko said, "because you can find the same ethics in France's anti-Nazi resistance movement." Rather, in Ukraine, nationalism is associated with the idea that "you should fight, that you should not accept evil, that you should resist, and you should be strong as steel."

Shkandrij agrees and also explains the self-organizing nature of Ukrainian resistance to Russian colonialism. "If you look back on the history of spontaneous and mass uprisings, there's a clue there to how Ukrainians have always had to behave because their elite has been removed, has been arrested, has been killed off over several generations." The heroes will also be taken from these ordinary people who fought very hard or for a cause they believed in, Shkandrij adds. "It's a phenomenon that is very Ukrainian."

External Reader Comments

"elite"? No, I think you are referring to popular leaders, elected/chosen representatives and/or administrations. Please be precise. Kyiv independent, please STOP using this totalitarian propaganda word to describe countries' administrations, elected representatives, public servants and 5th column business interests. There is nothing "elite" about these occupations per se, and certainly nothing "elite" about most of the people who occupy them. This word has been misused to disentitle and disempower everyone else, by pretending they are somehow superior and entitled to abuse their contracted functions. Strongly recommend you add an editorial policy to remove use of the word "elite", except when speaking of actual elites in a given field. It is lazy, vague, and harmful.

The vast majority of Ukrainians in this war aren’t fighting for their history or national pride; they are fighting for their country’s sovereignty and indeed their very existence. Stop being arrogant when you don’t have a clue of what’s going on.

I don’t claim to know anything about Ukrainian history. I do know, however, about nationalism. Nationalism is different from patriotism. Patriotism is love of country, and it applies to all of the country. Nationalism, on the other hand is only about loving some of the country. There is no time in history when nationalism has provided unification. It cannot do so, because its goal is not to unify. Its goal is to dominate and divide. This is why I strongly doubt the conclusions of this article. I do not doubt that Ukrainians have come together in defense of Ukraine. I simply doubt that they’ve done so because of nationalism. I strongly believe they’ve done so because of patriotism.

Sorry, but i'm getting a bit tired of your discussions around nationalists, nazis, soviets, antisemits, meaningless pogroms and so on. So sad. I prefer to think of Ukraine as the motherland of the Cossacks, whose leaders were elected by the troops, and later and more importantly of the Makhnovists during the so called Bolshevik revolution. They were anarchists and the only true democrats. They fought the nationalists and the bolshevists as well, for the dignity and freedom of the people. You never speak of these aspects of ukrainian history which I hope are still alive and make this nation so deeply different from the Russians, that seem unable to free themselves of centuries of serfdom and violence.

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The Making of Modern Ukraine

On of the best sources to quickly come up to speed on the history of Ukraine is a lecture series from Yale University - The Making of Modern Ukraine. It is organized by themes. I have listened to the Yale University course lectures and mined the transcript. The GDA tool was used to mine the transcript. The tool is free to use. A new GDA template was developed that you will need to use if you decide to use GDA - Ukraine History Tempate . This is a text version of the transcript that you can use for GDA - The Making of Modern Ukraine Text .

YaleCourses, Timothy Snyder, The Making of Modern Ukraine - 2021, Yale University, Sep 3, 2022. Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He speaks five and reads ten European languages.

Videos

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_

This is a very long lecture series. Try setting the speed to 1.25 or 1.5 and just listen. Let the content slowly sink in, then go look at the transcripts.

Syllabus of Ukraine lecture class: The Making of Modern Ukraine Fall 2022 https://snyder.substack.com/p/syllabus-of-my-ukraine-lecture-class

Ukraine must have existed as a society and polity on 23 February 2022, else Ukrainians would not have collectively resisted Russian invasion the next day. What does it mean for a nation to exist? Timothy Snyder explores these and other questions in a very timely course.

Ukraine must have existed as a society and polity on 23 February 2022, else Ukrainians would not have collectively resisted Russian invasion the next day. What does it mean for a nation to exist? Is this a matter of structures, actions, or both? Why has the existence of Ukraine occasioned such controversy? In what ways are Polish, Russian, and Jewish self-understanding dependent upon experiences in Ukraine? Just how and when did a modern Ukrainian nation emerge? For that matter, how does any modern nation emerge? Why some and not others? Can nations be chosen, and can choices be decisive? If so, whose, and how? Ukraine was the country most touched by Soviet and Nazi terror: what can we learn about those systems, then, from Ukraine? Is the post-colonial, multilingual Ukrainian nation a holdover from the past, or does it hold some promise for the future?

Putin and the Presidents: Timothy Snyder (interview) | FRONTLINE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um-SEQDQidM

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Transcripts

Table of Contents

  1. Lecture 1 Ukrainian Questions Posed by Russian Invasion
  2. Lecture 2 The Genesis of Nations
  3. Lecture 3 Geography and Ancient History
  4. Lecture 4 Before Europe
  5. Lecture 5 Vikings, Slavers, Lawgivers: The Kyiv State
  6. Lecture 6 The Grand Duchy of Lithuania
  7. Lecture 7 Rise of Muscovite Power
  8. Lecture 8 Early Jews of Modern Ukraine
  9. Lecture 9 Polish Power and Cossack Revolution
  10. Lecture 10 Global Empires
  11. Lecture 11 Ottoman Retreat, Russian Power, Ukrainian Populism
  12. Lecture 12 Habsburg Curiosity
  13. Lecture 13 Republics and Revolutions
  14. Lecture 14 Interwar Poland's Ukrainians
  15. Lecture 15 Ukrainization, Famine, Terror: 1920s-1930s
  16. Lecture 16 Colonization, Extermination, Ethnic Cleansing
  17. Lecture 17 Reforms, Recentralization, Dissidence:1950s-1970s
  18. Lecture 18 Before and After the End of History
  19. Lecture 19 Oligarchies in Russia and Ukraine
  20. Lecture 20 Maidan and Self-Understanding
  21. Lecture 21 Comparative Russian Imperialism
  22. Lecture 22 Ukrainian Ideas in the 21st Century
  23. Lecture 23 the Colonial, the Post-Colonial, the Global

Putin and the Presidents: Timothy Snyder (interview) | FRONTLINE

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Lecture 1 Ukrainian Questions Posed by Russian Invasion

0:12 - Okay, greetings. Happy Thursday. This is my first day of teaching, so I'm like slowly making the transition 0:19 from, you know, summer to fall and public stuff to teaching stuff.

0:24 I'm very glad that I can teach a class on Ukraine. I'm very glad that you all are here to at least try out this class on Ukraine.

0:33 Let me just say a word about the way the class is going to work and see if you have any questions about that, and then I will jump into, 0:39 you didn't always have a beard. I'm going to jump into a kind of introductory lecture 0:47 about what some of the major themes of the class will be. So this is a straightforward survey lecture class.

0:55 We're going to cover a lot of, we're gonna cover a lot of time. We're gonna be focused on Ukraine, 1:02 but not in the sense that we're trying to prove that Ukraine as it exists now had to exist, 1:07 but rather we'll be concerned with the things which made it possible, and the other kinds of entities 1:14 which were important on the territory along the way. And more abstractly, we'll be concerned with the question of 1:20 why this nation, why nations in general, how do you get from something, 1:26 how do you get from nothing to something? Why are there nations in general? Or if there have to be nations, 1:32 why the ones that we have to have? Which is the ultimate thing, which seems self-evident, 1:37 like if you're produced in the given educational culture, then the existence of the educational system 1:43 and the state that created it seems self-evident, but it's not really. Like that's the existence of the United States or Ukraine 1:49 or Russia or any country is highly contingent, and frankly, pretty darn unlikely. And so, the burden of proof is really on us as historians 1:57 to show how these things are possible, as opposed to taking them for granted.

2:03 So, as I say, this is a straightforward lecture class. You're expected to come to lecture.

2:08 In week three, we'll have section. You're expected to come to section. You're not expected to bribe your TFs, 2:13 but you are expected, oh, look at all those heads that perked up. I was like, there are like, yeah, 2:20 there are geographical lines where, you know, there are places where that would be expected, but I'm happy to announce that Yale University 2:26 is not one of those places. I'm noting like (class laughing) 2:32 - I'm noting like undergraduate wisdom, which I'm ignoring.

2:37 There are things that I don't want to know. So where was I? So lecture class.

2:42 Two exams. Map quiz next week. Map quiz, take that very generally.

2:48 I might ask you questions on the map quiz, very simple questions which have to do with the readings 2:53 assigned up to that point. If you do the reading and you look at the maps, it's gonna be very straightforward.

2:59 If you don't do the reading and you don't look at the maps, you're gonna be baffled. You're not going to be able to fake it.

3:04 It's gonna be a terrible experience and you'll go home crying. Okay. So it's meant to be easy, 3:10 and the reason why I do a map quiz is because geography is kind of one of 3:15 the great missing things from the way that we do history, along with military history, which has gone missing, 3:20 which is a bit awkward right now that nobody does military history anymore. No, I mean, it's a serious problem, 3:26 actually that we have a lot of history of like the discourse of war and the culture of war, which is interesting and important, 3:32 but we have relatively little straightforward battlefield history, which means that the journalists writing about the war now 3:39 tend to move very quickly into, "Oh, what's Putin thinking?" Or you know, like all the things that we find comfortable, 3:44 like the psychology of people we don't know. We move very quickly into those things as opposed to how do logistics work and why does it matter 3:52 if it's a steppe rather than hills, and what is partisan warfare like, 3:57 and these things that used to be known, but which we've kind of discarded in the 21st century. Okay. That was my big conservative move for the day.

Systems Observation: War is about logistics, terraine like steppe versus hills, and warfare like partisan warfare not what Putin or the Russian people are thinking.

4:04 I'll go back to being myself now, but it is actually very, very important.

4:11 So what we're gonna be doing is moving through time, starting the next lecture.

4:18 Well, next lecture, this is just, I'm gonna be giving a very general introduction this time. Next lecture, we're gonna talk theoretically 4:24 about the origins of nations. Try to open up that question, go through some of the thinking 4:29 about where nations come from. Our guiding thinker on this 4:35 is gonna be a fellow called Ivan Rudnytsky, who is a very important Ukrainian thinker and kind of uniquely situated to address this question 4:43 for reasons which are going to become clear to you, I hope, over time. And then beginning, then you'll have the map quiz, 4:49 and then beginning September 13th, we are going to start moving through time, beginning with the ancient world, 4:55 into the middle ages, into the Renaissance, and so on. So it's all pretty straightforward. I don't wanna spend too much time talking about it, 5:01 but if you have a question about the form of the class, please go ahead and ask.

Systems Observation: The origin of Nations guiding Ukrainian thinker Ivan Rudnytsky. Movement through time using maps beginning with the ancient world, 4:55 into the middle ages, into the Renaissance, and so on is important.

5:08 Yeah? It's all clear? Okay. All right. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to just enter into 5:17 some of the big questions that are raised by the moment that we are in now.

5:23 So history is not about how everything has to be the way that it is now.

5:28 Nevertheless, it would be naive not to notice that the way that we start thinking about history 5:34 has to do with the predicaments and the questions that are raised by the present moment. You can't get away from the present moment.

5:40 As you might have noticed, it's very hard to get away from the present moment, but what you can do is you can use the present moment 5:47 to reflect, right, to reflect, and then when you've reflected, the history that you learned 5:52 might make the present moment more comprehensible. So I'm not gonna say that the purpose of this class is to make the Russian war against Ukraine make sense.

6:00 What I am going to say though is that the war perhaps is an occasion for us to go back 6:05 and understand this history. Some of the things which might seem mysterious, like how is a war like this possible 6:13 might seem less mysterious. Some of the claims that are made about the war 6:18 might seem easier to dismiss or easier to understand once we have the history under our belts.

6:24 So let me start with where we are. Where we are right now, it is what, the 31st of August or something like that? 6:32 Where we are right now is that the Ukrainian armed forces are undertaking a limited offensive 6:38 in the the Kherson oblast of Ukraine, which is right in the Southern part of the country.

6:44 Kherson, it's an interesting name, if you think about it, it doesn't actually, if you have, 6:50 if you know anything about Slavic languages, it doesn't sound particularly Slavic, and that's because it's not. 6:55 Kherson was named after an older ancient Greek settlement on the Crimean peninsula. 7:01 It was named by Katherine the Great when she founded the city. By the way that ancient Greek city. 7:08 which was also called Kherson, is now, the ruins of it are now in a suburb of Sevastopol, 7:14 which is another city name which you might be hearing of. Things are exploding there at the moment. 7:19 Sevastopol is part of the territory in the extreme south of Ukraine and Crimea, which was occupied by Russia in 2014.

7:27 So these place names which seem exotic and mysterious point us back to a history 7:33 which is actually durable and comprehensible. So the Greeks are the oldest documented 7:44 inhabitants of Ukraine. I'm not gonna say the oldest inhabitants, because there are the Scythians and there are are all kinds of other people 7:49 who left other kinds of traces, but in terms of continuous documentation of presence, the Greeks have been there for the longest, 7:56 along with the Jews. So the Jews and the Greeks are the longest documented inhabitants of Ukraine, 8:02 which suggests that familiar concepts of classical history, whether coming from a Greek side or coming from 8:10 a Jewish side are going to turn out to be useful in application to Ukraine.

Systems Observation: Scythians and other people are the oldest inhabitants who left other kinds of traces, but in terms of continuous documentation of presence, the Greeks have been there for the longest, along with the Jews.

8:17 The history of Ukraine as we're going to see is about an axis of south to north. 8:26 Okay, I realize I'm now getting into geography and heads are spinning already. 8:31 North is like, when you're looking at a map, it's the up one. (students and professor chuckling) 8:37 - I'm sorry. (students and professor chuckling) - And south is the other way. 8:44 So when we think of it, people talk about Ukraine in terms of east and west, and that, I just wanna say, that's a very recent phenomenon. 8:50 The axis on which early Ukrainian history is going to emerge, or the history of Kyivan Rus', 8:56 which is the first big documented polity in this region is a north, it's a North-South axis.

Systems Observation: The history of Ukraine is about an axis of south to north. Today people talk about Ukraine in terms of east and west and that is a very recent phenomenon. The axis on which early Ukrainian history is going to emerge, or the history of Kyivan Rus', which is the first big documented polity in this region is a north, it's a North-South axis.

9:03 It has to do with Vikings, which is a major theme in European history, right? 9:08 The Viking age, which begins in the eighth century. It has to do with the encounter of the Vikings 9:13 and the continuation of the Roman empire, which is known as Byzantium, which is capital in Constantinople, which is now Istanbul.

9:22 It Kyivan Rus', our history, begins with an encounter of this major Northern development 9:28 and this major Southern development, which meet in Kyiv and sets something off, which is in some way continuing. 9:35 This something that is set off, we're gonna be following for a thousand years. The state, which is founded, as I've said, 9:42 is called Rus' or Kyivan Rus', I will describe, I'll talk about why it's called Rus' later on.

Systems Observation: Vikings come from the north and the continuation of the Roman empire (now called Byzantium, with the capital in Constantinople, now known as Istanbul) meet in Kyiv and this sets off something continuing today.

9:47 It's very interesting, but the territories in question are also going to be governed by other entities like the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, 9:53 the biggest state in Europe for quite a long time. Poland major, the major power of the region 9:59 for quite a long time, the Ottoman empire, which we cannot forget, and if I get through the middle of this class and I haven't talked enough about the Ottomans, 10:05 I want you guys to call me on it because like there's this whole thing about Kyivan Rus' 10:11 and like Putin talks about it, then Zelensky talks about it, and both Putin and Zelensky are named after the guy 10:16 who was baptized, maybe, in order to found Kyivan Rus', who's is called Valdemar, 10:22 because of course he was a Viking and not a Russian or Ukrainian, cause Russia and Ukraine didn't exist at the time.

10:29 But the Viking who got baptized, who was called Valdemar in 988, that name then becomes Velodymyr in Ukrainian 10:37 and Vladimir in Russian. Right, so that contemporary heads of state of these two countries are named after this figure who a thousand years ago maybe converted to Christianity.

10:47 So there's this Kyivan Rus' business, and we're gonna follow Kyivan Rus' and it's fascinating, but we have to remember that the whole south of the 10:54 territory that we're talking about was never actually part of Kyivan Rus' right? So Putin is now making this war in Ukraine, 11:02 and part of his logic, as I'm gonna talk about is that Russia and Ukraine have always been one people because of a Viking 11:08 maybe got baptized a thousand years ago, which I want you guys to understand is not a persuasive historical argument, okay? 11:13 If we get one thing out of this class, it's gonna be that if a dictator tells you a thousand years ago, somebody got baptized, 11:19 that doesn't mean your nation is the same as his nation. If we can get through that, we'll have done a good job.

11:24 So at least for the first 15 minutes of class. But my point is that we cannot forget that these Southern 11:29 territories were not part of Kyivan Rus' at all, where the fighting is happening now was not, 11:37 it was part of the ancient Greek world. It was part of the Ottoman world for a long time, 11:42 but it was not actually part of Kyivan Rus'. Southern Ukraine has a different history and it is 11:48 brought into this larger Ukrainian thing later on. So let's. I'm just saying that because we have to mark the 11:56 Ottoman empire and we have to mark Islam, and in general, by the way, we have to mark Ukraine 12:02 as a major center, not just of Christian history, because when you focus on Kyiv 12:09 and the conversion to Christianity, then you're in this kind of Christian teleological arc. Somebody, maybe or maybe didn't get dunked in water 12:16 and therefore it's Christian forever, but Ukraine is actually a center of Muslim and Jewish and Christian civilization, 12:24 and this is one of the things which makes it interesting and of note and in the ancient period, it was a center of what you could think of as a contest 12:32 between those three monotheistic traditions to convert the pagans who lived there, which we'll get to in a later lecture.

12:39 For now though, what I wanna make sure that we get to is this issue of how you get to be a nation.

12:47 Okay, so that's gonna be one of our major themes, and I don't mean it teleologically, just to stress, I don't mean why Ukraine had to be, 12:54 because that's a terrible question. As soon as you're in the world of why a nation had to be, 13:00 you've obliviated, you've eliminated, you've erased all human agency in the whole story, right? 13:07 If I'm able to say right now from the pulpit Ukraine had to exist, then we're removing everything 13:13 which makes history interesting, right, the human choices along the way. The way people saw the circumstances they were in, 13:19 what people thought was possible, what they thought they were doing, and what they sometimes even did. All that goes away.

13:25 If I can say, "Oh, there had to be America or there had to be Russia, or there had to be China. " 13:30 There didn't have to be any of these things. We can explain how they came into being, but what we can't say, and this is what Putin does, 13:37 we can't say that it's predetermined. As soon as we say it's predetermined, this is no longer a history class, it's in some kind of, 13:43 we're in some kind of exercise in, you know, applied physics or something. Okay, but the bad, so there's a bad answer 13:51 to why, you know, to where history comes from, which is that things had to be the way they are, and that bad answer is closely related to this war 13:58 because Putin gave that bad answer in July of 2021, when he wrote an incredibly long, for a politician, 14:04 not long for you guys, an incredibly long essay which he called "On the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine" 14:13 and his bad answer is that things are the way they are because they had to be this way basically, right? 14:20 Russia and Ukraine have always been together, and if they're not together, that's the result of alien, 14:26 non-historical forces. This is really important, by the way, because when a tyrant makes an argument 14:33 about how history has to be, then some of the forces that are actually resident in history, 14:39 then get classified as being ahistorical or non-historical or exotic or alien, right? 14:46 So in Putin's telling you the story, all the Lithuanian stuff and all of the Polish stuff 14:52 and all of the Jewish stuff, for that matter, all the things which aren't about Christianity or Russia 14:58 are now suddenly exotic, alien, foreign. They're not really history.

15:04 They're the things that have to be removed so that history can go the way that it's supposed to go, 15:09 and that is precisely a rationale for war. In fact, it is the rationale for this war, 15:15 because the argument for this war is that Ukrainians don't know who they really are because they've been polluted by all this Polish stuff 15:24 or Lithuanian stuff or Habsburg stuff, or maybe latterly European Union stuff or American stuff.

15:32 So you have to peel away all this artificial things to get down to who they really are, 15:37 and they may not know who they really are and that's tragic and we have to apply enough violence 15:42 so that they can understand who they really are, right? And once you're in that way of seeing things, then of course the war makes perfect sense to you, right? 15:50 And so the way that history is presented has an integral connection with the decision to make a war, 15:56 and also for the way that a war seems to make sense while it's going on, right, 16:01 while it's going on to people who are taking part of it. So the point is though that is not that we're gonna 16:08 start with this bad history because it's the right kind of history, the point is that the bad history or what I would prefer 16:15 to call the myth or the political memory gives us an occasion to see how history 16:21 might actually have been. It's a kind of, the bad history is a kind of invitation to what might actually be more interesting.

16:30 Okay. So what's wrong with the idea, let me just open this up to you guys very quickly.

16:37 What's wrong with, this is kind of a trick question. I'm sorry. What's wrong with an essay which is titled 16:43 "On the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine?" 16:50 Go for it. - [Student] There is no historical unity of Russia. - Okay. That's alright. I'll give you that. But I'm looking for yes. Okay.

16:57 Why not? I mean, why not? Because you don't think so? - [Student] No, I think it's been forced, 17:05 but the unity has been forced. - Okay. - [Student] Doesn't never like substantial. - Okay. All right.

17:11 I'm going for something more fundamental. Yeah? - [Student] Russia and Ukraine might not have existed in the way we talked about them.

17:17 - Good. Okay. That's good. That's good.

17:23 Russia and Ukraine as nations definitely didn't exist in the year 988, right? 17:29 The nation is a modern historical construct characterized by the notion that you feel a kind of solidarity with people 17:38 you don't know. That's Benedict Anderson imagined community. It's a good argument that you, 17:46 somebody else is American or Ukrainian or Chinese, and you think you have something in common with them, even though you don't know them personally, 17:52 that's the nation. The nation also involves a certain, at least a certain notion of equality.

17:57 We may not be equal in every ways, but I'm not more American than you are, right, if you're American 18:04 We're, at least in the, at least notionally, we're equal as members of a nation, right? 18:11 That does not exist in the ancient world, or it doesn't exist in the medieval world. So that's a good one.

18:17 Now, can we go even deeper than that? 18:23 All right, I'm gonna have to answer my own trick question. Yeah, go for it. - [Student] This might be a long shot, but this statement itself is inherently contradictory.

18:30 Can you say the unity, but he's also recognizing Ukraine sovereignty by saying that Russia and Ukraine is separate entities.

18:38 - That's kind of where, I mean, I'm gonna give you like extra credit points for that, because I think you're right.

18:46 And I think what I'm aiming for is the actual language of the statement.

18:51 The way that "On the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine" plays a certain trick.

18:58 The trick is that if I begin a title with, "On" 19:03 the thing that's there is supposed to be real, right? So if the title is "On the historical unity 19:10 of Russia and Ukraine" the trick is that, well, since it's "On" this, that thing must exist, right? 19:15 If I write a book which says "On quick chess strategies to defeat Garry Kasparov" 19:22 then it's like, that thing must exist, right, even though it doesn't exist, right? But if I say on this thing, then it exists 19:30 and so that kind of language, the kind of implicit assertion of existence 19:35 is non-historical language. It's the language of legend, the language of myth. It's tricky language which gets you thinking 19:43 in terms of categories of eternity, categories of durability, categories which isn't changed, 19:49 what things which don't change, which leads you to where Putin is, which his idea that some things are, as he says, 19:58 predetermined, right, which is a very strong word. His idea is that because there was a baptism in Kyiv in 988, 20:04 the rest of it is predetermined and anything which doesn't go the way it's supposed to go is somehow exotic or foreign and has to be suppressed, 20:12 and then historical unity, I mean, I'm gonna make your point a little bit more strongly. It's not just that Russia and Ukraine, 20:19 there's no such thing as historical unity, right? History is not about unity. History is about, okay, I'm gonna throw this one open.

20:26 What's history about in two words? You can have two, you have three if one of them's an "and. " 20:33 War and peace. I guess that's what I deserve for my military history comment earlier on.

20:39 (students laughing) - I mean, it's not bad. It's not a bad answer by the way. It's a pretty good answer. Anything. Anyone else wanna go for it? 20:45 Yeah. - [Student] People. - Did it in one word. That's good. It's people who can write stuff down, 20:51 actually, that's where history stops is the line between history and archeology or anthropology.

20:58 History is all about written records. So we're gonna do a lot of warmup before we get to written records, but one of the reasons why baptism is important 21:06 in the history of Eastern Europe or Europe in general is that with baptism and Christianity comes written language 21:11 and with written language comes the ability to make different kinds of interpretations where historians are comfortable. All right, I'm gonna give this one more shot.

21:17 What's history about? 21:22 Don't you guys dream of, isn't this like your dream you're gonna come to Yale and a professor's gonna ask you what history's all about and you're gonna raise your hand 21:28 and say something brilliant? (class laughing) - Like isn't that what you guys dream about? This is your moment.

21:34 Yeah, Jack. - [Jack] States in society. - State in society. That's good. That's good. That's pretty good. Okay.

21:39 So what I'm thinking about is something even more basic and dumb, which is change in continuity.

21:46 Okay, so you don't have to write that down. It's a very fundamental thing that sometimes things change and sometimes they don't 21:52 and history is aware of both of them, right, and you're in, history is aware, 21:58 so the historical unity is a non-historical concept because what it does is that it's a trick 22:05 because historical doesn't mean historical, it means unchanging, right? Historical unity in that phrase means forever.

22:12 It means eternal, right It doesn't actually mean historical, cause historical would mean it changes.

22:17 Maybe there was some unity at some point, but if it's historical, then it would change because that's what history is.

22:22 History is change as well as continuity. So history is about change in continuity, which means it's about ends and beginnings, 22:29 and it's also about unpredictability. Okay, so as you might have gathered, 22:34 this lecture is also because we're doing this big question, we're handling this big subject of war, 22:39 and we're trying to do this big question of where nations come from at the very beginning. I'm trying to do just a little bit about what history actually is, cause we're gonna need it.

22:48 So one of the things which, since history is about beginnings and endings, it's also unpredictable, right? 22:54 It's about things that you couldn't expect, and that may seem counterintuitive, because you probably think, 23:00 well, okay you probably don't, cause I know you're all very sophisticated, but someone in some other classroom might think 23:06 history is about old dusty books and we know what's gonna happen in the old dusty books.

23:11 But here's the thing, even if you read all the old dusty books that you wanted about the year 1439 and you became 23:18 the world's leading expert on 1439, you still would not know what happened in 1440, right? 23:25 That's the level you wouldn't have, and that's the level of unpredictability of history, and it comes up to the present.

23:32 You can read all, I mean you could know everything you could possibly humanly know about 2021, but you wouldn't know what's gonna happen in 2022.

23:40 You just wouldn't. It's only afterwards that it all seems like it had to happen, right? Like up until February 24th.

23:45 "Of course Russia's not gonna invade Ukraine. " After February 24th. "Oh, of course Russia was gonna invade Ukraine. " That's how our minds work and history is there to remind us 23:54 that actually we're wrong pretty much all the time, that things are not actually predictable, right? That what people expect to happen 24:00 is generally what doesn't happen, and that novelty is an authentic thing, that there are new things which come about all the time.

24:08 In our case, the new thing that we'll be thinking about the most is nature. I mean, sorry is the nation.

24:17 Now one of the things which gets elided, and I've already mentioned this and it's pretty important 24:24 in the notion that history is some kind of eternity or some kind of repetition. Like you may have heard the phrase, 24:31 you may have heard the idea that history repeats itself. I don't know about you guys. I hear it all the time. Because whenever I talk about the past, then people say, 24:37 "Well, history is repeating itself" because this thing is like this thing, but if history really, oops, I'm getting out of the camera view probably.

24:43 I'm not used to doing this. If history repeats itself, 24:50 that would mean that nothing we do matters, right? If history literally repeated itself, 24:55 then there would be no human agency. It's the same thing as saying things never change.

25:01 If things change according to a pattern, that also means no human agency, right, and so the notion that history is a cycle, right, 25:08 there was a time when we were great and now we have to make ourselves great again, 25:13 like the notion that there's a cycle, that there was a Golden Age and then something went wrong and then we correct it. That's also not historical.

25:21 That's also a way of eliminating human agency, right? So history doesn't repeat. It doesn't repeat.

25:26 You learn things from history which can then help you recognize other things. You might see some certain patterns, but history doesn't repeat.

25:33 Okay, so the thing which goes missing in these accounts, 25:39 which I want us to get better at recognizing over the course of this class, 25:44 and as we think about the nation, is the notion of human agency.

25:51 Not volunteerism, like not the idea that you can do whatever you want, but the notion of human agency that you, 25:57 history helps us to identify the structures as best we can, and then the better we understand the structures, 26:04 the better we see what humans can and can't do or could imagine that they can do within those structures.

26:12 So when we do history, we're trying to, as it were objectively, understand the situation around a person, 26:19 but we're also trying to subjectively understand what that person might have been thinking or trying to do, 26:25 and we never give up on the second part, right? So to take the example of this baptism in 988 to, 26:31 don't worry, we'll return to it over and over again, but when Valdemar got himself baptized, 26:38 we know he was not thinking about Russia and Ukraine a thousand years later, like that we can be sure about.

26:44 We can be pretty sure he wasn't even thinking about Christianity because we know enough about his predicament to say what he was probably thinking 26:51 about was geopolitics and what form of conversion would be best to preserve his own rule, right? 26:59 And we'll try to explain how that all works out, but what we're always trying to do 27:04 is to understand the situation around someone which is, so to speak, of an objective undertaking.

27:10 But then we're also trying to get inside the individual actors and their own minds and recognize that they have a subjective appreciation 27:18 of these, and you can never quite do away with that tension between what I'm calling very simply 27:24 the objective and the subjective forms of history.

27:31 Okay, so we've already talked about many of the ways that this kind of myth of eternity is wrong.

27:40 Another way that I wanted to talk about it is in terms of diversity or in terms of change.

27:48 If I give you a myth of a Golden Age, 27:54 I'm usually getting rid of diversity. I'm usually getting rid of all the interesting stuff.

28:00 If I'm talking about how, and this is, by the way, all myths of a Golden Age are pretty much structurally the same.

28:07 Interestingly, it always turns out that we were the good guys. Right, like try to think of a myth of a Golden Age 28:13 where the other guys were the good guys. If it's, funnily, it all kind of comes down to the same thing.

28:18 It's aways, we were the good guys. We were innocent, and then the bad people came and they polluted us or they did something very bad.

28:25 It's structurally always the same, and it doesn't even matter whether you're an empire or not. You can be the most powerful empire in the world, 28:31 the most powerful empire in the most powerful country in the world, hint USA, 28:37 and you can still come up with a story of how you were the victim and the other people came and they polluted you, but the structure is always the same, 28:46 and so when you have a story of which Putin's version of the baptism in Kyiv is one example.

28:53 You have a story about how everything was always static. Everything was pure, right? 28:58 That's why the baptism, by the way, is so attractive. It's not that Putin actually goes to church or that the Russian church really exists as such, 29:05 but baptism is a notion of, it's a cleansing, right, 29:11 it's a purifying, it's a starting again, and that's why it's such an attractive image in this story.

29:18 The baptism allows us to forget all the things that happened before and present history or the past 29:23 as this kind of clean unity where anything which was polluting came from the outside, 29:29 and that is a way of getting rid of diversity or getting rid of the things which might, as historians or as students of history, 29:36 we might actually find to be interesting, where it gets rid of things coming from other places.

29:45 It gets rid of origins. It gets rid of innovation. It gets rid of all of the interesting stuff.

29:51 Like, for example, the alphabet. The alphabet might seem like something which is eternal.

29:57 I mean, when was the last time you guys thought about the alphabet? 30:04 All right, that's not the question that you were dreaming your professor was gonna ask you the first week of Yale. "He was asking me about the alphabet, mom.

30:10 I can't believe it. I studied so hard. " So the alphabet is a really interesting creation.

30:17 It was actually only invented once, like a lot of things that we take for granted and then copied a bunch of times, the specific Cyrillic alphabet, 30:24 which came to Kyiv after the baptism, was invented by a couple of, we'll talk about this, 30:30 a couple of Byzantine priests who were trying to convert, not Kyiv, but Moravia, not then, 30:36 but a couple centuries before, and they had an interesting career and it wandered and ended up in Kyiv, 30:42 and then suddenly you have this alphabet. And then that Cyrillic alphabet can seem like a kind of eternal marker of like east and west or whatever 30:49 once it's established, but it's actually an innovation which came from the outside, right, 30:57 like, for that matter Christianity itself. So when you focus on how things, or if you pretend that things are static, 31:03 what you're doing is you're excluding all the diversity, all of the innovation, and all the things which came from the outside.

31:11 What we're gonna be trying to do in this class is make the opposite point.

31:17 That what's interesting about Ukraine is that rather than being part 31:22 of somebody else's myth of purity, right, is that Ukraine actually embodies in a very intense form 31:32 most of the major themes of European history and some of the major themes of European history, 31:38 of world history. What we're gonna try to be arguing. is that as a result of Ukraine's geography, 31:46 as a result of this north-south axis at the beginning, and then east-west axis later on, 31:52 all of the themes of European history appear in Ukrainian history, just in a slightly more interesting form, right? 31:59 So the Vikings, for example, if you're interested in European history, you may be interested in the Vikings.

32:06 The Vikings, let's face it, they're interesting. Okay. So you have this mainstream of European development 32:12 where the Franks start a state and the Vikings react to the Franks and they start raiding the Franks 32:18 and they invent these boats and they travel all over the world. Very cool. But maybe the single most lasting trace of the Viking Age 32:27 is Kyiv, right? The Vikings founded states. They knocked over states. They founded the states all over the place.

32:33 Normandy, for example. Normandy, as you might remember, invades England and establishes England in the form that we know it today.

32:40 Vikings matter a lot, but Norwegian democracy, it also began with Vikings, 32:46 but Kyiv may be the single most interesting legacy of the Viking Age, maybe the most durable legacy 32:52 of the Viking Age. When you look at pictures of wartime Kyiv now, which, you know, where San Sophia is still standing, 32:59 thankfully, like that's a legacy of Viking civilization. That's a legacy of Vikings converting to Christianity.

33:08 If you think about the history of the Reformation, right? Oh the Reformation, we all know the Reformation 33:15 is a big theme of European history. Suddenly there are Protestants as well as Catholics, and maybe there's a Hundred Years War 33:20 and a third of the population of Germany is going to get wiped out and the printing press comes along and suddenly there can be disputations 33:26 which seem to lead to a lot of violence. This whole thing about the internet causing trouble so far 33:32 is like nothing compared to the printing press. Like we may get there, but like the printing press came along and that was a mess.

33:39 But in Ukraine you have the Reformation, but it's not Catholics and Protestants, it's the Orthodox and the Greek Catholics 33:45 and the Catholic and the Catholics and the Protestants and all kinds of Protestants. And you have a religious war in 1648, 33:51 which is also a proto national war, and an anti-colonial war and something which is extremely interesting.

33:57 So basically everything that happens in European history happens in Ukrainian history, just slightly more intensely and sometimes slightly earlier.

34:05 And indeed one of the themes or one of the things that I hope you'll notice as we go along is that George Orwell said this, 34:11 that the hardest thing to notice is what's right in front of your nose, right? 34:17 I don't know, this is your first week at Yale, maybe like 50 years from now when you're an alum, you'll be like, "My professor told me the hardest thing 34:23 to notice is what's right in front of your nose. " If you take that away, I'll also be happy, but that's true.

34:30 The things which are most intensely obvious are very often the things that are hardest to take on 34:35 and history in a way is actually like, "Oh, America's an empire. " I mean, history is a way of picking up on the obvious 34:43 because it gives it to you from a whole bunch of different angles at the same time, and then maybe the obvious 34:49 will eventually come through, right? So the point is that Ukraine is at this absolute center 34:59 of a lot of things, which we regard as central. I've given you the Viking Age and the Reformation, which may seem a little exotic.

35:05 It's absolutely at the center of the First World War. It's absolutely at the center of the Second World War. It's absolutely at the center of Stalinist terror.

35:12 It's absolutely at the center of the Holocaust. It's absolutely at the center of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

35:18 It's at the center of major historical developments, not just ancient and medieval, but also very contemporary.

35:25 But the fact that it's, precisely the fact that it's at the center of the development makes it hard to see and hard to notice.

35:32 It's sometimes hard to direct your gaze at the thing which is most important sometimes, 35:37 because where things are most important is also where things are darkest, right, and very often Ukraine is going to be a kind of 35:46 heart of darkness. Who wrote "Heart of Darkness" by the way? - [Student] Joseph Conrad. - Where is he from? - [Student] From Poland.

35:53 - Give you one more try. - [Student] Ukraine? - You're guessing though, right? 35:58 Yeah. So you're not wrong that he was from Poland, but it's a very interesting trajectory.

36:04 So "Heart of Darkness" is a famous, famous book about the race for Africa. It's a remarkable novel.

36:09 Conrad's a remarkable writer. Conrad is a Pole. How does he know about colonialism? 36:15 Because he is from Ukraine, right? There's a recent Polish history book about Ukraine, which is called "Poland's Heart of Darkness" 36:21 which of course the Poles really didn't, in general, like to hear, but it's a very valid point.

36:27 During the Renaissance period, as we'll see Polish colonialism in Ukraine was incredibly intense, 36:32 and that gives Conrad the background to understand the European race for Africa, 36:39 and in turn Hannah Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism" is basically one long riff on Joseph Conrad's novel "Heart of Darkness. " 36:48 And so it's not surprising that Arendt actually understands that Ukraine is important.

36:54 Just kind of closing the loop here, but a heart of darkness is something which is hard to see, 37:00 but that doesn't mean it's unimportant, right? So things get wiped out of the history 37:06 that are precisely the things that we have to see, okay. I'm getting towards the end of the main themes 37:13 that I wanted to make sure we got introduced here. So we've talked about what history is.

37:18 We've talked about what a nation is. We've talked about the difference between history and myth.

37:26 I've mentioned this sort of trigger question of Ukraine exists, why? Or Ukraine exists how? 37:33 Which is a lot trickier than it seems at the beginning. So if you're living through the 21st century 37:39 and I realize like this is the only century that you guys have lived through, which I find very troubling.

37:45 One of the, no like, if you're me, like think about this for a second, okay, if you're me, you guys never get older, right? 37:52 Every September I show up and you're always the same age. That is really weird, right? 37:58 It's very strange. And every year I get, every year I get older, which is very, it's very troubling.

38:06 But if you're in the 21st century, there are these moments where you say, "Oh, look, Ukraine exists. " 38:13 Like 2004, what Ukrainians now call the Revolution of Dignity or sorry, 38:19 the Orange Revolution, 2014, the Revolution of Dignity or 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

38:25 It's very easy and tempting when Russia invades Ukraine and Ukraine resists to say, "Oh, look, now Ukraine exists. " 38:34 But that wouldn't be a very Ukrainian perspective, right? The fact that you recognize something because someone else 38:41 acts doesn't mean that they just came into existence. On the contrary, I think the argument probably runs better the other way.

38:47 The fact that Ukrainians were able to resist the Russian invasion suggests that the nation 38:53 or the civil society had already consolidated to a pretty impressive degree, right, 38:58 and the fact that we, and that would be my American "we," but it was a general assumption, 39:04 all thought that Ukraine would collapse in three days might say more about our misunderstanding of the place 39:10 than it does about the place itself. And after you misunderstand it and you say, "Well, it doesn't really exist.

39:15 It's gonna collapse in three days" and then it doesn't collapse, what's your next move? Your next move in order to rescue your position is to say, 39:23 "Oh, well Ukraine must have just been created by the Russian invasion" of which is something that 39:29 if you've been following this war at all, you will have heard journalists and others say. "Well, you Putin and Putin united Ukraine 39:35 with this invasion" right? And of course it's true that there's a lot of solidarity and so on that wouldn't have happened without the war, 39:41 but the idea that Putin created Ukraine by invading it is ludicrous, right? You can invade lots of places, 39:47 that doesn't mean that they start to exist as nations. That's not how history actually works. So that itself, that whole move that journalists then made 39:55 to say, "Oh, well, Ukraine exists because Putin" is just a way to keep talking about the thing, which people are very comfortable talking about, 40:00 which is Putin. If you're a writer in a democracy, you're very attracted to authoritarians. I don't know if you've noticed this trend, 40:07 but there's a kind of seductive lure of the distant authoritarian. No, it's true. Like, the twenties and thirties, 40:12 if you go back to the twenties and thirties and you read about the way Americans wrote about not just Stalin, but also Hitler, 40:18 you'll see this tendency. If you're in a democracy, you're very kind of tempted by this idea that, "Oh, there's somebody over there 40:25 and everything is orderly and they have a vision, and this is kind of interesting" and so on, we fall, we go for that again and again and again, 40:31 and with Putin even now though, it's much weaker now than it was before February. There's this idea that, "Oh, he's interesting. It's kind of seductive.

40:39 He's a strong man, and let's talk about Putin" right? Let's talk about Putin and then saying, "Oh, Putin created Ukraine by invading" 40:47 is one more way of talking about Putin rather than talking about Ukraine. In other words, it's one more colonial move 40:53 that you're making. Well, okay. They didn't exist, but if they do exist, it's the paradoxical result of a foreign dictator, right? 41:01 Okay. So there are these triggering moments, but what I'm trying to suggest are these triggering moments should be triggers 41:06 of our asking ourselves what actually happened, you know, as opposed to jumping to easy conclusions 41:13 that are convenient, with which are consistent with what we already, which what we already think.

41:19 Okay. So we've done history. We've done what history is. You guys feel like, you know what history is now? Cause I hope so, because we only have one lecture for this.

41:27 We've talked, we've introduced a little bit, the difference between history and myth.

41:34 There's one more theme which I wanna just introduce very quickly, and it's a 20th century theme 41:40 which I want you to have in mind. The theme is genocide. And the reason it's a 20th Century theme 41:46 is that the 1948 definition of genocide assumes that there's such a thing as a people.

41:52 So Raphael Lemkin, who is the lawyer who's educating what's now Ukraine, by the way, Polish, Jewish lawyer, 41:58 who's educated in the university, and what's now Lwow, when he made up the word genocide, 42:04 he's assuming the existence of a people, right, because genocide is about the intentional destruction of a people.

42:10 So it assumes that there is such thing as a people, right, what we might call a nation or a society.

42:16 So it's a 20th century construction. I mean genocide is the antipode of the creation of a nation.

42:22 We think of nations are modern and any attempt to destroy a nation is also modern, right? 42:29 The theme of genocide is a late theme, but I want you to keep it in mind because of this war 42:35 and because of the way that genocide also asks questions about where nations come from. This war is a strangely genocidal war.

42:43 It's strange in the sense that it's very rare for the authors of a war to actually say 42:49 at the beginning that the aim of the war is the destruction of another people. That doesn't happen very often.

42:55 That might be the aim, but for it to be announced openly, as it has been in this war, is pretty unusual.

43:00 and that's the intent part of genocide. The practical part of genocide one can find very easily in the hundred thousand dead in Mariupol, 43:07 as it appears unfortunately, in the 3 million Ukrainians deported, including a quarter million children, 43:13 at least who were to be forcibly assimilated into Russian culture in the systematic campaign of rape and the murder of local elites 43:20 in the territories that Russia controls and maybe more banally, but I think also very importantly, 43:28 in the systematic attempt to destroy publishing houses, libraries, and archives, which are the way, of course, 43:34 that nations or societies or people remember themselves. So there is a genocidal aspect to this war, 43:40 and I want you to keep this in mind as a theme because this concept of genocide, though it's a modern concept, 43:47 it also points us backwards towards other questions, which we're gonna be thinking about, 43:53 which have to do with colonialism and which have to do with why people recognize or do not recognize other people.

44:00 Why, what were the, if we're gonna ask the positive question, 44:06 a Ukrainian nation exists how? Which I think is a really interesting question, not just about Ukraine, a Ukrainian nation exists.

44:13 How was that possible? The converse question is what were the things which were thrown up along the way and why? 44:21 So why was there particularly Ukrainian famine in 1933 in the Soviet Union? 44:28 Why that? Why did Hitler particularly think that Ukraine would be a good site of Lebensraum? 44:35 Why in the 1970s were Brezhnevian assimilation policies particularly applied to Ukraine, right? 44:43 What is it about this place which has put it at the center of so much colonial pressure over the centuries 44:50 and the decades? I don't want you to apply the word genocide to things that happened before there's a nation. That's not my point.

44:55 My point though is that I want to introduce some concepts, which are what is history? What is a nation? 45:02 And then the kind of pendant or counterpart to what is a nation, is what is genocide? What are the things which lead to nation? 45:09 If there are things that lead to nation destruction, what are the things which, sorry, to nation creation, what are the things that lead to nation destruction? 45:16 What are the deeper impulses? Not just a war which is happening now or a famine which happened then, or a terror which happened some other time, 45:22 but what are some of the deeper forces which push us in that direction? So it's, Ukraine is a heart of darkness 45:28 in that sense, right? It's a way to collect those kinds of events as well. They're not the only things we're gonna be talking about, 45:35 but the concept of genocide can help us to remember that this is an important part of the history that we're gonna be investigating.

45:41 Okay. So much for introductions. Thank you all for being here, and I hope to see you again next week.

45:48 (class applauding) 45:55 (upbeat transition tones)

back to TOC


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Lecture 2 The Genesis of Nations

0:00 (solemn music) 0:11 - But today is a kind of second introductory lecture where we're gonna be thinking about the origins of the nation in particular, as with last time, 0:20 I'm gonna toss you some what I think are softballs, but also feel free to raise your hand and interrupt, 0:26 because that can help me when I understand that something's really not coming across or something is unclear. So just feel free to interrupt 0:32 and ask a question anytime you want. So this lecture is called The Genesis of Nations, 0:39 and it's about a question, which I raised last time, which has kind of been a question puzzling philosophers 0:46 from the beginning of philosophy, which is how do you get from something to nothing? 0:51 At some point there wasn't a Ukrainian nation and at some point there is a Ukrainian nation.

0:56 How does that happen? How do you get social forms to come into existence 1:01 that didn't exist before? It's a really interesting question.

1:07 And you can ask it with other social formations as well. There didn't used to be classes, 1:13 but now we don't have any difficult-- I don't mean the classes that you're in. I mean, social classes, right? Economic classes.

1:18 Those didn't use to exist either, but now we don't have much trouble identifying, oh, he's middle class. Actually we're in America, so everybody's middle class.

1:27 Thinking that everyone's middle class is part of the class struggle, I'm sure you know that. So if you all think you're middle class, 1:33 that means you're already in, okay. Sorry that wasn't our subject today at all. We're gonna move back to nations.

1:38 Although the Marxists are gonna get a little shout out later on because actually Marxists were some of the first people to think about the nation.

1:44 But when we're thinking about this social form of the nation, what makes it particularly tricky 1:50 is that the nation, once it exists, lays claim to the past.

1:55 So the nation didn't always exist but once it comes into existence, 2:01 it tells a story about the past and the story that the nation tells about the past is wrong.

2:10 That's the short version. It tells a story which clears out the past and that story calls itself history.

2:17 Although it's not really history, it calls itself history. And so this new social form has a story 2:25 about how it's very old and that confusion is confusion that basically everyone lives their whole life with.

2:32 Unless you're American. If you're American, then your national story is that you're new and you're fresh and you're all about the future, 2:38 which is ironic because the American nation is actually comparatively speaking, quite old. It's funny, right? 2:44 It's actually older than most of the European nations, but don't tell the Europeans and don't tell the Americans, 2:49 'cause that would mess everybody up. So the trick though is that the nation is modern, 2:56 but it lays claim to the past in a way which if we ourselves are at all nationally minded 3:02 and many of us probably are, feels comfortable and right. And that makes it very hard to answer this question 3:09 of where the nation came from because the nation is already giving you an answer.

3:15 The nation comes equipped with an answer. It comes equipped in the most banal 3:20 and obvious practical sense, which you've already encountered in your lives probably, which is that as you're educated, 3:26 as you go through elementary school, middle school, high school, if you're in anything like a national educational system, 3:32 you're given answers to these questions, which seem self-evident as to where the nation came from.

3:37 But of course, there's a circular phenomenon here, which is that once there's a national consciousness, 3:42 once there's a national identity, then the educational system takes on a national character 3:48 and then reproduces that national consciousness and identity in a way which then starts to seem unproblematic 3:54 and commonsensical. So there's a circular quality about this, which is very hard to break out of 4:00 when you're seven years old. I mean, I'm sure all of you are smarter than average and each one of you is smarter than the person next to you.

4:07 I'm aware of this, you're Yale students, but when you were seven, you pro-- Okay, six.

4:13 When you were six, you probably weren't raising your hand and talking about the constructed character of national-- 4:18 Right? You probably weren't. You were probably, I don't know. Correct me, but I imagine 4:23 that what they told you about the past in your schools, you were probably either ignoring it or somehow taking it in to some extent, right? 4:29 Thank you for those nods. That's very affirming. So the obvious way that this happens 4:36 is the institutional way. The nation takes over the state, the state takes over the education, the education takes over the kids 4:42 and then the kids believe the things which are commonsensical and 99 times out of a hundred and I say this as a historian 4:48 who gets trapped in cocktail parties all the time in corners with people who know what really happened in the past, 4:53 99 times out of a hundred, you never break free, right? 99 times out of a hundred, you're basically trapped where they pinned you down 5:00 when you were seven. The less obvious way that the nation gets hold of the past 5:08 has to do not with the institutions, but with the form of the story. And I'm gonna tell you a couple forms of the story 5:14 and try to make them seem less commonsensical or less obvious, less natural than they are.

5:20 I called this maybe a little bit too preciously, I called this lecture The Genesis of Nations, 5:25 because now I'm gonna talk about Genesis. A great story about the nation 5:31 is that there once was innocence and the innocence was lost. That is a big story about the nation, 5:36 especially nations that emerge out of empires. Especially nations like the Russian.

5:42 I'm not gonna talk about too much about America, but it's certainly true of America too. There's an American imperial story 5:47 about how things were at some point, the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s.

5:53 At some point, things were fine. At some point, things were good. And then somehow the immigrants got in and we lost control 6:00 and now things aren't so good. That's a story of innocence. If you're about making the country great again, 6:05 like a cycle. You go back to a cycle where there's a point or the founders are another good example of this.

6:11 So some people think that the moment of 1776 or 1789 is a kind of moment of innocence.

6:17 The founders got it basically right. That's a very attractive idea. The founders thought of everything, 6:22 they're kind of demigods. They walk the earth, leaving huge footprints behind them and the footprints were filled with the water 6:28 and residue of righteousness. And that's all you have to know. That's a very attractive view. Somebody got everything right at one point in time.

6:35 Most of the Supreme Court now pretends to believe this at this point. By the way, you know what the problem with originalism is? 6:43 I realize this is not our subject at all so you don't have to take notes. But there's a school of thought called originalism 6:48 about the American Constitution, which says that you have to take the Constitution only in terms of what it actually says.

6:55 But you know what the Constitution doesn't say? It doesn't say that you have to take the Constitution the way that the Constitution actually says.

7:01 That is to say the originalist position is self-contradictory because the originalist position is not actually in the Constitution, right? 7:09 Okay. I've blown your minds, right? All right. (students laughing) But I'm only saying this by way 7:16 of this general imperial nation problem of wanting to go back to a moment 7:22 where somehow we got everything right. In Russia today, this is very evident 7:27 in the thought of a character called Ivan Ilyin, 7:35 who for several years Putin read and who takes a view like this, that the world is flawed.

7:44 The world itself is flawed, but Russia has a kind of mission 7:49 of restoring the innocence of the world. I mean, it's kind of ironic, 7:55 but very often it's the imperial nations, the post-imperial nations that are focused on innocence. They're focused on a time when everything was all right.

8:04 Nations that are peripheral or are anti-colonial, anti-imperial 8:09 very often have a different structure of story, which I wanna try to make seem both familiar and unfamiliar to you if I can.

8:15 And that's a three part story. And again, it's biblical.

8:21 So the story of lost innocence is of course, the story of Adam and Eve, the garden of Eden. There's also a longer story in the Hebrew Bible, 8:29 the Old Testament about a people which had a state, but then that mistakes were made 8:35 or bad people came and they lost their state. But at some point they're gonna get their state back.

8:40 And when they get their state back, everything's gonna be fine. That's a structural story that's inside the Bible.

8:48 People have different views about how it's gonna be right again. The Christians say Jesus came and then everything was fine.

8:54 Zionists might say we made Israel, then everything was fine. You can be in disagreement about when everything is fine, but there's still the basic three part story 9:01 of everything was once good, then we lost it somehow.

9:06 Probably not our fault, probably somebody else's fault, but we lost it. But then there will be a moment of redemption.

9:12 So the nation takes over this story very easily.

9:17 You've probably heard phrases like national renaissance, a rebirth.

9:24 The whole idea of rebirth is if you think about it just for a second, in some kind of literal way, it's a very weird idea.

9:32 It's very weird. If you just think for a quarter of a second, what it would be like to be reborn, wouldn't that be strange, right? 9:40 Okay, this may be a little too Freudian, you just left home, I know. But a rebirth is a strange idea 9:46 if you think about it at all. So the idea of a national rebirth is that you're going back to that time 9:53 when everything was right. You're going back to that golden age. Usually the nation says we're in some kind of middle period 10:00 where things have gone wrong, but everything used to be right. And if you're an anti-colonial or a post-colonial nation, 10:06 the story usually has to do with the people. The people were right and good.

10:12 They're still somehow basically right and good and we're gonna restore that rightness and goodness by giving them a state and then things are gonna be fine.

10:20 There's been a middle period, which involves a diaspora or an empire or something messing things up.

10:25 But in the future, things are gonna be good. So notice the three part story. The three part story is very widespread. Very widespread.

10:33 Classical examples are the Jewish national story, the Greek national story. And I mentioned in the last lecture, the Jews and Greeks 10:40 are actually the oldest documented inhabitants of the territory of Ukraine. But basically, every national story 10:45 has cottoned onto this, has followed this pattern.

10:52 So I'm gonna say the obvious thing now. It's not that this is true. It's not that there ever was a pure nation.

10:58 It's not that there was an ethnicity which existed a thousand years ago and still exists today. I hope I'm not shattering anybody's illusions, 11:04 but that never actually happens. I know I'm breaking something to you now, 11:12 but somebody has to at some point. Relationships are a lot more complicated than that, right? 11:18 Fatherhood and motherhood and sex. It's a lot more complicated than a straight line from a thousand years to now.

11:24 Okay. I'm glad we had this moment. I feel like this awkwardness has now been dealt with.

11:30 Okay, good. So I'm not gonna surprise you 11:35 when I say that that's not how history actually works. There isn't really a three part. There isn't really a golden age, diaspora return to gold.

11:43 That doesn't really happen. But the story is reflecting something.

11:48 It's reflecting a change that is happening. It's a way of handling a change which is happening.

11:55 And that change is the entrance of the people into politics.

12:01 So the nation and the way we're talking about the nation is a modern form of politics, 12:07 which involves, if not everybody, it's meant to involve the masses. It's not feudalism.

12:12 It's not the nobility being in charge, right? It's not monarchy, it's not aristocracy, it's not oligarchy, 12:19 it's not rule by the few. The nation means rule by the many. Doesn't necessarily mean democracy, but the nation means a form of politics 12:25 in which the subject of politics is supposed to be the people.

12:31 That's an idea which seems very commonsensical now. I mean, even the people who are against it say that they're for it as you might have noticed.

12:38 Basically everybody in the world, as they do away with democracy, they talk about how, yes, the only way to have democracy 12:45 is to suppress all of these votes. Only if I count the votes it's a demo-- you know. But very rarely people say, oh, I'm against democracy.

12:53 It's commonsensical. But that's very new, right? The idea that the people are the subject of politics 12:59 is only a couple hundred years old. So these stories are a way of handling a transformation.

Systems Observation: A nation is not monarchy, nobility, aristocracy, oligarchy, rule by the few - it is rule by the many. Doesn't necessarily mean democracy, but the nation means a form of politics in which the subject of politics is supposed to be the people.

13:06 They're a way of handling change. So now I'm moving from what they say about themselves to how they actually work.

13:12 The reason that they actually work is that in the 19th century, let's say, more or less, 13:18 there comes a time when you have to handle a form of politics in which the people now matter, 13:25 large numbers of people now matter. And so you need some version of the past 13:30 which accounts for that. And the version of the past that you can give is the one that says way back when, 13:38 the people were in charge and now the people are gonna be in charge again. Or way back when, the people were virtuous 13:44 and now they're gonna be virtuous again once we do away with the empire or the diaspora 13:49 or one of the things which was in the way of this pattern from happening. So the story is a way of making sense of something, 13:56 making sense of a challenge, which actually had to be met. And the challenge is what do you do 14:01 as the people enter politics? That's a challenge which was met in all kinds of other ways. Like the Marxists who we're still gonna talk about 14:08 met the challenge in a certain way. So the people are entering politics, 14:13 there is some kind of transformation. And I want you to mark this. We'll get to this part of the course here in a few weeks, 14:19 but think about what is changing. Is it that there's now a big capitalist economy 14:26 and so people are encountering each other in new ways. Is it that there's now a functional state, 14:32 which is able to collect taxes and make people perform military service. These are some of the changes that are associated 14:39 with modernization. But something is changing so that it no longer seems normal to say 14:46 that the king is just in charge or the nobility is just in charge. Something is changing so that 14:52 that no longer seems plausible. There's still kings and queens, 14:57 but they basically serve as the kind of rhetorical cover for welfare states. They're not what they used to be.

15:07 Fascinating as they are, the adventures of Harry and Meghan, that's not what royalty used to be like.

15:16 It was a little like that, but that was never the essence of it. So at a certain point, it stopped seeming plausible 15:24 that a few people should be in charge and how do you handle that? Well, you handle that with a story.

15:30 So you have modern politics and modern politics has to have a story 15:36 about how the people are coming into politics, why the people should come into politics. And this story is displacing other stories.

15:43 Okay, here comes question time. What's another story? What kind of story would that have been displacing? 15:49 What's a story that would've made sense? Yeah. - [Student] So a king is chosen by some religious, like God, right? 15:55 Now I'm the king and I control society. - Yeah, okay. So divine right. Or you're the king, because how about this? 16:02 You're the king because your father was king. I mean, that seems ridiculous, right? 16:08 Just because his father was king he gets to be king? Doesn't that seem insane? 16:13 Was your father king? - No. - Okay good. 'Cause I get in trouble if I get into revealing your personal life.

16:19 So if anybody's father is king, I need to know now or in an email preferably, all right.

16:26 It could be. All right. So that notion, so his father was king and his father, 16:34 it's absurd, doesn't it seem? But in other historical circumstances, 16:39 it could have made perfect sense. It obviously did make perfect sense, but not in modern historical circumstances 16:45 it somehow seems not to make sense, but it's a story. The story of genealogy, the story that his family is better than other families.

16:51 Perhaps they're half gods, something, right? What's another kind of story that this could have displaced? 17:01 Yeah. - [Student] Something related, but just like landowning people or landowning-- 17:07 - Good. Excellent. Excellent. That's a very good example as well.

17:12 But it can be related because the right to property is inherited.

17:17 I mean, that's something which is still true in our system. And it's commonsensical. If Zhenya has a bunch of land.

17:25 If I have a million acres, why shouldn't my children have a million acres? It still seems commonsensical.

17:30 But the idea that there's a property class and the right to own property is something special.

17:37 So you people over here have the right to own property and the rest of you have the right to work on their property.

17:45 That seemed plausible for hundreds of years, but at a certain point around again, around the 19th century, it stopped seeming plausible.

17:52 But that story that not just that a person, but that a group is maybe different from another group. Maybe the nobility thinks that it's descended 17:58 from other people, it often did, right? Or the nobility has earned rights because historically, the nobility fought the wars or something, 18:06 but they're different, they have the right to rule and they have the right to own land. So those are different stories which are displaced 18:12 by the national story or challenged by the national story. And they represent different kinds of political systems.

18:17 For example, let's imagine an absolute monarchy or let's imagine a system that we'll come to, like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 18:23 where the noble class gets to vote and the noble class gets to own land, but other people don't.

18:29 And at a certain point, that starts to seem problematic. So we have a story that brings the people 18:35 to the center of politics, but doesn't say that directly, right? 18:41 It seems to make all of history make sense.

18:47 It's a story that brings people to the center. And this is where I have to talk about Marxism because it might have occurred to you that this whole, 18:55 I'm not gonna check you on this. And I don't know how many of you 19:00 know very much about Marxism or how much that comes across your education.

19:06 When I ask this in graduate classes, there's the guy who raises his hand or the woman, it's like, yeah, I grew up in the People's Republic of China 19:12 and we studied Marxism. So you might have noticed 19:17 that Marxism also has a three part story. Marxism also has a story about a golden age 19:25 and about transformation and about the people coming to the center of politics. In the Marxist story, 19:31 it used to be that none of us owned any property and that was fine. And then technology came along 19:37 and technology created new social relations. And along with them came private property.

19:44 Private property alienated us from ourselves, bad. But one day we will get rid of private property 19:52 and we will all seize it together and that will be good again. Okay, I'm simplifying this a lot.

19:58 But there's also a three part story. Interestingly, right? Marxism and the modern idea of the nation 20:04 actually emerge at about the same time, around the middle of the 19th century. And they're very much in dialogue with one another.

20:10 And they're actually very similar, one difference being that the Marxist story 20:15 is about the class. It's about a non-national class, a working class. Whereas the national story is about particular nations.

20:23 It's about particularities. Or to put it in a different way, the national story...

20:30 Don't hide your phone behind your computer. The national... Don't use electronics at all.

20:36 The national story is pretends to be just about you.

20:41 But in fact, everybody's national story is very similar. The Marxist story is supposed to be about everyone, 20:50 but in fact, the Marxists had a terrible time getting the various nations to line up.

20:56 So the two stories are our in tension with one another. Does anyone know what the Marxists say about the nation? 21:04 What the Marxists thought about the nation, especially at the beginning? Or wanna take a guess? 21:11 Or not. Yeah? - [Student] Did they think it was gonna be a transitional state? - Good, true.

21:17 They associated the nation with capital-- either with feudalism or with capitalism, 21:22 but not with socialism. So we're gonna get over it. Yeah. Jack? - [Student] Political and economic revolution.

21:29 So transition to this socialism movement. - That's in the Soviet Union. Yeah. So the Soviet Union is an attempt 21:34 to go through all the stages very quickly. And so in the Soviet Union, the idea is that first, 21:40 we're gonna do the capitalist style modernization. And with that, will come the nation, that's in 1920s.

21:45 And then in the 1930s we'll have an economic revolution where maybe we'll get through the nation very quickly that way.

21:51 So the basic idea that the Marxists have is that the nation is associated with a period of history that's passing.

21:59 And this is where they have trouble. But if there's capitalism and the capitalism advancing, and there's more nationalism, 22:05 that's a kind of misunderstanding. So Marx and Engels had a tremendous problem 22:12 with actual workers because actual workers were very often in favor of imperialism, for example.

22:18 They had a tremendous problem with actual workers who were influenced by the national politics, 22:24 who had turned out, were as nationally oriented or more nationally oriented than the middle classes or the nobility.

22:32 So nationalism has a tremendous problem or sorry, Marxism has a tremendous problem with nationalism.

22:37 And as a result of this, some of the first people who theorized about the nation 22:45 in an interesting way, were Marxists who were trying to deal with this problem.

22:54 Around the year 1900, there were several Marxists who said essentially, 22:59 look, modernization isn't doing away with the national question, on the contrary, 23:06 modernization is bringing about the nation and we have to deal with that.

23:11 The nation isn't actually part of the feudal past, it's part of the modern, even the proletarian future.

23:19 And so this was a Pole, his name was Kelles-Krauz. And then he was in dialogue with several people called Austro-Marxists.

23:25 They made the argument, an interesting argument, that if you have capitalism that uproots people 23:32 from their local traditions and forces them into a kind of melting pot in the city 23:39 where the lowest common denominator might be their language. And so on the basis of their language 23:44 and feeling alienated because they're uprooted, they might seem to think, okay, we're part of a nation 23:50 or they'd be vulnerable to politicians who made that argument. They also said the modernizing state, 23:56 the modernizing state is going to make people literate. This is what the modernizing state does. It educates people. It makes people literate.

24:04 At the end of the 19th century, early 20th century in European countries, you go from very low literacy to very, very high rates of literacy very quickly.

24:11 But literacy can also mean not identifying with an imperial center, 24:16 but identifying with a nation because you're reading perhaps in your own language or you learn to read in one language, then you learn to read in a different language.

24:23 And so these guys made this argument, which was then repeated in the 1980s 24:29 by a number of national theorists or these kinds of arguments were made in the 1980s by some important interesting national theorists 24:37 called Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson.

24:42 Who also said that the nation is not ancient, but it's a result of certain kinds of modernization.

24:50 So that's the short course on the theories of where nations come about.

24:57 What I'm trying to say is that this argument about the theory of how nations come about, 25:03 goes back almost as far as the nation, right? So the position that nations aren't old, they're new.

25:11 People have been saying that for more than a hundred years.

25:17 National theorists will generally say oh, everyone who talks about the nation, they're stupid.

25:22 They're unaware of the fact that it's politically constructed. No, no, no. There's been awareness that it might be politically constructed 25:29 for almost as long as there's been the nation itself. This discussion that we're having now has been going on 25:35 for almost as long as the nation has existed. Oh, by the way, this Kelles-Krauz guy. I mention him partly because 25:41 he gives two interesting examples for his argument 25:48 that the nation is all about modernity and not about tradition.

25:54 And his examples are the Jews and the Ukrainians. So at the time when he was writing, 25:59 which was the early years of the 20th century, he died in 1905. So the very early years of the 20th century, 26:04 the idea that Jews were a nation was generally seen as absurd because they lacked what were thought of then 26:11 as the objective attributes of a nation. For example, territory.

26:16 And so Jews can't be a nation. Ukrainians were thought not to be a nation 26:21 because they lacked another objective attribute, which was a historical political class.

26:27 So if your theory of the nation is that there is certain durable stuff, 26:32 like land or like a political class, and that those make up the nation, then you look at the Ukrainians and the Jews in 1904 26:39 and you'd say, no, they're not nations. The Hungarians maybe, the Poles maybe, the Germans certainly, but not the Ukrainians and the Jews.

26:46 What Kelles-Krauz said is think about it in a different way. Bracket what you think about the past, 26:52 look at the way modernization affects people right now and it turns out it doesn't matter he argues, 26:59 whether or not there are these "objective attributes" or not. All that matters is that modernization 27:05 is gonna generate the processes, the alienation, the urbanization, which are gonna lead people 27:11 to these new forms of solidarity. And so when he said that the Jews and the Ukrainians 27:18 were gonna be modern nations in the early 20th century, that was a very radical argument, 27:24 but it was consistent with the theory of the nation, which says that the nation is a result of modernization.

27:31 So that ends the part about the theory of the nation. I want to close by talking about 27:37 how some of our Ukrainians thought about the nation.

27:42 So we've talked about the nation in general, we've talked about theories of the nation.

27:47 Now we're gonna talk about some of how the Ukrainians thought about the nation. And it's important to be clear 27:55 that this whole thing is a very self-conscious process. The people who made nations knew what they were doing.

28:04 They knew what they were doing. The way they talked about it might be a little different than how we would talk about it, but no one slept-walked into nationhood.

28:13 That didn't happen that way. There were larger processes in the background, I think.

28:18 We can keep talking about this. I think the modernization people are right, that larger processes in the background like urbanization, 28:26 like capitalism, like literacy made it likely that some new form of solidarity would emerge.

28:33 But where, and for whom? 28:39 Where and for whom? Why these nations and not other nations? 28:47 So again, going back to the point I made at the beginning, nations mess with the past.

28:52 Once they're created, they mess with the past. They make it very hard for people to process the past.

29:00 It's like the periodic table's invented and then it says everybody do alchemy. They mess with the past. And one of the ways the nations mess with the past, 29:07 maybe the most profound one is that they convince everyone that their own existence is self-evident.

29:14 So if you're in Poland and you grow up in the Polish educational system, many things might be uncertain, 29:19 but the existence of Poland is not called into question. Even in the United States 29:24 where there's so many obvious contingencies. So many obvious contingencies.

29:29 It's very difficult to argue that the United States, that the revolution of 1776 had to happen 29:34 or that the Americans had to win or in 1812, they had to win. I mean, they should have lost in 1812. We, sorry, should have lost in 1812.

29:41 You know, the Louisiana Purchase. All this stuff, it obviously didn't have to happen, 29:48 or the border with Canada, totally arbitrary. I don't mean that in an aggressive way, if there are any Canadians out there.

29:54 It's cool. It's cool. It's fine with me. But even if you come to an American school system, 30:03 the existence of America isn't gonna be called into question, right? The first class, the teacher's not gonna say, "By the way, 30:10 America didn't have to be. Maybe it shouldn't have been. Maybe that would've been cool. What if the British Empire had been here longer? 30:16 Maybe that would've been better. " I'm gonna guess that didn't happen in any of your classes, right? 30:22 All right. So we'll find out where you went to school. But the basic idea is the nation makes itself self-evident.

30:31 But it isn't, right? It isn't. So when we study Ukraine, we're gonna be studying the formation of a political nation.

30:37 But what I don't want to think is, wow, Ukraine is really special 'cause it's political and all the other nations are real.

30:45 That's a lesson that I don't want you to draw. I want you to think 'hah, this is interesting' 30:50 how the Ukrainian nation is maybe a little more self-consciously political or maybe it's been forced into circumstances 30:56 which reveal the political character of the nation to our eyes a little more clearly than with the French or the Americans or whatever.

31:03 But I don't want you to think, oh yeah, the Ukrainians are kind of funky, but everyone else has a rock solid tradition.

31:08 I don't want you to think that. I want you to think, oh, as we've studied the Ukrainian nation, we're gonna see patterns which maybe actually help us 31:13 to understand the Poles better or the Russians better, or even the Americans and the British and the French better.

31:19 So how did the Ukrainians think about themselves? 31:25 In the 19th century, the main move in the Russian Empire and don't worry, 31:32 this is all gonna become clear when the Russian Empire starts and when it ends and so on. For now I just need you to know that in the 19th century, 31:39 most people who spoke the Ukrainian language were in the Russian Empire.

31:45 And in the Russian Empire in the 19th century, the second half, there was this idea of going to the people 31:50 which was called populism. So not populism in the sense that you're used to, populism now means, I don't know what it means, honestly, 31:57 but it means something like if you... Okay, I'm not gonna go down that road. When people say populism, they generally mean something 32:04 that's not liberalism that we don't like. But populism in this sense meant going to the people 32:10 and trying to figure out who the people were. It was an urban movement in the Russian Empire 32:16 associated with the science of what was then called ethnography that we now call anthropology. Very influential in literature.

32:23 Dostoevsky starts out being this way and then goes to prison and actually meets people and changes his mind about how great they are, 32:28 which is an interesting story.

32:35 So going to the people and so one source of the Ukrainian national identity 32:40 is this empirical contact with the people in the Russian Empire where you realize, 32:46 huh, their folklore and their songs and their language are different.

32:52 They're different. They just are different than the peoples further north, 32:58 the people who we now call the Russians. And so you go to the people and you discover that the society, 33:05 if you take it on its own terms, is just a little bit different and you start thinking about that.

33:11 That populism leads to something which we now call social history, 33:17 where you locate the nation.

33:30 That's the Ukrainian historian who did this, where you locate the nation in its own self-understanding, 33:37 in its customs, in its songs, in its stories, in its language. So in the 19th century, that's a very strong movement.

Systems Assessment: A nation is its customs, in its songs, in its stories, in its language.

33:45 And so you then say, okay, the nation has always been there or it's been there for a really long time, 33:50 but it's not politically represented and that's the problem. That's the problem.

33:56 So you're replacing the kinds of legitimating political stories we talked about before 34:01 with a different political legitimating story. So it's not the czar or the Polish landlords 34:07 who should control politics, it should be the people because they've been here for a long time and look how numerous they are.

34:13 And if you look at their customs, you can see that they're in fact a unity. That's populism, that's social history, 34:20 that's going to the people. And of course Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi wrote the very, very long history which justifies all this.

34:27 There's a stage in the 19th century where you have to write a very long history in order to esta-- 34:33 I don't mean to make it sound like a joke, 'cause it's not easy, but you have to write a long history to document the continuity of the people 34:41 where social history is in the foreground and the political history is in the background and that's a radical reversal.

34:47 Until then, generally you could write history with just the politics and the people didn't have to be present really at all.

34:54 Now, the weakness of this or a tendency within this is that it will tend to move you 35:01 towards an ethnic understanding of what the nation is. Because where you're identifying the nation 35:06 is in its customs and its language and so on. Well, what if there are other people, I've already mentioned the Greeks and the Jews, 35:12 there are probably others in Ukraine, we'll get to them. But what if there are other people who don't speak the same language 35:17 or who have markedly different customs? What do you do with them? That's the problem of ethnicity.

35:24 That if you define the nation in terms of customs, then that always is going to raise the question of what about the other people? 35:31 And then here comes the interesting part. It's not that nobody noticed this at the time.

35:36 The people who came up with the ethnic notion of the nation, 35:41 this is a little logical point here, but ethnicity didn't exist, it was being created.

35:48 So the people who came up with the ethnic notion of the nation were not ethnic themselves. They couldn't have been 35:53 because the idea was just kind of coming into being. And even if you don't buy that and you believe, okay, 36:00 there was a thing called ethnicity at the time, they were very often themselves coming from 36:05 what we would think of as a minority position. So Hrushevs'kyi, as the Ukrainian historians might not tell you, 36:12 had a Polish mom and that is very typical.

36:17 Very typical. If you look at the people who invented the populism, the social history, 36:22 and sometimes later the ethnic nationalism, all across Eastern Europe, it is very often people who were from a Jewish minority 36:30 or a German minority, or some kind of minority who themselves adopt the ethnic position 36:37 or create the ethnic position. I say that not because it's like a clever paradox, 36:43 but I say that to alert you to the fact that the very thing which is supposed to be the most eternal and unchanging 36:52 is not, right? The very notion of the eternity and the unchangingness, 36:57 is created by people who are very often changing themselves in some way. Not that they dropped all the sophistication 37:04 that came from the background that they had. Being multicultural and multilingual certainly helps you as a historian to write history books.

37:13 But they're keeping that and they're saying history is really about the people who are in this one language.

37:19 So that leads us to a debate. That's a position, that's a debate.

37:26 And on the other side of this debate is a character, Okay, I really should have made a sheet for today, I guess.

37:39 Is a character called Viacheslav Lypyn'skyi. And Lypyn'skyi says basically, 37:45 hey, Hrushevs'kyi, look at Ukraine. The cities are full of Russian speakers, 37:51 lots of Jews, lots of Polish nobles. How are you gonna make your state out of that? 37:58 You're not just gonna be able to say the Ukrainian people, the masses and the peasants. You need this very commonsensical point.

38:06 We need the cities and we need the taxpayers and those traditional historical, 38:11 going back to these traditional stories, the people who are from the traditional stories, what are we gonna do with them? 38:17 Are we just gonna eliminate them? Or maybe we should give them a different role. So Lypyn'skyi answers Hrushevs'kyi by saying fine, 38:26 the people are coming into politics, but if we're going to have a nation, the nation itself is going to have to be 38:34 politically savvy enough to say, okay, there's a place for the Polish nobility. Maybe they don't get to own the land anymore, 38:40 but they get something. There has to be a place for the Jews. There has to be a place for the people 38:46 who used to own the land. We can't just imagine them away. It's beautiful to say that the essence of the nation 38:54 is in the countryside and the people who tilled the soil and look at the sunset and the beautiful mounds of hay.

39:00 You've seen the art that arises from all this. Look at that beautiful image.

39:05 There's a beautiful woman and there's her beautiful daughter and look, they've have a scythe and that's the nation, right? 39:11 It's beautiful, it's very persuasive. But what are you gonna do about the people who live in the cities? What do you do about all the other people 39:18 and you can't have a nation without the cities. So what do you do? So Lypyn'skyi has an answer to this.

39:24 Lypyn'skyi has an answer. Lypyn'skyi in his turn, and don't worry, we're gonna do all this history many, many times over.

39:35 Lypyn'skyi in turn-- Oh, did I mention he was from a Polish noble family? He was from a Polish noble family.

39:41 Lypyn'skyi in turn is answered by a guy called Dontsov.

39:48 Now we're getting into the 1920s and 1930s and Dontsov is the most important ideologist 39:53 of Ukrainian far right wing politics. In fact, fascism.

39:58 And Dontsov is very much inspired by the Italians.

40:05 Dontsov says no, no, it is really all about the people and the people really should be homogenous.

40:10 And the people really should rebel against all these other traditions.

40:15 Dontsov... I'm gonna let you guess. Okay, I won't let you guess. He had a brother who was a Bolshevik 40:24 and that Bolshevik brother was a Russian, right? So it's an example of how the people who are maybe even the most radical 40:31 on the ethnic side of things, they're not coming from the ethnicity. They're choosing something, 40:36 at the beginning you have to choose. Because at the beginning, the nation is still coming into being, 40:42 so you have to choose. So Dontsov is answering Lypyn'skyi.

40:47 These guys are enemies 40:53 and the Dontsov tradition of what we call ethnic nationalism is important.

40:59 It matters in Ukrainian political life. And it matters in Ukrainian diaspora, 41:05 it continues in North America. But Dontsov in turn was answered 41:17 by this guy that we're supposed to be reading. Now, I'm aware that his book turns out not to be in the bookstore.

41:23 I put the first essay up online and we will keep putting the essays up online.

41:28 And we're reading Ivan Rudnyts'kyi because he is a foundational political historian of Ukraine 41:35 and he lays out some of the major issues. But in context, Ivan Rudnyts'kyi 41:46 is trying to handle this argument which says that the Ukrainian nation is only about people who speak Ukrainian.

41:52 And that somewhere out there, at least aspirationally, there's a homogenous Ukrainian nation.

41:58 Ivan Rudnyts'kyi is trying to handle that. What he's arguing, and as you read him, 42:05 I want you to read him to learn about Ukrainian history, obviously. He's good at setting up the major questions, 42:10 but he's also coming into this debate about what the nation actually is supposed to be.

42:16 And Ivan Rudnyts'kyi takes the position that the nation is fundamentally a political act.

42:23 It's fundamentally about political commitment. So modernization matters, 42:28 modernization matters, sure. The traditional landowning classes, they matter, sure.

42:35 The presence of the Jews matters. This all matters, but the nation is fundamentally a political act 42:41 directed towards the future. That doesn't mean it's voluntarist and you can do anything.

42:46 You can't make it up. You can only act on the basis of what really is and he mostly wrote about the past.

42:52 But the nation itself was a political act directed towards the future, which means that in principle, anyone can take part in it.

42:59 Anyone can take part. So I'm now just gonna say one word 43:04 about who Ivan Rudnyts'kyi was. So, oh, very important.

43:10 He wins. He wins the argument, which is kind of fascinating.

43:16 If there's any person who wins the argument, I mean, maybe in the 22nd century it will look different, 43:22 but looking at it from the point of 2022, he wins the argument in North America 43:29 and he also wins the argument in Ukraine. Although as we'll see, there are many reasons in Ukraine 43:35 why his arguments are gonna seem plausible. But he wins the argument about what Ukraine should be like.

43:41 And that in turn has very important implications for what Ukraine is like, 43:47 because theorizing the nation is not an abstract action. It's also about how you form the nation.

43:55 So 30 seconds and I'll tell you who Ivan Rudnyts'kyi is and we'll return to that. So Ivan Rudnyts'kyi was Halachically Jewish.

44:03 His grandmother was born Ida Spiegel 44:10 in the Habsburg monarchy. She married a Ukrainian and they had five children.

44:19 He died early, the husband, and Ida Spiegel, who was alienated from her family 44:26 and took the name Olga, raised the children to be Ukrainian. The common language in the family was...

44:33 Anybody wanna take a shot at that? Common language? 44:39 We're in the Habsburg monarchy. Not bad.

44:45 We're in Galicia in the Habsburg monarchy. - Polish? - Polish. Polish, Polish. Common language between-- 44:52 I mean, her mother tongue was Yiddish and his mother tongue was Ukrainian. Although he had Polish grandparents, 44:58 but their language between themselves was Polish. The kids' best language for a long time was also Polish.

45:03 So there were five kids with this Jewish mother.

45:09 All five of them became very important figures in Ukrainian national movement, we'll talk about that. But there was one daughter, Milena.

45:17 Milena was a feminist and a very prominent parliamentarian 45:22 in the Polish parliament. She did some extraordinary things that we'll talk about later on, but Milena Rudnyts'ka was the mother of the Ivan Rudnyts'kyi.

45:33 So his mother's mother was self-identifying Jewish.

45:40 Everybody who's taking part in these conversations, regardless of their position, is coming from all over the place.

45:46 But there's a conversation where Rudnyts'kyi ends up being the most influential figure 45:52 and that conversation shapes not only this class, it very much shapes the way 45:58 that Ukrainians are talking about nationality now. I'll leave you with that 46:03 and I'll see you again in a week's time, map quiz on Thursday. Thanks.

46:09 (upbeat rhythmic chime)

back to TOC


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Lecture 3 Geography and Ancient History

0:00 (solemn music) 0:11 - Okay, greetings everybody. Welcome to lecture three. I knew when I was gonna give this lecture 0:17 that it would be after I had gone to Ukraine and back in-between. So the nice people who are filming this 0:24 asked me not to wear the same shirt as I wore last week, both times, which I'm sure you guys noticed. I didn't notice.

0:30 It was very tactful for you guys not to mention that. (class laughs) 'Cause I could've just worn the same shirt all semester, 0:36 and you guys would've been cool. You wouldn't have said a thing. I am wearing the same shirt that I wore on the train, 0:41 because the train is 30- It's like, from here to, in case you were thinking about doing this next weekend, 0:48 it's a solid 35 hours from here to the center of Kyiv.

0:53 And there's no way to make it shorter. That's like in the best case. So I knew when I was gonna give this lecture 0:58 that I was gonna be going there and back again. And so I thought I would make this subject of this lecture, 1:03 what I'm calling Geography and Deep History, or maybe just Deep Geography for short.

1:09 That is, the way that we think about places and how the way we think about places then has to do 1:16 with how we apprehend what happens in the world. So the subject today is going to be naming and placing 1:25 and how the names and the places then affect how we understand events before our eyes.

1:32 Which may seem a little misty and abstract, but hopefully as I get into the geography 1:38 and then a little bit into the war, it will come clear how the deep notions that we have of place 1:45 tend to suggest, trigger, push us in certain directions when we're confronted with events.

1:51 So what is the place I was going to? So in the reading, this is kind of ambiguous.

1:57 So the place that I was going to, maybe it was Ukraine, or maybe it was the Ukraine? 2:03 What's the difference? I have already told some of you what the difference is, so don't cheat. But what is the difference 2:09 between going to "Ukraine" and going to "the Ukraine"? I mean, you probably know that if you say "the Ukraine", 2:15 you'll get disapproving looks from the Ukrainians. But beyond that, what's the difference? 2:21 Yeah. - [Student] Saying, going to the Ukraine implies that Ukraine is a region, 2:26 a sub-region of something like Russia or the Soviet Union. - Exactly. So if you say "the Ukraine", it already, it means, 2:35 in Polish you can actually say "going to the Lithuania", which you can't say in English, but that suggests where this all comes from.

2:42 It's important to remember that English is not the master language for everything. And that very often, the way we say things in English 2:47 actually comes from somewhere else. So we say "the Ukraine" because in Russian and in Polish, 2:52 you can say, "na Ukraina". Yeah, I even have this on the sheet this time, 2:59 you can say "na Ukraina", which is something like more like "at". So you're going to someplace which is not quite defined.

3:05 As opposed to "v", "v Ukraina" or "v Ukraini," which means "in Ukraine".

3:12 It's a place that's like, if it's a "v", that means it can be contained. So it has a border. It's a defined place.

3:18 Maybe a state, because a state has borders and a state is defined. So if you say "na", you're not really talking about a state.

3:26 And you may be talking about something which is kind of misty and undefined and maybe a little bit poetic.

3:31 So in your reading, up to now, like the article from Rudnyts'kyi, who cannot be accused of being anything but a Ukrainian, 3:37 it was still okay in the '60s for him to be saying, or maybe it was required of him, I'm not sure, to say "the Ukraine".

3:44 And while we're on the subject of- Okay, so is that clear, the "v" and the "na"? So it's very important, 3:51 if you're speaking Polish or Ukrainian or Russian. And so, the Poles, it's interesting, 3:57 the Poles all switched over in the early '90s. They switched over.

4:02 When I learned to speak Polish, you were supposed to say, "na Litvia", but now people say- that means sort of "at Lithuania", 4:08 but now people say "v Litvia", meaning "in the state of Lithuania". And "na Ukraina" was how I was taught to say it in Polish.

4:15 But now I would say "v Ukraina" because it's a state. And Ukrainians have very clear ideas about this, too.

4:24 So while we're on the subject, though, you might have noticed that the capital of Ukraine is spelled a couple of different ways 4:31 in your readings as well. What's the difference there? Anybody wanna take a stab at that? Yeah.

4:38 - [Student] One is the Ukrainian spelling and the other is the Russian spelling and pronunciation.

4:44 - Yeah. One is a transliteration. Exactly. So you guys know what transliteration is? There are many alphabets, 4:50 and when you render from one alphabet to another alphabet, that's called transliteration or transcription, technically.

4:57 So in the standard English spelling of the capital of Ukraine, for a very long time, 5:04 until very, very recently, in fact, was Kiev, K-I-E-V. And that was a transliteration from Russian.

5:13 In Ukrainian, it's Kyiv, hence the English transliteration, K-Y-I-V.

5:20 Which is a little bit awkward, because there just aren't that many words that don't involve '90s punk bands, 5:27 which have Ys and Is in front of them. The Y-I is not a normal combination in English.

5:36 And this was an evolution. So in my early books, I wrote Kiev, K-I-E-V, just because I thought, 5:42 "This has been standard in English for so long. It's not really such a big difference between Kiev and Kyiv.

5:49 People reading English are just gonna be distracted by this Y and the I together. Why should I do it?" But then at a certain point, I changed.

5:55 The last few books, I spelled it with the Ukrainian transliteration. And if you want, you can check and see when the New York Times changes.

6:00 Because the New York Times always does everything right. (class laughs) And, (laughs) thank you, that was good.

6:06 The New York Times always does everything right, but even the New York Times has to change from time to time, how they're gonna do certain things. And so you can check and see when they changed 6:13 from spelling it one way to another way, 'cause that represents a certain kind of cultural consensus.

6:18 And so, these things change. And the reason why it's interesting that they change is that these things that might seem to be superficial, 6:24 like language, are actually very deep, because they're the things that you read and you take in, you don't call them into question.

6:30 And then they may form how you see the world when you're confronted with something surprising.

6:37 So, the "v" and "na" or the "the": Is it a region or a country? Kiev or Kyiv: Is it Russian or is it Ukrainian? 6:45 It's a pretty big- And what is actually normal in English? 6:52 This is really interesting, because you might think, let's say, you're, I'm assuming many of you are native English speakers. All of you know English, or you wouldn't be in this class.

6:58 Or you're in this class doing some kind of weird meditation that involves listening to a language you don't understand, which is cool. You'll probably pass, anyway.

7:05 (class laughs) I'm assuming if you're doing that, you're taking it pass/fail. But you might think, "Well in English, 7:13 we all have a certain distance from all this. There's a certain objectivity, whatever it is in English is somehow just neutral. " 7:20 But it's not. What it is in English has effects too, very much so.

7:25 And what it is in English is also subject to change, as we've seen in both of these examples. Just in the little span of time 7:31 between when your readings start and now, the basic uses in English for both the country and its capital have changed.

7:39 And you're presumably, if you have kids, which I know that none of you are thinking about now, because when you signed to go to Yale, 7:45 you promised not to get married and not have kids, I know. But when you have kids, presumably, they will think K-Y-I-V is totally normal.

7:53 Maybe you already think it's totally normal. And they'll think, it will not occur to them that it might have been some other way.

7:58 But these things change all the time. Now this notion of deep geography also has to do, 8:05 so I've talked just about of words and letters. It also has to do with narratives.

8:12 So a story can tell you where you are. A story can tell you where you are before you get there.

8:19 And this occurred to me during this trip, because I was talking to a bunch of American diplomats, and we were pondering, 8:25 I mean, just to put it very briefly and brutally, we were pondering why every American gets everything wrong about Ukraine all the time.

8:32 Like that basic question, which you can't help dealing, you can't help asking with respect to the war, because even the people 8:38 who were supposed to know what they're talking about were totally wrong. It's a luxury for me to say this because I wasn't, 8:43 but in general, everybody was totally wrong about everything with respect to the war. Ukrainians are gonna lose after three days.

8:50 They can't possibly fight back. They're gonna lose, it's a stalemate, blah, blah, blah. Everything that the consensus has said in the US 8:56 has been wrong the whole time. And you can't kind of say, "Well, this is just a matter of lack of military analysis," 9:01 or whatever. No, there's something else deeper going on. And we were sort of trying to ponder that together. And I think it has to do with the deep narrative 9:10 that everyone is taught. Because the deep narrative that everyone is taught, all these diplomats were taught it too, 9:16 everybody who studied East Europe, almost everybody, not in this class, but almost everyone who studied East European history 9:21 in the US has the narrative, which says: There was Kyiv. And then, from Kyiv, somehow there was Moscow, 9:30 there was some kind of transfer. And the thing in Moscow was the same state as the thing in Kyiv, even though that, 9:35 I'm not gonna say "even thoughs", I'm just gonna try to tell the narrative. The thing in Moscow somehow inherited the traditions of the thing in Kyiv.

9:41 And therefore the thing in Moscow fulfilled itself, when it actually incorporated Kyiv in the late 17th century.

9:47 That was somehow natural. That's part of the destiny of this place. And it's normal that Moscow and Kyiv 9:53 will be together forever. And in some way, it's all Russia. It's all Russia.

9:59 So I didn't do a good job with that narrative, because frankly, that's not what I'm being, that's not my job here to do a good job with that narrative.

10:06 But that's the basic narrative. But the point is that everybody who has ever studied this 10:12 has that narrative. And if you have that narrative, then it makes you think that Russia's a real place.

10:20 And what is Ukraine? Because in that narrative, nothing called Ukraine ever appears. So there must be something suspicious about Ukraine.

10:29 It must be somehow invented or somehow marginal or somehow provincial or in some way questionable.

10:35 Whereas nobody ever questions Russia. No one ever- I mean, is that wrong? 10:41 No one ever questions that Russia is a real place. No one ever questioned the Soviet Union 10:47 was a real place either. And then, one day it ceased to exist. No one ever questions that Russia is a real place.

10:53 There's a non-zero chance that the Russian Federation, as we know it, will cease to exist. In fact, there's a 100% chance that every place, 10:59 I mean, that's, that shouldn't... Know there's a 100% chance the Russian Federation will cease to exist.

11:05 All states that have ever existed have ceased to exist. There's also a 100% chance the United States of America will cease to exist.

11:13 Probably not before you graduate, don't worry. (class laughs) Unless you're freshmen, in which case, eh, I'm not so sure.

11:20 (class laughs) But all states cease to exist. So any narrative about 11:26 how something's gonna be around forever is obviously going to be wrong. But my point here is that as I was sitting with my fellow Americans and thinking this over, 11:33 it kind of seemed clear that the reason why they, Americans, people generally, have trouble imagining 11:40 that Russia could lose this war to Ukraine has something to do with the fact that Ukraine isn't quite real in their minds and Russia is real.

11:48 And they wouldn't say that directly, but the narrative which you're taught when you're younger 11:54 is gonna be there for you always. We live in time in one direction. Our history education happens in only one direction.

12:00 And the things that get in first tend to stay. Now, we don't have to spend a lot of time 12:07 challenging that narrative. That's not really the point here. The point though, is that, just if you believe, 12:15 if this is your deep geography, that this was always Russia, and then if it wasn't Russia, 12:22 that was some kind of divergence. If that's the way you see it, then naturally your brain, 12:28 when you get to thinking about the war, of course, you're gonna think Russia's gonna win. Because this was always Russia, and Ukraine is some kind of exception.

12:35 Yeah, do you have a question? Oh, sorry. Okay. And, "always" is a very powerful word, 12:40 but it's also a very comfortable word. We really like "always". We really like for things 12:46 to have a kind of durability, continuity. We like for there to be something in the world where we know its shape, and we know its shape is permanent.

12:54 And it is a little disturbing when it turns out that none of these things that we think are permanent actually are.

13:01 That's a little disturbing. And so Russia has made it into the level, I think it's fair to say, you can correct me, I mean, 13:07 I realize you guys are young, you're from a different century and all that, but Russia has made it into the realm 13:13 of the kind of calmly permanent. It's up there with, I don't know what, Star Trek, hydrogen, 13:21 it's like things that have always been there. Whereas Ukraine has not. Whether that's fair or not, it's probably unfair.

13:27 But I think that's the case. And we just don't like it when something which is "always" is called into question.

13:36 So, "always" is very comforting. And of course, Russia itself, that word "Russia", 13:42 in a deep geography, it's not clear where the borders of that Russia are. I mean during this war, there's been a lot of really, quite, 13:52 let's call it ambitious Russian propaganda.

13:58 There are now placate, what do we call placate? - [Student] Posters. - No, wrong.

14:06 Billboards. (snaps fingers) There are now billboards. I mean, that's true, but like billboards. You get points for speed though, both of you.

14:11 And it wasn't wrong, I was just thinking of a different- Like billboards in Russia, which say Russia has no borders.

14:17 Which is one way to think about it. No borders at all. But my point is that, when we think of Russia, 14:24 we could be thinking of the Soviet Union, we could be thinking of the Russian Empire, we could be thinking of a lot of different things with very different borders.

14:31 And since the borders change, it's a big place, we're not surprised to learn 14:37 that a lot of things are Russia. A lot of things turn out to be Russia. So you get my point.

14:45 There is a reason why basically everybody except the military historians 14:52 kept saying Ukraine is gonna lose. And one of the puzzles of this class, if you want, is to think about why that is.

14:58 Why would everyone be wrong? And the suggestion that I'm making is that this thing that I'm calling deep geography 15:05 has something to do with it, with the words, the spellings, the narratives that indicate to us what is real and what is not real, 15:13 before we get into the empirical world. Because as I suggested before, if you read, 15:20 there aren't that many military historians left, but if you read them and their boring threads about logistics and all this stuff, 15:27 they don't know anything about Russia or Ukraine, but they know where the rivers are, and they know where the bridges are and so on. And they've done a much, much better job 15:35 than the people who are supposed to be Russia specialists. Why is that? Why is it that not knowing anything about Russia 15:41 seems to be an advantage in predicting who's gonna win this war? And so you see what I'm trying to suggest, 15:47 that if what you know about Russia has this kind of metaphysical underlay, 15:52 which is actually, then, pushing the empirical evidence around, that's going to be a problem for you.

15:58 So basically what I've done so far- Yeah, go for it. - [Student] Is there something distinctive about America that makes our narrative wrong? 16:05 Like, is there a different European, because of the proximity to the area, that the predictor- 16:10 - Well, in Poland, there is, yeah. (laughs) In Poland, there is. All of this sort of stuff 16:15 that I'm calling anti-colonial and so on, like the Poles and the Ukrainians have been making these arguments for a long time. But as soon as you get west of Poland, no, 16:22 it's the basic, it's the same story dominates. That Kievan Rus' somehow becomes Moscow, somehow all the same place.

16:29 When Moscow takes over Ukraine in the 17th century or in the 18th century, that's somehow a fulfillment, 16:34 even though Kyiv and Moscow have been apart for 500 years, even though Kyiv has never been ruled by Moscow before, 16:39 somehow that's a natural fulfillment of history.

500 years is a long time, by the way.

16:45 But that basic story is dominant in Germany and France, and in England, it's not just us.

16:52 It's a story, I'll get to why it's an ironic story. So, what I've been doing so far, 16:58 is I've been making a case for how important literary history actually is. Like how important culture actually is, 17:04 and how important cultural critique can be, like being aware of the narratives and the words and so on can help you to understand the politics, 17:10 or being aware of the culture can help you understand political judgements.

17:15 What I want to move on to now, is just a word about how you then address this.

17:23 How you begin to talk about it. And one way that we'll be talking about it in this course is the very broad approach of colonial history.

17:31 Where one of the first things that you do, if you're doing colonial history, is you question the neutral claims of knowledge.

17:44 You question, whether the things that have been laid down might in some way have been laid down with an imperial spin, 17:52 which has to then be queried. So if you're doing colonial history, 17:59 you're taking for granted that there's, that the libraries have been organized the wrong way.

18:05 Or at least they've been, I won't say wrong, but they've been organized a certain way, that even the language has been organized a certain way, 18:11 so that you don't see some things that you might otherwise see. Now, these are arguments that many of you might be more familiar with in an American context.

18:18 Where you would say that in American history, one has to be very careful, because American history has been laid down in such a way that you might not see, for example, 18:26 the history of enslaved people. That's probably a very familiar argument. But that's a generic anti-colonial argument 18:31 that can be applied in lots of other settings around the world, including in Russia and in Ukraine.

18:37 So in colonial history, you're asking yourself to question the apparent neutrality of knowledge, 18:45 including the instruments of knowledge: languages, spellings, maps, library organizations.

18:52 And you're also asking yourself, "Can people change halfway?" So if these concepts have been laid down into us 19:00 and we've accepted them as neutral, are we actually capable of catching ourselves halfway? Which is a very important history question.

19:06 Because if it's not possible, then we might as well give up on history, because we all have a lot of legends laid into us, 19:12 imperial and otherwise. And getting to history is a matter of being able to say, "Huh, well, maybe some of the things I'm committed to 19:18 maybe might not be correct. " 19:24 So I want one of you to figure out how many lecture classes there are on Ukraine, on Ukrainian history right now in the US.

19:29 'Cause I'm gonna say one, and I want you guys to prove that there's another lecture class going on on Ukraine 19:35 in the United States right now. I'm gonna guess that, despite the fact that it's in the news and so on, 19:40 I'm gonna guess there's only one. And that's sort of, that would be weird, wouldn't it? 19:45 I mean, would you go that far with me? I'm gonna say one, maybe two. Like full-on lecture classes that are just about Ukraine.

19:52 Not classes where somebody mentions Ukraine, or a Ukrainian poem is assigned, but a full-on class about Ukraine.

19:57 In our country with 300 million people, in our fantastic higher educational system, I'm gonna go with one, 20:03 and I'm gonna be surprised if it's more than two. So somebody figure that out by next class. Because it's an example of what I'm talking about 20:08 with the institutions. Because no one would disagree now with the proposition that something important is going on in Ukraine.

20:15 If something important is going on in Ukraine, that means something important could go on in Ukraine. If something important could go on in Ukraine, why are we so woefully unprepared for that? 20:22 There has to be an answer to that question. It has to go somewhere, it has to go somewhere deep. So if you're doing colonial history, 20:29 you question the neutrality of knowledge, you look for ways, 20:34 and one of your methods is you look for ways for the colonized to talk back. Not that they're right, by the way.

20:40 It's not about how one is right and the other is wrong. That would be oh, too simple, right? But rather, when you hear how the colonized talk back, 20:47 then it shakes you a little bit and gets you thinking about how you might do things another way.

20:52 So I was in Kyiv for several days and I stayed up late watching, 20:59 'cause I didn't anything else to do, actually, I had a lot of other stuff to do, (laughs) but I stayed up late watching Ukrainian television 21:06 because I find it just really ethnographically interesting to soak in the news in a country where something's going on.

21:13 And they have ways of talking back. Later in the semester, you're assigned an article about "ruscism," that I wrote.

21:21 Ruscism, to make it very simple, is a kind of merger of the words "Russian" and "fascism".

21:27 And ruscism, or with the personal noun, Ruscisti, 21:32 has become a pretty standard way of referring to Russians who are invading Ukraine. So standard in the sense that the newscasters use it.

21:41 They don't say "Russia". They rarely say "Russians". They almost never say "Russia".

21:46 They occasionally say "the Russian Federation". But usually they talk about the Ruscisti, 21:52 and they talk about ruscism. And when they refer the country, they're calling it "Moscovia".

22:00 Why would you call it Moscovia? Besides the fact that sounds sort of cool. Why would you call it Moscovia? 22:06 Go for it. - [Student] You're breaking the link between Russia and Kievan Rus'. - Yes. You're taking the Rus'.

22:12 So, Russia is called Rus', which is a name that Russia took in 1721 when the Russian- 22:18 when the Russian Empire was founded. If you call it Moscovia, you're taking away the historical reference to Rus' 22:24 and you're also kind of naming it as a smaller country than it is. And you're suggesting that its boundaries 22:29 might have a certain flexibility. (chuckles) You're also kind of suggesting that when you say Moscovia.

22:37 The other phrase they use a lot as a euphemism for Russia is "aggressor state". They say aggressor state.

22:43 Which is like neutral. "It's the aggressor state. " But it's also not neutral because you're suggesting that that state might always be an aggressor, and so on.

22:50 So the next thing that I want to talk about in this notion of 22:56 geography and deep geography and deep history is I want us to think a little bit about 23:02 this late 20th century, early 21st century notion, 23:08 that of globalization, and the idea that globalization has made 23:13 all this kind of careful work that we've done in the first few lectures of this class irrelevant.

23:19 Because what globalization does- this is the argument. What globalization has done is that, 23:25 to use Thomas Friedman's phrase, it's flattened the world. It's kind of made everything the same everywhere.

23:33 I mean, his example, one of his examples, was airport lounges, which frankly, I don't think is a great example, 23:40 not least because they're really different. I mean, the ones in America are terrible, for example.

23:47 Okay. But I give it as a joke in a different way, 23:53 because of course, airport lounges is not a representative experience. So the fact that airport lounges might be similar, 24:00 or McDonald's might be similar, doesn't really take you very far. But what I'm really going for here is the overall argument 24:05 that since the end of communism, something like that, since the rise of global trade, the second globalization, 24:14 things are basically interchangeable. Places are basically becoming more like other places.

24:20 And people are also becoming interchangeable. Because there are only so many ideas in the world and we share them all instantly through the Internet, 24:28 goes the idea, therefore we're interchangeable. Maximus and I are interchangeable. Zhenya and Maximus are interchangeable.

24:35 So it doesn't matter what TF you have, actually. (students chuckle) We're all basically interchangeable because we're all sharing ideas all the time.

24:40 And there are only so many ideas, and we're sharing them instantaneously. So maybe you don't have the idea I have right now, but you can have it instantaneously.

24:46 So this is the notion. So in this utopian view, 24:52 space doesn't really matter. Traveling distances doesn't really matter. 'Cause we're all really kind of all in the same place 24:59 in the same time. Now the objections to this are pretty clear. One of them is, does information really travel? 25:08 In the world where we are, well over 90% of the supporters of Viktor Orbán and Hungary 25:14 believe that Ukraine is at fault for this war. And why do they think that? They think it because that is their information space.

25:22 What Russians and Ukrainians think about this war is obviously very different. And it's not just because they're Russians and Ukrainians, it's because they're in different information spaces.

25:30 What you and your cousin Harry may think about Donald Trump might be very different. And that might not just be because 25:36 you and your cousin Harry have other differences. It might be because you are in different media spaces. One could argue that what's happened, actually, 25:43 is that information space has created more differences or it's created even firmer boundaries than existed before, 25:50 because the Internet, arguably, actually travels less well than a newspaper does. If I can print the same newspaper all over the world, 25:58 as used to be the case, then I may be actually doing better than I'm doing if I'm the Washington Post 26:05 and I can't get my stuff out in China today. So, information maybe doesn't really travel, and it may- 26:14 And can we really go everywhere. I mean, this is obviously on my mind, 'cause it took me 35 hours to get back from Kyiv.

26:20 But there is a certain cost in going places. And when you take your body certain places, it does have an effect on how you see things.

26:27 There's a difference between being in a place and seeing it on a screen.

26:32 If you go somewhere and it involves passports 26:38 and changing the gauge of a railway, or it involves going through checkpoints, 26:43 that is different from just clicking on a picture, to another picture, to another picture.

26:48 It changes the person. By the way, one of the things I found really interesting on the checkpoints, 26:55 and it has to do with this overall question of language and where you are and how language suggests where you are, 27:02 the Ukrainian soldiers generally still speak Russian. That's not really a big secret.

27:08 But at the checkpoints, if you're at a checkpoint, the way they greet you is they hit you with a really flowery, friendly Ukrainian.

27:17 And as long as you can hit them back with a really flowery, friendly Ukrainian, you're basically through the checkpoint.

27:23 Because there just aren't that many Russians who can do that. So you make sure you show your document, but the language itself is the first checkpoint, 27:31 which is kind of interesting. But where I want to really go with this is that, in historical terms, it really does seem to matter 27:39 how far people get at certain times. There really do seem to be historical turning points where non-interchangeable people get, or don't get, 27:48 to very special places, and that it seems to matter. A big classic example that we'll get to in about a week, 27:54 in our part of the world, is the Mongol invasion of Europe. The Mongol invasion of Europe.

28:00 Well, when did the Mongols reach Paris? 28:08 I see, yes? - [Student] They haven't yet. - Yeah, good! Good answer. I like that. I like the "yet", 28:13 I like the way you're holding the future open for good things. (class laughs) That's awesome. That's really good.

28:19 Yeah, so in the late 1230s, early 1240s, the Mongols aren't defeated by anybody.

28:25 The Batu Khan is not defeated by anybody. We'll talk about this. They have the stirrups, 28:30 they have the encirclement maneuvers, they have the calls. They're not defeated by anybody in Europe.

28:36 They destroy every army, European army, they touch. And that includes Kyiv, 28:43 but it doesn't include France. Not because they couldn't have done it, but because at a certain point, 28:49 the Batu Khan has to go back for a succession issue. 'Cause the main Khan has died.

28:55 But if the Batu Khan gets to Paris, I mean, arguably no Renaissance, no Age of Exploration.

29:02 Probably some other part of the world carries out the Age of Exploration, not the Europeans. And it's a very, very, very different world.

29:09 And that's just a matter of one person dying. If one person had died a year later, we're probably looking at an extremely different world.

29:16 Not to say that the moment we're in is quite comparable to that. But it does strike me as being significant that, 29:25 and of course you can't help but think about this when you're standing in the middle of Kyiv, but it seems quite significant that Russian soldiers 29:30 do or don't get to Kyiv in February of 2022.

29:36 And it's really close. It's really close. The Russians land in the Hostomel Airfield, 29:44 and their plan is to land there, drop the paratroopers, drop the special forces, go in, gather up the elite, kidnap them, probably exterminate them.

29:52 And that's part of the plan to take over the city. And they get to Hostomel, which is only about 35 kilometers, 20 miles, 30:00 from the center of Kyiv. They get that far on the first day of the war. They get that far, but the Ukrainians stop them.

30:07 There's a terrible battle around Hostomel and it goes on, but the Ukrainians stop them. Bucha, which you probably heard of 30:13 because of the atrocities, And, I saw Bucha very briefly too.

30:24 It was also very, that was also kind of interesting because the air raid sirens went off in Bucha, and I was with the Ukrainian general 30:31 and he was like, "Well, we can always go to the basement of the church, if anything actually happens. " 30:38 Bucha is basically a bedroom community. It's like 28 kilometers from Kyiv.

30:44 It's a suburb. Irpin, where so many buildings are destroyed, 30:51 it's like a beautiful parked, it's a really nice place. You might wanna, if you were like going up in the world 30:57 and you wanna have a nice place and drive, commute, the American dream. If you wanted to do that, 31:02 Irpin would be a wonderful place to go. Now it's all shot up, and there's a huge pile of burned cars, and there building after building was destroyed 31:09 by Russian tanks as they were retreating. That's like 20 kilometers from Kyiv.

31:14 And the same is true going the other direction across the Dnieper towards Chernihiv.

31:20 The Russians got very, very, very close to Kyiv. But they didn't get to Kyiv.

31:26 They didn't get that little difference, those last 15 miles of physical geography 31:33 would seem to make a huge difference. And the way people react to the war 31:41 also has a great deal to do with how they understand the geography around them. So for example, 31:47 time after time after time, people who lived in Kyiv or other cities 31:53 would say, when the war started, "i should go to the villages, I should go to the suburbs. " 31:59 That's a natural thought. Like, "They're gonna get to Kyiv, I should go to my dacha, I should go to my grandmother's, 32:06 I should go to my second house. " But it was the villages actually that took the punishment, 32:13 time and time again. People from Kyiv went to Bucha and Irpin, because they thought Bucha and Irpin 32:19 would be safer than Kyiv, which turned out not to be true. A friend of mine who lives close to the Dnieper, 32:27 the Dnieper runs through Kyiv. And so, a friend of mine assumed that the Russians would get as far as the river, 32:34 and the Ukrainians would then blow the bridges, and then you only have one direction to flee. So in moments like this, you're thinking in terms of space.

32:45 I wanted to go someplace besides Kyiv and Bucha and Irpin and Hostomel. I wanted to get outside of Kyiv Oblast.

32:51 And so I went with a friend to Chernihiv, the Chernihiv Oblast, which is just basically due north, a little bit east.

32:59 Chernihiv is a fascinating city. We're gonna return to it.

33:05 It might have been on one of your maps. The reason it was on one of your maps is that it's an old city.

33:11 It's 500 years or so older than Moscow. It's been there for a very long time. It's ancient.

33:16 And it is an ancient center also of scholarship, of theology and of scholarship.

33:24 Along with Kyiv, it was one of the two great centers of religious, and intellectual in general, disputation 33:31 in what's now Ukraine. And one reason why I have Chernihiv in mind 33:38 is that this whole story about the Kyiv and the Moscow and how it's all one place, 33:44 that was actually invented by a guy in Chernihiv. It was invented by one person.

33:49 Like now, we all believe it. It has this incredible effect on- And the reason he invented it 33:54 had everything to do with geography. Oh, I forgot to put his name on the sheet. Okay.

34:03 (chalk tapping) 34:10 So in the war, in the Cossack wars of the 17th century, which don't worry, we'll get to, in the Cossack wars of the 17th century, 34:17 at the end of it, there's basically a stalemate between Poland, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 34:22 and Moscow. And the stalemate is codified 34:27 at the Treaty of Andrusovo in 1667. And according to that treaty, 34:33 the territory on the east of the Dnieper was going to be Russia, and west of the Dnieper was going to be Poland.

34:39 It was a little unclear what that meant for Kyiv, because Kyiv was on both sides, but eventually Kyiv ended up being part of, 34:46 being under control of, Moscow. And that meant Chernihiv was as well. So Kyiv and Chernihiv, which are these major centers 34:54 of European scholarship and thought, are now suddenly under the control of Moscow, which has no centers of scholarship and thought.

35:02 And no, that's just a statement of fact. I mean, there aren't any universities, there aren't any academies in Moscow at that time.

35:14 So Lazar Baranovych was a very intelligent guy, one of the great theologians of his time, 35:20 and used to enjoying a certain amount of personal influence, it should be said. And when Chernihiv and Kyiv fall under Moscow, 35:28 he makes a play. And see if you could think of a play which is as good as this play. He says, 35:36 to the fellow Orthodox clergy in Moscow, he says, "You know what? We're actually all one country.

35:46 And the history of your country, that one in Moscow, it actually begins in Kyiv. " 35:52 And this was news to the people in Moscow. This had not occurred to them. This was not their story of themselves at the time. But Baranovych said, 35:59 "Your history actually starts with Kyiv. " And of course, why does he say that? Because that makes Kyiv really important.

36:08 Because, so suddenly Ukraine and Kyiv and Chernihiv are not just places that got conquered by Moscow.

36:15 It turns out they're the beginning of the history of Moscow. And that dignifies him, 36:21 and it dignifies his collegium, his school, it dignifies Chernihiv, it dignifies Kyiv.

36:27 That seems like a pretty good play. And it worked. For a while, it worked.

36:35 But you can then imagine what happens next. What happens next is that eventually, 36:42 the Russian clerics say, take over the story on their own. And they say, "Yes, okay, that's true. " 36:48 But, after a couple generations, they pick up all the tricks that the Ukrainians use to argue.

36:54 They learn the languages, too. They start reading the Western religious literature themselves. They learn about theology and disputation.

37:00 And so they take the argument and they make it their own. And then by the 18th century, it becomes a secular argument, 37:07 no longer a religious argument, but a secular argument. When the Russian Empire is formed to 1721, 37:13 it's called the Russian Empire for this reason. And then when Russia invents a secular history of itself 37:20 in the 19th century, it's this story. But this story happened because of this guy, 37:25 who, if he drowned under his horse, as people tended to do at the time. If something had happened to him on the way to writing that letter, 37:32 maybe that story would never have arisen. And then maybe we would all analyze this war a little bit better than we did.

37:38 And so, again, I'm just trying to make the point that where a certain person is at a certain time and place may matter, actually, a lot.

37:44 Like you couldn't actually trade Lazar Baranovych off for anybody else. He wasn't interchangeable. And those circumstances, 37:50 that Chernihiv fell under Russia at that particular time, were very specific.

37:56 So Chernihiv itself was bombed in early March.

38:04 I was told by the locals, I haven't checked this yet myself, but the guy who was actually doing the bombing runs was himself born in Chernihiv, 38:10 which raises the question of how you can believe different stories about the place where you're from.

38:18 When I was in the rubble, I was in- There was one really terrible bombing run which destroyed, or partially destroyed, 38:25 four major apartment buildings in one neighborhood. And when I was there talking to people, 38:33 I was struck by a few things. Like how, I mean, just like this place for young people, 38:41 like there was a kid there who was collecting books. He had a book collection.

38:46 And he found an iPhone in the rubble. Like he had all these books and he had an iPhone, and as he walked out, he said to me, "I found an iPhone!" 38:51 Like, this is his childhood. But also one thing that struck me is that in these apartment buildings, 38:59 people don't necessarily know each other or know who they are. But then after the bombing, people did know who one another were, 39:06 because they had to help each other with things. And then it turns out when a building is destroyed, that it has a history.

39:12 One of the reasons you know that is that the same kind of bombing will destroy different kinds of buildings in different ways. So Soviet-era kommunalka, or Soviet-era buildings 39:21 that were put together from modules, are very vulnerable to bombing, it turns out, 39:27 whereas post-1990s buildings are generally less so. And you can literally see that worked out before your eyes.

39:34 Or another thing, in this complex of buildings that was destroyed, one of them, it turns out, like this is something you would never have to know, 39:40 but it turns out that one of them was built for survivors of the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl.

39:48 And so they all came down and they got this building as a way of moving away from where they were.

39:54 But that history would never have come out without this other event. When I went to the suburbs of Chernihiv, 40:01 I mean, the villages around, I talked to a woman who had five Russian soldiers 40:09 in her house, in her basement. And I said, "Okay, they're Russian soldiers, 40:14 but where were they actually from?" Were they Russian, or were they some- And she's, "Oh, they were from Bashkiria and Tatarstan," 40:22 and I think maybe one of them was Russian from Russia, he was from Siberia. And they had a geography.

40:30 They had a notion that Ukraine was Russia. But it's a funny kind of geography 40:36 because they're from so far away, they're from thousands of miles away, in some cases. And there she is, and they're all speaking Russian together.

40:44 And she's a native Russian speaker. She was talking to me in Russian. And they're telling her what Russia is 40:49 and that she's in Russia. And there's something very strange about that, but that's their deep geography, 40:55 and there's something about it which seems to really matter. I'm gonna leave you with the last example, 41:02 which I'm sure you probably already thought of, which is Kyiv itself.

41:09 So the way we think about cities often has to do with particular things that happen 41:15 in those cities or in those neighborhoods. Like Wannsee might not mean anything to you, but Wannsee is where a famous plan was made 41:23 for the extermination of the remaining Jews of Europe. It's a part of Berlin.

41:28 And so you, you cannot, once you know that, you can't hear Wannsee and not think about that.

41:34 Or Vichy. So Vichy in France is, I mean, there's nice soda water and everything, 41:40 but it's a spa town, but it's also where the collaborationist government had its capital during the Second World War.

41:46 And so Vichy means that. It's very hard to take that away from Vichy. I would suggest that there's going to be 41:52 a little something around Kyiv like that, but in a positive sense, 41:58 because Zelensky stayed. If Zelensky had left, many things, I think, would be different, in the world and in our minds 42:05 and in this class, probably. But he stayed, and I think that makes Kyiv mean something different than it would've otherwise been.

42:13 In other words, I'm trying to suggest that this deep geography, although it's real, is also fungible, it's changeable.

42:21 It can be altered by human action. I'm thinking in particular about the night, 42:27 a couple of nights into the war, where he made the selfie video, where he said, "President tooth. " 42:33 "I'm here. " And then he goes on, "My advisors are here. We're all here. We're all right here. " And he was countering Russian propaganda, 42:40 which had said he had fled. That's part of it. But also, he was saying, "I'm here, I'm going to stay. I'm reassuring people. " 42:49 And this is just my last example of the point that maybe places and people aren't so interchangeable.

42:56 That it matters a great deal that when he said, "I am here," the buildings behind him were Kyiv, 43:02 and not Lvov and not Warsaw. That everyone in Kyiv, when he said, "I am here," 43:07 could recognize where he was in Kyiv.

43:13 And that "I'm here" was also the counter to a different kind of deep geography.

43:22 Because at the moment when he said that, there still were bombs falling in Kyiv which were meant for him.

43:28 And there were still groups of assassins moving towards Kyiv, or actually inside the city of Kyiv, 43:34 who were meant to kill him. And they were operating under a different deep geography, deep geography which goes something like this.

43:41 And I'm not, I don't have to invent this because it's what Putin said in in 2021, 2022, 43:46 that Russia and Ukraine have always been one place, and the people who say that Ukraine is a different place, 43:53 they are somehow exotic. They somehow come from the outside. They're Hapsburgs, they're Poles, they're Europeans, they're Americans.

43:59 And therefore anyone who says that there's a Ukraine, there's something flawed about that person. They don't belong there.

44:05 They simply need to be removed. And we'll remove them lexically, by calling them Nazis or whatever it takes.

44:13 But we're also going remove them physically. Because if we remove them physically, then the rest of the Ukrainian people will go along with us, 44:19 and the war will be over. That is a kind of deep geography. And that deep geography animated the attempt 44:27 to take Kyiv and to kill this person. So I had a lot of time to think about that, 44:34 because if you're visiting the President, it takes a long time to get there, obviously. Because like, they lead you here and they lead you there, 44:40 and then you're never gonna find your way out. They lead you here, it's all dark and confusing, and there are lots of checkpoints, 44:46 and there're lots of barriers and things. And so it gets you to think, how important is it actually that this person is right here, 44:53 as opposed to another person right here, or this person being somewhere else? 44:59 So, the deep geography is important. That was the point of this. But also the deep geography can be changed.

45:08 The deep geography can be changed by action and by experience and by renaming.

45:13 And I was thinking about that, I think about that as well.

45:18 I was there during this last, this Kharkiv counteroffensive, when the Ukrainians took back almost all of Kharkiv.

45:25 And of course, that means that Kharkiv Oblast now means something different than it did a few days ago. And for the men and women 45:31 who were involved in that offensive, it's gonna mean something different to them as well. And that the fact that 45:40 so many Ukrainians have had to move during this war, for bad reasons, 45:47 4 million deported to Russia, well over 10 million crossed a Western border and come back, 45:55 people inside the country, well over half the population has moved in one way or another. And that moving is associated with the changing of meanings.

46:04 And sometimes it's associated with a change in meanings in a positive sense.

46:09 This is just the very last thought. But I was really struck, I mean, I'm not trying to make a happy story of this, 46:15 because of course it's not a happy story, but I was really struck by how, when people talked about all of this movement, 46:22 whether it was the President himself, or whether it was some of the soldiers I talked to, or whether it was some of the people in villages that I talked to, when they talked about all this movement, 46:29 they had interpretations of it, that like this in some way shows who we are.

46:36 The fact that we went away and came back, 46:42 The fact that we were able, or have already- a lot of people have already rebuilt their houses, 46:48 the fact that we rebuilt, the fact that we got back to Kharkiv, the fact that Zelensky stayed, 46:54 that these things say something about us, about who we are. We can be pushed, we can be pulled, 47:01 but then where we choose to be in the end, says something about us. That we choose to fight this war, 47:06 that we choose to help the people fighting this war, that we choose to make it through somehow, says something about us.

47:13 And so in that sense, like this thing that people are talking about as the formation of a nation, I think, is not quite right.

47:18 The nation was already there. But how people think about their nation, and particularly what they think it means to be free, 47:24 and what it's worth sacrificing about, you can also connect that to space. In fact, I guess my point would be, 47:30 you almost have to connect it to space. It's hard to imagine people having a story about themselves 47:36 which involves risk and values, which doesn't also in some way involve space.

47:42 And that's where I'm gonna leave it. Thank you.

47:50 (gentle chimes)

back to TOC


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Lecture 4 Before Europe

0:00 (mysterious electronic music) 0:12 - Okay everyone, greetings. Nice to see you all. Welcome to the fourth lecture.

0:17 As you'll remember, section starts this week.

0:23 Somewhat incredibly we have a Pole, a Ukrainian, and a Lithuanian TF-ing in this class, 0:30 which honestly could not have been, I mean, if I'd tried to do that, there's no way that could have actually happened.

0:36 So your TFs will be the beautiful and talented, Zhenia Monastyrskyi.

0:42 Zhenia, say hello. There you go, that's Zhenia. - [Zhenia] We already met. - Oh, okay. The equally beautiful and talented Wiktor Babinski, 0:50 and the no less beautiful and talented Maksimas Milta. These are your three TFs.

0:56 Get to know them, get to love them, figure out what the bribery culture is in their various countries, and adapt yourself to it.

1:03 Lots of laughter from the Ukrainians there, that's a clue. (audience laughing) 1:08 That's a clue. I do not have time for funny bribery stories. If there's time at the end of the lecture, 1:13 I'll tell you a funny bribery story. Okay, so welcome. We are working our way now towards proper history.

1:21 I've been trying to set up some of the concepts because the longer I've been doing this job, the more it seems to me that we have to think about 1:28 what history is before we jump into doing the subject. And so I've been using the fact 1:34 that we're in the moment in the middle of a war to try to help the, I've been trying to use the war to like shake up the concepts 1:41 and to help us think about how things are fluid, and also help us to think about how we talk and how we think about things 1:47 may influence the world more than we realize, right? That the unthinking or half thinking ways 1:54 that we approach the past will affect the decisions that we make in the future by determining how we see things in the present.

2:02 But this is also really important, because Ukraine is, you know, for many of you, a new subject.

2:07 And even for those of you who it's not a new subject, it's unlikely that you've actually had a class that was just about Ukrainian history.

2:13 Did anybody check how many classes in Ukrainian history there are? - [Student] I couldn't find any.

2:19 - Okay, so I'm holding one lecture class in the United States of America on modern Ukraine, 2:26 which is an extraordinary thing, right? If you think about it. It raises the question of what has gone wrong with us 2:32 in general, right? Like, no, why is it that what we do 2:37 is so mismatched with the world around us, right? Like don't you feel ill served? If you're going to any, I mean, 2:43 okay, not everybody at Yale is in this class, but isn't it odd to think that if you were at any other university in the United States, 2:49 you wouldn't even be able to take a class in Ukraine, even though, right? And that raises the larger question of 2:55 why is it, in the 21st century, where we supposedly have access to all this data all the time, and we all know everything instantly, 3:03 why are we always surprised by things, right? Why is it that things that happen in the world 3:09 always seem to catch us unprepared? And so you know what my answer for that is gonna be, my answer for that is gonna be that you should all be history majors.

3:15 Because if you're a history major, or just take, I don't care whether you're a major or not, just take a bunch of history classes, because you'll be less likely to be surprised 3:22 by the things that happen to you over the course of your life. Like, if nothing else, it'll help you not be surprised 3:29 by stuff that happens. Okay, our job today is to set up Europe.

3:35 You know, if you're looking at it from the point of view of today you could be thinking, well, is Ukraine Europe, is Europe Ukraine.

3:40 We're not there yet. We're thinking about the world before Europe, because Ukraine, Kyivan Rus, 3:46 which we're gonna get to in the next lecture, Kyivan Rus is coming into being at a time when the notion of Europe doesn't really exist yet, 3:52 and wouldn't really make any sense. So I'm gonna start by talking about a couple of ways that people look at 4:01 the sequence of events that led to Europe. Then I'm gonna move on to the things which really were there before Europe.

4:07 I'm gonna talk about language for a bit, I'm gonna talk about pre-Christian religion for a bit, and then I'm going to move towards the story 4:14 of how this state came into being. So there are, if you are in, broadly speaking, 4:21 the trajectory of Western Europe, the United States, or North America, 4:26 the way that the trajectory of European history is taught 4:33 begins with ancient Greece. And I'm not gonna change that here. We're also gonna be talking about ancient Greece.

4:40 I'm just gonna be messing with it a little bit. I did the whole thing with the olive tree 4:46 and the trident already, right? Did I do that in an earlier lecture? No, I didn't do that? Okay. So I did or I didn't? 4:52 You're the only one who remembers it, okay. Maybe the entire class has switched out since then, and you're the only, 4:57 like this was a really aggressive shopping period, they're all new. Okay, so just to remind you, of Athens itself, 5:05 the founding story of Athens itself, involves an olive tree and a trident. It involves a contest between Athena, the goddess Athena, Athena vs Poseidon 5:14 and Poseidon, who gets to be the namesake. You know the answer because the city is not called, you know, Poseidon, it's called Athens.

5:22 So Athena wins because she gives the Athenians an olive tree, and the Athenians say this is very nice, shade, olive oil, right? 5:30 Poseidon strikes his trident on the ground, and seawater springs forward, springs forth.

5:35 And the Athenians say that doesn't taste very good, we're not really into that. That's the way the story goes, right? That's the way the story goes.

5:41 And it brings you an image of Athens which is peaceful and contemplative and maybe tending towards consumer society.

5:47 It's a certain image of democracy, right? Whereas Poseidon is offering, you know, 5:53 strife, and sea commerce, and war, and navies, and things like that.

5:58 Now, underneath that story is a question. Because, you know, all societies 6:05 in the way that they tell their story of founding are hiding something, right? And this little story, what's being hidden 6:11 is the answer to the question: how can you possibly live just on olive oil, right? 6:16 You can't. I mean, no, yes? 6:22 I mean, at least you need a little bread at least with the olive oil. And so where was the bread coming from? 6:28 I'm now gonna see if anybody was at this lecture. Where was the bread coming from? Where were the calories actually coming from? 6:34 The grain? Yes. - [Student] The Southern Ukraine, right? 6:40 - Right, what's now Southern Ukraine. The northern coast. So the ancient world, the ancient Greek world, 6:46 includes the Black Sea, up to and including the north Black Sea coast, which is now Southern Ukraine. The Ancient World 6:52 That's where the calories came from. And so you can plant your little city state full of olive trees, 6:59 because you're engaged in an international trade, and you're getting your calories from somewhere else.

7:06 So this isn't just mark that, that's important, because the connection of our part of the world with other parts of the world by way of food and calories 7:15 is enduring. So for the ancient Greeks, what we're calling Ukraine was a place. And if you did your reading of the Serhii Plokhy 7:22 you'll know that for Herodotus, who was a major source, the ancient historian Herodotus, 7:28 along with Thucydides the two, you know, the two people who found history, as such.

7:34 Herodotus maps what we call Ukraine in a certain way, correctly, which is sea, coast, steppe, and forest, 7:42 moving from south to north, right? Sea, coast, steppe and forest.

7:47 And the further north you go, the more exotic it is, right? So from the point of view of that civilization, 7:54 northward means more exotic. And so it's in the North that a lot of the Greek mythology is located, 8:01 a lot of like the Elysian Fields are there, and the Mountains of Hyperborea are there, 8:07 griffins are there, all kinds of stuff is there. The Scythians, they locate, I didn't write the Scythians, the Scythians are also there. The Cythians 8:14 The Scythians are, in fact, real.

8:20 And they did inhabit what's now Ukraine at the time and they did fantastic work in gold.

8:26 So that part, the part about Ukraine being rich in gold is not entirely false. The treasures of the Scythians still exist, 8:32 they're still in museums, they're being looted in this war. So there are a lot of ways in which 8:37 what happens in the war actually reminds us of things that were a couple of thousand years ago, like the Scythians, for example.

8:42 There's a museum in Ukraine which was looted, and the Scythian gold work has now been taken off to Russia. South to North 8:49 Okay, so the Greeks are already looking at the territory 8:55 that we think of as Ukraine, and they already have a certain geographical view of it, which is south to north. And I want you to think about this, 9:02 because we are, you know, we are in the West, and so when we look at Ukraine we're thinking, okay, West Ukraine, East Ukraine.

9:08 But from the point of view of our story, south to north and north to south is actually much more important, 9:15 at least for the first few weeks of this class. Okay, so if you're looking, so taking ancient Greece as a starting point, 9:23 if you're now looking at this whole thing from today, but from a Western point of view, 9:29 there's a certain way that ancient Greece connects to you, and this will be familiar to you probably, 9:35 it goes like this: there was Greece, and then there was Rome, and then Rome fell, right? 9:44 Very dramatic, it fell. Imagine all the buildings falling, right? It's a very dramatic image, Rome fell.

9:51 It was overrun by barbarians, it ceased to exist, right? Very dramatic. And then nothing happened for a while, Renaissance 9:57 and then there was a Renaissance, or there were Dark Ages and then there was a Renaissance, and then that Renaissance miraculously, 10:03 the clever Europeans discovered all those things that were lost. They discovered the Greek stuff, and the Roman stuff, 10:08 and they, so I told you before, always be skeptical of this rebirth metaphor, because if you think about rebirth for one second, 10:14 it's really creepy, right? I mean, just birth itself, honestly. Like, I don't know how many of you have seen one, 10:20 but it's a thing. And then think about doing it twice with the, I mean it's just, so be suspicious of rebirth metaphors, 10:27 including the Renaissance. So anyway, this is a Western perspective, right? Greece, Rome, Rome falls, 10:33 then there's a Renaissance where everything is rediscovered, and then after the Renaissance comes nations, and the nations, the French, the Italians, 10:40 the British, and so on, all in some way look back to ancient Greece to this pattern. If you're in our part of the world, this looks different.

10:48 You can still start with ancient Greece, as I say. There's Rome, there's ancient Greece, there's Rome.

10:53 So far, so good. Does Rome fall? - [Student] No. - No, never falls. Yeah, okay (laughs).

11:01 There's like one solid supporter of Byzantium over here.

11:06 I'm glad. (students laughing) That's right, Rome does not fall, right? Rome doesn't fall, the buildings don't all fall, Rome doesnt fall 11:12 the Colosseum doesn't fall, it's still there, you can visit it today, trust me. It doesn't all fall down, the barbarians don't all come rushing in one day 11:18 and have a barbarian party. That never happens. Part of the Roman Empire slowly falls under the influence of others.

11:26 The capital of Rome moves to the city which is today known as Istanbul, but which for a long time was known as Constantinople.

11:33 And the Roman Empire continues as Byzantium, as Byzantium.

11:38 It continues for another thousand years, which let's face it, even if we're cynical, is a pretty long time.

11:45 And that thing which is called the Renaissance, where the clever Europeans like rediscover all the things, 11:51 the Renaissance is possible, you know, in large measure, because Rome never fell in the first place, 11:58 because there was, there's no, I'm not gonna say the Byzantium preserved everything of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, it didn't, 12:03 but it preserved a lot of things, like for example the Iliad. So if you've had like any kind of like, 12:09 if you've done, you know, DS here, have had any kind of that sort of education, the Iliad only exists, Byzantium 12:15 that's the story of the Trojan War with Achilles and all these figures, the Iliad only exists 12:21 because people for a thousand years in Byzantium hand copied the thing over, and over, and over, and over, 12:26 and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again, right? Until late in the day copies were transferred to Italy 12:33 right before Byzantium was overcome, let's say. And then they were printed in Italy and translated 12:40 and then it becomes a classic text. And so therefore, because of Byzantium, we have Achilles, we have the Iliad, we have Homer, right? 12:46 And we can say, oh, we rediscovered it, isn't that wonderful? And we can do that kind of time travel magic where we leap back to ancient Greece.

12:52 But it's less time travel magic if you remember that Byzantium was actually around for another thousand years.

12:58 And for our story, for our East European story, you just can't do without Byzantium in the middle.

13:05 If you're telling this story from a Western point of view it's kind of awkward that Byzantium is still there, right? 13:12 It's kind of awkward. It's like you're trying to like date a new person but you're still going out with the other person but it's like, I'm not really, you know, not really, 13:19 like you know, she's not, not, you know? And that's what Byzantium is like in the Western story.

13:24 Like okay, there's this huge thing over there, and it calls itself Rome, and they're speaking Greek, but it's not really Europe.

13:29 It's not really there. Let's just look the other way, right? That's what Byzantium is if you're doing the West European thing.

13:35 But if you're not, if you're trying to figure out Ukraine, or for that matter Russia or Belarus, 13:41 but the fact that Byzantium is there the whole time is important. It's not marginal, it's not some kind of unwanted appendage, 13:46 it's not this confusing thing. It's part of this unbroken tradition, right? So I was just in central Kyiv 13:53 and I was looking at the cathedral, which is spectacularly beautiful, St. Sophia, and it was built, you know, that was built in 1037, right? 14:01 It was built, you know, it was built while Byzantium was still around. It was built three centuries before Notre Dame, right? 14:08 Three centuries before Notre Dame. The daughter of the guy who had it built, by the way, was Queen of France.

14:13 And she went to France and she said this place is backward and dirty, and I really wanna go home, right? So that gives you, and that's not just the kind of thing 14:20 that makes Ukrainians proud, but it also just gives you a sense that, for quite a while, this Byzantine story 14:28 was a heartier and more interesting story than the West European story. Okay, so there's a different story 14:35 starting with ancient Greece, which is, in a way, more robust and continuous. I'm not saying it had to be that way.

14:43 I'm not saying that Ukraine had to be part of the Byzantine tradition. Other things could have happened, but that is in fact how it turned out.

14:49 Okay, so language here then becomes important.

14:55 In the West European version, or the Western version, there's Greek, right, then there's Latin, 15:04 and then from Latin you get the Romance languages, Portuguese, Romanian, French, Spanish, Italian.

15:12 So the Romance languages they're called, Rome. And then you have the Germanic languages.

15:19 So the Germanic peoples were some of the ones who overwhelmed Rome, replaced Rome actually kind of slowly. Slavic Languages 15:25 So, you know, Danish, and Dutch, and Swedish, German, right? 15:31 So in Western Europe, the Western Europe is dominated, oh English is a Germanic language, forgot. So Western Europe is dominated by these Germanic 15:39 and these Romance languages. In Eastern Europe we have a different trajectory, which is Greek, more Greek, 15:49 a language called Old Church Slavonic, which we'll explain more about at the end of this lecture and next week, and then Slavic languages.

15:57 Now Slavic languages, which we're gonna move into, they are par excellence something which comes before Europe.

16:03 It has always been and is still frankly a little mysterious why so many people speak Slavic languages, right? 16:09 The Slavic languages are actually the dominant language group of Europe if you count the people, right? 16:15 If you count the people, or especially if you count the territory where more people speak it than any other, right? 16:21 Slavic languages cover a lot more territory than Germanic ones do or than Romance ones do.

16:27 And the Slavic languages that were spoken a thousand years ago are not, 16:33 are clearly related to the Slavic languages that are spoken now. Okay.

16:40 Okay, what am I doing with my hand? 16:45 - [Student] Punching. - Punching, okay. So if you had a drink, if you had a drink, I'm not saying that you did, 16:51 but if you had a drink on Saturday night, and it was in a big bowl, had some alcohol in it, some other stuff, what was that called? 16:58 - [Student] Punch. - Okay, why, has it ever occurred to you, like why is this and the, why is that the same word? 17:06 That's never occurred to you, okay. But you know the answer. - [Student] No, I don't, I just, if you drink a lot of the punch, maybe you're more likely- 17:12 (Timothy laughing) - All right. That is what is known as a folk etymology. Folk etymology 17:19 (students laughing) Like, and the thing is like, now that's gonna be on the internet, and next week it's gonna be true.

17:24 (students chuckling) It's gonna cover the, you're gonna have taken over the cognitive space to that explanation. So the reason why, okay, is that a punch 17:34 is a drink that has five ingredients. And a punch like this, count 'em, five fingers, okay.

17:43 How do you, anyone know how to say five in Russian? - [Student] Pyat. - How do you say five in Polish? 17:49 - [Student] Piec. - Five in Ukrainian? - [Student] Pyat. - Okay.

17:54 That's why, all right? It's a rare example of a base Slavic word 17:59 coming into our language, right? So the reason why punch and punch, 18:06 we have that word, is from Slavic languages' five, the word for five, that's where it comes from. Are you speaking the language 18:11 And so, interestingly, so that raises the question like are you speaking the language, or is it speaking you? Because you didn't have to know why it's a punch, 18:19 like you would've gone through your, if you hadn't taken this class, amazingly, you would've gone through your whole lives without knowing, right, why it's a punch, 18:26 and why I'm throwing a punch, or why I'm drinking punch. So are you speaking the language, or does the language speak you, right? 18:32 Language is interesting because, I mean, how many of us actually invent a word and have it stick? 18:37 Relatively few. Even in the age of the internet, relatively few of us. The language is there for us, we speak it, or does it speak us? 18:43 And it outlasts us. I mean when we're gone, the language that we speak is still going to be there. So it's important to kind of, it's important, 18:52 what I'm starting to say is, to disaggregate the language from the people.

18:57 So I'm gonna be talking about the Slavs, and the Slavic language, but it's important to remember that 19:02 it's not that there's a language biologically connected to people. The language is there when people are born.

19:08 And whether they end up speaking that language or other languages are gonna depend upon what happens to them over the course of their lives, right? 19:15 So just to take a very easy example, more people are speaking Ukrainian in public now 19:22 than when I was there the last time a year ago, noticeably. That's not, that's because of something that's changed 19:28 in the world, right? It's because something that's changed in the world. Language is not, so it's not the same thing, 19:33 like when languages move, it's not necessarily because people have moved.

19:39 It's not as simple as that. So the way that historians tell the story in terms of the movements of people 19:46 is not the same way that the historical philologists tell the story with the movements of languages. And historical philologists are probably, 19:52 I think, are probably right. So language does change, but it changes more slowly than we do, right? 19:58 So, I mean, we can still, we can all read Shakespeare, right? If you're Polish, you can easily read the Polish of 400 years ago.

20:05 And if you're Russian or Ukrainian or Belorussian or whatever, you can read texts from several hundred years ago 20:10 with just a little bit of effort. And although it's weird to think about vice versa, right? Like if you could time travel people 20:16 from like 500 years ago to now, they would understand our conversations, at least with a little bit of work.

20:22 So the language is there before you get there. An example that's relevant for our class is the Vikings.

20:27 The Vikings are speaking, obviously, you know, proto-Swedish, Scandinavian languages, a Germanic language.

20:34 They arrive in Kyiv. Don't worry, there's a whole lecture about this, it's the next one. They arrive in Kyiv and the dominant language around them 20:41 is a Slavic language. And what do they do? They learn it, right? They learn it, and they take it on, 20:47 they change their own names so that their name sounds Slavic, right? So what could sound more Slavic than Yaroslav, right? 20:54 Yaroslav. But if I say Jarisleif, you might think for a second, say, oh, Jarisleif, 20:59 that sounds like somebody in an Icelandic saga, and you would be right, and it's the same person. Or if I say Volodymyr, you'll think, well, 21:07 that's the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr, that sounds very Slavic. But what if I say Valdamar, right? 21:12 Then we're somewhere completely different. And the guy who is remembered by the Ukrainians as Volodymyr, or by the Russians as Vladimir, 21:18 was actually called Valdamar, right? And certainly like when he, you know, 21:24 talked to his Scandinavian relatives, that's what he was called. So they learn the language, they adapt their own names to this language, 21:33 and then this language also speaks us, right? Then this language speaks us. Like I was on American television last night, 21:39 with an American, you know, asking me questions. And he's talking about Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy and I'm thinking, you know, 21:46 more than a thousand years ago, a Scandinavian called Valdamar, you know, got himself baptized and now we are saying Volodymyr.

21:54 Like it hasn't, my point is that it hasn't changed that much, and we can even kind of explain why it changed.

21:59 Like the guy who was called Valdamar, he took on the name, in this language at that time was probably something like Voldemar, right? 22:06 But he took on a name, and now a thousand years later we're still, these names are speaking through us.

22:13 Okay, you get the point. So language is there between us 22:19 and language is helping to make us. Now this is only possible because Language is there between us 22:25 some institutions outside of individuals are keeping the language going, right? 22:31 And we're gonna talk a little about what those institutions might have been. But the big institutional change is whether there are, 22:38 whether there's a written language or not, and whether some institution is propagating the written language.

22:43 And so a big moment of historical change for any language is when literacy comes, and that's where we're gonna be edging towards.

22:50 So the conversion, in around 988, to Christianity is also the moment when a written language 22:56 emerges on these territories. But, that said, you know, 23:01 it's important that there was a Slavic language, that it was spoken, that it was not so terribly different 23:07 from the Slavic languages that are spoken now. This is a, so this is a continuity.

23:12 This is something which was there before Kyivan Rus, before any idea of Europe. If there was a time traveler from a thousand years ago 23:19 and heard Ukrainian or Russian for that matter being spoken, they would understand that there was, that this language had something to do with their language.

23:27 Now, by the way, I'm not trying to say that Slavic was the only kind of language 23:32 being spoken then, right? Other languages are being spoken on the territory of Ukraine as well, like Greek, for example.

23:39 But it was the main language then, just as it is the main language now.

23:45 And so here we have a very significant continuity. Okay, what was that language, 23:50 and what can that language tell us about the people we're concerned with? Slavic language, so how do we call each other? 23:58 When I was in Kyiv, I was overhearing, as one does, it's like an important, you know, scientific method, 24:05 you listen in to other people's conversations. I was listening to a couple of military officers talking about like one of their colleagues 24:10 who's going off for training. And the first guy said, you know, he went, he said he went do Germaniyu.

24:18 And then he corrected himself, do Nimechchyny, right? So what was happening there is that do Germaniyu is not really, that's like, 24:24 kind of, so that's not really Ukrainian. It's kind of Russian.

24:30 Do Nimechchyny is Ukrainian, to Germany is what it means. Nimechchyny, Nimechchyna.

24:38 Why is that country called that, why is Germany called that in Slavic languages? You've taken classes before.

24:44 Have you taken classes before? Okay, why is it called that? - [Student] Well Nemets means kind of mute in Russian and they couldn't understand the Germans.

24:50 - Very good. Yeah, so a Nemets, sorry, Nemets, it's the same in a bunch of Slavic languages, 24:56 is somebody who can't hear you, can't understand you, right? So in a lot of these languages up till now a Neme or something like that 25:01 means mute or maybe deaf, someone who can't talk or can't who can't hear. So there's, so that, like that tells you The line between Slavic and German 25:09 that there is this ancient barrier between people who speak Slavic and people who speak Germanic languages, 25:15 and that line is still there, right? It's not where it always was. It's probably, I'm sure it's occurred to you, 25:20 if it hasn't it's gonna stay with you the rest of your life, Berlin isn't really a very German name, right? 25:28 It's not, it's a Slavic name, right? A lot of the toponyms in what's now Germany are actually Slavic names because the line 25:35 between the two languages used to be further to the west than it is now. So the way people use languages starts to tell us 25:42 where they think they are, where they think they start, where they think they stop. The word for Slav, which we're just gonna use Ukrainian 25:49 'cause this is a class on Ukraine, but if I say Slav in Ukrainian it's Slovyan, 25:54 and the word for word is Slovo, okay? So as best as we can make out, 26:02 the Slavs thought of themselves as the people who could talk, right? The people of the word. As opposed to the Germans who you can't figure out 26:09 what they're saying, and you know, they don't understand you. So it, so like Slovyanska, or in Polish Slowianska, 26:16 these are people, these are the people who have the word. And this, like this broader name, 26:21 it survived into the nations that named themselves the latest.

26:26 So like the Slovenes and the Slovaks, right? Those were the Slavs who took on national names late.

26:33 And so basically they just took the name Slav as opposed to other people. Now, that word, Slav, for self, 26:42 which means people of the word might mean something else to other people. So in, if you are an Arab speaking slave trader 26:55 that word means something entirely different. Al-Saqaliba means slaves, means slaves, 27:02 and that Arabic word then becomes the, goes into the West through German as Sklavin 27:09 and becomes the English word slave. So it's actually not a coincidence that the English word slave sounds like the word Slav 27:16 that we're talking about. It's not a coincidence at all. It's historically revealing because the people that we're talking about 27:22 were enslaved, right, between the Baltic and the Black Sea, 27:27 usually by slavers coming from the north to the south, and so an Arabic word to describe them 27:33 then comes into our language, right? With a very different meaning. It's very different to say I'm the people of the word 27:40 as opposed to the people who can be enslaved. And although, like with the punch thing 27:45 that you could probably do without the word punch, but you can't really do without the word slave.

27:50 And so here you have an example of how the language is speaking you and the language is carrying knowledge of something that happened, 27:56 as it happens in our part of the world, the language is carrying knowledge of something that happened in our part of the world a thousand years ago or more, right? 28:03 And now you know what that knowledge is. The knowledge is that the pagan Slavs that we're talking about, for a long while, 28:09 were enslaved, they were legitimately enslaved. Why do I say legitimately? That's not a good word.

28:15 It's because the monotheistic religions in general did not enslave their own people.

28:22 So they might enslave other people who are believers of other monotheistic religions, but not themselves.

28:27 But if you were a pagan, everyone could enslave you, right? If you were a Christian, Muslims might, and pagans might, 28:35 and so on, but if you're a pagan, then everyone might enslave you, including the other pagans. And so that's an important point that raises the stakes 28:43 of this whole monotheism. When we get to the conversion it's not just this, like, it's not just that people are becoming Christian.

28:50 I mean in a way like that's the least important thing, and it takes a while to happen. You're, but when you join the Christian world 28:56 it means that other Christians aren't going to enslave you. And it means that you're, you know, you're part of a larger group.

29:03 But don't worry, we'll talk more about that later. Okay, so the Slavs, from their own point of view, 29:12 are the people of the word. From the point of view of people around them, for a while at least, they are people who can be enslaved. Who were the Slavic 29:21 So this brings us to what I want to talk about next, 29:26 which is who they were at the time. So again, before Europe, before the conversion, 29:33 means before literacy, so we know less about them, right? So, I mean the history, 29:40 this may seem like a bit of a cop out, but history is based on written records, and so, you know, we have the history 29:46 of ancient Mesopotamia and history of ancient Egypt, legitimately the history, because they left documents.

29:54 We don't have the history of their neighbors necessarily because their neighbors didn't leave behind documents.

30:00 So when we're talking about the history of the Slavs up to this point where the sources we're using are Jewish travelers or Arabic travelers, right? 30:08 Or maybe Christian missionaries, and just the most basic principles of source criticism would tell you that 30:15 these monotheistic visitors are gonna have a certain kind of bias towards the pagans that they see.

30:21 But those are the kind of written sources we have up until the Christian conversions. But we know some things, but we know less than we might.

30:31 We know something about the paganism, but because these people were not literate and because they didn't have temples, 30:36 and they were an aniconic, that is they didn't have icons. They only started to have temples and icons, 30:42 that is physical instantiations of their divinities, very late in the day when they were influenced by the Christians.

30:49 But on their own, they didn't. And so there isn't really a physical trace, not just not a written trace, but there isn't really a physical trace 30:55 of how they worshiped. But we know something. We know that they were, as I've said, that they were pagans.

31:05 That means that there were a number of gods and the gods were not necessarily divinity 31:11 separate from the world. On the contrary, they were connected to the world.

31:16 They were connected with things that happened in the world. This will be familiar from Greek or Scandinavian mythology.

31:22 There, actually there's pretty strong similarities between this and Scandinavian mythology, so if you think of Thor, not in the most recent movie, 31:31 not that Thor, like I thought the most recent one didn't really work, I don't know about the rest of you. Like I was in Vienna and I was with a seven year old 31:37 and a 10 year old and I took them to see the most recent Thor movie and like it turns out that it was like 17 and over.

31:43 Seemed weird to me. And I said like together they're 17, and they're like, okay. (students laughing) 31:48 And they looked away. And I took them, but it wasn't really, I don't think that last Thor movie really worked, yeah. Monotheism 31:54 Anyway, but if you think of Thor, the Scandinavian divinity, you're not far away from Perun 32:00 who is a central divinity in the Slavic pantheon, a god of thunder associated with the thunderbolt 32:08 also associated with the oak tree. Another important god was called Svarog who was associated with the sun and with the crops, 32:15 but the spirits and divinities were everywhere. So that's the thing about, like, about monotheism, it's not just that there's one god, 32:22 it's that that one God is often located somewhere else besides Earth, which is a very strange thought 32:28 if you're not used to it, right? Like there's something, there's something very, there's something very ascetic and demanding and disciplined 32:35 about monotheism, where you put God somewhere else besides here. Like there's a way in which it's much more comforting, 32:40 actually, to have the gods kind of around all the time. Right? Okay, so the gods were everywhere and the notion was that 32:49 you are in constant relationships with them, which explains things that we now treat as superstitions.

32:56 The things that we now treat as superstitions, the little physical actions, are gestures towards the gods.

33:04 Sacrifice, human sacrifice, would be part of these relationships, sacrificing the right kind of person at the right kind of, 33:09 at the right time. If you spent any time in the Slavic world, and you think about it, you'll notice that the sacrifices to, 33:16 the spring sacrifices and the summer sacrifices to water and to flame are both still present in the culture.

33:24 They're now ritualized and nobody gets hurt, but the rituals are still there. We can talk more about that if you want.

33:31 The dead are still with you. That's another part of this pagan religion.

33:36 The ancestors will help you, or they will hurt you. Your kin relationships extend 33:42 to the dead members of your family as well, and so you're supposed to continue to do certain rituals in their direction, 33:48 which is not really so strange if you think about it. At the end, very important was the end of life.

33:57 The end of life is something that had to be very carefully met, very carefully looked after, 34:04 because if not then the dead are angry, or the dead are irritated and the dead 34:10 don't do the things that they're supposed to do, instead they do other things, which is a very fruitful source, by the way, 34:16 for our own culture. And probably more fruitful all the time. The, if death is not handled properly, 34:24 then the dead are unquiet, and how, what's an improper death? 34:29 If you're drowned, if you commit suicide, if you're hanged, all these things, 34:35 if you die during childbirth, if you die on your wedding day, which frankly, I get it.

34:41 I mean, that's, that does seem like bad news.

34:49 And if you're not cremated properly, right? So religions have ways of physically handling death, 34:56 not just narratively, but physically, and so cremation is what's supposed to follow. The female unquiet death, unquiet dead, Unquiet Dead 35:03 this is still quite popular in the Czech lands like if you're have anything to do with Czech culture you'll have heard of these creatures, Rusalki.

35:12 Rusalki are water spirits or meadow spirits that, again, like a lot of, 35:19 actually like a lot of pagan stuff this shows up in Tolkien, things like this. Like, if you know about Slavic paganism 35:25 and then you reread Tolkien, there'll be a lot of things which pop out at you. But they sing you, or they lure you into the marshes, 35:33 the Rusalki, so they're very beautiful and they're very attractive and they know how to draw you in, and then you drown.

35:41 The, or sometimes they tickle you to death. I don't know what to make of that, but that's a possibility too.

35:47 The male unquiet dead are, it's an easy one, what's from Eastern Europe, still with us? 35:56 Yeah. - [Student] Is it vampire? - Yes, vampires. The male, a male unquiet dead is a vampire, right? So, and you know what vampires do.

36:04 The vampires, they come back, they feed on the blood of the living, they take the souls away, they start with the family, right? 36:10 So when Bram Stoker brought the vampire into Victorian culture he was working with an actually existing pagan tradition. Vampire Crisis 36:17 And the reason why, so it appears, and this is now, again, this is not from historical evidence 36:23 'cause we don't have it, but it's from, it's actually from archeological evidence. It appears that when the Slavs did convert to Christianity, 36:32 which, again, don't worry, we're gonna talk more about it in the next lecture, but when they did convert to Christianity, 36:38 there was a vampire crisis, which you can imagine, right? Because suddenly nobody was being, 36:43 like even if you do convert, and remember conversion, like when conversion is presented retrospectively, 36:49 it's like boom, like the leader dunked himself in the water and suddenly everybody was Christian and you know, that's it.

36:55 But it actually takes generations or centuries and there's usually lots of backtracking and rebellion and so on.

37:00 And even if you convert, it's a pretty dramatic thing.

37:06 And it's very unlikely that you will instantly get rid of all of your previous convictions, right? And when the convictions are very high stake convictions, 37:15 oh, sorry for the pun, it was not intended, but when the convictions are very, like when they're very significant convictions, 37:22 like will my loved ones come back after death or not, you may want to hedge your bets a little bit.

37:29 So when the Christians came the Christians said no, no don't cremate, inhume, bury.

37:36 Right, bury. But that's not a proper way to die, right? That's not a proper way for, and so the way that the Slavs handled this 37:44 was to keep, in order to keep the male dead down, they put stakes through the bodies 37:52 so that the vampires couldn't come, just in case, just in case, right? 37:57 And so hence the notion that the way to stop a vampire is to put a stake through the heart, right? 38:03 So these, you know, these things are very old and very interesting. All right. So how do we get then from no written language From paganism to Christianity 38:14 to written language? How do we get from paganism to Christianity? I'm gonna talk about the details of this next time, 38:20 but what I want you to see now is that 38:26 the Slavic world was being prepared for conversion to Christianity somewhere else.

38:34 The first Slavic state is the Grand Duchy of Moravia, 38:39 which is first mentioned in the year 822, and the first Slavic state, so Moravia is now in the middle, 38:48 the northern part of what's the Czech Republic. And it was being contested between Byzantium 38:55 and Western Christianity. So Byzantium, the Byzantine Empire, sent missionaries 39:03 and these missionaries were Slavs, because remember there were Slavic languages are spoken 39:09 all over Europe until you get to Central Europe. It's a huge amount of territory where people speak Slavic languages.

39:14 So there were a couple of men, you might have heard of them, Cyril and Methodius, 39:20 who were Slavic speakers, from probably what's now Macedonia.

39:27 They were sent north to Moravia to convert the Czechs.

39:32 And in order to convert them, you know, their tool was a written language, right? 39:40 So as Slavic speakers, they generated a Slavic language, which we now call Old Church Slavonic, 39:48 and they translated some of the Bible into this language, passages of the Bible, and brought them with them.

39:55 And so in the attempt to convert the Czechs, which fails, eventually it fails, but the attempt 40:02 to convert the Czechs generates this language, and this language is accepted by the Pope, 40:08 for a while anyway, as a third legitimate language aside from Greek and Latin.

40:15 So Cyril and Methodius, it's a long story, but they fail.

40:21 Cyril never leaves Rome, he's buried in the basement of a little church called San Clemente, which if you visit like lots of people from the Balkans 40:29 leave their candles there. Cyril never leaves Rome, Methodius does get back to the Slavs, 40:34 but he fails to convert the Czechs. But, and he dies in Moravia.

40:40 But here's the interesting thing, just as a spoken language is there when you arrive 40:47 and it's there after you die, if you can create a written language, it's also gonna be there after you die.

40:53 So Cyril and Methodius die, but Church Slavonic goes on, the written language goes on, it's taken on, 41:02 it's taken up in Bulgaria by people actually who are trying to set themselves up 41:07 as rival to the Byzantines, it's taken up in Bulgaria. The Tsars, as they call themselves, of Bulgaria, support it.

41:15 In Bulgaria, this language shifts to a different alphabet. The original alphabet was called Glagolitic, 41:23 but the new alphabet was called Cyrillic. Not because Cyril invented it, he didn't, 41:28 it was, he was dead, it was named after Cyril. So Cyrillic, which is gonna be familiar to all of you.

41:34 If it's not familiar, some of the words on the sheet are written in Cyrillic, like I wrote, what did I write? 41:40 Oh, I wrote Slovo, I wrote Slovian, I wrote Nimecy, Nimechchyna. That's Cyrillic, right? 41:45 That's Cyrillic as it was invented, more or less as it was invented, circa 893, right? 41:52 So you can, if you invent a language, it can last, and if you invent an alphabet, right, 41:57 that can really endure. I mean, so the people in Bulgaria who set down Cyrillic, 42:03 if they picked this up, they could read it, right? They could read it. So that's something which was there 42:09 before the conversion happens, and it's very important that it's there before the conversion happens 42:14 because when Kyiv converts to Christianity this civilizational package, Old Church Slavonic, 42:22 which is a Slavic written language, the Cyrillic alphabet, which allows you to write things down, 42:29 is going to be available with Eastern Christianity. And so, you know, not that things don't change along the way, 42:35 but here we are more than a thousand years later, and it's still, it's an Eastern Christian country 42:40 using the Cyrillic alphabet. Okay, so that is all generated for different reasons, 42:47 and those different reasons have to do not just with Byzantium wanting to convert people.

42:52 I mean that's normal, you would expect that, but it also has to do with a competition, 42:59 which we'll talk more about next time, between the Byzantines and the Western Christians.

43:06 So this whole, in this, in our class, we're generally residing in this trajectory 43:13 which goes Greece, Byzantium, Kyiv, right? 43:18 But there is this other trajectory, which is real. And the other trajectory there is Greece, Rome, 43:24 and then the creation of this new model state, this new model state, which has become, 43:30 gonna become very important in the world, where church and state are sort of separated, 43:36 where the states are Christian but the Pope is not in charge. That model of state.

43:41 And the first important model of that state is founded by the Franks, who we'll talk more about, 43:48 but the Franks are the ones who essentially establish the political version of Western Christianity.

43:55 The Franks are the ones who stop Islam 44:01 at the Battle of Poitiers. This is like the kind of thing, so Poitiers is 722, 44:07 so this is really, so I'm not sure to wrote that down. Before Europe 44:13 When I say before Europe, one of the things I mean is before the Classical world, 44:20 which is a Mediterranean world and a Black Sea world becomes a world which is north of the Mediterranean.

44:28 The Classical world is just as much about Africa and what we now think of as the Near East as it is about the European coast.

44:33 And insofar as it's about Europe, it's about the coast, the northern coast of the Mediterranean, 44:38 the northern coast of the Black Sea. It's not about most of what we think of as Europe. So before Europe also means before it gets established 44:48 that north of the Mediterranean people are going to be Christians, not Muslims, 44:53 and one of the ways that gets established is at the Battle of Poitiers in 722 when the Muslims are stopped.

44:58 In our part of the world at about the same time, it'll be the Khazars who stop, in the Caucasus, 45:03 who stop Muslim armies. Another way that Europe becomes Europe 45:10 is not just that Islam is stopped, but that Christianity spreads northward, right? 45:15 Christianity spreads northward. The Franks, the other thing that they do 45:21 is that they provoke the people who we remember as the Vikings.

45:29 Okay, so much as I'd like to, I can't completely keep Western Europe outta the story, because the West Europeans do do some important things 45:35 like Poitiers and like provoking the Vikings. So it's, the Vikings like if you just have 45:41 a cartoon image of the Vikings, the Vikings come and they destroy, right? Like they're just there to take the gold from the churches.

45:48 But the Vikings were responding to the emergence of the Franks as a power.

45:53 And they responded to the dominance of the Franks on land 45:58 by their superior naval technology, right? The way that they fought and the way that they sailed 46:05 was a response to the power of the Franks. This is how history works. You run into somebody else who's strong in one way, you become strong in a different way.

46:11 So the Viking Age, which begins in the eighth century, is a response to the power of the Franks. And the Viking Age, although it includes North America 46:20 and Greenland and Iceland and of course Scandinavia and of course Normandy, the north of France, 46:26 and by way of Normandy the remaking of England into the form that we now know it, all those things, 46:31 the Viking Age is very important for Europe, Northern Europe, North America, our class is also part of the Viking Age, right? 46:38 Because when the Vikings bump into the Franks and then set all, and become a kind of counter power, right? 46:44 The power that uses the boats, the power that's in charge, that can move, right? 46:50 One of the places they get to is Kyiv. Getting to Kyiv in the eighth century, the ninth century, 46:57 is part of the Viking Age. So another thing that the Franks do is they set off the Viking Age and the Viking Age leads to Kyiv.

47:03 So that brings us to where we need to be when we start the next time. Byzantium is trying to convert from the south.

47:11 Byzantium is in a contest with the Franks about which kind of Christianity, under who's domination.

47:17 Meanwhile, the Vikings have been released and are moving around the north and are trying to find a way from the Baltic Sea 47:26 down to the Black Sea in their boats. And the reason why they're doing this, 47:31 one of the reasons, is because of the slave trade, the economics of the slave trade.

47:36 They're capturing and they're enslaving the people who live, are Slavs, right? They're capturing those people and they're bringing them down.

47:42 So the metamorphosis that's going to happen is when these Vikings have an encounter with the Byzantines 47:52 and decide to become Christians, and as they become Christians, the people around them become, not potential commodities, 48:01 but rather become people to be ruled by law. And at that point then we can start to talk about a state.

48:07 So I've tried to line up the things that we need to have, the religion, the language, right, a little bit of the economics, 48:13 before we get to this very important moment, which is the conversion of the people who are ruling Kyiv, 48:19 which is next time. Okay, thank you.

48:25 (gentle electronic music)

back to TOC


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Lecture 5 Vikings, Slavers, Lawgivers: The Kyiv State

0:00 (somber music) 0:13 - All right, everybody, greetings. Happy Tuesday. It's good to see you all.

0:19 I'm used to being wired and I'm used to teaching classes, but I'm not used to being wired while I teach classes. And so this has led me 0:24 to a certain number already of missteps. Like, for example, in the previous lecture, when I unwittingly doxxed my TFs 0:32 by telling, saying what their name was and making them stand up and turn around, as a result of which, they're all now getting thousands 0:38 of emails from the admirers of all of the stages of their short lives, right? 0:43 (students laugh) So I didn't think of that, guys. I'm sorry.

0:49 The other interesting feature of doing it this way is that like for every one of you, there are literally like 10,000 0:54 other people watching, or 1,000, let's not exaggerate, but there's like behind you, there are like 1,000 people out there 1:00 who are watching. And it turns out they also have views, which is interesting. And like they're just writing.

1:06 You know, they're not coming to office hours. Oh, speaking of which, come to office hours. Some of you have come to office hours. It's really nice to be able to get 1:12 to know you personally, if only for a moment. And it helps me teach, if I figure out what you're actually getting 1:18 and what you're actually not getting. Okay, I promise you that by the end of this lecture, something's gonna happen.

1:24 In the previous lectures, we've been mainly trying to set things up. We've been thinking about what history is. We've been thinking about 1:30 basic problems of history. We've been working on the colonial perspective, and how you work your way out 1:36 from under a colonial perspective. By the end of this lecture, I promise there will be a state which is in Kyiv.

1:43 I'm going to deliver on that promise. That is definitely gonna happen. But I'm gonna begin with one more remark 1:49 about what we're doing, because it's really important. Like, as we're in the middle of a war in which crimes are being committed 1:56 and people are dying and killing because of certainties about what had to happen in the past, 2:02 or what has to happen in the future, it's very important to understand that history is not that.

2:07 History is not about predetermination. It's not about what has to be. History can do, is it can be a kind 2:15 of guide to what was possible, right? So there is a Ukrainian society 2:20 and Ukrainian state today, which means that it must have been possible. The most we can do 2:26 is we can guide ourselves towards a greater understanding of how such a thing was possible.

2:31 But when we get to that border of how much we can understand, there always has to be room 2:36 for what the people actually did, right? Not just the people today, but the people all the way back 2:42 1,000 years ago or more, that we'll be talking about today. Had their choices been somewhat different, 2:47 then other things also would have been somewhat different. So even as we push our understanding forward 2:53 as far as it can go, we're always keeping in mind that what people do and the choices that people make are beyond our ability to predict.

3:01 And that's why history is, in a way, like it's a science, we're trying to figure things out, but it's also a humanity, 3:07 where we leave room for human agency. We try to understand human agency. At the same time, we know that human agency, 3:13 you don't understand it with the same methods that you understand mountains and rivers. Okay. So the big idea today 3:21 is how you get to a state. And that is a big idea, right? I mean, like you might have noticed 3:27 that whenever there's a country, whenever there's a state, there's always a legend about how it came to be.

3:32 Like, for example, there's an American legend of how America came to be. This isn't my strong suit.

3:37 You guys can correct me, but I think George Washington felled the cherry tree. And then 13 cherries fell, and from each of them 3:43 came a colony, something like that. I don't know, but everyone has a. Thank you. Okay.

3:49 (laughs) Good. We have an American studies student here who says, "Yep, that's what it was. " All right. So, but everyone has an origin story, 3:56 which mixes usually some element of what happened with some element of what it would be nice to think about what happened.

4:02 And the reason why everybody has an origin story is that it's hard to explain 4:07 how you get from no polity to a polity. And it's usually complicated, and it's best to have a story about us and them, 4:14 and how it's very simple. And those stories are never true. But it is authentically hard. So in this lecture today, 4:19 we're gonna be talking about some general causal forces which made it likely that there would be states coming into being 4:27 in Eastern Europe around the year 1000. And those general causal forces are things like Christianity, 4:34 and what Christianity could do for people, for rulers and for others.

4:40 Secondly, the fact that Christianity was not a singularity, but Christianity was a plurality.

4:45 There were two versions of Christianity that were emerging. From our point of view, a Western version and a Southern version, 4:52 a Frankish version and a Byzantine version. And those two versions of Christianity, it wasn't their theological differences 4:58 that mattered so much. It was that they were represented by two strong political units that were pushing outward imperially 5:06 into our region, in competition with one another. In competition with one another.

5:13 And then underlying all this is the basic economic status of the place we're talking about, 5:19 where nomads are still coming and going, where slavery is still very prominent.

5:25 And when you think of what statehood does for people, one of the things that statehood does for people, 5:31 and this is not just true in Eastern Europe, this is a sort of general characterization of what a state is, 5:36 statehood protects the people that the state recognizes from being enslaved by other people.

5:46 So the basic economics of the globalization that we're in at this point, 5:51 circa 800, 900, 1000, is a globalization of a slave trade, 5:57 in which the human beings of our part of the world are being shipped, very far distances sometimes, in order to be enslaved.

6:03 That is a form of global economics. It persists and expands and continues well beyond our region, 6:09 well beyond this time. What a state can do is put a stop to that locally. A state can say, "We recognize you.

6:16 "We have the coercive means to make sure "that you will not be sold into slavery. "We also have the coercive means to tax you.

6:22 "So we prefer," making a very long story short, "We prefer that you stay here and work the land, 6:27 "and we tax you, "rather than we capture you "and sell you into slavery. " 6:33 And, you know, not to make you too cynical about the world, because I know you're, you know, young and naive, 6:39 but the same people who do the enslaving are also often the same people who start the state.

6:45 And that's gonna be true in our case as well, right? The people who are doing the enslaving are also gonna be the same people who, 6:50 by the end of the story, are gonna start the state. So there's a general story about causality here, 6:56 but then there's a particular story that I want you to keep in mind, too, and be thinking about, which is, okay, maybe Professor Snyder is right, 7:02 that Christianity, the clash of two Christianities, this economic and human issue 7:09 of slavery, that these made it likely that there would be states. Fine, but why some states and not others? 7:15 Why some states and not others? From the point of view of a national historiography, this question never arises, right? 7:22 Your state is always inevitable. Others people's states might be questionable, but yours is always inevitable, but it's a real question.

7:28 Why some states and not others? Why Kyivan Rus'? Why Kyivan Rus'? 7:33 And here, we're gonna get into particularities, which involve Vikings, which involve rivers, 7:39 which involve Khazars, and which also involve, and this is very important, the presence of other Slavic states.

7:45 So a huge amount of politics is copying. A huge amount of politics is taking things 7:51 which someone else has already done in a neighboring place, and applying them yourself. So it's very important for Kyivan Rus', 7:58 that there was already Moravia and that there was already Bulgaria. Okay, so you remember the basic setup 8:06 of where we are. We've tried to set up 8:11 this period in various different ways. Europe is being created, right? So again, Europe seems self-evident, 8:18 but the difference between Europe and the classical world is that Europe is north of the Mediterranean, 8:23 and the classical world goes around the Mediterranean, right? So when the classical world 8:30 blends into Europe is when Islam begins, in the 7th century, and the line between Europe 8:36 and what's not Europe then becomes a Christendom, non-Christendom sort of divide, right? There are famous, you know, examples 8:44 of when we should think of this. The 720s, when the French stop Arab armies in Poitiers.

8:49 The 750s, when the Khazars stop Arab armies in the Caucuses. Those are kind of symbolic.

8:56 But the basic idea is that Europe is now north of something, whereas the classical world encircled something, right? 9:03 So Europe is coming into being, and is coming into being as the failure of Christianity 9:09 south of the Mediterranean, or the serious decline of Christianity south of Mediterranean, and the spread of Christianity 9:15 north of the Mediterranean, up into, eventually into Scandinavia, around the year 1000, 9:20 and into Eastern Europe, around the year 1000. Remembering that these are territories, 9:27 Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, which were not directly part of the classical world, right? 9:32 So they're going from their own versions of paganism, which we've talked about, into Christianity.

9:38 Okay, so this brings us to the question, which we're gonna look at now in a little more depth, 9:44 of what is Christianity at this time, right? And this is tough because, 9:50 I mean, many of you will have been raised Christians or have some contact with Christianity. And the Christianity that we have in the third decade 9:56 of the 21st century has all kinds of varieties. And these varieties all have their traditions, some of them going back to this thing 10:02 called the Reformation or the Counter Reformation. We need to sort of clear our minds of all that, 10:08 and try to think what Christianity looked like to pagans, from the point of view 10:13 of the 9th and 10th and 11th centuries. And to make a long story short, 10:19 it's almost always true that when you convert as a ruler, you're not converting because you believe.

10:26 I'm sorry. You might believe, I'm not saying it's impossible, 10:32 but you're generally converting because the religion in question is bringing something to you 10:37 that your native cult does not have. Like, for example, a written language, 10:44 a set of elites who can use that written language, who can be your ambassadors and your bureaucrats, 10:49 like legitimacy with other states, right? So from the point of view of pagan rulers 10:55 looking outward at this world, the math was working against them. What do I mean by the math? 11:01 The math of slavery, okay? So if you're a pagan, everyone can enslave you.

11:08 And for a while, you might say, "Well, I can enslave everyone else.

11:15 "I can enslave other pagans. "I can enslave Christians. I can enslave Muslims. " And so long as the power balance is on your side, 11:20 that may seem like an acceptable answer. And for the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that we'll be talking about next lecture, 11:27 that was an acceptable answer all the way until the 14th century. They did much more enslaving than people did, enslaving of their people.

11:33 They stayed pagans for a very long time. It worked for them. But what I mean by the math is that Christians 11:39 are not supposed to enslave Christians. Muslims are not supposed to enslave Muslims. When Christian and Muslim states fight, 11:45 they'll do exchanges and so on. But so long as you're a pagan, you're fair game for everyone. And so territorially, 11:53 as Christianity spreads into Europe, there are more and more of them, and fewer and fewer of you, right? 11:59 So every time some other state converts to Christianity, the math is getting worse 12:05 for you as a pagan. There are more and more situations where you can be enslaved, and fewer and fewer situations 12:11 where you're gonna find it practicable to enslave other people. It's just kind of a general logic. Okay, I realize that's a strange answer 12:17 to the question of what is Christianity, but what is Christianity is fundamentally a way of joining a Christian order 12:24 of states in which you're not supposed to enslave the other people, who are also subjects of a Christian order of state.

12:30 More specifically, Christianity means these two varieties of Christianity.

12:35 So when I say that Christianity is a power and that it brings with it recognition, okay, recognition by whom? 12:41 Recognition by the Franks coming from the west, 12:46 or recognition from the Byzantines coming from the south? As you know, the Franks and the Byzantines 12:52 have two different accounts of what happened to the Roman Empire. It fell, and we rebuilt it.

12:57 Very beautiful. That's the Franks. Or it never fell. We are it. Also very beautiful.

13:03 That's the Byzantines. So these are two relationships to the classical world, but more importantly, 13:13 these are two powers that are moving into Eastern Europe. The Franks, so let's get some more detail about this.

13:20 The great leader of the Franks. So this is not a course in French history, but you'll find that we have to talk about 13:25 what the French, 'cause France, frankly, was very important, okay? So we will keep coming back to things 13:31 that happened in what's now France and Germany because France and Germany are very important.

13:37 The turning point here, the coronation of Charlemagne as king of the Franks on Christmas Day 13:42 of the year 800. Very easy to. He calls it the.

13:48 (indistinct) He calls it the restoration of empire. Christmas Day, 800.

13:53 Charlemagne just means Charles the Great. And incidentally, the word Charles.

13:59 So there's now another king called Charles, right? Am I up on my news? So the word Charles 14:04 in Slavic languages. Well, how do you say like Charles in a Slavic language? Any Slavic language.

14:11 Hm? - Karel. - Karel. Karel is good. Okay, so that name Charles 14:17 becomes the Slavic word, or a Slavic word, for king, which is, I mean, that's kind of impressive, right? 14:24 Like, I mean, that's the sort of thing, like if you were a rapper, you would want your name to become 14:29 the word for king, right? And I'm just gonna say now, no rapper is ever going to achieve that, right? I mean, no rapper is ever gonna outdo Charlemagne 14:38 on this front, I don't think. Okay. I mean, I'm just, I'm happy to have that prediction on tape.

14:43 So Charles, in French, Charles, Charles, becomes Karl 14:49 or Karol in Slavic languages, which is the word for king. In Polish, it's Karol.

14:55 Ukrainian, Karl. So the very idea of kingship is coming from this kingdom 15:00 of the Franks established in 800. And it is a new model state. It's the model state 15:06 which is then going to prevail in Europe, very importantly, where the king accepts 15:12 that he is a Christian ruler, and he accepts, for example, that he can be crowned by a pope, 15:18 but he's not subordinate to the pope. Whereas in the south, in Byzantium, 15:25 the idea of kingship is going to be very different. The idea is that 15:32 the secular ruler and the religious power are very much in alignment.

15:37 We'll return to that. So the word for ruler in much of Eastern Europe 15:44 is czar, which comes from Caesar, right, which comes from Rome. That's the Byzantine tradition.

15:50 So the very words that you have for the supreme leader in a political system are coming from these two rival powers.

15:56 Okay, so what can we say about the south? We've already said a lot of it. Byzantium, the Byzantine empire.

16:03 Capital in Constantinople, which is today Istanbul. There's a song by They Might Be Giants about that, 16:08 which I'm sure those of you who are into oldies know. It's been the capital of the Roman Empire 16:13 since the 4th century. From the point of view of Byzantium, there's an unbroken succession 16:19 of legitimate Roman emperors the entire time. They refer to themselves as the Romans.

16:24 They do so speaking Greek. That's Byzantium. That city, Constantinople, 16:32 is unparalleled in the Europe of the time. It's 10, 20, 30 times bigger than.

16:39 It's 30 times bigger than Paris. You know, we don't know exactly how big, but maybe something like a million people.

16:45 A tremendous scale of a city for the time. And gloriously beautiful in a way 16:51 which no European city can vaguely think of rivaling.

16:56 And still worth a visit, by the way. Still lovely, Istanbul. Worth a visit.

17:01 I was there on my honeymoon. It was worth it. Okay. So the differences between the Franks 17:06 and the Byzantines. We've listed several of them. Two claims to the Roman inheritance, right? 17:11 Two varieties of Christianity, although the theology's not so important. Two different relationships between state and secular power, where in Byzantium, 17:18 state and, sorry, state and religious power, state and spiritual power are much more carefully lined up.

17:25 Two relationships between lords and vassals. In the Frankish political tradition, 17:31 the vassals are gonna be lined up in something which we think of as a feudal system, where they have the right to property 17:36 and have a certain amount of autonomy. That is going to be less true in Byzantium. But both of them are in Europe, 17:43 and both of them are in a Europe which is pushing into the pagan world. There are the Scandinavians to be converted, 17:50 there are the Celts to be converted and there are the Slavs to be converted.

17:56 The Celts. The Celts, you know, the Scots, the Irish, they're out of reach of Byzantium.

18:03 The Scandinavians, it turns out, are also out of reach of Byzantium, except for the Scandinavians who travel to Kyiv, 18:10 which we're gonna get to, but the Slavs are not out of reach. And the Slavs are the biggest group, the Slavs are the biggest prize, 18:16 and the Slavs are an object of direct and explicit competition between these two powers.

18:23 Byzantium is already there, with its missionary activity. We mentioned Cyril and Methodius. That's an example of missionary activity from Byzantium.

18:32 The Franks set up an archbishopric in the German city of Magdeburg 18:38 in 962. And that is a kind of outpost 18:46 of missionary activity. So when you think of these archbishoprics.

18:52 So the way that the Christian Church in the West is set up, there are bishops, and the bishop 18:58 of Rome is the highest bishop, and he's known as the pope, right? Underneath the pope, there are archbishops, 19:03 who have territory. Underneath the archbishops, there are bishops, and they have territory. Underneath the bishops, there are priests, and the priests have territory.

19:09 And that territory is known as a parish. It's all beautifully organized.

19:15 But when you think of these archbishoprics, you should be thinking of imperial expansion, too. Magdeburg is about imperial expansion to the west.

19:23 And Bremen, by the way, is about imperial expansion to the north. So when the German speakers are trying to convert 19:30 the Scandinavians, they're doing it from Bremen. In the meantime, people are also trying to convert the Scandinavians from England.

19:36 But the Scandinavians are out of reach. I just mentioned this as another example. This is also a nice place to visit.

19:43 The Scandinavians are out of reach, but the Slavs are not. Okay. This all hooks together.

19:49 It all connects when everyone. And, you know, if you try to think, like, what is the one thing which causes this? 19:56 Things are always connecting, right? So if I say, "What does religion have to do with it?" Well, religion has to do with creating a state, 20:03 but it also has to do with not being enslaved, and eventually, it has to do with what people actually believe, and these things are all connected.

20:09 If I say, at this part of the lecture, "What do the Vikings have to do with it?" The Vikings come in 20:14 to the history of both the Franks and the Byzantines, right? Because this period that we're talking about 20:21 is the Viking age. The Viking age begins in 793. That's when the Vikings first make themselves known.

20:28 And if you say the Viking age, it's like now we cut to a completely different movie, right? 20:33 We forget everything else. It's just the wooden ships with their beautiful brows and the burly men and the beards and the horns 20:39 and the throwing the spears over the enemy, which probably is a myth, and the berserker thing, which is also probably a myth.

20:45 But we're cutting to a completely different story, right? And that's what we can't do, because the Viking age is happening simultaneously 20:52 with the expansion of the Franks and with the expansion of the Byzantines, and it's related to these two things.

20:57 It is the expansion of the Franks which probably provokes the Vikings to test out their own naval technology 21:04 by plundering the Franks. (laughs) And then, realizing they can do this, they can get down rivers, they can do interesting things, 21:09 they can also go out to sea and do interesting things. So the Vikings are probably best understood 21:15 as a reaction to Charlemagne. And in their reaction, 21:21 as they realize that there are an awful lot of rivers they could go down in river in Europe, and there's an awful lot that could be plundered, 21:27 or looking at it more sympathetically, trade routes to be established, 21:35 this brings them to Eastern Europe and to Byzantium. And I know you guys are wondering why 21:40 I keep obsessing about the mountains and the rivers and all these things that don't matter anymore because the internet, I know, but you can't figure out 21:48 what the Vikings are up to without knowing where the rivers are. The Vikings are trying to get from north to south, 21:53 because they're trying to make a huge amount of money. There's a lot of silver down there with the Arabs, 21:58 and they can get that silver, and they can bury it in big hoards, which is what they like to do, for mysterious reasons.

22:05 It's really great for archeologists and for historians, because we can say, "Okay, look, "here is a hoard of coins, 22:11 "which were clearly minted "in an Arab-speaking place at this time.

22:16 "But look, it's in Northwestern Russia. " And how do we explain that? And we explain it with the Vikings, right? 22:21 So the Vikings are trying to make a lot of money by trading from north to south. And they do that with their technology, 22:28 which is the boat, but they have to find a way, right? So they try to get down with the Volga, 22:33 which doesn't work. They try to get down with the Dnipro, which does work, right, the river which runs 22:39 through the middle of Ukraine. They eventually find their way down and they eventually start to trade. But this means that our Vikings, these Vikings, 22:46 who are known as the Rus', these Vikings come into contact with Byzantium.

22:52 They come into contact with Byzantium, right? Byzantium is the big economic and political power down there in the south.

22:59 And they're aiming for Byzantium. They're trying to get down to Byzantium. And a midpoint, a beautiful trading post 23:05 along the way, is Kyiv, right? So our Viking age 23:10 is not just like, you know, Erik the Red and Iceland and the sagas, all of which is cool. And by the way, some of our Ukrainian figures 23:17 actually appear in Icelandic sagas, which gives you a sense of how it's all connected. But the Viking age is about the Franks, 23:24 and it's also about Byzantium, because the Vikings are trying to make their way down to Byzantium, and that's why they get to Kyiv, 23:31 which has already existed for several centuries. Okay.

23:36 So Eastern Europe, what is Eastern Europe? One is always struggling for a reason 23:42 to explain why Eastern Europe, and not Western Europe. What's special about our little zone, which includes Kyiv and what's gonna be Ukraine, 23:49 in this context, is that it is between these two different kinds of Christianity.

23:55 Not just in some kind of metaphorical way, like lands in between, blah, blah. It's between them in the sense that the Franks and the Byzantines 24:01 are striving to control these territories. But it's also in between, in the sense 24:08 that it's Eastern Europe, or at least our part of Eastern Europe, where the Vikings, who have been in contact with both the Franks and want contact 24:14 with the Byzantines, make their way. Okay, so those are a lotta the important pieces, 24:20 the Franks, the Byzantines, Vikings. Oh, how the Vikings make their money, 24:25 they are slavers. I mean, it's not really romantic. That's what they do. They sell other things, as well, 24:30 but they're slavers. And so when they go from the north to the south, they are enslaving people as they go down and they're trading.

24:37 Now, I probably told you this already, but the Vikings, although they were marvelous seamen, 24:42 could not actually deal with the rapids. I told you this, right? They couldn't actually deal with the rapids of the Dnipro.

24:48 So how did they pass them? They made the slaves carry the boats. And at their places where they failed 24:54 to ride the rapids, they left runic markers of the Vikings who died, 25:00 some of which we still have, right? The first people who could actually deal, to my knowledge, with the rapids are the Cossacks, 25:06 who we're gonna get to. Don't worry, we'll get to them six or seven centuries down the line. Okay.

25:12 So we have many of the pieces here. We have the Franks, we have the Byzantines and we have the Vikings, who have to do 25:17 with both the Franks and the Byzantines. What we also need are the other Slavic states.

25:25 So, as I said before, every state is gonna tell a story about how it emerged from nothing, right? 25:31 It emerged from nothing. Our people came from a mysterious place over the sea. You know, there was a city on a hill, whatever.

25:36 Like, our people came from nothing. That's how it always starts. There's a blank slate. There were our people. It's wonderful.

25:42 In fact, there's always a tremendous amount of copying, which is very awkward for the national legends, 25:47 but very important for history. So the state that emerges in Kyiv could not have come into existence.

25:53 Again, we're talking about possibility, not necessity. Could not have come into existence without Moravia and without Bulgaria.

26:00 Okay. What's Moravia? Moravia is so hugely important because Moravia was the first Slavic state.

26:09 It's the first one we know about. Early 9th century. The first mention of it is in 822.

26:14 Quite a long time ago. Moravia is where the Czech Republic is now, roughly.

26:20 And it was heavily under the influence of the Franks.

26:26 To make a long story short, and I've mentioned this before, Moravia sets up the classic geopolitical situation, 26:33 which is, okay, you're a little Slavic state. You have to be Christian. Why do you have to be Christian? 26:38 Because you need to be recognized, right? If Islam had come further north.

26:44 And remember, of like from the point of view of 822, this almost happened, right? If Islam had come further north, 26:50 then you could be recognized by Muslim states, and that would also have worked, but that just barely didn't happen.

26:57 And because it just barely didn't happen, the states you wanna be recognized are the ones that are around you, namely the Christian states, 27:03 namely the Franks. Okay. The Moravians are heavily under the influence 27:10 of the Franks. Their ruler, who's a man called Rostislav, 27:16 Rostislav does the natural thing, which is he sends an embassy to Byzantium.

27:22 By the way, it's only very recently that embassies are buildings. It used to be that embassies were people who were sent with missions, 27:30 with diplomatic missions. So they sent an embassy to Byzantium. Why? To balance.

27:36 And this is the story everywhere. Maybe you have to be Christian, but you wanna get the best deal possible, right? 27:42 If you didn't wanna get the best deal possible, you would be a terrible ruler of your people.

27:48 You'd be a terrible power calculator. And it's this conjuncture, this rivalry between the Franks and the Byzantines 27:54 in Moravia, which generates the mission of those two gentlemen who we mentioned before, namely.

28:01 What was their names again? - Cyril and Methodius. - Cyril and Methodius. Right, Cyril and Methodius. So Cyril and Methodius are Slavs, probably, 28:09 and they are Slavs who create a written language for other Slavs. That is another huge breakthrough 28:16 and also an act of human creativity, right? It's an act of human creativity, 28:21 the importance of which lasts right down to the present day. If they had made it up differently, 28:27 any little thing they had done differently would have meant an entirely different cultural history for all of our region, right? 28:32 At this point, these two men are the ones who lay it down. Now, they're laying it down for a purpose.

28:38 They're translating parts of the Bible. They're missionaries. There's a distinct reason why they're doing 28:44 what they're doing, but they're the ones who lay down a Slavic written language, which we now call Church Slavonic 28:50 or Old Church Slavonic. They're the ones who make, in principle, the Bible accessible 28:55 for a much larger group of people. Okay, so this mission 29:03 to Moravia fails, as missions will, but it has two long-term consequences, 29:10 which I want you to note. The first consequence of its failure is Poland.

29:15 So this is not a course in Polish history, but as it will become clear over time, you can't really do Ukraine without Poland.

29:21 And a very important thing to know about Poland is that it is a Western Christian country.

29:27 So why is Poland a Western Christian country? It's a Western Christian country because of the Czechs, 29:33 because the Czechs got there first. The Czechs were a Western Christian country. In Poland, just like in other Eastern European countries, 29:40 there is Old Church Slavonic. There is a Polish declension 29:47 of Old Church Slavonic. It was not fated that Poland was gonna be a Western Christian country, but it became one 29:53 when a Polish ruler married a Czech who was already a Christian, and that leads to conversion. So that's a consequence of the failure in Moravia.

30:01 So the Czechs, but also the Poles, are Western Christians, and they still are, right? That's the way it's gonna be.

30:07 The other consequence of this failure is that the followers of Cyril and Methodius have to run, as one does.

30:13 They and their students end up in Bulgaria. And it's in Bulgaria 30:20 where the Glagolitic script, which Cyril and Methodius invented, 30:28 was shifted over to a Cyrillic script, which is much easier to read and which is basically the alphabet 30:34 that, you know, a bunch of people in this room were educated to learn when they were in kindergarten, 30:39 with some minor changes. So by the time Cyrillic script was created, 30:46 which is around the year 893, we now have an availability of an alphabet and a language 30:53 for other states. The most important one of these states is Bulgaria.

30:59 Again, Bulgaria, not our subject. I couldn't personally do a whole semester on Bulgaria, but one could do a whole semester on Bulgaria.

31:06 It's a fascinating place. Who were the Bulgars? I know that when you woke up this morning, 31:12 you were thinking, I hope Professor Snyder gets to this question of who were the Bulgars.

31:17 I know this has been troubling you. And it is authentically confusing.

31:23 The Bulgars are a Turkic people, some of whom stayed in what's now 31:28 kind of south-central Russia and converted to Islam. So there are Turkic people 31:35 who stay in Russia, become Muslim. And just, if we were doing the history of Russia, and we'll do a little history of Russia, 31:41 this is very important. A lotta the territory of Russia is inhabited by people who are Muslim.

31:47 When I was in Ukraine last week, I was talking to a woman who had, 31:52 in Chernihiv oblast, who had five Russian soldiers in her basement. And, of course, none of them were from European Russia.

31:58 And two of them, I think, were Muslims. That's Russia, right? Russia has been a Muslim country 32:04 from the get-go, among other things. But some of the Bulgars, okay, some of the Bulgars migrate 32:12 and come to dominate part of the Balkans. And they seem to convert to Christianity around the year 865.

32:18 And that's the prehistory of the Bulgarian nation that we know and love today.

32:23 And the Bulgarian found a state which is Orthodox, 32:29 Eastern Christian, that is, but which is in rivalry with Byzantium. And that's a very important model, right? 32:36 That you can be Orthodox and Christian, but not be actually part 32:41 of the Byzantine Empire. That's a model of statehood. Very important, right? 32:47 The Bulgarian get there first. And part of the way they get there is that they use the legacy of Cyril and Methodius.

32:54 They use Old Church Slavonic. They develop, you know, a slightly national version 32:59 of Eastern Christianity, but they're also creating a model of statehood.

33:05 Okay, by the way, you've probably been wondering like, you know, the Russian president's name is Vladimir, 33:11 and the Ukrainian president's name is Volodymyr. So like is Volodymyr a Ukrainian name or is it a Russian name? 33:17 It's a Bulgarian name. (laughs) It's a Bulgarian name. The Volodymyr who's gonna convert to Christianity 33:23 at the end of this lecture, his name was actually a Bulgarian name. It's a cultural borrowing from Bulgaria.

33:29 Copying is really important. It's much more important than we think. Okay, this brings us to the special case 33:35 that we're gonna land on, which is the case of the Rus'. And when we talk about the Rus' 33:40 and the creation of Kyivan Rus', we need to now know who the local competitors for power are.

33:46 The local competitors for power in the 8th, 9th and 10th century here are the Rus', who we've talked about a little bit, 33:53 these Scandinavian slavers who come down from the Baltic Sea, and the Khazars.

33:59 The Khazars are already present, and the Rus' are on their way down.

34:07 So let's talk first about the Rus', and then let's talk about the Khazars. Okay, so some of you have asked me about names, 34:14 and it is very, I mean, names are very powerful. What we name things does have a certain power, 34:19 and there's a tendency to say what something is named now, it must reveal something essential about it.

34:26 And, you know, we all have names and like we're called by our names, and it runs very deep.

34:32 But one has to be a little careful about this. So like America is called America, but we're not all Italian mapmakers 34:43 and so on and so on and so on, right? But we still unproblematically call ourselves America.

34:49 Rossiya, Russia is called Russia as a reference to Rus', 34:55 but Rus' is itself the name of a Scandinavian, probably a Scandinavian trading company. In any event, a group of Vikings.

35:02 So, and the reason they were called Rus', no one is quite sure. It's close to a Finnish word 35:07 which means rudder. So our best guess is that modern Russia 35:13 is named after an old Finnish word for our rudder, right? But that doesn't mean that the Russians 35:18 are actually medieval Finnish rudders. So the name that something has now 35:24 and like working it back doesn't actually have any magical quality, right? So, you know, why Belarus is called Belarus, 35:30 or Ukraine is called Ukraine, is interesting, but it doesn't necessarily reveal anything essential 35:35 about the country. Okay. Right. So that's the Rus'.

35:43 So what do we know about them? As I said, they're seeking a trade route south.

35:49 The first mention we have of them in our part of the world is in the 840s, 850s, 860s.

35:56 They're mentioned as Scandinavians engaged in the slave trade in order to gain silver.

36:01 As I mentioned before, we have these silver hoards, which is part of the evidence for what they were doing.

36:08 They are still nomads, right? They're marine nomads. They move mainly by sea, but they're nomads.

36:14 And one of the big underlying transitions here, I've emphasized it in terms of slavery 36:22 versus peasantry, right? But another way to think about this is nomadism versus settlement.

36:28 When the people in power are still moving, that's one situation. When the people in power settle 36:34 and build cities, or take over someone else's cities, that's a different situation. So what the Vikings did 36:40 was they overwhelmed sedentary civilizations. They took cities.

36:45 They negotiated trade terms, which is what you do. That's just normal. What's special is that they end up settling in Kyiv, 36:53 and that's when we get a state, and I'll talk about that. So as I mentioned, they tried 36:59 to go down the Volga River, which is in the middle of Russia. They were blocked by the Bulgars, 37:04 the Muslim Bulgars. And then they went down the Dnipro. And went down the Dnipro, then we're setting up the history where we are.

37:12 The people who dominated Kyiv and Ukraine at the time were the Khazars.

37:18 The Khazars are tough to figure out. We have no written documents at all that are directly from their state.

37:25 It was a multiethnic and multi-confessional realm, which had some Christians and some Jews 37:31 and some Muslims in it, but also had lots of non-monotheistic believers 37:37 in it as well. The Khazars came to an end in a way which is also incredibly confusing.

37:45 There was rivalry among the various monotheisms about which monotheism they all converted to. And it's actually not clear they converted to any of them.

37:52 There's a beautiful novel, though, about this called "The Dictionary of the Khazars" by a Croatian writer called Pavic, 37:59 which I don't know if you like read "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories as a kid, but it's like, it's a novel, which is set up as three dictionaries, 38:06 a Christian, a Jewish and a Muslim, where you kind of choose like in what order you read it.

38:12 It's very beautiful. But it gets across the kind of lack of narrative that we actually have about the Khazars. We have very little.

38:20 Oh, Cyril visited them. That's interesting, Cyril, our same Cyril who went to Moravia, 38:26 also visited Khazaria in 860, in order to try to spread Christianity.

38:32 So we know that they weakened and we know that they faded into, 38:39 married into the Rus' in some way. We know this partly because of language.

38:45 When the Rus' settle down and start to try to rule Kyiv, they called their leader a khagan, 38:53 and that's a Turkic word, right? That's a word that they got from the Khazars. Their ruler is first called a khagan.

39:01 Okay. So the Rus' are settling into Kyiv, 39:07 late 800s, early 900s. We know they dominate Podil.

39:14 That's the part of Kyiv from which you would trade.

39:19 We know they dominate, they control Kyiv by about the year 900.

39:25 They're basically taking over what the Khazars left them. They're taking tribute from the people who used to be paying the Khazars tribute.

39:32 That's a sign of who's in charge that historians can follow pretty well, is who's getting the tribute, right? Who can make other people regularly pay money.

39:41 By 911, a ruler of the Rus', called Oleg, is signing a treaty with Byzantium, right? 39:48 They're reaching Byzantium, but not with violence. They're now reaching Byzantium with diplomacy. But you can tell that they're still, 39:55 they're not just traders. They're people who are feared. A provision of this treaty with Byzantium 40:01 is that the Rus' are only allowed to go through one gate of the city, a specified gate, and they can't come in more than 50 at a time, right? 40:08 So there's a sense that perhaps these people, you know, might cause a certain amount of trouble if you just let them come in in large numbers.

40:14 Okay. To put this back into perspective, we're getting towards the year 1000.

40:20 I'm gonna deliver the promised conversion of Volodymyr before this is all over. But I want you to notice that in this time 40:26 in the 900s, the 10th century, this is the time of a lot of other conversions as well.

40:31 This is the time when the Vikings in Scandinavia 40:36 are starting to move towards establishing the Danish and the Swedish and the Norwegian states, 40:42 which are also associated with Christian conversions.

40:49 The 10th century is a time when the Vikings are settling down and founding states everywhere, 40:55 including in continental Europe. So in 911, the same year of this treaty, is when Charles the Simple of France 41:01 grants Duke Rollo, who's a descendant of the Vikings, Normandy.

41:06 Normandy being Northern France. Normandy also being the launching point for the Normans, who then control Great Britain.

41:12 So this is a time of Viking conversion, a time of Viking state creation. Our story is special because it's taking place 41:19 amidst different kinds of people, amidst the Khazars. It's taking place with different kinds of models, 41:24 the Slavic models. And fundamentally, because it's taking place at a time when there was a choice between two different versions of Christianity.

41:32 The first time. Okay. When you convert. The story always goes, you convert.

41:40 You believe it. All of your people convert. It's like everything (snaps fingers) changes all at once. That's not how it happens.

41:47 Olga, who rules from 945 to 962, does convert, but her kids don't convert 41:54 and her grandchildren don't convert, and her people don't really convert. She converts to Eastern Christianity, 42:01 but then she asks for some German missionaries to come a couple of years later. Her son, Sviatoslav, which is a great name, 42:09 still borne by many lovable people. Sviatoslav rules from 962 to 972.

42:17 He's a pagan. Her kid is a pagan. We have few sources about why, but I really like one of them, 42:23 where he basically says, he's asked why he can't convert to Christianity, and he says, "Well, like my crew 42:28 "would all make fun of me. " (laughs) (students laugh) And that is kind of what Sviatoslav did.

42:34 He, in the 960s, he seems to have destroyed the remnants of the Khazar state.

42:40 And then in the late 960s, early 970s, he campaigned in the Balkans to try to gain control of the Balkans, and failed.

42:48 When he was leaving, this is one of the reasons we know he was a pagan, in 971, he invoked 42:54 two Slavic pagan gods, Perun, who's the god of thunder, and Veles, 43:00 who is the god of the earth and of the harvest. And by the way, in the Slavic mythology, 43:05 which is kind of like the Scandinavians are clearly influencing it. But in the Slavic mythology, Perun and Veles 43:10 are in this kind of embrace, where you explain the change of the seasons by battles between the sky, 43:16 which is Perun, and the earth, which is Veles. It's actually kind of beautiful. Okay.

43:23 So in 972, on his way back, Sviatoslav is killed on the Dnipro by Pechenegs, 43:31 who make a cup from his skull, as one did in the time and place.

43:37 So that leaves us open. There's then a very complicated succession struggle, 43:43 at the end of which the person who comes to power is Volodymyr, who's remembered as Volodymyr the Great, 43:49 who is the person who actually converts. So I'm gonna read you the passage 43:56 from a primary source, which is the "Primary Chronicle. " It's from about 100 years later. The story goes like this. This is after the fact.

44:02 It's 100 years after the fact. So just think about, I mean, how reliable a source 100 years after the fact 44:08 is generally going to be. It sketches things out in a way that makes them seem plausible, 44:14 but it's kind of more revealing about how things look in retrospect, but it's still fun to read. Okay. So this is about how you make a choice for Christianity, 44:22 and it aestheticizes it and makes it all very clear. The Bulgars, means the Muslims, right? 44:28 The Bulgars bow down and sit and look hither and dither, and there is no joy among them, but only a dreadful stench.

44:34 Their religion is not good. Then we went to the Germans, the Western Christians, the Franks.

44:40 Then we went to the Germans, and we saw them celebrating many services in their churches, but we saw no beauty there, right? 44:45 Eternal complaint about Germans and their churches. Then we went to the Greeks, the Byzantines.

44:52 Then we went to the Greeks, and they led us to the place where they worship God, and we knew not whether we were on heaven or Earth, right? So it's all very clear.

44:57 It's all very aestheticized. But having gotten this far in the class, you know that it has to do with other things.

45:04 It's gonna have to do with power. It's gonna have to do with the choices of a particular ruler. Volodymyr himself, no particular religious preferences.

45:12 Maybe flirted with Islam at one stage in his life. Certainly tolerant of, encouraging of pagan worship 45:18 in Kyiv when he took power in Kyiv in 980. We know that Perun, the god of thunder, was worshiped.

45:25 What he had was an opportunity, and he took it. The great power in the south, 45:30 the Byzantines, were in internal turmoil.

45:36 There was a rebel who sought to take power from the Byzantine emperor, and Volodymyr threw the power of Rus' 45:41 on the side of the Byzantine emperor and helped to win, helped the Byzantine emperor 45:48 to preserve power in a campaign in, you guessed it, Crimea.

45:53 So Volodymyr, having done this, then says, "I would now like to marry 45:58 "the sister of the emperor," which is a big ask, but the circumstances were what they were.

46:04 And the Byzantines answered, not surprisingly, "Yes, but there's a little proviso, "which is that you must convert to Christianity," okay? 46:14 It's a little power play, the Rus' helped the Byzantine ruler, but then there's the larger power play, 46:20 which is happening all over Eastern Europe, which is that one or the other of these large states is eventually gonna get you to convert 46:26 to its version of Christianity. This time, the conversion sticks.

46:31 There's a permanent link now between Byzantium and Rus'. Rus' soldiers remain in Constantinople 46:38 as an imperial guard. The Byzantine emperor sends Greek-speaking churchman to Kyiv.

46:45 Churches are built, most famously Saint Sophia, which still stands in the center of Kyiv, 46:50 in all of its beauty. Volodymyr ensures that the population of Kyiv converts. Idols and temples that he himself had raised, 46:58 or allowed to be built, he destroys, has thrown into the river. And as a result, 47:05 Rus' becomes part of the Byzantine world, and in a couple of ways, part of the classical world.

47:13 One way is continuity. The continuity of Greece, Rome, Byzantium and Rus'.

47:23 That's one way. But the other way is that Rus' is now going 47:29 to extend territorially northwards, this classical civilization, 47:35 which had never gotten so far north. Which is, it's a big part of the history of the Slavs in general, of Eastern Europe in general, 47:41 is that, sure, there are these models that come from the south, and now they are going further north, 47:47 which brings me to Serhii Plokhy. So we've been doing this little derby about whether there are any other lecture classes 47:54 on Ukraine in the United States of America. And so far, this is the only one, but alert people have pointed out 48:00 that there's like, in some provincial university in Boston area, there is actually one, 48:06 but it starts in 1500. So I'm gonna say that we're still the only survey lecture class, because we're five lectures in, 48:12 and we're not even close to 1500 yet, right? So we're still five centuries, five good centuries away.

48:18 But in all seriousness, that class is taught by Serhii Plokhy, who is a giant among historians of Ukraine and Ukrainian historians, and who is the author 48:25 of the book that you're reading "Gates of Europe. " And he makes the very important geographical point, which I hope you've been following, 48:32 about how the creation of Ukraine is not about east and west. That's a much later point of view.

48:38 But about south to north. It's about south to north, and north to south, where south to north has to do 48:44 with the ancient world, the Greeks, the Byzantines, the Black Sea, 48:50 and the northern coast of the Black Sea, and things moving up towards Kyiv.

48:56 And now the north to south has to do with the Vikings. They're moving down the Dnipro River, seeking Byzantium.

49:04 And the Kyivan state, you know, putting it very grandly, is a kind of encounter of a movement from north to south, 49:09 and another movement from south to north, which meet each other in the city which already existed and was dominated 49:15 at the time by the Khazars. Okay, so that's gotten us 49:20 as far as I thought we could get. Volodymyr has converted. The state of Kyivan Rus' has been founded.

49:26 A state in the sense that it will be recognized by other states. A state in the sense that it belongs to a monotheistic religion, Christianity, 49:33 the Eastern version, which will be recognized by other Christians. A state in the sense that it has a language, 49:38 a written language, and people who are literate to use it. A state in the sense that it is building, and a state in the sense that it's gonna recognize 49:45 its subjects, which we're going to talk about. The weakness of the system, which I'm just gonna leave you with, because it's important, 49:51 the weakness of this system. And it's important, also, when you think about the heritage of Rus' 49:56 and people who claim the heritage of Rus' today, the weakness of the system was the principle of succession, 50:02 or the absence of a principle of succession. There was no idea that, for example, the oldest son would inherit or anything like that.

50:09 Basically, parts of Rus' were given out to various sons, and there tended to be lots of sons.

50:15 Volodymyr managed to keep seven different districts under his control by wit, 50:21 but it wasn't simple, this business of having sons. So just to keep this in perspective, before he married Anna, his most famous wife.

50:28 She was not the only one, I'm afraid. There were about half a dozen others. But before he married Anna, 50:34 the sister of the Byzantine emperor, he already had 800 concubines. Presumably, he didn't mention that to the Byzantine emperor, nor would the Byzantine emperor 50:41 have been impressed by the number. I mean, just for the record, but (students laughs) that gives you a sense of the succession problems 50:47 that you might have. There are going to be a lot of male offspring. And when the father is weak 50:53 or the father leaves the scene, there's gonna be competition. So next time, we're gonna start talking about law 50:59 and how this state recognized its citizens, and how the state found a particular, citizen subjects, how the state found 51:05 a particular way to do so, which then becomes a legacy that goes on for centuries. But in this tradition of law, 51:12 the weak point was succession. The weak point was how the state actually reproduces itself over time.

51:18 We'll talk more about that. All right. Thanks.

51:24 (soothing music)

back to TOC


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Lecture 6 The Grand Duchy of Lithuania

0:00 (ethereal chime plays) 0:12 - As we try to figure out what Ukraine is, we're also trying to figure out what the countries around Ukraine are.

0:17 And so over the course of this semester, you'll have occasion to think about what Russia is.

0:23 That's not our main subject, but I assume it's come to mind already that Russia 0:31 is also not simple, and that the history of Russia is also not straightforward.

0:39 And that indeed this war that's going on now may have more to do with uncertainty about what Russia is 0:47 than it does with uncertainty about what Ukraine is. Just something to think about.

0:53 Professor Bushkovitch, our outstanding historian of early modern Russia, was going to lecture 0:58 on the formation of the Russian state on Tuesday, but he can't. So I'm gonna do it instead.

1:04 The lecture is going to happen. You're going to see, in this lecture, 1:09 that something like the beginning of a Russian state will start to appear. And I want you to track that, 1:15 because the chronology of all this is very important. This is partly on my mind because of where we are, 1:22 in fact, where we are in the war, which is that, as I'm sure most of you know, the Russian Federation has begun a mobilization 1:30 under the heading partial mobilization, whatever that might mean. But the edict in question essentially allows 1:36 any Russian male to be mobilized for war. And now people in Russia are being mobilized for war 1:41 all over the country, but notably, and not surprisingly, in Asian Russia and in Southern Russia, 1:48 in places where people are poor, or also in places where people are ethnically, as we say today, not Russian.

1:54 Which is a reminder that one of the things that Russia is, is an Asian state. Most of the territory of Russia is in fact in Asia, right? 2:02 And so, when Russia invaded Ukraine, many of the soldiers who were invaded, 2:08 many of the casualties were themselves Asians. I just mentioned that because it's gonna be helpful in the next lecture when we try to think about 2:16 what Russia is and how it is or isn't like Ukraine. Okay.

2:21 The first point I wanted to make today, as we move from Rus' to Lithuania, is again about language.

2:29 I want you to remember that languages and peoples are not exactly the same thing.

2:34 There's a modern fantasy which says that there's one language, and there's one people, and it's all the same thing.

2:40 That often goes under the heading of nationalism, or ethnic nationalism, or ethnicity, but languages are there for you, and you can move 2:49 in and out of languages, especially when you are young.

2:54 Hey, multilingual guys, stop making jokes, stop whispering. They're all like, we speak a lot of languages.

3:03 I'm sure your TFs have been like that. They've probably been like, what languages do you guys speak? Right, have they done that in section? 3:09 They have in fact done that in section. I'm not surprised. Okay, but actually, you know, I mean, 3:16 for Wiktor and for Maksimas, the language that they're teaching you in 3:22 is a language that they've moved into, right? It's not their language of birth. It's a language that they've moved into.

3:27 And the capacity for of humans to do this is very important in politics, especially in non-modern politics.

3:33 So when we're talking about this fellow, Volodymyr or Vladimir, or Valdemar, as his Scandinavian was, 3:42 we're talking about the fellow who converted to Christianity and in some sense began the whole statehood project 3:47 that we're concerned with. He's a Scandinavian prince, right? He's from Scandinavia, his family's from Scandinavia.

3:53 His successors even will still be Scandinavian princes. And his name is Waldemar.

3:59 And then he had, but there are these nice Slavic versions of his name. Today we say Volodymyr and Vladimir, 4:04 but those names in turn seem to come from Bulgaria, right? So there's a Bulgarian Vladimir.

4:11 So is he a Scandinavian prince? Is he a Bulgarian prince? And this gets us thinking in the right directions, 4:18 because he's not any one thing, right? The way to come to power, and very often the way to stay in power, again, 4:24 especially in the earlier periods, is to be more than one thing, to speak more than one language.

4:30 So if we think about Valdemar, or Vladimir, or Volodymyr, we're right to think about the Vikings, 4:35 but we're also right to think about the Bulgarians, and we're right to think about the Byzantines. When he converted the Christianity, he took another name, 4:42 which is Basil, that was his baptismal name, Basil. It's notable that he didn't make that his main name, 4:49 that he stated his main name remained Volodymyr. So people come into languages.

4:54 Languages are there, you can move through them, you can do things with them.

5:00 So when I was in Ukraine the last time, which is a couple of weeks ago, I was speaking to someone who was called Volodymyr.

5:07 And you know, that Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he's also someone who's coming into a language, right? 5:13 Ukrainian was not his best language when he was elected president of Ukraine. But now of course it's his public language.

5:20 And just even I can tell that his Ukrainian is much better now than it was a couple of years ago.

5:27 And when I spoke to his wife, Elena Zelenskyy, she's also, we spoke Ukrainian. And I think I made her feel good because my Ukrainian 5:33 was just, you know, I made mistakes. And I think that put her at ease. But you know it's cute, I made mistakes.

5:40 Mistakes are cute. An old guy making mistakes is cute. It's like one of the many advantages we have.

5:45 But she was coming into a language, like I was coming into a language, right? 5:51 Ukrainian is not, I was speaking Ukrainian with her. Ukrainian is not my language of birth, right? It's like fourth or fifth best language.

5:56 I was coming into a language in a different way she's coming into a language, right? You can come into languages.

6:02 Another related theme is that Volodymyr, 6:08 Waldemar, is coming into a religion. So a conversion is a kind of sideways move.

6:15 You don't really stop being a pagan when you become a Christian, 6:20 it's not that your whole past disappears, it's that you're moving into something which already exists 6:26 and brings with it certain features. In this case, it brings with it priests, it brings with it another language, of church Slavonic.

6:33 It brings with it a tradition. It brings with it a heritage, because the moment that you convert into Christianity, 6:40 you're inheriting the Bible, and so hence the history of the Jews, 6:48 a very ancient history. Like you're not putting yourself into that timeline as well. Because you're going into Greek, 6:53 you're also going into the tradition of the ancient Mediterranean world that way. Suddenly you're in all of these vertical traditions 7:01 that you weren't in before. Okay, so we're gonna get from, in this lecture, 7:07 we're gonna get from Volodymyr to Yaroslav, and then we're gonna get from Yaroslav to Lithuania.

7:14 We're gonna end in Lithuania, much the joy of our, I'm counting them, three Lithuanians in this group.

7:21 So the two great leaders of Rus', if you just read like a textbook about early Rus', 7:26 are going to be Volodymyr and Yaroslav. And we have, so first we have to get to Yaroslav.

7:32 It's complicated. Okay, I mean, I could say Volodymyr was Yaroslav's son, 7:38 and that would make it sound very simple, but it's not really simple at all. As you remember last time, 7:44 when Volodymyr took Ana, the Byzantine princess Ana, as his wife, he already had about six others and, you know, 7:53 a harem of hundreds of women. When he died, so his relationship with his sons 7:59 was not straightforward. When he died in 1015, he had one of his sons, 8:05 and I tried to write all these down this time. He had one of his son's, Sviatopolk, in prison, as one does, 8:11 he was making war against another one of his sons, Yaroslav, as one does.

8:16 So when Volodymyr dies, Sviatopolk is freed.

8:23 Sviatopolk then arranges for, it seems, the death of three of his brothers, 8:29 probably with the help of Scandinavian allies. Sviatopolk then goes to war against Yaroslav.

8:40 Yaroslav initially wins, with the help of some 8:45 Scandinavian allies, at least that's according to the tale of Evalynd, which is an Icelandic saga, 8:52 which reminds you how this is all this, this could all be Nordic history, by the way. We could be in a Nordic history class at this point, 8:59 the history of Rus' at this point fits in with the history of what's, as Rus' is becoming a state, 9:06 so simultaneously are Norway and Sweden becoming states. It's a simultaneous, and it's an intermingled, process.

9:14 So Sviatopolk is freed, but then he's defeated by Yaroslav. Then Sviatopolk goes to Poland, and gets an army, 9:22 and brings it back. He's married to a Polish princess. He brings a Polish army back, he defeats Yaroslav, Yaroslav goes east, 9:32 recruits an army of Pechenegs, comes back, defeats Sviatopolk.

9:38 Seems that Yaroslav is now in charge, but then yet another brother, there were at least 10.

9:43 I'm sure there were many, many more, but there are 10 that come down to us. And then another brother was called Mstislav, 9:49 which means something like glory to revenge, beautifully. Mstislav marches on Kyiv and defeats Yaroslav.

9:56 As a result of this in the end, Mstislav and Yaroslav rule Kyiv together for a while.

10:03 Mstislav about a decade. Mstislav dies in 1036, and from 1036 Yaroslav rules alone.

10:09 Okay, I give you those details because the colorful details from all of the Scandinavian sagas 10:14 in the early Kyiv of sources are very interesting, but also because I want you to see a problem, which is the problem of succession, 10:21 how you get from one ruler to another, how you keep a state going. This is a key problem in political theory, 10:28 in political practice, which you wanna mark. Because even if you're just thinking about contemporary politics, like why, for example, 10:34 are things so chaotic in the Russian Federation right now? One of the first things that you should try out is, 10:40 what's the succession principle? How do they know who the next ruler is going to be? That's it.

10:45 So in early Rus', there was a big problem with succession. If you count it the way we're counting it, 10:51 from one ruler to another single ruler, from Volodymyr to Yaroslav, it took 21 years.

10:58 And along the way, at least 10 of the other children of of Volodymyr were killed.

11:07 Okay, also I want you to mark succession as an issue because when we get into other kinds of regimes 11:13 in a couple of weeks, the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian empire, succession is also going to be 11:18 a very important issue there. This brings us to Yaroslav and what is regarded 11:23 as the golden age of Kyivan Rus'. His rule, which is the 1020s, 1030s, 1040s.

11:30 He rules by himself from 1036 until his death in 1054.

11:35 So Yaroslav is also a Scandinavian prince.

11:40 I wanna make sure this is clear. The fact that he's a Scandinavian prince doesn't mean that he's not the prince of Rus', right? 11:48 But he is a Scandinavian prince. He's in the saga of Harald Hardrada, 11:53 who is the king of Norway. And he marries off one of his daughters to that same king of Norway.

12:00 He himself is married to a daughter of the king of Sweden.

12:05 As I've already said, some of the sources about him are Icelandic sagas. And by the way, Iceland sagas are the earliest 12:12 significant European literature. They're quite extraordinary, but they're also interesting historical sources 12:18 because they record events that are only about one or 200 years before when they were recorded, and they're based on oral tradition.

12:25 So they're pretty good comparatively speaking to historical sources. And, oh, he also married one of his, 12:31 So Yaroslav also married one of his own daughters to the king of Norway, right? So we're very, here, connected 12:38 to the history of Scandinavia. And it's inconceivable that he didn't speak 12:43 whatever we wanna call the Swedish language, or whatever we wanna call it at that time.

12:50 He did marry another one of his daughters, this is just something we have to know. He did marry one of his other daughters 12:55 to the king of France, which is a fun fact, which every Ukrainian needs for you to know.

13:01 So we're gonna make sure that it's in this class. That would be Yaroslav's favorite daughter 13:06 who was called Ana, who was remembered as Anne of Kyiv. Because from the point of view of Paris, 13:12 she was Anne of Kyiv. She, in the middle of the 11th century, she was the queen of France.

13:19 She was the one who went to Paris and said, compared to Kyiv, this is kind of dingy and pathetic 13:24 and wanted to go back. So now you know, that's Anne of Kyiv. So Yaroslav is a Scandinavian prince, 13:34 but he is also an inheritor of Byzantine Christianity 13:40 from his father. And he is also the ruler of a Slavic speaking population. So it's like there's a triangle.

13:45 So on the Byzantine side of the triangle, he builds, or maybe he completes the church of San Sophia, 13:54 which is the central cathedral in Kyiv, which still exists.

13:59 It exists in a kind in a kind of Baroque reconstruction, but which still exists and was completed 14:05 somewhere around the 1030s. And it was modeled on Hagiya Sophia in Constantinople.

14:12 So the main cathedral in Kyiv was modeled on the main cathedral in Constantinople.

14:18 So he's balancing that. With that church came Greek speaking priests.

14:24 The first priests who came to convert the population were from Constantinople.

14:29 They spoke Greek. And with these Greek priests, and with the conversion 14:35 came a certain model of order, which might seem intuitive to a lot of you. It seems so natural, perhaps because 14:42 it's now more or less hegemonic, but it had to arrive at a certain point, which is the days of the week.

14:48 The days of the week and the idea that the day of rest is the seventh day, Sunday.

14:56 Churches and churchyards come with Christianity. The idea that you bury your dead, as I mentioned before, 15:03 rather than cremate comes with Christianity. That you bury them in a certain place, a cemetery in a churchyard, comes with Christianity.

15:11 So there's a civilizational package, which comes with the Greek priests. But interestingly, it is Yaroslav who shifts over 15:19 from Greek priests to local, Slavic speaking priests.

15:24 In the year 1051, he manages to have appointed, or appoints himself, as the local head of the church, 15:32 the metropolitan, a man called Helarion, who was a local Slav and not a Greek.

15:39 And somewhere around this time as well, and this is crucial, the language of the liturgy 15:46 gets changed from Greek to old church Slavonic.

15:53 So in other words, there's a big difference between going to church 15:59 and hearing a language that you can't understand at all, to going to church and hearing a language 16:05 where you can understand a little bit, right? So that's basically the shift from Greek 16:10 to old church Slavonic. Geek, from the point of view of Kyiv, is a foreign language.

16:16 Very few people speak Greek. They're mostly people who have arrived from Constantinople 16:22 or Greek traders coming up and down from the Black Sea coast, as we've talked about, 16:27 it's basically a foreign language. And in the whole history of the Greek church, 16:32 the Orthodox church, the Eastern church in Kyiv, relatively few people learn Greek.

16:38 Some people do, but relatively few. Basically very educated churchmen learn Greek. Old church Slavonic is a different story.

16:44 You'll remember where old church Slavonic came from. Old church Slavonic is invented by Cyril and Methodius. It has this journey down to Bulgaria, 16:50 and now it arrives in Kyiv. And it has the huge advantage that it is a Slavic language.

16:57 It is based on a Slavic language, probably the Slavic language that was spoken in Macedonia 17:03 by the mother of Cyril and Methodius. But it's based in a Slavic language.

17:09 And therefore, if you're a native speaker of a Slavic language, you can figure out a lot of it.

17:16 So when I studied old, I'm not a native speaker of Slavic language, but I studied old church Slavonic. A lot of it was intuitive to me, a thousand years later 17:24 and with the funny glycolytic alphabet, but a lot of it was intuitive to me. I could look at it and see a lot of it.

17:32 So it's not totally impenetrable and, once you start with a Slavic language, 17:37 and this is very important, you can then start to mess with it. You can then take it as a basis of a written language.

17:44 And then with time, vernacular words will start 17:49 to make their way into the language. What's the vernacular? The vernacular is the language as we actually speak it.

17:54 As we actually speak it. And so Slavic words, as people actually spoke them, 17:59 made their way into the written language, thereby enriching it and changing it.

18:06 And this language, church Slavonic, slowly becomes a written language, 18:12 which is serving not just the church, but also the state. And this is hugely important because, 18:18 if you're going to run a state as distinct from a church, it's good to have law. It's good to have a language in which 18:23 you can record that law. So old church Slavonic, in the version that it's used in the Kyivan state, is usually called Chancery Slavonic.

18:32 Just to make this distinction. Chancery Slavonic.

18:42 And this Chancery Slavonic is recorded in, is the language of a very important text, 18:47 which seems to originate with Yaroslav, and then continues after his time for another century or so, 18:52 which is called the Ruska Pravda, or the Russkaya Pravda, which is a collection of laws.

18:59 So there's secular law now. There's secular law. Not just church custom and church law, but secular law.

19:06 And what the law itself says is itself very revealing.

19:12 So now the law becomes a historical source for us. We don't just have sagas, we don't just have genealogies, 19:18 we don't just have, you know, legends about Rus' written in Kyiv a century after the events.

19:24 We have the law, which was applied in its own time. What we see in this law are at least two 19:29 very important developments. Number one, you see that the society has shifted 19:35 from the kind of society we talked about in the beginning, which is one where people could be enslaved, 19:40 to one in which the chief preoccupation of people was agriculture, and agriculture is being regulated.

19:46 So we now have a state which is based upon people generating a surplus in agriculture.

19:54 The classic model, which we see over and over again, beginning in Mesopotamia, the classic model, where you can have a city, 20:01 and you can have a state with a capital in that city, because you have rules about how you collect a surplus 20:08 from the people who are actually working the land. Which may be a somewhat exploitative system, but it's a very different system than raiding 20:15 and slave trading. It's a very different system than raiding and slave trading. And it describes a relationship between a ruler 20:21 and his people, as opposed to a relationship between people who are just passing through and collecting things 20:27 or people that they're going to sell somewhere further down the river. So by the time the law is written down, 20:32 that transition has been achieved and we're in a different kind of society. Maybe even more fundamentally, 20:39 what you see in the Russkaya Pravda, the Ruska Pravda, is an attempt to make a transition 20:44 from a culture of personal revenge, to a culture where disputes are actually settled in courts.

20:53 So I'm sure all of you, you know, in your lives, depending upon where you're from, have some familiarity, at least from, I don't know, film, 20:59 with what I mean by personal revenge. Where I do something to your clan 21:05 and therefore your clan has to do something to my clan, and this can go on indefinitely, and it can be very costly and destabilizing.

21:11 If you're trying to set up a state, you don't want this clan and this clan to have a feud indefinitely, right? 21:18 If there's a dispute, like this clan has stolen this, or this clan has burned down that, or whatever, you want that dispute to come to me, 21:24 you want the dispute to come to the court, to the state, where it can be resolved. And so one of the things that Ruska Pravda lays down 21:30 is what the appropriate penalties are. So there's a generic penalty rather than personal feuds, 21:38 this is the kind of thing that builds up a state. But, I keep coming back to this, 21:45 but a weakness in the state is that it didn't have 21:51 the legal structures to allow it to perpetuate itself, which one finds surprisingly often is a problem with states.

21:58 It's actually, it's kind of the magic of founding a state is how, the German sociologist Max Weber 22:03 was also obsessed with this, how you get from the stage of founding a state to the stage of continuing a state.

22:09 Where you might found a state because of some great achievement or because of some charismatic leader, 22:15 but neither the achievement nor the charisma lasts. And so then how do you keep the state actually going? 22:21 Maybe you found institutions, these institutions sound pretty good, but how do you make sure that people continue 22:27 to believe in them without the achievement and the charisma somehow backing them up? 22:32 In then you event, how can you do it without a procedure? So, in Kyiv, when we talk about Kyivan Rus, 22:38 we're talking about a range of lands, going to the east, going to the north, going a bit to the south 22:45 and west of Kyiv. We're talking about not just Kyiv and Ukraine today, we're talking about what's now Belarus 22:51 and what's now a lot of European Russia. All the way up to a bit to the east of what's now Moscow.

22:57 And these various districts were passed out to the various sons in an extremely confusing order, 23:03 which honestly no one has figured out. And one suspects it changed from generation to generation, 23:08 or sometimes that they were just making it up. And if we don't know it, I think it's forgivable because 23:13 whatever the rules were, the brothers were constantly fighting each other. And if they were constantly fighting each other, 23:20 it means that whatever the rules were, maybe they were contested, or not clear, or maybe not taken always seriously.

23:27 So the rulers in Kyiv passed out the various districts to their sons, and there was an idea that a certain son 23:34 at some point would become the ruler of Kyiv and will be superior to all the others, but that never panned out the way that 23:39 it was supposed to be. So after Yaroslav's death in 1054, we essentially have one long confusing 23:46 series of succession crises until the Mongols come in 1241.

23:52 There are however, at least one moment in here which I want you to mark, 23:57 which is the rise of a city called Vladimir, not the person, the city.

24:03 And we're gonna call it Vladimir and not Volodymyr because this city is all the way out in 24:10 the far Eastern extreme of Rus', a little bit to the east of where Moscow now is.

24:17 I say now, because Moscow didn't exist at the time.

24:22 Vladimir, the city, was ruled in the 1160s, 1170s 24:28 by a man called Andrey Bogolyubsky, who I think is on your list, should be on your list.

24:34 And he attacked Kyiv, not once, but twice. The first time he successfully sacked it. The second time he was repulsed.

24:42 But the point is that Andrey Bogolyubsky had the idea that he was gonna make Vladimir 24:49 the most important city, the successor of Kyiv, as it were. He took an important icon that was near Kyiv, 24:55 and he brought it to Vladimir. He built a church in Vladimir, which was meant to look like St. Sophia in Kyiv.

25:02 So he had the idea that he would be the most important ruler and that his city would be more important than Kyiv.

25:08 So this is Vladimir, and Vladimir is in a district which is called Suzdal.

25:19 The Mongols are going to come, they're going to wipe out Vladimir, they're gonna wipe out Suzdal, they're gonna wipe out basically everything 25:25 in that part of Rus. But I want you to at least mark that this idea was already here in the 12th century, 25:32 that there could be a successor to Kyiv that could somehow be better than Kyiv. Okay.

25:38 When the Mongols do come, and we'll talk more about the Mongols and what they were up to, but when the Mongols do come, we see a partition of Rus, 25:47 which is very durable. I'll just say a word about the Mongols and what they were up to. Just a word.

25:53 It is always the case that from the point of view of the people whose cities get sacked, 25:59 that the arriving people are just marauders, and chaotic and so on, 26:04 but it is almost always the case that, in fact, what is happening is that those who are arriving 26:09 are trying to establish trade routes, admittedly on terms favorable to them. And you tend to get, I mean, 26:15 this is why we now have a European Union to avoid this, but the way you get terms favorable to you is you sack the city.

26:21 And then you get terms favorable to you. I mean, it's tough, but that's how it is. So the Mongols, like the Vikings before them, 26:29 were trying to establish a long trade route, the Vikings over sea, the Mongols over land, 26:34 in which they would be able to trade favorably all the way down the line at terms which are favorable to them.

26:40 At terms which are favorable to them. And they had tremendous success with this everywhere they went.

26:47 They were never really defeated. In the early 1240s, they destroy what remains 26:52 of Kyivan Rus'. You understand that when they destroy Kyivan Rus', they're not destroying a unified state, 26:58 because there is no unified state. There are a bunch of districts with rivals. When the princes of Rus' go out to meet the Mongols 27:09 on the battlefield, they're literally arguing amongst one another on the way to the battlefield 27:15 about who is who, and who gets to go first, and who's the most important. So that gives you a sense.

27:21 Even if they'd have been in perfect formation, had loved one another, they still would've had their hats handed them by the Mongols, however. The Mongols were gonna win.

27:27 So after the Mongol invasion, we get a kind of three part division 27:33 of the lands of old Rus, which I'm gonna mark. And then we're gonna talk about the most important of these, 27:38 which is Lithuania. So, far off to the west you have a district 27:45 called Galicia-Volhynia. And that district, Galicia-Volhynia, is going to have a slightly different trajectory 27:51 than the rest, because Galicia-Volhynia is gonna be ruled by its own princes for a while. And then the Galician part of Galicia-Volhynia 27:59 is gonna become part of Poland in the mid 14th century. So that Western part of Ukraine, 28:05 Galicia-Volhynia, is going to have a somewhat different history. That's part one.

28:11 Part two, so that's the extreme west, part two is the extreme east or the extreme Northeast.

28:20 Suzdal, the areas around what is gonna be at some point, Moscow. Moscow has still not come into being, but I promise you, 28:27 at some point Moscow will be created. The territories in Suzdal in the Northeast 28:33 are going to remain longer under direct Mongol domination.

28:38 That's also a different political story. The Mongols are gonna come and they're gonna stay.

28:43 And they're gonna establish a durable form of transactional politics with the 28:51 inheritors of Rus' princes in the far Northeast. And we'll pick up that story next time 28:58 when I talk about the origins of the state, which is based in Moscow, the origins of Russia.

29:04 The third and the most important trajectory is the one we're going to follow today, which is the grand Duchy of Lithuania.

29:11 Most of the territory of old Rus' comes under the grand Duchy of Lithuania.

29:17 And not only that, one of the reasons why I've spent so much time talking about this civilization is that, 29:24 interestingly, this civilizational package associated with Yaroslav, the language, 29:30 the Chancery Slavonic, the law all gets absorbed by Lithuania. The Lithuanians take it over.

29:37 They appropriate it, they make it their own very comfortably. And so in that sense, the Kyivan civilization survives 29:45 in the written form of its law. So it's sometimes it's helpful to think of history as having different speeds, or different 29:52 elements in history having different kinds of durability. So a language has a lot of durability. It changes over time.

29:58 A particular civilizational package, like law, it doesn't last as long as a language, but it can last much longer than a person.

30:05 So the fact that Yaroslav got the law together has meaning, which goes well beyond his lifetime, 30:11 deep into the history of Lithuania. Centuries later, when Lithuanians are gonna be writing their grand statutes, 30:17 which starts in the 16th century, when they write their statutes, three of them, they're gonna be using this language, Chancery Slavonic.

30:24 In turn, it's gonna have more words from their part of the world and so on, but this civilizational package long outlasts 30:32 the actual Kyivan Rus'. So the last big thing we have to do, we've gotten Volodymyr to Yaroslav, 30:39 Yaroslav to the end of Rus'. Now we have to get to Lithuania. What is Lithuania? And how could Lithuania be so, I mean, 30:45 isn't Lithuania just this tiny country? It's this tiny country filled with Baltic speakers? 30:50 How can it? It was the biggest country in Europe, my friends. It was the biggest country in Europe at the time.

30:56 And it emerged, as countries often emerged, because of pressure from two directions.

31:02 The Lithuanian state consolidated, because of pressure from the west, 31:08 in the form of Christianity. Now a very aggressive, pointed pressure 31:13 in the form of crusades. A few centuries earlier, when we're talking about the Franks, and Poland, and Moravia, and so on, 31:21 that's a more gentle pressure. You know, we want you to convert. Perhaps you'll be a little bit subordinate to us.

31:26 We're now in the 14th century in the era of crusades, 31:32 and the Lithuanians were subject to violent, forcible conversion.

31:39 By that I mean, all the men were killed and the women and children were taken and baptized.

31:46 That's what the Teutonic Knights did. So pressure from the west, the Teutonic Knights had wiped out the Prussians.

31:53 I realize there's still a place called Prussia, but the place called Prussia today takes its name from an earlier people who spoke a Baltic language, 32:01 similar to Lithuanian. These people were exterminated by the Teutonic Knights. They no longer existed.

32:08 And as that was happening, the groups of Baltic speakers that are called the Lithuanians managed to consolidate a state.

32:14 So they were consolidating because of pressure from the west. And also, as we'll get to, they consolidated 32:20 because of what the Mongols did in the south. So faced with pressure from the west, 32:25 the Lithuanian state in the early 14th century, in the 13 hundreds, was able to move south 32:31 from its base around Vilnius into what's now Belarus, and deep into what's now Ukraine.

32:37 And so, as they were pressed from the west, they took advantage of what the Mongols had done in the east.

32:43 It might help, although, you know, in the kind in a kind of Christian dominated historiography, this would never be put this way, 32:48 to think of the Teutonic Knights and the Mongols as arriving at about the same time, which they did, 32:54 and their arrival at about the same time creating the conditions in which a Lithuania could face a challenge and respond to that challenge 33:01 by gathering up territories from the south, from Rus, and becoming the biggest state in Europe, 33:07 which it was. So what do we know about Lithuania? The Lithuanians, so I talked earlier about the math, 33:16 the math of slavery and paganism. The Lithuanians were the last holdouts in this.

33:22 They were the last major pagan group in Europe. They were the last ones who were able not to be enslaved 33:28 more than they enslaved others. They were using slave labor of others in their countryside.

33:33 They raided Rus' for slaves, they raided Poland for slaves, they also raided their Baltic, 33:39 their pagan neighbors for slaves. So long as they had pagan neighbors. They brought in tens of thousands of people 33:45 to work as slaves in their agriculture. We know that they traded timber, and furs, and grain, 33:52 and wax and honey for iron products. We know that they turned a corner in their own 33:58 agricultural planning in the early 14th century under their most important ruler, who I may not have put down, Gediminas.

34:06 Is he there? He's there? Okay. So under Gediminas, who ruled from 1315 to 1343, 34:13 they started moving away from slavery and towards colonization, 34:19 where they would accept the rules of local, they would kind of control land rather than people.

34:25 So in a way it's the same kind of transition you see earlier in Rus', control land, rather than people, 34:31 accept basically the rules that already existed. And then try to tax. It's Gediminas who moves into what is now Rus'.

34:40 What was their religion? Very briefly about this, we know a lot more about it because their paganism 34:46 lasted for another four centuries. And many people had contact with them, many Christians, 34:53 many Muslims, many Jews had contacts with them over the centuries. There were Christian churches in Vilnius the whole time.

34:59 Why? Because if you're a tolerant, prosperous regime, you need to have traders coming from other places 35:05 and you have to make sure they have churches, right? And additionally, just to make sure this is always clear, 35:11 this story is gonna end with the Lithuanian rulers converting, but the Lithuanian rulers are always ruling over a country 35:18 which is majority Christian. Because most of the people who are in Lithuania are in what is now Belarus, and then later 35:25 in what is now Ukraine, i. e. they're Eastern Christians. So the whole time this is a regime where 35:31 the rulers are pagans, and the ruling families are pagans, but most of the population are actually Christians.

35:38 So when I talk about this religion, this is the religion of the Baltic core, which then spreads out and tolerates Christianity.

35:46 They make no attempt at converting the Christians at all. So we know that the grand duke was also the high priest.

35:53 We know that the priests were priests of sacrifice, 35:59 as in the Slavic lands. We know what some of the most important gods were, who were familiar figures already. They had a version of Perun, who was called Perkūnas.

36:07 In general, if you just add us to the end, you'll get a Lithuanian word. So like, okay, doesn't always work.

36:14 Doesn't always work. But the Lithuanian version of Perun was called Perkūnas. Other important gods were 36:22 Andai, who was associated with water, Teliavel, who was associated with like a Hephaestus figure, 36:28 associated with the smithy. But as with the Slavic paganism, the gods were not separate.

36:35 This is much more animistic, it's much more a religion where everything is in some sense animated by divinity.

36:43 So trees were venerated. Specific groves of trees regardless as important.

36:50 In specific groves of trees, the dead would be burned as a sacrifice.

36:56 Specific springs and rivers and rocks were also important. The Lithuanians, like the Slavs, also didn't have temples 37:03 until they made contact with Christians. And then they began to build temples, it appears, as a kind of borrowing from the Christians.

37:12 We know that they divined omens from the behavior of, some of them still do, from the behavior 37:18 of horses and snakes. We know that after victories they sacrificed a third of the spoils to the gods.

37:26 We know that horses were of special significance. That horse skulls were meant to ward off evil spirits.

37:32 That two horses in front of a house, on the gable of houses, was meant to bring good fortune.

37:39 We know that if you were important and you died, you were buried with your horse so that you would have your horse in the next world.

37:46 And Lithuanians also thoughtfully did this to important people who they captured on the battlefield. So for example, when they were in battle with 37:57 the crusaders, and they captured important knights, they would thoughtfully burn them to death, 38:04 fully armed, on horseback. That's a mark of privilege.

38:10 A major Teutonic Knight who, so the crusading wars between the crusaders and Lithuanians 38:16 were unbelievably fierce on both sides, and were recorded by the crusaders that way.

38:23 The conflict between the crusaders and the Lithuanians actually makes it into English literature 38:30 right at the very beginning. So if you've had like a high school course in English literature, where you were forced to read, 38:36 where you happily read Chaucer, the Canterbury Tales, 38:42 you might remember that when the knight is introduced as a character in the prologue, 38:47 he's described this way. A knight there was, and that a worthy man, that from the time that he first began to riding out, 38:54 he loved chivalry, truth and honor, freedom and courtesy 38:59 above all nations in Prus, Prussia, in Lithau had he reysed 39:05 and in Rus. Lithau is Lithuania and Rus' is, of course, Rus'.

39:10 So the Knight in this English story from 1380, from the 14th century, is a Crusader, 39:17 but he's a Crusader in Northeastern Europe. He's a Crusader in Lithuania.

39:22 And that word, he reysed, that's the German word, reyse. And reyse, in this particular context, every year 39:30 the Teutonic Knights declared that there was a reyse, which meant that all of the flower of chivalry, all of the Knights from the other Christian countries 39:36 were meant to come and join the crusade. That's what they did. They had the crusade was a kind of seasonal adventure, 39:42 which was called a reyse. So it's the Teutonic Knight who are forcing Lithuania 39:49 to consolidate and who are pushing Lithuania to the south.

39:54 The Teutonic Knights creep their way across the Baltic sea as Polish rulers invite them to come and deal 40:03 with pagan problems or other problems. Teutonic Knight come, Teutonic Knights stay, 40:09 Teutonic Knights establish their own state. They rule Teutonic state along the Baltic Sea.

40:16 They do this in defiance of the Polish Kings who say, or grand Dukes often who say, 40:21 we just wanted you to solve this particular problem. They also do it by exploiting a specific 40:26 feature of Western Christianity, which is that the Teutonic Knights play off between 40:33 the Holy Roman Emperor, we'll talk about what this means later on, but the Holy Roman Emperor, the chief secular figure in the west, 40:40 the chief secular leader, and the Pope. They manage to play off between these two patrons 40:45 and essentially do what they want and become a power into themselves. So these are armed monks.

40:52 They are crusaders. They're men who isolate themselves from the world who are trained in the spirit of sacrifice.

40:58 Their fellow monks find them intimidating. Their basic program of Christian conversion, as I mentioned, 41:06 is that you attack, you kill all the men, you resettle your own men, and that's baptism, 41:14 that's conversion. Their major achievement was the colonization of the Baltic Basin, from what's now in Northern Poland, 41:22 all the way up to what's now Estonia where Germans had some kind of significant social 41:29 and political presence for the next 700 years until 1945 41:34 and the arrival of the red army. So they begin something which lasts in some form or another for a very long time.

41:42 So it is their war. We're now getting to the crux, which I'm sure you already understand, it is their war against Lithuania which coincides with 41:51 and brings about the Lithuanian absorption of the lands of Rus'.

41:57 They are fighting in the late 13th century into the 14th century. I'm gonna read you one long quotation 42:03 from the chronicler of the Teutonic Knights, Peter of Dusburg, just because it gives you the flavor of how they saw it.

42:10 The odd kind of respect that the crusaders, the Teutonic Knights, had for the Lithuanians, but also the fierceness of this.

42:17 This is from 1283. He writes, 53 years had flowed since the war began 42:22 on the Prussian nation, and all the nations in the said land, Prussia, had been beaten and exterminated 42:29 so that not one survived which did not humbly bow the neck to the Holy Roman Church. Okay, so that's Prussia, which is gone.

42:37 The afore said brethren of the German house, us, Teutonic Knights, initiated the war against this mighty people, most hard of neck 42:45 and well versed in war, which is neighbor to land of Prussia dwelling beyond the Nemunas River in the land of Lithuania.

42:51 So that's how it looks from the Teutonic Knight's point of view. The Lithuanian reaction is not, 42:58 we will never become Christian. Lithuanian reaction seems to have been, 43:04 we will not become Christian this way. We will not become Christian this way.

43:11 So in the late 13th century and the early 14th century, 43:17 what you have is a kind of geometry of four powers.

43:24 Where there's Poland, there's Galicia-Volhynia, there are the Knights, and there is Lithuania, 43:36 and there is What's left of Rus', 43:42 which is no longer a political entity. So what happens is that the Lithuanians, 43:52 facing this challenge, move south in the early 14th century.

43:57 They attacked the city of Breast, which is now in Belarus. By 1323 it appears that they have also controlled Kyiv.

44:07 But the crucial thing here is that, although there seemed to have been some armed engagements in the beginning, the Lithuanian rule Rus', 44:16 not just in a spirit of toleration, but in the spirit of appropriation. So they come to the great ruler, 44:21 they come to the princes of Rus', and they say, in their own language, we're not gonna bring anything new 44:29 and we're not gonna change anything old. How do they say it in their own language? Because remember the Lithuanian Grand Dukes 44:34 are ruling a country which is already majority Slavic. It's already majority Eastern Christian, it's already majority Slavic, 44:40 it already controls some of the lands that had been Rus', which is Belarus. So it is not as though Christianity, or orthodoxy, 44:48 or even the language is unfamiliar to them. They know all of these things, they know what Christians are, right? They know all of this stuff.

44:53 So they say to the princes of Rus', you don't have to change anything.

44:59 We're just gonna marry into your families, you're gonna regard us as the center of the state, 45:06 and you're gonna organize taxes for us. And that's how it works. And it seems to have worked very smoothly.

45:14 So this process then all comes to a kind of crux 45:19 in the last part of the 14th century. The Lithuanians are pressed from the west, 45:29 they have absorbed the lands to the south. But the way that the Lithuanians actually find a way 45:36 to defeat the Teutonic Knights finally is by making an Alliance with the Poles.

45:44 And this is carried out by the second Lithuanian Grand Duke, whose name I really want you to remember after Gediminas, which is Jogaila, 45:51 or as he's remembered by the Poles, as Jagiello. So, oh, sorry, I forgot something very important.

45:59 The Lithuanian Grand Dukes, they not only know all about this. They know about Rus', they know that Rus' existed.

46:06 They know that Rus' was a very important state. And so to their own list of titles they add, 46:12 we are the rulers of Rus'. So the Lithuanian grand Dukes add, 46:17 we are the rulers of Rus'. So from their point of view, they have not just inherited the territory.

46:23 They've inherited also the patrimony, in the legal sense, we are the rulers of this thing called Rus'.

46:32 And, as I said before, in the earlier part of this lecture, they inherit the legal language and they began to use it themselves.

46:38 And that's not such a stretch, because remember, they're used to using Slavic languages. Slavic languages are nothing new, nothing surprising.

46:44 It's good to have a written one. Okay. But the way that this history reaches a climax 46:50 has to do with Poland. Poland has a succession crisis.

46:57 The king of Poland is a 11, 12, maybe 13 year old girl.

47:04 It looks for a moment as though she's gonna be married to a Hapsburg. If that had happened, the whole history of our region 47:12 would've been very, very different. But the Habsburg, who was called Wilhelm, 47:18 who's riding to claim his Polish bride never makes it, he's stopped by some Polish Nobles along the way.

47:23 And instead this girl is married to a much older man.

47:32 I mean, I'm afraid it's a little scandalous. He's like 40 years older than she is. Though Lithuania's not scandalized.

47:38 So, Jogaila, what is her name by the way? 47:45 Jadvyga or Hedwig. She has a very interesting past, too. I mean, she has a fascinating past, 47:52 she's only just a very young girl, but she's been raised for interesting things. But anyway, she turns out to be the king of Poland.

47:59 Her name is Jadvyga or Hedwig. She marries Jogaila. And in that way, a whole bunch of things happen at once.

48:07 The Lithuanians, the ruling family convert to Christianity, 48:12 1385, 1386. Slowly, the Lithuanian nobility, 48:18 which includes the old Rusia nobility, will merge with the Polish nobility 48:23 and start to take up some of its norms, which we'll talk about. But most importantly, a new state, a defacto new state, 48:31 it's a personal union. It's a personal union between Lithuanian Grand Dukes, who will also be Polish Kings, is set up 48:39 and it will bump along for the next 200 years. So the Polish, the Lithuanian Grand Dukes 48:47 and the Polish Kings are generally gonna be the same people for quite a while now. For a couple hundred years.

48:54 And what this means for these territories is hugely important for Kyiv. We're keeping our focus on Kyiv.

48:59 This means that Kyiv is gonna be attached to Vilnius and to Poland from roughly 1320 until roughly 1670.

49:12 For a very long period of time, which we'll be dealing with in the next several lectures. It means that this, so there's also gonna be this, 49:19 the Northeast, there's also gonna be Galicia-Volhynia, that most of Rus' is gonna be in this Lithuanian Polish synthesis for the next several centuries.

49:30 Where this all leads to is a famous battle that all the Polish kids, and actually all the students from much of Eastern Europe will know about, 49:38 which is the battle of Grunwald. The famous battle of Grunwald which is famous for Poles, famous for Lithuanians.

49:43 It's the battle where decisively, in 1410, it's the battle which is so shocking to everyone, 49:49 which it's referred to by both Hitler and Stalin during the second world war, it's still taught as fundamental.

49:55 It's the battle where the Lithuanian Grand Duke, who is now king of Poland, and can now marshal an army 50:01 which includes people from Rus' and Poland, as well as Lithuania, where he decisively defeats the Teutonic Knights.

50:08 And the reason why it's remembered, or one of the reasons, if you go to central park, which you will, right? 50:15 You're in New Haven, you're gonna go to central park, right? It's not far away. There's a statue of Jogaila, Jagiello, holding two swords.

50:22 And one of them is his. And the other one is the one which was given to him by the grand master of the Teutonic Knights, 50:28 according to legend at least, at the beginning of the battle on the logic of, you're going to need this.

50:36 And so that little bit of like Teutonic arrogance got remembered down the centuries. And so the notion of Jagiello going to battle 50:43 with the two swords, and of course the Lithuanians, the Poles, the Slavs winning is something which 50:49 made a big mark in history. Okay, we're gonna leave you there. We're gonna pick up with this Polish, Lithuanian, 50:54 Ruthenian synthesis next time around. But we're also gonna try to explain how we get to Russia.

51:05 (ethereal chime plays)

back to TOC


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Lecture 7 Rise of Muscovite Power

0:00 (bright thoughtful music) (scenes scratching) 0:13 - Okay, greetings everybody, happy Tuesday. This is a lecture that I was not expecting to give.

0:19 This was going to be Paul Bushkovitch's guest lecture, but as you see, I'm gonna give it. It's about the origins of the Muscovite state 0:25 and Muscovite power. The way things are are gonna work the rest of the week, is that on Thursday, my friend and colleague Glenn Dynner 0:33 is going to give the lecture on Jews in Ukraine, something which he is eminently qualified to do.

0:39 Same reading, same everything, there will just be a slightly different person wearing the shirt with the buttons in front of the classroom on Thursday.

0:46 So please give Professor Dynner the attention he deserves for making the schlep up here and giving the lecture.

0:52 One of the TFs will introduce, and I'll see you again on Tuesday. So this is also not a lecture I was expecting to give, 1:00 in the sense that when I gave my first lecture about the rise of Muscovite power, I wouldn't have expected to be in a situation 1:07 where there is so much to explain. So we're in the middle of this war where, just to take two very obvious points that are pertinent, 1:14 the justification for the war, or one of the justifications for the war has to do with the continuation 1:20 of some kind of permanent identity from Kyiv a thousand years ago into Russia today.

1:28 Another point, which you'll see the pertinence of, I hope, is that many of the people who are doing the fighting 1:34 in the Russian army today are Asians, are indigenous people from deep into Asia, 1:39 who are disproportionately fighting and killing and dying in Ukraine. And so you might be asking yourself, 1:45 if you're paying attention day by day in this war, "Who are these Buryats, and why are these Buryats doing so much fighting and dying in Ukraine?" 1:53 Where do they come into the Russian state? Why is it that a people of whom there are only a few hundred thousand who live somewhere 1:59 around Lake Baikal deep into Asia and are Buddhists, why are they doing so much of the fighting and dying in Ukraine? 2:06 Why is it that when I visit a woman living in the suburbs of Chernihiv, and I'm asking who the Russian soldiers are who were in her basement, 2:13 she says, "Well actually, two of them are Buryats. " How is that, who are these people? What do they have to do with the history of Russia? 2:18 By the end of this lecture, I hope that all becomes clear. So I wanna start with a philosophical reflection 2:26 about how you get something from nothing, because once again in this lecture we are dealing with the origins of something.

2:33 And of course, the origins of something is a very tender, sensitive subject.

2:38 Origins are always tricky, because it would be nice if we could have something from nothing. You might have noticed that a lot of origin stories 2:45 involve how something, there was something beautiful and pure at the beginning, right? 2:50 And it was corrupted later on. There was this little thing called the Book of Genesis, which is a bit like that. You might have noticed that national stories 2:57 are also a bit like that. There was an ethnicity, it was pure, it was simple. It might have been corrupted later by foreigners, 3:03 and bad things happened. But deep down in the beginning, it was all folk songs and harmony before the other people came and messed everything up.

3:11 Naturally, you'll have understood, I'm sure you're understood already, but it's been a main theme of this class, that things don't come out of nowhere.

3:18 That the states and the nations that we're trying to explain always have something to do with contacts 3:23 with other states and nations. There's always something out there, which is at the beginning of the story, 3:29 but it's not in the beginning of its own story. It's in the middle or or at the end.

3:35 So one way to deal with this problem of how you have things that didn't exist before is to imagine this, you know, this state of Eden, 3:41 this state of innocence. Another way to deal with this problem is the way that social sciences deal with it, or the way that, ooh, the social science PhD perks up.

3:49 The way that, that would be Daniel, yeah he's a postdoc. Daniel say hi, he's also Ukrainian.

3:55 Now you've been doxxed.

4:01 So the way that social sciences generally deal with the question of how you get something from nothing, is you just start with the something.

4:07 You don't worry about the origins, things just are as they are. And something similar can be said about philosophy, that we just assume that there's a person, 4:13 there's a kind of, you know, there's a person, the person is fully formed. We don't worry about the way the person came from.

4:19 In history, we have to confront, like the weird stories of origins, but we also have to come up with a plausible story of origin ourself.

4:26 And I wanted to suggest that a root for plausible stories of origin would be something 4:31 more like Ovid's "Metamorphoses", which I don't know if you've studied, but the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid are all about weird contacts 4:39 involving violence and sex and families that generally don't work out, but the theme is transformation.

4:44 You're not getting something from nothing. You're getting something from something else. You're getting something from some kind of encounter.

4:49 And history is more like that. It's, unexpected things arise from the encounters of things, 4:55 and then later on you tell a story about how it had to be that way. But at the time, it's all very messy and confusing.

5:02 It involves some kind of transformation. Okay, check out this segue. So Ovid's "Metamorphoses" were probably the major influence 5:10 or a major influence on Shakespeare. When I talked to Zelenskyy a couple of Saturdays ago in Kyiv, 5:17 he made the point that everything was in Shakespeare, which has me thinking about "Hamlet" as I often do anyway.

5:22 Hamlet was a prince of what? Help me out. - Denmark? - Denmark. - A hundred out of a hundred for the classroom, excellent.

5:28 Everybody who spoke up got it right, and everybody who didn't know was quiet, which is like perfect yell behavior, well done.

5:34 (students laughing) So Denmark, and Denmark is an heir of what? What kind of a state is it? 5:41 Vikings, right? Okay, you fell back on the TFs. It's a Viking state, right? So, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, 5:48 which for a long time is part of Denmark, Iceland, and Rus, these are all Viking states.

5:55 These are all post Viking states, and also another post Viking state which we might forget, 6:00 because we think of it as so big and important. It's the language I'm speaking. - England. - England, right? 6:07 England is also a post Viking state. So this phenomenon of post Viking states is very important in European history, 6:13 From England all the way to the East Slavic lands 6:18 The England of Shakespeare is a post Viking state, right? The Normans, I'm just gonna run this through with you 6:25 and you'll see where it's going. The Normans who invaded England in 1066, Norman means Northman or Norseman.

6:32 The Normans were a synthetic people of Vikings who had arrived in northern France, 6:38 who were there for a while, and then they later invaded England. When they invaded England in 1066, 6:43 they invaded England in 1066 three days after the Norwegians invaded England in 1066.

6:49 It was actually a kind of post Viking pincer movement in England in the early autumn of 1066.

6:55 The king of Norway who invaded England in September of 1066 was Harald Hardrada, 7:01 who you were definitely going to remember, was in the service of Yaroslav the Wise 7:07 in early Kyivan Rus'. Harald is the same figure who shows up in Kyiv, who doesn't have much else to do, 7:13 and becomes a warrior in the service of Yaroslav the Wise, who we know about all this thanks to the Icelandic sagas.

7:21 You'll remember Yaroslav the Wise is the one who shows up in the Iceland sagas as Jarislief, 7:26 less flatteringly as Jarislief the Lame, right? So this is all one world, right? 7:32 The post Viking, who is invading England as the Norwegian king, is the same post Viking Harald 7:40 who was in the service of Yaroslav the Wise in Kyiv, and who then went on to serve in Byzantium, okay.

7:46 So he fails, by the way. So Harald has this great, he has this fascinating life.

7:51 He starts out in Norway, he goes to Kyiv, he serves Yaroslav the Wise. Shows up in the Icelandic sagas, 7:57 which let's face it, none of us is ever gonna do, right? Shows up in the Icelandic sagas. He goes on to Byzantium, he serves as part of a Ruthenian 8:07 or a Rusyn bodyguard in Byzantium, then goes back to Norway, succeeds in becoming King, invades England, 8:12 but gets killed right away, okay. So like that's, you know, not the way it would've ended in the Netflix serial, but that's so, but his life, this life of Harald, 8:20 it reminds us that there's this whole arc from Scandinavia to Byzantium. And in this arc of history, right? 8:27 Or really from England to Byzantium, where the Vikings are in the middle, and the big pushing forces 8:32 were the Franks and the Byzantines. The Franks and the Byzantines are pushing from one side and the other, 8:38 the Vikings show up in the middle, and then the Vikings end up having to do with the creation of a whole bunch of states 8:44 from England all the way down, all the way down to Rus', okay. So when the Normans, 8:52 the Normans are the post Vikings who win, right? The Norwegians lose, but the Normans are the ones who win.

8:57 And it's often forgotten that there were two attacks on England at exactly the same time, although I saw some nodding in the gallery, which is cool.

9:03 So the Normans are the post Vikings who win England. Their leader goes under the name of William the Conqueror.

9:09 He kills the English king, he establish his own elites, and the language has changed, right? The language has changed.

9:16 So remember, another big theme of this class, our big argument is how the language is there for you.

9:21 The language and the people are not necessarily identical. Languages change, people move into languages.

9:27 So the English language that we're moving into now, or that we're using now has something to do 9:32 with William the Conqueror conquering England. It would be very hard for me to create a sentence in English which doesn't involve a word which came from French.

9:39 You know, I'm not gonna like show off at this point, but I will give you, I'll read you a passage 9:45 which we've already read, which is Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" from 1380, the same passage.

9:50 "A knight there was and that a worthy man, that from the time that he first began to riden out, he loved chivalry, truth and honor, freedom and courtesy. " 9:57 Right, there isn't gonna be chivalry or courtesy in Chaucer without the Normans, without the post Vikings invading England.

10:03 Or Shakespeare and "Hamlet", the most famous speech is "to be or not to be" right? Which includes a beautiful line about how 10:10 "conscience makes cowards of us all", which he couldn't have written without the word conscience, which of course is a French word, okay.

10:17 So you've gotten the point about this, this big political cultural synthesis, which takes place over a few centuries, 10:23 and how our world is part of that world. Our East Slavic Rus' world is part of that world, 10:28 although it's special. And one way that it's special, as you know, 10:34 is that the East Slavic world Rus' becomes Christian under the Byzantines, 10:40 whereas all the rest of it's going to be Western Christian, right? Boring. Whereas our part is going to be Eastern Christian.

10:46 The other thing which is special, by the time we get to this lecture, and this is the subject of this lecture, is that it no longer exists.

10:52 So, England, Norway, Norway slash Denmark, Sweden, these are all fairly durable political entities.

10:59 England is still around. I mean, by the end of the semester let's see but England is still around, 11:04 and Denmark, Norway, Sweden, they're also around. Rus' is not still around, and so that's another difference, 11:12 and that's the subject that we're getting to today. What actually happens to Rus', 11:17 and how are we best to think about that? So I introduced a next moment of contact 11:25 in the last lecture. The moment of contact I tried to introduce in the last lecture was another East/West moment, 11:32 which was the Mongols coming from one side, and the Teutonic Knights coming from the other side.

11:39 So if we're going to explain the origins of Lithuania as we tried to do in the last lecture, 11:46 we explain the origins of Lithuania not by saying they were always Lithuanians, 11:51 they were always wonderful pagans, they were very innocent. You know, they did a lot of human sacrifice, which is how you preserve innocence, as we all know.

11:58 No I mean honestly, you've had, I mean the human sacrifice, well I mean. (sighing) 12:04 Where do I draw all the lines on the jokes knowing that I'm filmed? (students laughing) That's just occurred to me for the first time.

12:10 But let's face it, human sacrifice has a kind of simplicity and clarity, which other forms of, you know, ritual don't.

12:16 So the, where was I? Oh, so the Lithuanians, it's not that the Lithuanians 12:22 were always there and they were pure and they were an ethnicity and so on. That's not the story at all, right? The story is that the Lithuanians saw 12:28 what happened to the Prussians, the Lithuanians gathered together some tribes, some Pagan tribes who speak the Baltic Lithuanian language.

12:36 The Lithuanians went south and gathered up most of the lands that had been Rus', and on that basis 12:42 were able to stand up to the Teutonic Knights. And then because there was a rising state called Poland, 12:48 the Lithuanians married into the Polish crown, and in alliance with Poland, and having annexed 12:56 most of what was Rus', Lithuania had, there the Lithuanian rulers created the state which could actually defeat the Teutonic Knights.

13:02 But all of that only makes sense, that whole rise of Lithuania as a great state only makes sense 13:07 if you understand Teutonic Knights pushing from the West, Mongols have come in from the East and destroyed Rus'.

13:14 If the Mongols don't destroy Rus', Lithuania is not going to annex it. If Teutonic Knights are not pushing in 13:19 with their program of forced Christianization, the Lithuanians aren't going to consolidate. So this is another one of these symphonies 13:25 where larger pressures push, particularities arise, new states are consolidated, right? 13:31 And so we get to this, we've already gotten to this. It's the next few verses in Chaucer, right? 13:37 So the Chaucer, "Above all nations in Pruce and Lettow, had he reysed and in Ruce," you know what that means.

13:43 The Teutonic Knights were the (speaking in German). Great German word, by the way. A (speaking in German) now is just like, "I'm gonna make, you know, making a little trip, 13:50 (speaking in German). " But in this context, it means part of a crusade. You're joining a crusade.

13:55 You're coming from France or England or somewhere far away, you're going to join in a crusade. Pruce is Prussia, which has been fully destroyed.

14:02 Lettow is Lithuania, and Ruce is of course Rus'. So that's kind of interesting, isn't it? 14:09 I'm sure when you read this in high school, or in your free time, or when you read it in the future, you just skimmed right over, "What is this Ruce place, R-U-C-E? 14:15 Probably Chaucer made it up to rhyme with Pruce," right? But no, Ruce is actually the country R-U-S, 14:21 which we've been studying, which in the 14th century was a completely unproblematic word, okay. So this Lithuanian trajectory we followed, 14:30 and we're gonna keep following it. We're gonna keep following the trajectory of what in this lecture I'm gonna call Lithuanian Rus'.

14:38 Because if we're gonna understand the, if we're gonna move east and understand the consequences 14:44 of the Mongol destruction of Kyiv in 1237 to 1240, 14:49 we have to then move into the question of the successors of Rus'.

14:55 And the successors of Rus' are going to overlap with other things.

15:00 They're going to overlap with the Mongol world, but not only. Very briefly, we've already done 15:06 one of the successors of Rus'. One of the successors of Rus' is Lithuania. The Lithuanian Grand Dukes called themselves 15:12 the rulers of Ruthenia, and Ruthenia in Latin, 15:17 of Rus' in their own language. So one of the successors of of Rus' is Lithuanian Rus'.

15:24 A second successor of Rus', which we briefly talked about, is Galicia and Volhynia.

15:30 So this is all, right? This is all on your sheet. Okay? You nodding, thank you. So Galicia and Volhynia are the two 15:38 Westernmost districts of Rus'. These are very important places to know.

15:46 They're very interesting places. Galicia and Volhynia are English words which come from Latin, but the original terms 15:55 come from the old Ruthenian names for the places, (speaking in foreign language), hence Galicia, 16:02 And then Volhynia in Latin is actually (speaking in Latin), but (speaking in Latin), you don't have to know this, 16:08 I'm just giving you a little break. You don't have to write it down, I'm just cruising. So Volhynia in Latin is (speaking Latin), 16:14 is from the city of Volodymyr. Volodymyr becomes (speaking in Latin), and Volodymyr is course of city named after 16:20 the first baptized ruler of Russia, which is Volodymyr. So Galicia and Volhynia are what we call 16:27 these Western districts, they're very important because they hold out as rulers of Rus' 16:35 for an extra century or so. They, the leaders of Galicia and Volhynia, 16:41 claimed also to be the rulers of Kyiv. They very often actually had their person ruling Kyiv.

16:49 After the Mongol onslaught, they managed to hold their own in Galicia and Volhynia.

16:55 After 1240 they were the only princes of Rus' who actually engaged the Mongols on the battlefield 17:01 with anything other than complete failure. So, and they managed to hold Kyiv, actually, but of course.

17:08 But they managed to hold their own lands, and consolidate the rule over their own lands in the 1240s.

17:14 After the end of Kyiv, after the destruction of Kyiv, they refer to themselves as Princes of Rus' 17:21 and Princes of all of Rus'. In case I don't get to it later, this is a theme. If you're gonna call yourself the Prince of Rus', 17:27 just go ahead and call yourself the Prince of all of Rus', and you will eventually figure out in practice how much all of Rus' turns out to be.

17:35 That is the answer to the question of what all of Rus' is. All of these people called themselves the Prince of all of Rus', okay? 17:42 Nobody said, "I'm the Prince of Some of Rus', and maybe somebody else is," no. They all when they, as soon as they thought of it, 17:47 they all said, "I'm the Prince of all of Rus'. " And the question of what all of Rus' is, is determined by practice, how far you can actually get, 17:55 and then you will call that Rus', whether it was historically Rus' or not.

18:01 So in 2022 we're in a war where Russia is fighting Ukraine in territories on the basis of the idea 18:06 that these territories are formerly Rus', but they're not. The lands in the south of Ukraine 18:12 are territories of the Crimean Khanate. They were never part of Rus', and but never, 18:17 so, and this is a traditional theme. When Moscow, and I'm gonna get to this, when Moscow takes over Novgorod, 18:24 Novgorod suddenly becomes Rus', but Novgorod didn't itself think that it was Rus'. It only becomes Rus' after it was conquered, 18:30 and so on and so forth. So the whole idea of controlling all of Rus' is essentially a pragmatic idea, right? 18:36 After the destruction of Rus', okay. So the point about Galicia-Volhynia 18:43 is that it's gonna have a bright future. Galicia and Volhynia are very important to the future, to the history of Ukraine.

18:49 But also they maintained some kind of Rusyn Ruthenian statehood for, 18:54 basically a bonus century into the 1320s, 1330s, 19:00 when they fall to Lithuania and to Poland. So about 1320, the Lithuanians have gotten to Kyiv, 19:07 and Volhynia becomes part of Lithuania, okay? Volhynia becomes part of Lithuania. Galicia, Halychyna, becomes part of Poland as of as of 1339.

19:17 Okay, so that's, so now we have two successors of Rus'. We have the Lithuanian Rus', and we have the Galicia and Volhynia Rus', that's two.

19:26 The third one, the one that we're gonna focus on today is Mongol Rus'.

19:32 So the part of Rus' which falls durably under Mongol control 19:38 from circa 1240 deep into the 15th century.

19:44 So a different story, a story of multiple centuries, multiple generations.

19:51 Time matters a lot. So this is just a basic historian's point. It matters a lot whether regime governs a territory 19:57 for 50 years, a hundred years, or 300 years, right? That's just a very, it's a very basic point.

20:03 And so when we're starting to think about what's different between Galicia-Volhynia and the Northeastern territories that become Mongol Rus', 20:13 durability of Mongol rule. Galicia-Volhynia encountered the Mongols. They only very briefly paid tribute.

20:20 The territories of Mongol Rus', hint, Mongol Rus' is what's gonna become Moscow and the Russian Empire and all the rest of it, okay? 20:26 So the territories that become Mongol Rus', that are Mongol Rus', are under Mongol control for centuries.

20:33 That's a basic fundamental difference. So Mongol Rus', here's another way to think about it.

20:41 It is one of the successors of Rus' for sure, and we're gonna see the connections 20:47 between Mongol Rus' and Kyivan Rus'. But it is also one of the many Mongol or post Mongol states 20:56 all across Asia and eastern Europe. So the Mongols, after they come and destroy, 21:03 which admittedly is like, that's their famous moment.

1240, 1241, they arrive, they destroy, they conquer everyone.

21:09 They have to go back for a funeral, as happens, changes all of history, right? The Batu Khan arrives, he destroys, no one can resist him.

21:16 Gets a phone call, didn't get a phone call. He gets notice that he has to go back to Mongolia 21:22 basically, for what? For a succession crisis. A funeral is the polite way of saying it, but a succession struggle.

21:28 When someone dies, there's a succession struggle, right? Those of you who have families that don't write wills, you know what I'm talking about.

21:35 So the, uneasy class-based laughter, okay? 21:42 (students laughing) So I have to say that because apparently they can't hear 21:48 when you laugh on the video. That's been reported to me, like they can hear the jokes but like, then there's silence. (students laughing) 21:55 Which from my point of view is a little bit awkward, right? It's like, "He's telling jokes all semester, 22:00 and the Yale students are just a looking at him. " Okay, so 1240, so 1237 to 1241, 22:07 that's the period that you all remember. The Batu Khan comes, he conquers, no one's resistant, so he goes back. But after this, there is the Mongol state, 22:16 which is remembered under the name of the Golden Horde, okay? And then, but the Golden Horde over time, 22:23 itself falls apart into various entities. And these entities don't, 22:28 they're often very fuzzy in European history. They kind of just show up on the margins every now and again, making attacks, 22:35 or as allies in wars or whatever. But these are fairly durable entities.

22:40 And we have to understand Moscow and not just as a post Rus' entity, 22:45 but also as one of these post Mongol entities, along with the Nogai Horde, along with the Kazan Khanate, 22:55 along with the Crimean Khanate. And by the way, for us, the Crimean Khanate is the most important because the Crimean Khanate 23:01 is the one that controls Crimea, and then much of the north coast of the Black Sea, 23:07 what's now the south of Ukraine. So we have to imagine the Mongols establishing a state, 23:14 which over time fragments into a number of different entities, of which one is Moscow.

23:21 Of which one is Moscow. Now, how is Moscow different? Moscow is different in religion.

23:27 It's not Pagan as the Mongols are, to use the term of abuse that the Christians use. And Moscow doesn't convert to Islam.

23:34 This is important too. The rest of these entities convert to Islam. So, but Moscow doesn't, Moscow is Orthodox.

23:43 Moscow's Orthodox, but it's Orthodox in an interesting way, right? It's Orthodox in a place, mark this for the future.

23:51 It's Orthodox in a place where there's no other way of being Christian. This is really important, I mean, 23:57 I think right down to the present moment. There's no other way of being Christian. If you're Christian, you're Orthodox, that's it.

24:03 Whereas west of this, in Kyiv and in the rest of Europe, there are going to be lots of other ways of being Christian.

24:09 And even if you are Orthodox, in what's now Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, 24:14 you're going to be in a series of encounters with other sorts of Christians over the next few centuries.

24:19 In Moscow, this is not true. Orthodoxy is Christianity, Christianity is Orthodoxy.

24:25 And this is all, and related to this, also to mark, there isn't any theology.

24:30 There isn't any disputation about religion in Moscow. In points further west there is going to be, 24:37 the Orthodox are going to take part in all of the interesting conversations around Reformation, Counter-Reformation, all of that.

24:43 That's not going to be happening in Moscow until much later, when Moscow and Kyiv come into contact for the first time, 24:50 which is not for centuries. It's not for centuries, it's not in this lecture, it's in the 17th century, okay.

24:56 So we're in Mongol Rus'. Mongol Rus' is the northeast.

25:02 It's the district which I mentioned last time, Suzdal.

25:09 And then Suzdal, surrounding territories, the northeast of what had been Rus'.

25:18 And the way that the political system is set up by this, 25:25 is set up in this Northeastern Rus', this Mongol Rus', is really a kind of fresh start, 25:31 in the sense that the Mongols have come and destroyed. Okay, good, that's true for everyone.

25:37 Then there's the Black Death, it's a bit of a mess. There's really no one around to write.

25:43 And in addition to that, a new principle of political succession is set up.

25:49 The principle of political succession in the old Rus', the one based in Kyiv was admittedly very messy 25:55 and to the point of incomprehensibility, but it had something to do with the ruler and his sons.

26:00 That's about as much as we can say. And that's by the way, not so unusual in Europe. This whole idea that it was the eldest son, 26:06 and it was all very simple. That usually covers over a whole bunch of illegitimacy and bloodshed, but you know, okay.

26:13 So illegitimacy and bloodshed gets a lot of nods. I just wanna record that for the camera. All right, so focus.

26:21 So in Northeastern Rus', in and around Suzdal, there's a new succession principle which is, 26:29 how well can you collect taxes for the Mongol overlord? 26:35 That's the new principle of power. So the Mongols accept that there's something called Rus'.

26:41 They have no trouble with that, but who is the Grand Prince of Rus'? The Grand Prince of Rus' is 26:49 the person who can collect the tribute. So that is a new principle of rule. That is new compared to Kyiv obviously, 26:57 where if you were in Kyiv, you were the one taking the tribute, right? And by the way, this is a really fundamental thing 27:04 about political power. If you want to figure out who is actually in charge, who is paying tribute to whom? 27:10 Because everyone says, "I'm the king and the tsar, and all the galaxies," and so on, right? 27:16 That's very easy. Having stationary, okay, they didn't have stationary yet, but having a list of titles is very easy, right? 27:24 But what really matters is, are you paying the tribute, or is someone paying the tribute to you? 27:30 So the rulers of Muscovy had titles, right? They were the Grand Princes of Moscow, 27:37 which sounds great and certainly had its pluses. But they were paying tribute to the Mongols, 27:44 and they were the Grand Princes of Moscow because they could pay tribute to the Mongols.

27:50 The Mongols chose the man who could collect the tribute. And so that's a different principle of succession.

27:57 The people who ran Mongol Rus' were princes of, they were princes who were descended from the old Rus'.

28:04 Not in any particular distinction, but they were of the blood, but they were only the Grand Princes of Rus' 28:10 because they were the ones who could collect the taxes. And then the other way that this is a fresh start is that the whole system is based in a new city, 28:22 which is Moscow. So Moscow existed as some kind of fort or something in the 12th century, but Moscow had no princely line.

28:30 Moscow is not a district in old Rus'. Nobody goes to Moscow to rule anything, right? It's not one of these districts Suzdal or like Chernihiv, 28:39 where you go and you rule. It's not a district at all. It's no place, it's nowhere.

28:45 Moscow becomes a town, becomes a meaningful place with a princely line after the Mongol destruction of Kyiv, 28:55 and because it's a Prince of Moscow who's able to collect the tribute.

29:01 It was also, well, there's also some marriage involved. In 1317, Yuri, who was a Prince of Moscow, 29:10 married the sister of the Khan of the Golden Horde, right? 29:15 As one does, you know, in situations like this, right? So he also marries into power, and at that point, 29:22 power passed durably from a more important bigger city called Tver to Moscow.

29:29 And from that point, Moscow is gonna be the center of this entity.

29:35 And it's gonna be the Princes of Moscow who eventually remember, it takes them a while, but who eventually remember to say, 29:40 "We are the rulers of all of Rus'. " The first one, by the way to, as far as we know, 29:46 who says that he's the ruler of all Rus' was Vasily I, who ruled from 1389 to 1399.

29:53 And the evidence we have is there's a coin where he appears, and he says, "I am the ruler of all Rus'. " 30:02 On the other side of that coin, it says, "Long live Sultan Tokhtamysh", 30:07 which reminds you of what the actual political order is. He's the ruler of all of Rus', terrific.

30:13 But what he means by all of Rus' is the bit of Rus' that is under the control of the Golden Horde, right? 30:19 That's under the control of the Mongols. Now all of this, the Mongol connection is very important 30:27 because when the Mongol connection is broken, the basic state form remains.

30:33 There's no clear moment in the history of Muscovy where you can say, "Okay, the Mongols were here, 30:39 they were doing everything, and then they got on their little horses and left. " That's not how it worked at all.

30:44 The way that it worked was that somewhere in the middle of the 15th century, 30:50 Moscow stops paying tribute. But they don't change at that point, they just stop paying tribute.

30:55 It's the same entity, okay? So have a state which is in some way post Rus'.

31:03 Religion, princely family, language, all of that. But it's also in many ways a new start, 31:10 a new start under the Mongols. So it's post post Rus', I would say, and it's post Mongol.

31:18 Let me say a word now about the system, because the system is incredibly interesting.

31:23 First of all, and to give credit where credit is due, the Muscovites knew how to fight.

31:29 And the reason they knew how to fight was that they fought with, and then eventually against the Mongols.

31:36 So the Mongol cavalry techniques, which the Mongols brought with them to Europe and which no one could withstand, 31:42 were then learned by the Muscovites, because of course, the Muscovites were part of the same state. They were fighting on the same side.

31:49 So they were very good at war. And the way that they set up their armies in five parts 31:55 has everything to do with the way that the Mongols set set up their armies. So that's very important to know.

32:01 The Muscovites knew how to fight, that is part of their heritage.

32:06 The heritage that they don't have is all the legal bureaucratic heritage of Kyiv, 32:13 which we've talked about earlier. They're free and clear of that. For better or worse, they're free and clear of that. It's rather the Lithuanians who pick up that heritage, 32:21 which means that the legal tradition in Mongol Rus' is very simple.

32:27 It starts from the idea that the tsar owns everything, 32:32 which is convenient. I mean, it's very convenient if you're the tsar. And okay, and when I say all this, 32:39 don't overdo it, but do record this and think about it when you're thinking about the history of Russia, 32:46 the centuries, as centuries pass. So all the property belongs to the tsar, the ruler.

32:53 You can't really own land. You can own land conditionally. If I'm the tsar, I'm gonna be the tsar, 32:59 'cause I'm the one who's talking. You can own land conditionally until I say that you don't anymore, right? 33:05 So land ownership can be broken at any time. You own land practically, in exchange 33:12 for service to me, the tsar. So everyone who owns land by definition 33:19 is a servant of the tsar, and almost always that's military service. So this is the way the army is set up.

33:25 You get to control land, but in return, you serve in the army.

33:30 That is the fundamental deal. You control land in exchange for military service, 33:36 and I can break that at any point. So you're the fighting class, but you're not exactly a nobility 33:43 in the sense of West European nobilities. There is no legal list, there's no register, 33:48 there's no patent of nobility. There's no beautiful piece of paper which you can produce and say, "I have a better Latin script than you," or whatever.

33:56 You're not really nobles in the sense of being a legal estate. You're really nobles it more or less at my at my pleasure.

34:04 So there aren't property rights, and there aren't really feudal rights either. There's this deal, which is a very effective deal.

34:10 It works very well, a fighting class in exchange for control of land. And of course it works very well, 34:16 so long as we're getting more land all the time. And that's part of the magic of the system. We are going to be getting more land all the time 34:23 for at least a couple of centuries. The state is going to grow spectacularly, 34:29 first west into Europe, then south into formerly Muslim territories, and then west all the way to the Pacific Ocean 34:35 in just a couple of centuries, okay. This is basically an agrarian country though.

34:40 So part of this system is serfdom.

34:45 So you are off fighting wars, but you have a land manager 34:50 and you have serfs on your territory. The Russian peasants live in communes.

34:57 The word for commune, I forgot to write this down, sorry, is (speaking in Russian), which is a very evocative Russian word, 'cause it also means world and peace, 35:03 which is practically a whole universe of meaning, right? So commune, peace and world, all the same word.

35:09 The right that the peasants had in the system, The one right, was to leave and go somewhere else.

35:16 So think about how this works. The peasants are in a commune. The commune is on the land of someone 35:21 who's in this warrior class. The person who's in the warrior class is personally dependent upon the tsar. No way anywhere down in this hierarchy 35:29 does anyone really have any kind of formal rights. The right that the peasants have is to leave, and the story of serfdom is that that right is taken away.

35:38 Beginning from 1497 through let's say through 1649, 35:45 all of these rights are completely taken away. So in 1497, I'm not gonna tell the whole story, 35:51 but in 1497, you're right as peasants, 35:56 okay, I'll be the peasant. My right as a peasant to leave is limited to one day a year.

36:01 Okay, that's a restriction. And then in 1581, that day is taken away, 36:08 so it's now zero days. And then from there, the law escalates in the sense of, the landowner has five years to find you if you run away, 36:16 10 years to find you if you run away, 15 years to find you if you run away, and serfdom is considered to be complete by 1649, 36:23 when the landowner has your whole life to find you after you run away, right? So at that point, there's no, like, 36:29 you can't even go underground for 15 years. You're a serf until you die. So roughly 1% of the population 36:38 belongs to the service class, or the fighting class. Most of the remaining 99% of the population are peasants, 36:45 and most of these peasants are bound to the land. So that's a system which has a logic.

36:50 It's a system which has a logic in which you can make, you will do well if you're in the fighting class, 36:56 if there was more land. If you were a serf, the only thing you can think about is somehow escaping very far away, 37:03 and we're gonna get to that before we're done. So territorial expansion, there is a lot of it.

37:10 Russia, so Muscovy I should say, as soon as it comes into being, 37:16 as soon as it comes into being, it instantly joins the European age of discovery. That's one way to think about it, right? 37:22 So all these other places, like the Netherlands, or Portugal, or Spain, or the Italian states, they've been around for a while, 37:28 they've been doing other things. Muscovy comes into being, and immediately, boom, 37:33 it's expanding territorially on a tremendous scale. The Muscovy of 1533 is six times as big 37:42 as the Muscovy of 1462, and that's just the start. So there are three waves of expansion.

37:49 The first wave of expansion is in Europe, and it's westward. So Moscow is pretty far east, right? 37:58 So these places we're talking about, Moscow, Tver, that was the extreme northeast of Rus'.

38:05 It's very far east from the point of view of Rus' or from Europe. The first move that Moscow makes is to the west, 38:13 controlling in the 1470s, 1480s, 1490s, 38:18 the other cities that are Orthodox, not necessarily from Rus', the other cities that are Orthodox that are to its West.

38:26 The most important of these is Novgorod. And Novgorod is an ancient city.

38:31 Novgorod was a place where many of the rulers of Rus' ruled at some point in their careers.

38:37 It was comparably important to Rus' at some points. It was a very important trading state, 38:42 but also it was a city which was governed by its notables.

38:48 It had an assembly, right? It wasn't a completely vertical situation at all.

38:54 This was true of Novgorod, this was true of Pskov. These places, Novgorod, Pskov, 38:59 cities where there was freedom, at least for what we now call, like the bourgeoisie.

39:05 Cities where there was assembly, right? These cities had bells. This is a sort of charming, or uncharming, 39:10 or depressing detail. They would ring the bell, which would mean the assembly should meet.

39:16 But then symbolically, when these cities were sacked by Moscow and put under Muscovite control, the bells would then be ritually taken away.

39:23 So in 1510, for example, the bell from Pskov was taken down and taken away, 39:29 and everyone knew what that meant. So 1470s, 1480s, 1490s, early 16th century, 39:36 Ryazan falls in 1520. These are cities that are similar culturally, in the sense that they're Orthodox, 39:43 but these are not actually necessarily cities of Rus'. So just to, I'm banging this idea across I know, 39:48 but Rus' kind of becomes whatever you can make it be. People in Novgorod did not think they were part of Rus'.

39:54 But once you conquer it, it then sort of becomes part of Rus', because everything you control, you're going to call Rus'.

40:00 So first chapter of expansion is westward into these cities, 40:05 which were bigger, Novgorod much bigger than Moscow. Bigger, more sophisticated, richer than Moscow.

40:14 But once they are defeated by Moscow, this is very important. Over time their elites are humiliated, crushed, 40:21 dispersed, brought to Moscow, made dependent, and the system that I described in Moscow is then applied.

40:27 It takes generations, but is then applied in these other cities, so that the people who had been notables there become servants of the tsar, 40:35 because there is no other status besides servant of the tsar, which is available. There is resistance, there is attempts to get 40:40 Lithuania to help, all kinds of things happen. But the basic story is the people who had had some kind of status of their own in these cities 40:49 no longer have status of their own under Moscow. The Moscow system has spread west. Second stage is territorial expansion south, 40:59 and this mostly takes place under Ivan IV, who, the one who's known as Ivan the Terrible, 41:05 although his name is really more like threatening, or something like this. But Ivan IV, who rules for a very long time, 1547 to 1584.

41:15 Here again, it's remarkable how just as Moscow comes into being, it is immediately, 41:22 it immediately begins to expand. So Ivan IV, he defeats the Khanate of Kazan in 1552, 41:32 in the years after that. Kazan, it's today the third biggest city, or maybe the, 41:37 I think it's the third biggest city in the Russian Federation today, maybe the fourth. Major city, it's the capital of what's now called Tatarstan.

41:44 It's still Muslim, it's still a Muslim place. Kazan is where, if you can remember all the way back 41:50 to like a couple weeks ago, this is where the Bulgars were. So like the Volga Bulgars convert to Islam, 41:58 they are under the Mongols. They're known as the Khanate of Kazan. They are conquered by Moscow in 1552.

42:06 And so if you're asking yourself, "Why are there Tatars in Russia today? Who are these Tatars?" 42:11 This is who the Tatars are. The Tatars are the people who were in the Khanate of Kazan, who were in Volga, Bulgaria.

42:19 These are the people who are today in Russia south of Moscow. So this defeat has a couple of meanings, 42:25 a couple of very important meanings. The first is Muscovy, you know, basically not long after it's come into existence 42:32 is already an empire, in the sense that it is ruling people of a different religion, a lot of people of a different religion, Muslims.

42:39 Right away, right? So not long after Moscow comes into existence as a state, 42:45 it is already ruling lots and lots of people of a different religion than itself. And that is a durable fact about Moscow, the Russian Empire, 42:54 and for that matter, the Russian Federation today. The second thing, which is very important about this, 42:59 and I'm gonna return to it, is that this opens up, this opens up the Volga River 43:05 and the lands east of the Volga River, which are generally known as Siberia.

43:11 So from European Russia all the way to the Pacific Ocean, beautiful, rich territory, lots of valuable things, 43:18 furs mainly. There are only about 200,000 people living there at the time.

43:25 That is now, once the Khanate of Kazan is destroyed, that's all open.

43:30 The last move of Ivan though is to go back west 43:36 and begin the Livonian wars. Which don't worry, in two lectures 43:41 we're gonna spend a lot of time on the Livonian wars. In the Livonian wars, Ivan is trying 43:47 to pick up the Baltic territories, which were originally laid down by the Teutonic Knights.

43:52 The Teutonic Knights convert to Lutheranism, they change their ways, they build nice towns, they trade.

44:01 And their realm starts to fall apart, Moscow intervenes. Moscow's intervention, and we're gonna have 44:07 much of a lecture about this, generates a Lithuanian and a Polish response.

44:13 This is the 1560s. The Lithuanian and Polish response is to form the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth.

44:21 And as we're gonna see, it's the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth which actually generates the conditions of the thing that we call Ukraine.

44:28 So in a weird way, it was Ivan the Terrible who's responsible for Ukraine, So you know, we've heard how it was, you know, Lenin, 44:34 we've heard how it was Hitler, we've heard how it was the gays and the Jews and the European Union, but you know, 44:39 Ivan the Terrible actually sets off the chain of events. Okay, don't worry, we'll develop all this. But the thing to know here in this context 44:46 is that the Livonian wars don't go well. They go very badly, and Ivan becomes quite paranoid 44:54 and carries out a whole series of seriously weird purges, 44:59 to which one could devote an entire lecture, which involve a private guard called the Oprechniki, 45:06 who go around with black hoods and severed dogs heads or wolf's heads on their horses, 45:15 and carry out purges, murderous purges of the people who are supposed to be traitors, 45:21 a reign of terror all over Muscovy in the 1560s and into the 1570s.

45:28 All these cities, like Novgorod for example, are purged again, and in Novogorod thousands of people are murdered.

45:35 This is the part of Ivan's rule, which is why he's remembered as Ivan the Terrible. This, the paranoia, the purges.

45:42 And in this situation where they're losing, to Poland-Lithuania, and there are, 45:49 these crazy purges are going on. The Crimean Khanate, which still exists, 45:54 Kazan Khanate gone, Crimean Khanate still there. The Crimean Khanate invades and almost takes Moscow in 1571.

46:01 Okay, so at that point Ivan, by the way, sobers up. Sobers up, the purges slow down.

46:07 I didn't mean that in the alcoholic sense. He had many, he had many issues.

46:13 But no, he seems to take stock and the purges slow down and then they make a truce 46:19 with Poland and Lithuania in 1582. But the other thing that happens under Ivan, which is what I'm gonna leave you with, 46:25 is the third direction of expansion, which is actually global.

46:31 So it's eastern, but it's actually global. Getting it all the way to the Pacific Ocean 46:36 is actually global. Getting all the way to the Pacific Ocean, starting around the same time you begin 46:42 trade with England, which was 1554. That was a total accident, by the way. The English were in the Arctic Ocean 46:48 looking for a passage to China, which hint, hint, they didn't find.

46:53 And all of the boats capsized except for one, but the one that didn't found Russia. And being merchants they said, 46:58 "Oh, I bet these guys have something to trade," and of course they did. And one of the things the Russians had to trade was fur, 47:04 which was a hugely important good at the time. And where do you get fur? You get fur in Siberia.

47:09 And so this is actually, is that me? I'm sorry.

47:15 So the global part of this is that Russia is entering the global economy on the Atlantic side 47:20 and on the Pacific side at about the same time. So the way that this works in practice, very quickly, 47:27 is that the territory, once the Kazan Khanate has been defeated, this territory is open.

47:33 The Muscovites move in. The people that they send are called Cossacks, and a Cossack is basically a free person.

47:40 We'll talk more about them. The Cossacks go and they conquer, with the help of European weapons.

47:45 This is also a globalized element of this, and it's why Russia is part of the European age of discovery, if you like, at this point.

47:52 They're using muskets, they're using gun powder weapons, and that's one of the reasons why they're so successful.

47:58 They find lots of people who they can oppress and collect tribute from in the form of beaver 48:04 and black fox, and especially sable pelts, which are enormously profitable at the time.

48:11 They get their way across, they move across all of Siberia. Very quickly, the first expedition to the Pacific 48:19 is in 1639. A man called Semyon Dezhnev crosses the Bering Strait.

48:26 That is, he reaches North America, in 1647. So in a very, very short period of time, 48:34 a huge amount of territory, right? An eighth, a ninth of the Earth's surface is now under control of Moscow.

48:42 And that's not just a matter of territory, it's also a matter of human variety. There are roughly 500 groups in this territory, 48:49 speaking roughly 120 languages. And many of these groups still exist, and you can read about them in the news 48:55 as they're being mobilized to fight in Ukraine. But it's also, as I've tried to stress, 49:00 it's globalization, because Russia is trading the Atlantic and the Pacific at the same time.

49:06 And finally, this is the very last sentence, with China. So one of the limits, one of the few limits that Russia, 49:12 that Moscow reaches is with the Chinese. They reach, they sign a peace treaty with China 49:19 in 1689 in Nerchinsk, which establishes the border between Muscovy and China.

49:26 But more importantly, it establishes terms of trade between Muscovy and China so that all those furs 49:32 can be traded to China for luxury goods. So the route to China, which the English 49:39 were trying to discover, eventually does take place, but by way of land rather than by way of sea.

49:45 So this is the origins of Muscovite power. A new system, an enormous amount of new territory, 49:54 and the success of centralization in all of this. What this has to do with all of Rus', of course, 50:01 you know, is very fuzzy. If I've gotten anything across, I hope it's this, that Rus' has many successors, 50:08 and we wouldn't want deny the connection between Rus' to Galicia-Volhynia, or to Lithuania, or at the state that's founded in Moscow.

50:16 But Moscow also has very much to do with the Mongol period, which lasts for so very much longer there than elsewhere.

50:24 And it has very much to do with the fact that its first moves when it comes into existence, are territorial expansion to Europe, but mostly into Asia.

50:33 Okay, thank you very much. (bright chiming music)

back to TOC


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Lecture 8 Early Jews of Modern Ukraine

0:00 (mysterious music) 0:13 - All right, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Maksimas Milta. I am a graduate student 0:18 at European and Russian Studies program here at Yale, and also one of the teaching fellows for this class, 0:24 and as the syllabus says, today's lecture is focused on the history of Jews in Ukraine, 0:30 and we learned earlier that Jews are among those people who lived the longest in the territory of modern-day Ukraine, 0:37 and hence, the topic of today, and the lecture will be today delivered by our special guest, Professor Glenn Dynner.

0:45 Glenn Dynner is the Carl and Dorothy Bennett Professor of Judaic Studies and director of Bennett Center at Fairfield University.

0:52 Since 2014, he has served as a professor of religion and chair of religion department at Sarah Lawrence College.

1:00 Professor Dynner holds a PhD from Brandeis University in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, 1:06 and his scholarship focuses mostly on Eastern European Jewry, and more specifically, 1:11 on the social history of Hasidism and Haskalah, also known as Jewish Enlightenment.

1:17 He also works on the topics of Polish Jewish relations, Jewish economic history, and popular religion.

1:25 Professor Dynner is the author of two award-winning books. One of them is called "Men of Silk: 1:30 "The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society," and the other one is called "Yankel's Tavern: 1:36 "Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland. " Currently, Professor Dynner works on the book 1:41 titled "The Light of Learning: "The Hasidic Revival in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust. " 1:47 For those of you who consider an academic career in your future, I'd like to emphasize the fact that Professor Dynner is also a coeditor of "Shofar," 1:56 a journal of interdisciplinary Jewish studies, and he also serves on the editorial boards 2:01 of "POLIN" and "East European Jewish Affairs" journals. He's a member of several 2:07 Jewish studies related advisory and academic boards, including YIVO, and also, an academic advisory board 2:14 of the Fortunoff Archive here at Yale. Professor Dynner, welcome to Yale, and thank you for joining us.

2:19 - Okay, thanks, Max. (audience clapping) Thank you.

2:25 Yeah, it's great to be here. I guess you figured out I'm not Timothy Snyder, and I teach at Fairfield, 2:32 which is down the highway a little bit, and I missed my exit, and somehow I wind up here, which is a great honor, 2:40 so I'm gonna be talking a little bit about the Jews of Ukraine up to the year 1648. I understand you guys came up 2:46 to the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, so I'm gonna go a little bit beyond that because honestly, not a whole lot is known 2:53 about the Jewish communities in this part of Eastern Europe before then, and so we're gonna go through all this, 2:59 and we're gonna come up to 1648. I assume, to this point, you've really been learning 3:08 about the story of colonizers and the colonized. Colonizers being Lithuanians, 3:15 and then Poles, which you're just starting to get into, and the colonized being Ukrainians in this part.

3:22 What I would like to talk about today is a third very prominent group, 3:27 and that's the Jewish community, which is neither one of these things, right? The Jews constitute a diaspora group, 3:35 meaning they're without a homeland, so to speak. They're a guest, 3:41 and they have to somehow mediate between these colonizers and the colonized.

3:49 There's certain advantages to being a diaspora group, if you think about it.

3:54 They have a pretty far-flung social and mercantile network.

4:02 They speak their own language and are able to cultivate, you know, an elite culture 4:09 or subculture in these parts, and, you know, 4:16 it's a situation of where they're able to obtain economic niches and have a great deal of mobility.

4:23 Those things are true. However, it's also a situation of physical vulnerability.

4:29 The Jews are members of a, well, ostensibly problematic religion, 4:36 and, you know, as a result of this, they really wind up serving the more powerful groups, 4:43 meaning the Lithuanian and the Polish colonizers, and this works out for a while 4:51 until they really pay a horrible price for this, you know, because Ukrainians 4:56 are gonna rise up under Chmielnicki, and Chmielnicki is an anticolonial hero 5:03 from a Ukrainian perspective, but from a Jewish perspective, after a series of horrific massacres, 5:10 you know, Chmielnicki, for them, is a vicious persecutor, 5:15 and this is kind of the price that they pay. I wanna start with the bad news 5:24 and then move on to better news. The bad news is Jews, as you probably figured out, 5:30 are a pariah group, as some of the things I mentioned indicate, and that has very deep roots here.

5:39 It goes all the way back, in fact, to early church fathers. The most benign, 5:44 and, I would say, the formula that's basically adopted throughout most of real everyday life 5:52 is probably that one that's attributable to Augustine, okay? 5:57 And we'll go into that in a minute, but first, I just want to address this image, 6:03 which, if you can make it out, is really a kind of image of ambivalence 6:08 because over here on this side you have Jewish merchants, traders.

6:15 They don't look very prosperous. On the other side, you have peasants in their holiday garb, 6:22 and the painter is called (indistinct), who would paint Polish and Ukrainian kind of everyday life, 6:29 landscapes, and depict sort of scenes of everyday life.

6:35 They're together. They're gathered in front of a tavern, but you can tell they're pretty apart, right? 6:42 They're divided by their dress. They're divided by their language.

6:48 You know, Jews are speaking Yiddish, predominantly, and the peasants have their own local dialect.

6:55 It's gonna be a Slavic language, and there's little kind of communication between them.

7:01 The Jews are also involved in very different activity, you know, as traders, as petty merchants, 7:07 compared to the peasants who, on their holiday are dancing, and they're enjoying themselves, probably drinking, 7:13 and inside, if we went in there, we would probably see a Jewish tavernkeeper.

7:19 Jews leased taverns and distilleries from the nobility. The vast majority of taverns and distilleries 7:25 throughout these regions were actually run by Jews, and you really have sort of a, I would say, 7:33 an interaction, but not an integration, right? An interaction within very prescribed social categories.

7:43 You can call it a symbiosis because Jews are providing essential services, 7:48 the peasants providing essential services to them, but, of course, it can also develop into real animosity, 7:54 misunderstanding, resentment, and outright violence, so that's why I would call it a situation of ambivalence.

8:03 Where does the pariah status come from? If we go back to Augustine, I'd like to look at this text very closely 8:11 because it looks like anti-Semitism, but it's not really intended to be so.

8:18 This is from his "Contra Faustum": "It is not, as you say, not by bodily death 8:23 "shall the ungodly race of carnal Jews perish," and what he's basically saying is you can't kill Jews.

8:32 You know, they may have rejected Christ, but they live among us, and they're not to be harmed bodily, 8:37 and this is in a context of forced conversions at this time period, 8:43 you know, outright violence and death, and so he's really actually proscribing this.

8:49 He's forbidding this kind of thing. "For whoever destroys them in this way, 8:54 "shall suffer sevenfold vengeance," that is, shall bring upon himself the sevenfold penalty 9:02 under which the Jews lie for the crucifixion of Christ, and so he is blaming Jews for the death of Christ, 9:09 and deicide, or at least the murder of the human embodiment of God, is a pretty heavy penalty, 9:17 so to the end of the seven days of time, the continued preservation of the Jews 9:22 will be proof to believing Christians of the subjection merited 9:28 by those who, in the pride of their kingdom, put the Lord to death, 9:33 and here is perhaps the most dangerous formula of all because what it's basically saying is 9:40 Jews are to be kept around in a state of misery, right? As witness to what happens when you reject Christ, 9:48 but they're to be kept around. Now, the reason why I consider this so dangerous is 9:53 what happens when Jews don't fulfill that role of misery, of subjection? 9:59 What happens then? What happens when they're perceived as maybe violating that hierarchy, 10:05 even subverting that hierarchy? And, of course, at the heart of anti-Semitism is the claim 10:12 of excessive Jewish power, influence, and wealth, and all these things come into play, 10:18 so what I'm asking is is this formula a license to kill 10:25 when that, the Jewish part of the deal is not held up, right? The subjection or the misery, 10:33 and, you know, I think that kind of explains the trajectory that we're gonna follow.

10:38 Most of the time, most of the time, Jews are gonna lead a relatively prosperous and stable existence, 10:46 but then there are these episodes, extremely violent devastating episodes, today, what we would call genocide in some cases, you know, 10:55 and, you know, are Jews even aware of this bargain? Are they aware of this formula? It seems they are, to an extent, 11:02 because rabbinical leaders will actually forbid 11:08 ostentatious display like jewelry and fancy clothing and that kind of a thing, and they'll try very hard, 11:14 but it's very hard to control such things also. That being said, so we've got this kind of, 11:20 I would say, dangerous balancing act, you know, and it's like a collective balancing act 11:27 and this collective sense of ambivalence. That being said, 11:34 most of the Jews of the world are going to move to this part of the world, 11:40 not all the Ukraine. It's gonna be, also, you know, the Polish kingdom and other lands in Eastern Europe, 11:48 but it's pretty incredible.

75% of the world's Jewish population is going to reside in Eastern Europe by the 19th century, 11:58 and there's a reason for that. It can't be that horrible if they're living there. It certainly can't be that deadly.

12:04 The reason for that is that stability and relative prosperity.

12:10 They have economic autonomy. They're not allowed to own land, 12:15 yet that can also be, I suppose, an advantage 12:21 because they move into somewhat more lucrative pursuits like trade, crafts, moneylending, 12:28 and most importantly all, as time develops, leaseholding from the nobility. They will lease pretty much all 12:35 of the nonagricultural enterprises of the nobles.

12:40 Political autonomy. We're gonna see how they develop virtually self-government.

12:46 Now, later on, anti-Semitic claims are gonna be that they constitute a state within a state.

12:51 I think that goes way too far. You know, it's all contingent on the Polish landowners who own the vast majority of land in these areas 13:00 and linguistic autonomy. The vernacular everyday language is Yiddish, 13:06 a combination of German and Hebrew with some Slavic elements thrown in, 13:11 and then Hebrew, which functions a lot like Latin as an elite clerical language, a literary language, 13:18 one that's not really spoken until the rise of Zionism.

13:26 Now, we can go way back to the origins of Jewish presence 13:33 in what becomes the Ukraine, but historians will often start 13:40 with the Khazar kingdom, and it's kind of exciting to historians to think that there was a Jewish kingdom.

13:47 Supposedly, the king converted to Judaism. There's a classic called the "Kuzari," 13:52 which tells this story how the king had a representative from the Christians and the Jews and the Muslims, 13:58 and he chose Judaism, and it's exciting because you thought that it was only ancient Israel.

14:03 That was the last time that you had autonomy, and suddenly, we find we have this Jewish kingdom, 14:08 and there are little bits of evidence here and there that such a Jewish kingdom existed, 14:14 letters, mentionings in chronicles and that kind of a thing.

14:21 It's kind of a mess because there are historians who accept this 14:26 and who devote their whole careers to writing about this, and then there are historians who completely deny it, 14:32 who think this whole thing was a myth and that all these sources are forged. Your reading was Dan Shapiro's article.

14:38 It's probably the best article we have on the origins of, you know, Jewish presence in the Ukrainian lands.

14:46 He kind of, he contradicts himself. He kind of does both. On the first page you'll notice he says, 14:51 "There was no Jewish elite that converted," you know, "in the Khazar kingdom," and then, three three pages later, he's quoting it.

14:59 He's citing it. He's mentioning it, and if you look at the footnote, he says that Pritzak's book on this, 15:04 which goes through a lot of these sources, is complete nonsense, and I could write a whole book, you know, 15:10 that contains all the mistakes in this work, and then, those three pages later, he's quoting Pritzak, 15:16 so, you know, we're all over the place with this, and I think part of the problem is it's been politicized 15:23 because if you are an anti-Zionist, it becomes very interesting, 15:28 the possibility that actually Jews didn't originate in, you know, ancient Israel. They originated in Khazaria, 15:35 and this is something that the early Zionists are actually having to contend with, and so really, every anti-Zionist 15:42 gets very excited about this possibility, and, of course, every Zionist historian 15:47 is very interested in refuting even the existence of a Jewish presence in this kingdom, so Shaul Stampfer recently published an article 15:55 in which he went through all these sources and showed they were all complete fabrications and nonsense, and that's where we are, 16:01 so I can't say anything for sure about the Khazar kingdom other than, I don't know, maybe where there's smoke there's fire.

16:08 That may be the best that we can do. There might have been some indication of a Jewish presence there among certain elites, 16:14 but we're on more solid ground when we get into Kyivan Rus, 16:21 and here's a map. I watched a few of Professor Snyder's YouTube videos, 16:27 and I noticed he didn't use a lot of maps, so here's a good opportunity to see what it looks like.

16:33 Anybody know what the Golden Horde is? Yeah, what's the Golden, well, not asking the grad students going- 16:38 - Mongols. - What? - The Mongols. - Mongols, right? Do, you know, why it's called the Golden Horde? Their battle tents were gold, 16:45 and so that's how they got this name, and I don't think it's pejorative, but I'm not 100% sure, 16:50 so that's the Mongols over there, and we have Jewish presence is really on an axis, 16:55 kind of a diagonal axis running through Kyiv, and I looked at a map of trade routes, 17:01 and sure enough, it's towns along a trade route leading into Hungary, and that's how the Jewish presence is determined there.

17:09 It's an unstable existence, you know, and it's not very permanent, 17:16 and you find little tiny mentionings here and there. It's not a sizeable Jewish presence there at all.

17:24 Where it's gonna get much bigger is when the Grand Duchy of Lithuania comes into the picture 17:31 and effectively colonizes these areas. Now, the Jews are temporarily expelled.

17:37 Some link it to the expulsion of Jews from Spain. I guess it was a copycat expulsion.

17:44 That's what you read sometimes, but then, when he changes his mind a few years later, it's revoked under the same monarch, 17:53 and now you have approximately 4,000 Jews in 24 Ukrainian towns.

17:58 That doesn't sound like a whole lot. It's a frontier kind of existence where we find evidence of Jews 18:06 actually taking part in the defense of these towns, which are under a lot of pressure from Tatars, especially.

18:13 They're learning to shoot. They're doing even military exercises. It's not your typical image 18:20 of East European Jews, so it's kind of interesting, but they do manage to survive, 18:25 and it becomes safer and safer as the Grand Duchy of Lithuania really sort of concretizes its presence there, 18:33 and then you start to have more Jews moving in, and that's where we are, really, 18:41 with our knowledge about these areas. I mean, there's not a whole lot more, and we're kind of just about up to the point 18:48 where you are in the... I think we're past the point that you are chronologically, so now we're gonna go beyond that a little bit 18:54 for the next 100 years or so, and this is where Poland, 19:01 Crown Poland is gonna come into the picture, and I really call this colonization full-fledged 19:07 because it is kind of a big land grab. You know, you have Polish nobles, petty nobles, 19:14 magnates, these large landholders, coming in and just grabbing up as much territory 19:20 as they possibly can. It's the result of the actual agreement called the Union of Lublin 19:28 whereby the threat of Russia is such that Lithuania kind of accedes to this agreement, 19:37 which seems to really benefit the Poles. It's almost like a protection agreement, it seems like, 19:42 and you'll probably learn a lot more about it, but for our purposes today, those Polish nobles are going to bring Jews in 19:50 to settle their towns and to run their enterprises, and this is what it looks like, 19:57 so the dark gold parts are what the Grand Duchy of Lithuania is, 20:04 and these other parts are Poland, and this comes to be known as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 20:11 and by 1648, you go from 4,000 to 40,000 Jews 20:16 living in 115 Ukrainian towns, and, you know, that colonizing activity 20:24 is very good for the Jews because they have these economic possibilities.

20:32 They're still not allowed to own land, but what they do is 20:38 they begin leasing the various enterprises. Now, I'm gonna put a question to you.

20:45 Why is leaseholding, like, leasing a tavern or a mill, 20:51 better, from the Jewish perspective, than owning it? And I'll give you a big hint.

20:57 They're leasing it from the all-powerful nobility. Any ideas why it's better to lease than to own? 21:06 Yeah. - You have the protection of the nobles. - You got it right away. It's you have the protection the nobles.

21:12 Nobody is going to burn down a tavern if it belongs to the noblemen, but as, I mentioned before, you know, 21:18 Jews are in a very physically vulnerable situation, so this leaseholding arrangement is actually very beneficial to Jews 21:27 because they get noble protection, at least from that standpoint. They're also being taxed pretty mercilessly, 21:34 and the nobles don't want their best taxpayers to be, you know, physically assaulted either, 21:40 so it's not the most stable situation, but it's one of, it's good enough.

21:47 You know, they have Polish protection. Now, what's in it for the nobility? Why Jews? And I'll give you another hint.

21:53 It's not because they like Jews. In fact, it's very much the opposite, so why would you invite Jews in 22:00 to lease your various enterprises? Any ideas? 22:09 Yeah? - Maybe so you can, like, keep your eye on them, make sure that they're not doing anything you don't want them to be doing.

22:14 - For sure. I mean, there's a lot of control involved as well, but okay, yeah? 22:20 - Wasn't moneylending sort of like unbelief? - Okay, good, so it's not quite true.

22:26 You know, you do have actual banks, at a certain point, the nobles can borrow from, 22:33 but there are a lot of hoops to jump through, and Jews represent easy credit, 22:39 you know, and you're in a socially superior position 22:44 to your creditor, so that becomes very tempting, and Jews are involved very much in moneylending, 22:51 and it's funny because what I base a lot of this on is an article, a series of articles by Shmuel Ettinger.

22:59 They're in Hebrew, so most of you wouldn't have access to them, but they're the most, I would say, full information about this time period and this place, 23:07 and he spends a lot of pages trying to argue that Jews really weren't that involved in moneylending, 23:13 but then he contradicts himself too. I think moneylending has a bad image, but the fact of the matter is 23:18 people needed credit, you know, and this is where they could get it, for the most part, so yes, moneylending's a big part of it.

23:25 Anything else about Jews that makes them attractive as leaseholders? Yeah? - Does it have something to do with the fact that 23:32 because they're just, they can't enter other industries or they can't own land, then there's guarantee that they'll serve that role or that- 23:40 - Very much so. I would call it a captive service sector. You know, they don't have a lot of options.

23:47 Yeah. - Because they're not necessarily paying a tithe to the church, maybe they're (indistinct) be a good source of tax revenue.

23:55 Is that- - Okay, so that's a complicated question. Yes, they're great source of tax revenue, but believe me, they're paying more taxes than anybody.

24:02 They're paying taxes to the crown, and we'll go into that a little bit. They don't pay tithe to the church.

24:08 That's actually an interesting point that I haven't thought about a lot, so that's a great point, but they're paying so many other ways, 24:14 including to their own communities, and I'm not, it probably offsets, but absolutely.

24:20 Now, one thing nobody thought of yet is politics.

24:25 No matter how wealthy your Jewish leaseholder is going to become, 24:31 and some of them really do quite well by this system, they're never gonna be a political threat to you, okay? 24:38 And I can add other things, business acumen, you know, historically involved in trade.

24:45 Where they came from was Western and Central Europe, 24:50 especially the German- and Czech-speaking lands, and in those areas, they worked as merchants a lot of the time 24:59 until they were pushed out by the townspeople. They're also being pushed out 25:04 of parts of Poland proper, we could call it, Crown Poland, by the same Christian townspeople, and they're moving.

25:13 They're being pushed into these areas, so it's actually, 25:18 it's a great boon to the Jews who are losing opportunities in one place to be able to come to another place, 25:24 but, of course, this is all a colonial scheme, so it's volatile. It's dangerous, you know.

25:30 Jews are running these leases, but, you know, they're not very popular with the peasants 25:38 who are now being enserfed, and this is like a second serfdom, it's called, and so there we have 25:44 Augustine's rule being violated because they're in a position of superiority 25:50 to the surrounding peasants by running these taverns and mills and tolls and so on.

25:58 It becomes a real problem. It becomes intolerable. Now, this is the reason they're not allowed to own land 26:05 because if they own land, they're gonna be lording it directly over peasants who are farmers, essentially, and that's intolerable.

26:12 It just, the optics are too bad, but to run a tavern and a mill and so on, that's seen as okay 26:18 except from the perspective of the peasants, who really experience this in a negative way, obviously, 26:27 and, you know, we have a volatile system, but it's held in place 26:33 as long as the Polish nobility is in power, 26:40 and here's the thing. The nobility doesn't want the headache of collecting taxes directly from these Jews.

26:50 Plus, they can't be trusted to, you know, pay their taxes, and they all seem to have the same name, 26:55 like Yitzchak ben Moshe and so on. You know, there's like 17 of them in one town, and so what they do is they entrust the Jewish communities, 27:04 first Jewish tax collectors, specifically, and then the kahals, which is the Jewish self-government, 27:10 to collect the taxes for them, and in the process, they're giving the kahal...

27:17 I guess you'd compare it to a municipality. They're giving the kahals complete autonomy, almost, 27:24 to run daily affairs, to manage the garbage collection and keep the streets clean 27:32 and try to make sure people don't encroach on each other's leases, and they manage the educational system, 27:41 and they start to develop these extensive instruments of autonomy 27:46 to the point where when there are disputes between communities, they develop regional councils, 27:53 and then, a real game changer is when the crown basically says, 27:58 "Okay, we just want a lump sum from you," you know? "Forget about the individual communities collecting taxes.

28:04 "Give us one lump sum," and then the Grand Duchy of Lithuania says the same thing, 28:10 and that's when developing out of that is the Council of Four Lands, which is kind of like functioning 28:16 as not just a supreme IRS, a supreme tax collector, but a supreme court 28:22 that's adjudicating disputes between communities, that deals with, really, you call them national problems, 28:29 a blood libel accusation, a ritual murder accusation, the accusation that Jews have killed a Christian child 28:35 and used their blood for their, used the blood for their rituals, which never happened, I should emphasize, 28:41 but it was kind of like the rumor that refused to go away because it symbolically reenacts the crucifixion, 28:48 and it has a lot of resonance that way, so, you know, this Council of Four Lands 28:54 would have somebody intervene and try to prevent, you know, 28:59 this thing from getting out of control. They would negotiate the taxes, and they would serve as a supreme court in secular matters.

29:08 Now, each kahal also had a rabbinical court, so the entire Jewish community is known as the kehila.

29:15 It's run by the kahal, but they also have rabbis who are sort of separate from everything.

29:22 That Council of Four Lands is mainly merchants, is mainly wealthy merchants and leaseholders, okay? 29:30 The rabbis meet separately, and they tend to judge religious matters, which makes a lot of sense 29:36 until you try to figure out what a religious matter is. It's not so clear.

29:41 Murder seems to be a religious matter. Theft, kind of, but it's also a business matter, 29:47 so there's a lot of, like, jurisdictional disputes going on between rabbinical courts and lay courts, 29:52 but by and large, you know, when things are functioning smoothly, they support each other, and there's a actual power 30:01 to excommunicate members that's never really used, but the threat of excommunication, called the herem, 30:07 is enough to scare people into obeying the authority of these various courts 30:13 because being excommunicated would really be truly horrible. You know, you would really have no place to go 30:19 in Christian society, in Jewish society, and it's like social death, and a really devastating condition to be in.

30:27 It's never used until the rise of the false messianic movement of Shabbetai Tzvi, which happens later on.

30:34 We'll maybe touch upon at the very end. Now, a shtadlan is a very important function.

30:40 The shtadlan is a lobbyist, and every community would have one. He speaks the language of the land.

30:47 He knows the laws really well. He's charming and has somewhat of a secular education, 30:54 so a lot of times doctors would serve this purpose, and he basically is the go-between.

31:00 You know, he'll talk to the authorities when something goes wrong, and this is kind of like, you know, Jewish foreign policy, you could call it.

31:05 You know, this is how they defend their communities, through lobbying, yes, through giving of bribes.

31:12 I mean, this was actually totally on the books, out in the open. It was a normal way of doing business.

31:17 You bribed the secular officials to protect your community, and no one seemed to see anything wrong with that.

31:27 Now, with this extensive autonomy, really, the most extensive autonomy since antiquity, 31:33 you also have the development of vibrant religious life and the wooden synagogues.

31:39 Here's one in Khodoriv in the Ukrainian territories. They can develop very ornate, beautiful artwork 31:48 even though they're wooden synagogues, which suggests less wealth. Beautiful ceiling paintings.

31:54 Down in the corner there, I put an image of this guy, who's chained to the synagogue wall outside 32:03 by his neck. Any idea what he did wrong? He broke the Sabbath, 32:11 so this is actually called the kuna, and I put it there to remind us not to get too nostalgic 32:17 about this flourishing religious life 'cause there's a lot of religious compulsion involved too.

32:22 You know, keeping the Sabbath was not a choice, at least not throughout this period of time, 32:28 and if you go to the town of Czestochowa in Poland, you can actually see one of these on the synagogue wall. It's pretty interesting.

32:34 Most people could pay a fine and get out of it, you know, and they would prefer to pay the fine than be publicly humiliated in this way, 32:40 but it was there. Now, Jews are able to move into cities, 32:46 but again, you come into direct conflict with the Christian townspeople, 32:51 and economics is something that's perceived 32:56 in an ethnic way, right? There are groups against groups, Christians against Jews, 33:03 and the Christians manage to exact a lot of money and payment from Jewish merchants, 33:08 so it becomes very expensive to do business in cities, and that's where your leaseholding comes in, 33:15 and the official word for lease is arenda. You may see it in your readings.

33:20 The arenda can be a lease on everything we've talked about and some things we didn't talk about: tolls on roads, ponds.

33:28 You can lease the tax, and then you get to keep anything over the amount that you collect.

33:34 You can lease entire villages, taverns, and distilleries. This is an absolute boon 33:41 to Jews, economically, but let's just say it's not good to be a serf 33:47 in this situation, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth comes to be known, as I don't know if you've heard this before, 33:54 heaven for the nobles, paradise for the Jews, and hell for the serfs. The reason is this is an arrangement 34:00 that is not only economically debilitating for the serfs who have to continually work, 34:07 you know, the nobleman's land for free along with whatever land they're able to work of their own, which is very small.

34:13 They have to, you know, pay the Jewish tavernkeeper.

34:19 They have to pay the Jewish miller. There are even rumors that Jews lease the churches 34:26 and held keys to the churches, which would be really humiliating, but some historians have said that's actually not the case, 34:32 but that is something that made its way up through Ukrainian lore is that you even had to beg to use your own church, 34:38 you know, so it's a really humiliating situation, whether that last thing is true or not, and that's the reason for the volatility, 34:46 but nobody's going to attack the Jewish leaseholder for the simple reason 34:51 that he's under the protection of the nobleman. Nobles own the vast majority of land.

34:57 They're increasingly more powerful than the king, who becomes an elected monarch, 35:03 and they really, I would say, they own their own towns, 35:08 and those are increasingly attractive to Jews to settle in. It's a system of patronage, really.

35:18 Now, inside the tavern, you have that integration that I was talking about, 35:25 but it's really more of an interaction, and here you have Jewish musicians, 35:31 non-Jews who are dancing, and you have the Jewish tavernkeepers over on that side, 35:37 and notice that the wife of the tavernkeeper 35:43 is pouring the liquor. I'm not sure whose child that is in the corner there, but children were very much present 35:49 in these taverns as well. This was where people would spend their leisure time. These were also, effectively, news venues, 35:58 entertainment venues, banks, country stores, especially in the smaller, 36:03 you know, rural areas or small towns. They were the hub of everything, 36:09 competing, really, with the church, you know, because after the wedding, you would, you know, proceed from the church to the tavern, 36:16 where you'd be met by the tavernkeeper, who's kind of like the antipriest, but what I want to emphasize is gender 36:22 because women worked in the society, in Jewish society, and it was expected.

36:29 It wasn't something that women fought for as a right. It was absolutely expected. Your value on the marriage market was determined 36:36 by what business promise you could bring to the marriage. That would often be linguistic, 36:43 like, how well you speak Polish or Ukrainian or whatever, how well you know arithmetic, 36:48 and these marriages were really business partnerships. Usually, the husband would be dealing with the suppliers.

36:56 He might drive a taxi, you know, a horse and cart during the week. The woman would be, the wife would be serving the customers, 37:05 and it's a pretty rough lifestyle, but why that's important is 37:10 the Jewish familial unit presents a kind of double-barrel threat economically 37:16 because both the husband and wife are working, and this is absolutely the norm.

37:22 Occasionally, you have the situation where an extremely learned and accomplished rabbi 37:30 would study all day long and the wife would work in the marketplace or in the tavern, whatever, 37:35 but that was a pretty rare occurrence, okay.

37:42 Now, one arenda dispute that I went through pretty extensively 37:48 illustrates the problem with authority, the way things stand, and the importance of the development 37:53 of the Council of Four Lands, that supreme court. I just wanna go through this really quickly because what happens in this situation of leases, 38:02 and this is probably a tavern that's being leased, is competition between Jews, okay? 38:08 In this case, Simeon leases a liquor arenda. Reuben attempts to purchase it for the next three years 38:15 before his term is up, so he's the encroacher, and then, Simeon goes and negotiates 38:22 with the local nobleman, successfully, who gives it to him. Reuben, in this case, goes all the way to the queen 38:28 and gets her scribe to support his side, and he tells the town council to award the lease to Reuben.

38:35 The towns council agree, town council agrees, but for a bribe. Reuben pays the bribe.

38:40 Simeon bribes the nobleman, so lots of bribes going on here, and offers an even higher price, 38:47 and the nobleman orders the town council to withdraw it from Reuben, and then the queen steps in and supports Reuben, 38:54 so you have, like, these conflicting secular authorities that get involved, which leads me to think it's much more than a tavern.

39:01 It could be, you know, an entire right to distill, which is called (speaks in foreign language), but it's something that is pretty lucrative, 39:08 so they actually don't stop with the authorities, not even the queen. They now go to the rabbis, 39:13 and the rabbis are extremely prominent in this society, which is a, you know, community of believers.

39:20 Some of these rabbis have their own yeshivas, these Talmudic academies, where they teach the Talmud all day long, 39:29 but when disputes occur that have to do with some aspect of Jewish law, halakha, 39:37 they will often send questions to the most prominent rabbis, and this is what happens in this case, 39:43 so Rabbi Isaac Ben Bezalel of Volodymyr, 39:49 he argues in favor of Simeon, and he quotes a medieval German source 39:55 to basically say, "Do not encroach," okay? So he's basically anti-Reuben, anti-encroachment, 40:05 but then they go to a more prominent rabbi, Isaac Luria, who's young, but he's kind of a rising star, 40:13 and he actually rules in favor of Reuben and says that the laws of encroachment don't apply 40:20 'cause this is only a potential purchase, right? The lease term hadn't begun yet, so it's a potential, 40:27 it's like the next three years of the term, and he says, "It's known in the entire kingdom 40:32 "that we buy the right to farm taxes and liquor "and other rights in the town with an arenda contract," 40:37 and they're also accustomed to sell the arenda before the term for the first holder of the arenda expires, 40:44 and they sell it to a second person, so Reuben's okay. He's allowed to encroach, okay? 40:49 Now, Luria's young. He may be brilliant and a rising star, but he's young, so he sends it to an older rabbinic authority 40:57 for a kind of second opinion, just to make sure, 41:03 and this guy, his name is Rabbi Joseph Katz, and he rules, actually, against him 41:10 and rules in favor of Simeon, so you see it's a whole mess. It's a jurisdictional nightmare, 41:16 and he argues that the laws of encroachment do apply to ownerless property, 41:22 and only when there's a complete public agreement can that law be abrogated, 41:28 and we don't know how it's resolved, but we do know that about 50 years later, 41:33 the Council of Four Lands finally issues a ruling banning any Jew from bidding on an arenda 41:41 that's held by a fellow Jew, and then, the Lithuanian Council steps in and agrees.

41:47 They reiterate the ban, and they give a reason: Competitive bidding causes damage to the Jewish community 41:54 by raising the costs of leasing the arenda, so now, with the Council of Four Lands, which began as, basically, 42:00 a tax collecting, you know, institution, we actually have it regulating daily life and economic law, 42:09 and things start getting more regulated, more normal, and more in favor 42:16 of Jewish business practices, 42:21 but there's a downside to all this liquor sales. It may be lucrative, and that's why people are fighting about it.

42:28 Here's a much later depiction. You see a pretty satanic-looking Jewish tavernkeeper 42:34 who's looking on unconcerned as the peasants are drunk and passed out, 42:39 and, you know, this is a real problem, you know, and people begin to blame peasant drunkenness on Jews, 42:47 and they accuse the Jewish tavernkeeper of, you know, driving up his drinking debts 42:52 and taking advantage of the peasantry, and it causes a lot of social instability as a result.

43:01 Now, on the positive side of things, we know from rabbinic takkanot 43:07 that non-Jews were also part of this thing and profiting from these arendas on liquor 43:14 because you can't keep a tavern running on the Sabbath if you're Jewish 43:19 or on holidays, like we just had the holiday of Rosh Hashanah. It's not lawful, so what do they do? 43:27 They have local Christians helping them to run the taverns on those days, 43:35 and actually, it becomes a formal partnership because that's legally, halakh-ically, what you have to do, 43:40 and so, really, you see a surprising amount of cooperation 43:46 and, you know, economic integration going on at the local level where, if you really wanna spell it out, 43:52 Christians are helping Jews to get around their own Sabbath restrictions 43:58 so that they can remain profitable and they're also making, you know, a fair amount of money doing so, 44:04 so there's a fair amount of cooperation going on. There are rabbis who are against this practice, 44:10 strenuously against it, and Rabbi Betzalel Darshan of Przemysl 44:16 blames the 1648 massacres on this practice itself.

44:23 How much time is left? - About 10 minutes. - 10 minutes, good, okay. (student speaks faintly) Six minutes, okay, 44:29 so yeah, in very emotional language, "The blood of fathers and sons, 44:35 "the blood of pious men and children, or women, "the blood of saintly men and women 44:40 "and the blood of baby boys and girls "still suckling at their mother's breasts "who had never sinned or committed," sorry, "any crime, 44:47 "and the blood of rabbis and their disciples "was spilled like water. " This is the 1648 uprising, 44:55 and Chmielnicki massacre of the Jewish communities he's talking about. "God is righteous. " 45:00 We can't blame God for this, and notice he's not gonna blame the Cossacks either. He's not gonna blame Chmielnicki.

45:07 "It is we who are wicked "because of our repeated desecrations of the Sabbath.

45:12 "A select group, "the majority of villagers who undertake arendas, 45:18 "buy and sell on the Sabbath through the agency of villagers "all in a deceitful manner. " 45:24 They also order their gentile servants to "do such and such work, "and they sit and teach them "how to repair what has spoiled the job. " 45:31 This has all happening on the Sabbath, and, of course, God has punished the entire Jewish community for this.

45:38 "Oy for my eyes, which saw this many times, "and I had no way of protesting. " Then he goes on, kind of like a Jewish mother.

45:45 "Now, you see what happens, and maybe you'll listen to me," and turns out nobody listens to him 45:50 because this practice continues. It's the only way of running a lucrative tavern and distillery.

45:56 In fact, rabbis get involved in writing contracts up where they form fictitious partnerships, 46:02 and the practice continues, but let me go back to that Chmielnicki uprising because it's absolutely devastating, 46:11 and yet I'm not gonna condone massacres, obviously, but it's understandable 46:17 the position of Cossacks and Ukrainians. Now, who are Cossacks? They're essentially peasants who resist serfdom.

46:26 They obtain horses and weaponry. They often will ride down in the Zaporozhian district 46:32 and make, carry out raids on the Ottoman territories, and the Polish army tries to use them 46:40 and register them in the Polish army, but then they try to cut down their numbers, and there a series of Cossacks revolts 46:47 against the Polish government, Polish Lithuanian government, and in 1648, 46:53 there's a major uprising led by Chmielnicki, who's a semi-polonized Ukrainian nobleman 47:03 who's been spurned. He fell in love with a daughter of very powerful wealthy Polish nobleman 47:10 who threw him into jail, and he broke out and rode down and fomented rebellion, and the rebellion...

47:17 Look, I mean, if they could reach the Polish nobility, they probably would've tried, 47:24 but you can't reach them. They're too mobile. They're too powerful, and so who do they attack? 47:30 The perceived agents of the Polish nobility, namely, the Jewish leaseholders 47:35 and other Jews in their midst, and Jews are massacred in huge numbers 47:41 and in very sadistic manners. I'm not gonna read because it's absolutely horrific, 47:47 and you wonder if there's like a little bit of imagination going on in these chronicles. This is the famous one by Nathan of Hanover, 47:54 but let's just say it's gruesome, and a colleague of mine, Adam Teller, 48:00 has found a Polish version of this that seems to pretty much verify that this kind of thing was happening.

48:07 It's a furious massacre, and if the Jewish population pre-1648 was 40,000, 48:15 only about 21,000 seemed to survive. Many, 8,000, become refugees 48:22 and are wandering across Europe.

1,000 convert to save their lives, and 3,000 are taken captive mainly by Tatars 48:30 and sold in slave markets in far-flung places in the Ottoman Empire, 48:35 often redeemed by the local Jewish communities there, and, you know, it's an absolute shock 48:42 to the Jewish sense of security and stability. As a result, and I'm gonna finish here, 48:48 as a result, you know, there's a kind of psychic trauma to the Jewish collectivity 48:56 that makes it easier for this false messiah, Shabbetai Tzvi, to arise.

49:03 You know, it's a little bit later, but he bases his whole career on vengeance for the 1648 massacres 49:10 and managed to convince Jews all over the world that he's the messiah, and they follow him, and they sell off their possessions, 49:16 and some move to the land of Israel convinced that the Messiah has come, 49:22 but, you know, after that disappointment and throughout this period, really, Jewish communities managed 49:28 to reconstitute themselves very quickly. We know that from the number of houses.

49:33 The Jewish population continues to increase, really significantly increase.

49:40 How do we explain this if it was such a devastating massacre? It seems that the poor were probably the main victims 49:48 because they have fewer means of fleeing, you know, the Cossack armies.

49:55 The wealthy are able to flee successfully, and they can come back and reconstitute these towns, and that seems to be what happened in this case, 50:02 but look, this is a point in time when the system broke down, when it didn't really work, 50:10 but I just wanna end by saying that the system really worked most of the time, 50:17 that this was more the exception than the rule. There was this kind of economic-based symbiosis, 50:24 really based on a relationship with the Polish nobility, and it's really only with the decline of the nobility itself 50:31 towards the end of the 19th century that the system breaks down completely. That's when you're gonna have the so-called pogroms, 50:39 these anti-Jewish riots, you know, beginning the 1880s, and then 1903 to '06, and the worst being in 1919 and during the Holocaust.

50:49 This system usually worked and usually kept Jewish life in the Ukraine 50:54 and the rest of Eastern Europe relatively secure and prosperous. Okay, thank you.

51:00 (audience clapping) 51:07 (pensive music)

back to TOC


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Lecture 9 Polish Power and Cossack Revolution

0:12 - Okay, greetings everybody, happy Tuesday. You have an exam, not this Thursday, 0:19 but the one after that. It will be a 50 minute exam in this space.

0:27 You will have blue books.

0:33 Very exciting. The TFs and I are gonna remember to get blue books.

0:39 And if you have an accommodation for this exam, please make sure that your TF knows about it between now and then, 0:45 so we can make sure that everyone is set up the way they need to be set up. The format will be very simple.

0:51 There'll be a shorter essay. There'll be a longer essay. There'll probably be some IDs, maybe some dates.

0:56 But nothing very confusing. Okay, any questions about the practical side of this class? 1:05 The exam? Sections? Everything's good? 1:12 I was just waiting to see how long it would take for you guys to nod. I was like letting the blank stares go by, 1:18 waiting for you to realize you had to nod. Okay, good. What we're gonna try to do today 1:25 is bring the Polish factor into our class.

1:30 And this is a very important thing to do because without the Polish factor, no Ukraine, 1:37 no Ukraine as it exists today. I hope by now you've gotten used to the idea that nations 1:44 are not vertical constructions, which were born a long time, and then continue continuously over the same territory 1:51 in the boring way that it's presented to you in your school textbooks. I hope you've gotten used to the idea 1:57 that nations are a result of encounters of larger units and things bouncing off each other, 2:03 and unexpected reactions and counterreactions.

2:09 We've already worked through how at the basis of Ukrainian history, we have this encounter between the Franks and the Byzantines, 2:16 with the Vikings kind of sliding from one to the other. Without that encounter, no Ukraine.

2:22 We've then worked through how in the 13th century there was the progress of the Teutonic Knights from the West, 2:28 the Mongols from the East, and in that encounter, Lithuania ends up controlling most 2:34 of what had been the territories of Rus. Again, without that encounter, no Ukraine as we understand it.

2:41 We're now moving into another encounter, the encounter between Lithuania and Poland.

2:47 And in this encounter between Lithuania and Poland, Ukraine, for the first time begins to emerge 2:53 as something like a distinct entity. So at the end of this lecture, it should be pretty clear that there will be the emergence 3:01 of some distinct Ukrainian political features, which are recognizable up to the present.

3:09 Now, I'm gonna give you just a few things very abstractly before I get into the historical part. We need Poland for a lot of reasons, 3:17 but very briefly, like telegraphically, the things that are going to come in from the Polish side 3:23 have to do with the West. They have to do with the Franks, 3:28 the Holy Roman Empire, Western Christianity, right? Like in a way, when Poland enters the story, 3:34 it's like a delayed, you know, six centuries delayed, but it's delayed encounter with the Franks, 3:42 the Frankish version of Europe, with the Western Christian version of Europe, because Poland, as you'll remember, 3:48 converts to not Eastern, but Western Christianity. So from Poland, we are going to get Catholicism, 3:57 an encounter with Catholicism, with Roman Catholicism. We're also going to get the emergence of something 4:02 called Greek Catholicism, which still exists in Ukraine today.

4:08 From Poland we are going to get the Polish language and a Polish version of the Renaissance.

4:17 And from Poland, we're going to get the idea of a republic. It is a very important idea, a very ambiguous idea.

4:25 A republic means a state, which is for the public, which sounds wonderful.

4:31 Republic, res publica, rzeczpospolita in Polish, respublika, if you insist in Ukrainian.

4:38 It means the common matter, right? But it means the public, the public matter.

4:44 But who is the public? Is the tricky question for republics, you know, right down to and including the republic 4:49 in which we are inhabiting, which we are inhabiting today. So, if the republic is a state, 4:56 which is not for just a king, not just for a monarch, but it's for a public, who's the public? 5:03 Who's in and who's out? That political question is posed very powerfully in Poland.

5:09 As we're gonna see, it's gonna be posed vis-a-vis Ukraine. And in some sense, an attempt to answer 5:15 that question by the Cossacks is where a clear national history, or at least anticolonial history of Ukraine begins.

5:25 So Poland has a structure, and this is my very last preliminary remark, and then we're gonna dive in.

5:31 Poland has a structure which is different from Muscovy. So we're gonna see these points.

5:36 We're gonna see the contact between Poland and Muscovy over and over again. But if you think of Muscovy 5:43 as being founded as a post-Mongol state with a very centralized vertical type of regime, 5:51 Poland is something else. Poland is a horizontal regime in which the nobles 5:57 are much more important than the monarch, in which the nobles have rights, unlike in Muscovy, 6:04 in which the nobles rights increase over time. And in which by the end of this lecture, actually around the middle, 6:10 the nobles are actually selecting the monarch rather than the other way around. In Muscovy, the monarch selects the nobles.

6:16 In Poland, the the nobles select the monarch. And that's a very, very different kind of setup.

6:24 And with this notion of a republic and the notion of nobles 6:29 who belong to the republic comes the idea of rights. Again, not rights for everyone, 6:36 but rights for the people who belong to the noble estate. That's a Polish notion.

6:44 We're gonna see how it emerges over time. But again, you have to see the difference between that and Muscovy where the notion 6:50 that anyone has rights is really not present at all until much, much, much later.

6:57 And the Cossacks, the Ukrainian Cossacks are gonna emerge in this story, 7:02 and who we saw a bit of in the last lecture, the Ukrainian Cossacks are somewhere in between.

7:07 The Ukrainian Cossacks are going to get their idea, some ideas about rights from the contact with Poland.

7:14 And the Cossacks in some way are going to want to, they're gonna be a group that wants to get inside this system in order 7:21 to enjoy the rights of being inside the system, but are not going to be able to do so, but are going to be able to rebel.

7:28 And that's where we're going to end, okay. So let's, so, for the purposes of, 7:34 so you get the method, right? This is a class about Ukraine, but there is no way to do national history 7:41 by just doing national history, right? If you try to tell, so you might have noticed this, 7:46 like you go to a party and you meet a new person, and what do you do? You talk about yourself the whole time, right? 7:53 And when you talk about your yourself the whole time, what happens? The other person falls in love with you instantly 7:59 and everything goes great, right? So, national history is like that. You can't just say, 8:04 oh, there's just me, me, me, me, me, right? If you just say Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, 8:10 I might get a lot of like thumbs up, you know, from like certain Ukrainian nationalists or whatever. But, you can't make sense of yourself 8:19 without other people, right? And you can't make sense of yourself without listening, and you can't make sense of who you really are 8:24 without understanding what influences are coming in from where and what circumstances. So if we're gonna get to Ukraine, 8:31 but if we're gonna understand the Ukraine of the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, we really have to fundamentally 8:37 understand the Polish system. So we're gonna work on the Polish system or the Polish-Lithuanian system, okay.

8:43 So, the first thing to know about Poland, where I just left off, the rise of the noble estate, 8:48 very important historical difference from Muscovy and from other countries like France, for example.

8:54 The rise of the noble estate. The noble estate is in Poland, 9:00 first of all, very big, about 10% of the population, which means that by the time the noble estate 9:07 has a parliament and can vote, more people in Poland can vote than in any other country.

9:12 So it's a more representative system than any other country until British parliamentary reform in the 19th century.

9:20 More people can vote in Poland than anywhere else.

10% by early modern standards is a huge number 9:25 to participate in politics, okay. So it's very large.

9:30 By the 15th century, the membership has been stabilized. So all of these groups that are like, 9:37 that are very selective, you know, you know what I'm talking about. You're at Yale, like all these selective groups, 9:44 you know, that you can't get in all those groups. So all these groups at one time were very open, right? 9:51 Like, so the trick of it, like all the things which used to be which are now exclusive were once inclusive, maybe not all, okay? 9:57 But you get the basic idea. Historically, there's often a period where you can join something and then that group decides, 10:04 okay, no one can join anymore. The nobility in Poland is an example of that. So in the 15th century, 10:09 the nobility in Poland had managed to define who it was. The nobility is gonna pass on from father to son, 10:16 no one else is going to join. Membership is stabilized. And the nobility has by the 15th century at the latest, 10:23 a sense of a common identity in Poland. Now, what happens in the Polish system 10:31 is that the power of the nobility only ever ratchets upwards.

10:37 It only ever goes upwards until the 18th century when they have a constitution and they break it. And they have a very interesting moment 10:43 of political thought, which goes on for a few years. And then the Russians come and it's all over. If this were a Polish history class, 10:48 we'd spent a lot of time on that. I just spent 15 seconds. So, but for now, what we need to know 10:53 is that the power of the nobility ratchets upward. And there are logics to this. One logic is that the Grand Dukes of Lithuania, okay? 11:03 So, oh yeah, the essence of the Polish system is that they have a Lithuanian monarch, right? 11:09 You remember that, right? They have a Lithuanian monarch Jogaila or Jagiello, from 1385 until until 1572.

11:18 So for almost two full centuries, they are governed by a Lithuanian dynasty, right? 11:25 So the, the greatest, or at least the most interesting period of Polish history is when they had Lithuanian monarchs.

11:33 This is very important for our class, right? Because it's because there's a Lithuanian connection 11:38 for Poland that there's a Ukrainian connection for Poland. Because when Lithuania and Poland come together, 11:43 Lithuania controls most of what is today Ukraine. So, it's through the monarch, it's through Jagiello and his descendants, 11:50 descendants, descendants for almost 200 years that Ukraine and Poland are in the same state. It's through the body of the Lithuanian ruler, 11:58 but the Lithuanian Grand Duke, in order to become the Polish king had to make promises to the nobility, okay? 12:06 And so every time, I'm simplifying a little bit that basically every time the Lithuanian ruler dies, 12:11 the Lithuanian ruler then has to go to the Polish nobility. They make tours, actually. They travel from castle to castle.

12:18 It's not you imagine because of, you know, you imagine that the king has a big castle and everyone comes to him. That's a little bit later.

12:24 These were actually itinerant monarchs. They would, you know, you'd travel from place to place. You'd go like seasonally, you'd hunt with this person, 12:30 you'd fish with this person, and that's what you would do. You travel the entire time if you were king. It's kind of interesting. And so they would have to campaign 12:38 to become kings of Poland. And what do you do? What do you promise people? Well, you say things like, 12:45 okay, if I agree to give you a privilege in exchange for taxes.

12:51 So there are no regular taxes. Now think about how the state's gonna operate. There are no regular taxes. Every time a tax is levied on the nobility, 12:58 the monarch has to give them something. But the nobility has a sense of its own interests and is smart.

13:04 And unlike the monarch who's kind of a, it's in a one-off situation, the nobility is thinking long term.

13:10 And so what do you trade the taxes for? You trade them for rights. You say, okay, we'll pay taxes as a one-off, 13:16 but in exchange, we are gonna get rights and these rights last forever.

13:22 And they're gonna last forever because we're gonna have pieces of paper with beautiful cursive and wax, right? 13:30 Okay, that's not really why, but they did have that.

13:35 But, you see the notion, you see the logic here, right? And so those rights then only accumulate over time.

13:41 And so then there's another logic to this, okay? The other logic to this besides election is that there 13:49 are a few very powerful families, most of them, Lithuanian or Ukrainian, actually.

13:56 A few powerful nobles who are called magnates, M-A-G-N-A-T-E, magnates.

14:03 Magnateria was the Polish word for this group. That if you think oligarchy today, you won't be far off.

14:09 So, and the king would be in many ways less powerful 14:14 than these most powerful nobles who would tend to own hundreds of thousands of acres 14:20 and have tens of thousands of serfs and be able to raise private armies of their own when they wanted to.

14:26 And so, if you're the king, you need to counterbalance the force of these magnates, 14:31 of these great nobles. And so what do you do? Again, you give rights to the nobility as a whole.

14:37 You try to bring the lesser nobility, the middle nobility over to your side. And so in order to do that, you give them rights.

14:44 So some of these rights as they accumulate over time, are listed on your sheet.

14:50 There's the Czerwinsk Privilege of 1422, which is about property rights, very familiar concept.

14:58 And it's a big concept, right? Property rights is a very important thing. Again, remember the difference in Muscovy.

15:05 In Muscovy, if you die, I can just decide that your property is gonna go to somebody else.

15:10 I mean, you don't even have to die, but you don't have to do me the courtesy of dying. I can just decide. But if you die, you'll only own the property 15:15 in a contingent way. Whereas in 1422, the Polish nobility is already arranged for something, 15:21 which it looks very much like property rights at Czerwinsk.

1430, they get the right that they 15:29 cannot be imprisoned for no reason. Again, you might be thinking, or you might not be thinking depending on where you come from, 15:35 what your background is. That doesn't seem like a big deal, but that's a very, very big deal. In the English tradition that will be known 15:41 later as habeas corpus, that you can't just imprison somebody without giving a reason.

15:46 Again, the difference between this and Muscovy is stark. So these basic rights that you can have property 15:53 and that your body can't just be put behind bars for no reason, that establishes a fundamental kind 15:59 of political, let's call it, dignity, okay. So, and then a third thing which happens, 16:05 and this is under Casimir the Jagiellon. I think I listed these characters on your sheet.

16:12 Casimir the Jagiellon ruled in the middle end of the 15th century. He encouraged the lower nobility 16:21 to create local parliaments. Very big deal.

16:26 Because when you talk about how this is something which is cool about the early modern period. When you talk about how there's like democracy 16:33 or assemblies, you have to look very carefully to see what's meant by this. Because very often, and the Cossacks 16:39 are a good example of this, very often when you say, okay, there was popular approval, there was voting, there was an assembly, 16:46 what's really meant is like, one guy gets to stand up on a chair or at the top of a palace, which is even cooler, 16:52 and like, shout out what's gonna happen. And then ideally with a spear, you know, 16:58 and then everyone else says, yeah, right? And so like, in this form of democracy, you're like, 17:04 your role is reduced to saying, yeah! You don't have to do that. Actually, you know, definitely don't do that actually, 17:12 'cause like, we'll all regret it later if you do. But, so acclimation is one form of participation, right? 17:19 And traditionally, the king and the royal council in Poland, in the capital, which at the time was Krakow, 17:27 they would announce a decision and then there would be like a lot of shaking of spears and shouting. And that would be approval, right? 17:33 But under Casimir the Jagiellonian, the idea was that you can, 17:39 you as the nobility can organize yourself into local parliaments, which were called Sejmikis 17:45 or dietines in English. Very awkward word, diet sounds like a regimen of eating.

17:53 But a diet is another name for a parliament. And then the diminutive of a diet, a little diet is a dietine, okay? 17:59 You definitely learned something today, right? A dietine, so if you wanna tell your friends, like, I'm just going on diet, only on Thursdays, 18:04 you can call it dietine. And they'll be like, wow, what's a dietine? And you can say, well, my History of Ukraine class, I learned that under Casimir the Jagiellon, 18:10 the minor Polish nobility was encouraged to organize itself into local assemblies, which were called dietines.

18:17 Okay, now you know, you'll never forget. So, but the, no, I don't plan these jokes.

18:25 So, but this is important because it's moving towards representation, right? 18:33 Not just acclimation, but representation. And these dietines then elect representatives 18:39 who go to the central diet or in Polish, very important word in Polish, 18:45 Lithuanian too, also exist at Ukrainian, Sejm, 18:50 that's the name of the parliament, the lower house of the parliament, the Sejm. And so if, you know, you guys were all minor nobles 18:57 in a certain region, you could elect one of you to go to the, so then you actually do have something 19:03 which is like representative democracy. And that's a step so then you can discuss your interests 19:10 over the course of the year. You send your representative and you actually get to vote. The voting still had to be unanimous, 19:16 which we'll talk about maybe later, that can pose a problem, as the European Union sometimes notices.

19:21 But, you had a vote, you actually had a vote. You were, you were represented, okay.

19:27 In foreign policy, three questions for Poland.

19:32 Very quickly, I just want you to know about these things. Mazovia, Mazovia is the central district of Poland.

19:40 It's where the current capital of Poland, Warsaw is.

19:45 Warsaw is not the historic capital of Poland. The historic capital of Poland is Krakow.

19:51 Warsaw becomes the capital of Poland after 1569. Krakow is the capital of Poland, historically.

19:57 Mazovia is only added the Poland in 1526. So, the Dukes of Mazovia die out 20:04 and Mazovia becomes part of Poland in 1526. Okay. just so you know.

20:10 Second thing I need you to know, and we'll return to these guys in a couple of lectures, 20:16 the Habsburgs. There's a very important central European family 20:22 called the Habsburgs who are going to emerge and they're going to be in competition with the Poles for, 20:28 you know, only about half a millennium. And they are going to, in general be making alliances 20:35 with the Russians or later, with the Prussians against Poland.

20:41 And as a result of this rivalry, we get these two very interesting moments that define Poland 20:53 as an East European and not a Central European country. The first is very early, we already talked about it, 21:00 when the, the Polish king Jadwiga marries Jagiello.

21:07 Jadwiga's a she, she marries Jagiello instead of marrying a Habsburg. We talked about that a couple lectures ago.

21:14 Because Jadwiga marries Jagiello instead of marrying a Habsburg, Poland then becomes an East European country, right? 21:22 Poland and Lithuania together instead of Poland and the Habsburg are together. The second moment like this is 1515 and 1526, 21:31 the early 16th century, when as part of an attempt to make peace with the Habsburgs, 21:37 there is a complicated marriage deal, which I have to spend basically a whole lecture explaining in my other class.

21:42 And I'm not gonna do that now, I'm just gonna say complicated marriage deal. The result of which is that a Pole dies in a battle in 1526.

21:56 And this is something you never wanna have happen. His brother-in-law then inherits all of his claims.

22:02 And these include the claims to Bohemia and Hungary, which from 1526 onward are 22:09 at least theoretically part of the Habsburg domain. So that's the next part of Poland becoming an East European 22:17 rather than a Central European power, okay.

22:22 The third little thing in foreign affairs that again, I just need you to note because it's gonna become important later, 22:29 before we can get to, you know, Angela Merkel, and you know, Willy Brandt, 22:35 and Hitler, and the Second Reich, and the unification of Germany and all of these nice things, 22:43 we have to get to Prussia. Prussia is the bit, the little tiny bit, 22:49 the little tiny German state originally, which eventually will grow and expand and unite Germany in January of 1871.

22:57 Prussia at this time in the 16th century is a a little tiny state, which Poland recognizes in 1563.

23:10 And Poland accepts a family called the Hohenzollerns. I didn't write that down.

23:16 The Hohenzollerns will be allowed to govern.

23:26 That family is then going to be the princes of Prussia then the kings of Prussia, and then eventually they're going to be the rulers of Germany.

23:32 It's under them that Germany is going to be unified. So I just mention this because later on, 23:38 Prussia is gonna take advantage of moments of Polish weakness to become more important to declare itself a kingdom, declare itself independent of Poland, 23:45 and so on and so on and so on, until later in the 18th century, Prussia will take part in partitioning Poland, 23:51 and then Prussia will become a great power. It will become Germany and so on. Okay, so that's Poland in domestic 23:59 and in foreign policy, very briefly. What about the relationship between Poland and Lithuania? 24:06 This is also very important. When Poland and Lithuania come together, it raises the question of what Lithuania is 24:12 and how Lithuania is different from Poland. On the one side, Lithuanian nobles 24:17 take something from Poland, which is the idea of rights, a pretty important thing to take.

24:23 So the Polish noble clans adopt, join themselves with Lithuanian noble families.

24:29 And the Lithuanian noble families take the idea that they have rights. Up until that point, they had not had rights.

24:38 But at the same time, Lithuania remained a distinct state in the sense that you had to be a Lithuanian to serve 24:46 in office under the Grand Duke of Lithuania. And here's an important one, which we have to remember for the Cossacks later on.

24:53 In order to own land in Lithuania, you had to be a Lithuanian. So, and remember Lithuania at the time I'm talking about 25:01 means not Lithuania, today's Belaya Rus, all the way down into most of what's today's Ukraine.

25:07 So in order to own land in those places, you had to be Lithuanian, okay.

25:12 So the encounter between Poland and Lithuania 25:18 is kind of a two way thing. A Lithuanian family is ruling Poland for almost 200 years.

25:25 Fine. The Lithuanians preserve the court of the Grand Duke in Vilnius 25:30 and they have their own administration, they have their own language of law, which is, 25:37 I'm gonna be so happy if you guys know this. Chancery Slavonic, but you took the last class, right? 25:43 I'm outing you, okay. Chancery Slavonic. So, this would be a great exam question, by the way.

25:52 The Chancery Slavonic comes from where? Cyril and Methodius trying 25:58 to convert the Moravians, failing, their successors, taking the language to Bulgaria, 26:05 that language coming to Kyiv as the language of religion. Kyivan Rus taking that language 26:11 and turning it into a language of politics and law. After the fall of Kyiv to the Mongols, that language migrates to north Vilnius.

26:17 And so in this grand circle, right, which lasts, you know, eight centuries or so, 26:22 by the time the Lithuanian statutes are written in the 16th century, there are three statutes of Lithuania.

26:28 And they are there in part to distinguish Lithuanian law from Polish law. They're written in Chancery Slavonic, 26:36 so the point is, this is an inheritance from Kyiv, right? This is an inheritance from Rus.

26:41 So, things are going both ways, but in general, the high culture is spreading from west to east.

26:51 So people in Poland are not learning Lithuanian, but people, nobles in Lithuania are learning the Polish language.

26:59 And this is a time in which the Polish language is very, is flowering thanks to the Renaissance 27:06 and is also a powerful language of disputation, thanks to the Reformation. So the Polish language becomes the language 27:14 of the literate people in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which includes, again, Belaya Rus and Ukraine.

27:19 By about, as far as we can tell, by about 1640 most serious discussions 27:26 in what's now Ukraine among theologians, educated people were taking place in the Polish language.

27:32 Okay, so this brings us to the attitude towards Moscow.

27:40 So in Lithuania, the attitude towards Moscow 27:47 was necessarily different than in Poland, why? Because Lithuania was a direct neighbor of Moscow.

27:52 The Lithuanians were more or less constantly fighting wars with Moscow, the Lithuanians, most of them were Orthodox, and very often they were related 28:02 to people on the other side. And the Lithuanians, until the time, many Lithuanians at least until the time of Ivan the Terrible 28:09 had the idea that we can make a deal with the Muscovites, right? The Poles might not be involved.

28:15 We can make some kind of separate deal with the Muscovites. When this ends and when Poland and the Lithuania 28:22 are brought together is with Ivan the Terrible and the Livonian wars.

28:29 I think I mentioned this a couple of lectures ago. It's a very interesting thing to think about right now. When Russia is fighting a war in Europe, 28:36 which has had this surprising consequence of bringing European powers together. And everyone is making historical analogies.

28:43 Is this like the first World War? Is it like the second World War? You know, is it like 1917? 28:49 Is it like the Russian Revolution? But, one analogy, which people aren't making a lot, but which you guys are gonna be able to make 28:55 and I'm sure you will, like, at your next party when you're talking about yourself. I wanna tell you all about me.

29:00 I know about the 1560s.

29:06 In the Livonian Wars, that's when Ivan the Terrible, as you'll remember, that's when he overreaches, right? 29:12 He has that fateful thing that you don't wanna do, which is overreach. And the problem with overreaching is that you never know, 29:18 you never know until you've done and then until it's too late. Like that's the tragedy of overreach. Like, should I talk about myself 29:24 for five minutes or 10 minutes? Oh no, it should have been five minutes! So he overreaches in the Livonian Wars, 29:30 and this has the consequence of bringing Lithuania and Poland together. So we're now gonna tell this story not 29:36 from the Muscovite point of view, but from the Lithuanian Polish point of view. The Livonian Wars were the great opportunity 29:44 for probably the greatest Polish King, who was Zygmunt II. Sigismund II, Zygmunt II, 29:50 who ruled technically from 1520 when he was crowned as a boy until 1572.

29:56 So Zigmunt II Grand Duke of Lithuania, king of Poland, he is the big winner in the Livonian Wars, 30:07 whereas Ivan is the big loser. So Livonia, you'll remember. it sounds like a fairy tale name, right? 30:13 Livonia, it's basically Latvia Estonia today. The Livonian state is the successor 30:21 of the Teutonic state in the Baltic. Livonia exists as a German-speaking state 30:27 because of the Teutonic Knights. These are Baltic territories, which they do seize, 30:33 where the Lithuanians don't stop them, they then convert to Protestantism as many Germans did.

30:41 We have to remember, I know it's tough, but like while I'm talking, the Renaissance and the Reformation are taking place, you know, not in the background, but also in the foreground.

30:48 So they convert to Protestantism and the Grandmaster of the Livonian Order 30:54 asks for Polish protection. And then they also ask in the north for Swedish protection, 30:59 which leads to this very complicated war. But from the Polish point of view, what happens is that this 31:06 brings Poland and Lithuania together. And the Livonian Wars, the Lithuanian nobles understand we have to fight Muscovy.

31:11 We're not gonna be making a deal. And their Grand Duke, also the Polish king Zygmunt II 31:17 goes to the Polish parliament and says, we need to fight a war, we need to raise taxes. It's an interesting moment because he appears, 31:24 this is a very kind of modern political moment. He appears in Polish dress, right, in order.

31:30 So how you dress and what language you speak, very important. He appears in Polish dress to make the speech about how we have to go to the field.

31:36 We have to raise taxes. Oh, what is, okay, this one is really hard. All right, although I just dropped a keyword.

31:43 What did he normally wear? 31:50 What did he normally wear, do you think? - [Student] Lithuanian clothes.

31:56 - Okay, 200 years ago, that was right. Like that's where they, when Jagiello was showed up, he was like, he was wearing fur 32:03 and like unmistakably Lithuanian.

32:08 What was cool in the 1560s? Yeah. - [Student] Well, in Polish, but basically it's 32:15 something they got as a contribution from Turks and the Macedonians. - Okay. - [Student] In Turkish fashion.

32:20 - All right, in combat, that's true. And we'll talk about that. He was wearing Italianate Renaissance costume.

32:28 That's what he normally wore. He normally wore Italian Renaissance costume. That's what he, you know, puffy hat.

32:35 That's what he normally wore. So on, exception because this was the Renaissance, right? I realize we hadn't enough time to get into all of this, 32:41 but this was the Renaissance. This was the Renaissance. His mother was Italian, his court was largely Italian.

32:49 He normally wore it as one did at the time, he normally looked Italian, okay? 32:54 So with the Zygmunt II dresses in Polish garb, calls parliament in order to raise taxes, right? 33:01 So, remember this is the way it works back then. Parliament shows up. What are you gonna give me? 33:06 We're gonna give you some land after a war. What else are you gonna give me? Okay, I'm gonna give you a bunch of land 33:12 that was also part of the deal. Zygmunt II gave the nobles a bunch of land. What else are you gonna give me? Okay, we'll let you elect the kings.

33:19 Promise, you can elect the next king, because theoretically they've been electing kings for a long time. But somehow it always worked out 33:25 that even though there was an election, it was always a Jagiello. It was like one Jagiello after another for, so, you know, for 200 years.

33:31 Okay, fine, next time you can really elect the king. And that actually the next time they really did elect the king, which is another chapter 33:37 which we're gonna get to. So Zygmunt II, this is like a wonderful story of like, 33:42 of a king achieving, overcoming his own youth. In his youth, he had like various Lithuanian romances, 33:49 and there was a Lithuanian prince who thought he had 'em in his back pocket because of these romances, but no, Zygmunt II 33:56 gathers the Lithuanians and the Poles, goes to the battlefield, they win the Livonian Wars, basically.

34:02 Poland expands northward into Livonia, and Lithuania takes part, Poland takes part.

34:11 And in trying to then establish a new political equilibrium, 34:16 Zygmunt II does the thing which begins to define what Ukraine is going to be.

34:22 And that is that Zygmunt II in something called the Union of Lublin, 1569 recreates Poland-Lithuania, 34:32 not as a personal union. So for 200 years, it's been a personal union. You're the Grand Duke and you're the Polish King.

34:41 Now it's gonna be a constitutional union. So by definition, the leader of Poland and the leader of Lithuania, 34:48 you're gonna be the same person constitutionally, okay? And that person's gonna be elected, great.

34:53 And we're gonna call it a republic. It's the Polish-Lithuanian Republic, Rzeczpospolita.

35:00 But, and here's the but, which is crucial to Ukrainian history. Zygmunt II in the Union of Lublin, 35:06 and it seems like a footnote to the Poles and also sometimes the Lithuanians, but for the Ukrainians is not a footnote at all.

35:12 In the Union of Lublin, it's still a Polish Lithuanian state.

35:17 But the border between Poland and Lithuania is changed drastically, such that now the Ukrainian part 35:24 is part of the Polish crown, and Lithuania is much smaller than it was before.

35:30 Why is this so important? This is hugely important because it means that suddenly, 35:35 no longer is there Lithuanian law in Ukraine, but now there is Polish law in Ukraine.

35:42 So just to give you a very important central example. Now, Polish nobles can own land in Ukraine, which is, 35:50 it's like the opening of the frontier, basically. In fact, it is like an opening in the frontier because these are rich lands, agricultural lands.

35:58 And again, I know this stuff is happening in the background and is tough, but this is also the age of discovery, 36:04 the age of exploration. It's the first globalization, the 16th century, and all that grain that you can raise 36:10 by enserfing Ukrainian peasants, you can then sell on the world market and get gold and silver.

36:16 So suddenly, it's like a globalization, which involves the Ukrainian steppe.

36:22 Okay, and so anyway, but I wanna be clear, there's now a new line which didn't exist before.

36:27 There was never a line. If you imagine the northern border of Ukraine now, Ukrainian Belaya Rus, that line was never there before.

36:37 As of 1569, there is something like that line. As of 1569, the notions of Ukraine and Belaya Rus 36:42 start to make sense. That old territory, which is all part of Rus, now will follow two distinct routes.

36:49 The Belaya Russian part will have more to do with Lithuania. The Ukrainian part will have more to do with Poland, 36:56 dramatically to do with Poland. Okay, what's all the drama? What's all the drama? 37:01 Number one, the drama is language. The drama is language.

37:07 In the Renaissance, there's something called the language question, which is fateful for, you know, many of us.

37:16 The written language question is, do you keep using Latin or do you take the vernacular 37:23 and you turn the vernacular into a language of literature and education? So up until that time, it was normal for universities to be using Latin, 37:31 and it was normal to write, even novels, correspondence in Latin. But in the language question, which was answered by Dante, 37:39 and the answer was, make up Italian, create in Italian, which is, it sounds easy when I say it that way, 37:45 but it's actually an extraordinary achievement to take a vernacular and turn it to a written language and then have that version of the written language 37:51 be accepted by everyone. It's an extraordinary thing, right? In England, it's largely a matter of Shakespeare 37:56 or the King James Bible. But, you know, so the language question, 38:02 what's the answer, right? So some places it might seem more or less obvious, like, okay, you take a version of French or version of English, 38:07 but in Ukraine, what's the answer? What's the answer to the language question in Ukraine? 38:13 You have old church Slavonic, which is still around somewhere. You have the Ukrainian vernacular, 38:18 which is perfectly well exists. And you have Polish. And all these things are possible, right? 38:25 These are all possible answers to the language question. But the way it's answered, the actual answer to the language question 38:30 in Ukraine is Polish, as I said before. So people start writing in a language 38:36 which isn't an ancient language, which is not Greek, it's not old church Slavonic, it's not Latin, it's Polish.

38:42 But this answer to the language question is fundamentally different from the other answers elsewhere.

38:49 If the answer to the language question in Poland is Polish, that means suddenly everybody has the same, not everybody, 38:55 but many people have the same language, top to bottom, right? The nobles and the peasants can be speaking the same language.

39:01 In France, the same. England, the same, Germany the same. But in Ukraine, if the answer 39:06 to the language question is Polish, then suddenly roughly one to two, 39:12 maybe three percent of the population has one language, and 97% and 98% has another.

39:19 That's a very different social outcome, very different social outcome. So the language question always gets answered 39:25 in terms of the modern language, but it doesn't always get answered in terms of the vernacular, right? So that's one thing which is very dramatic 39:31 about the situation. Secondly, which is very dramatic, is religion. So again, while I'm telling you 39:36 about the Czerwinsk Privilege, while I'm telling you about these Polish details, the Reformation is going on.

39:43 And the Reformation is going on also in Poland. And in Poland in the 16th century, most of the nobility actually goes Protestant.

39:50 So like during the period, which the Poles find themselves find the most interesting, which is the 16th century, they had a Lithuanian dynasty, 39:56 and they had a Protestant parliament, which is just worth remembering, small talk for your Polish friends.

40:02 And in Ukraine, you also have the Reformation. But in the Reformation in Ukraine 40:09 is going to involve Protestants, it's going to involve Catholics in the Counter-Reformation, 40:15 but the population is mostly Orthodox, right? This is Rus, this is Eastern Christianity.

40:21 So you have a Reformation and a Counter-Reformation, which are overlaying onto this population, 40:27 which is mainly Orthodox. And the Reformation and Counter-Reformation are gonna go through all kinds of gymnastics.

40:32 And the elite families are gonna, they're first gonna go Protestant, and then they're gonna go Catholic. And it's all very interesting.

40:38 But at the end of the day, what happens is that after about three generations of this, you're going to have a top layer 40:44 of the Ukrainian population, generally the richest nobles. The people who also own a lot of land and a lot of serfs, 40:51 they're gonna be Roman Catholic, and they're also gonna be the same people who are speaking Polish, right? 40:56 So that's the second thing which happens. There's a new religious question. And then the final thing which is going to happen, 41:04 which I've already suggested, is the social question. Suddenly, Poles can own land in Ukraine.

41:13 So if you're an ambitious Polish noble with maybe not enough land, you go east, right? 41:18 And you go east with European land management practices, and you go east with your 41:24 almost certainly Jewish manager, right, and his family, and you go off and you colonize and you make money.

41:31 And then the local Ukrainians who see what you were doing, the local Ukrainian nobles, 41:36 they immediately copy what you're doing. They also insert their peasants. They also take a surplus. They also sell it up to the Vistula River into Europe 41:44 and the wider world if they can. And so the result of this is that you have 41:51 suddenly a population which is ever less free, which enserfed, which is bound to the land.

41:58 And you have a noble class, which is small. So I said in Poland as a whole, 10% of the population is noble, yes.

42:04 In some places, more. Mazovia, it's like 25%, right? So basically in Mazovia, if you're not a noble, 42:11 you have some explaining to do. But, in Ukraine, 1%, 2%, okay? 42:17 So 1%, 2% of the population owns the land, 42:24 controls much of the rest of the population, largely speaks Polish, and is largely Roman Catholic.

42:31 And that whole transformation takes place very quickly. Three generations from about 1569 to the 1640s.

42:40 That's the Polish connection. So, on the one side Polish connection, 42:45 very beautiful, right? The Polish connection means variety.

42:51 The Polish connection means the Renaissance. The Polish connection means a whole lot of really interesting theological disputes.

42:58 The Polish connection means that the Ukrainian clerics start their own academies and use Greek, 43:05 force themselves to learn Greek, which they'd been, you know, lazy about for the previous six centuries. But now they do it and they learn Latin, 43:11 and they learn Polish, and they learn French. And you know, and they become some most interesting debaters 43:17 because they have a lot, frankly, they have a lot to handle. They have to handle the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. They also have to handle after 1596, 43:24 something called the Union of Brest, which is an attempt to bring the Catholic and the Orthodox churches together.

43:31 They have a lot to talk about, and they learn how to do it, right? The Polish connection means the Baroque.

43:37 It means fabulous architecture, right? The Saint Sophia, as it stands today in Kyiv 43:44 is not the same one, which was built sadly in the 11th century. It's a kind of Baroque reconstruction, 43:50 and it's very beautiful. And there are lots of churches in Ukraine that are very beautiful, but they're in a kind 43:55 of Orthodox Baroque style, right? So the, the Polish connection is very interesting.

44:01 It's very beautiful. It's also hugely polarizing because it puts a small number 44:06 of people with one language and one religion, and who have property rights against a much larger group 44:13 of people who have none of those three people, which leads us to the Cossacks.

44:18 So, the Cossacks are free people 44:23 who manage to escape this system. They escape the system in which either you 44:30 are a noble or a serf, right? That's the Polish system. They escape that system by going into the steppe, right, 44:37 into the steppe into what's now the southeast of Ukraine. They have their headquarters and what they call the Sich 44:45 in the middle of the Dniepr River, they farm, they fish, and they raid.

44:51 They raid the Crimean Khanate, which we're gonna talk about. Sometimes they even try to raid Istanbul.

45:00 And they survive by being out of reach. They are at the fringes though of the Polish system, 45:06 and they understand the Polish system, and many of them are educated by some of them anyway, 45:12 like Bohdan Khmelnytsky, they're educated by Jesuits, right? They know the Polish system 45:19 and they have the idea of rights, very important idea. They have the idea of rights.

45:24 They have the idea that if we were nobles, we would have rights, right? 45:30 And the Cossacks wanna be in the Polish system, but they're not allowed into the Polish system because the existing Polish nobility 45:36 won't let them into the Polish system. So there's a compromise, which is struck, which is called being a registered Cossack.

45:44 So, there was a list of a few thousand Cossacks who had some kind of status in the Polish state, 45:50 and then the rest of them were called unregistered Cossacks, and they had no kind of status in the Polish state.

45:55 Every time Poland wanted to fight a war, the Cossacks suddenly became very important. And this, by the way, was the period 46:02 when the Poles were extraordinarily successful on the battlefield, late 16th century, 46:07 early 17th century, when they were defeating the Ottomans and they were defeating the Russians.

46:13 In the early 17th century circa 1620, Poland is bigger than it ever will be, ever will be before or again.

46:19 And that's when the Cossacks are essentially serving as infantry. And the Polish nobility is serving as cavalry.

46:27 And they fight extraordinarily well together. It's not a combination you would wish to face on the battlefield.

46:33 But in 1648, this all breaks up. And you've heard some about this already.

46:39 The underlying reasons are what I talked about, the social, religious, and linguistic differences.

46:48 The precipitating reason has to do with the Cossacks themselves and whether or not Cossacks 46:54 are part of the Polish state or not. In particular, this guy whose name I probably forget to write down, write down Khmelnytsky Bohdan.

47:12 He has a claim which has to do with his wife and property. And he's unable to get his claim through the Polish courts.

47:19 And at least, in legend, the king laughs at him, you know, and he naturally thinks, if I were a Polish noble, 47:26 I would have access to the Polish courts. And he doesn't, and so he does what you do 47:31 when you don't have access to the law, which is that he rebels. But he rebels at a time, this is the 1640s, 47:38 at a time when the Cossacks were all gathered anyway on the field for what was going to be a war against the Ottoman Empire.

47:45 And instead of fighting against the Ottoman Empire, Khmelnytsky rouses them to fight against the Poles.

47:52 This happens at a time when the Polish king dies, which means that there's a while when the Cossacks 47:59 have a great deal of success on the battlefield fighting whom? This is important.

48:04 Fighting generally the Polish speaking Roman Catholic, Ukrainian nobility, right? 48:11 This is largely a, this is not how it is in the Ukrainian textbooks, but this is largely a Ukrainian-Ukrainian Civil War.

48:17 At least at the beginning. It's the Cossacks against the Ukrainized, the Polandized Roman Catholic 48:23 Polish-speaking local Ukrainian nobility, until the Polish army eventually shows up and turns the tide.

48:29 When the Polish army shows up and turns the tide, we have a very fateful moment. And the very fateful moment is that the Cossacks 48:36 have to seek an ally. Up until about that time, their ally had been the Crimean Tatars, the Crimean Khanate.

48:45 As of 1654, the Crimean Khanate has withdrawn, 48:50 the Cossacks are losing to the Polish state. And so they need an ally. And for an ally, they find this fairly exotic 48:59 and unknown to them state, which we've talked about a little bit. And we'll talk about more in the next lecture, which is Muscovy.

49:05 And after that, everything changes, thanks.

back to TOC


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Lecture 10 Global Empires

0:00 (thoughtful music) 0:12 - Okay, greetings. Happy Thursday. Welcome. You guys have an exam a week from today.

0:20 We've been talking about the TAs, about the kinds of things that are going to be on the exam. It'll be very straightforward.

0:26 Some IDs, some dates, some short answers, some essays. You'll have a choice among questions.

0:31 You should think about, like... Think about what question you would ask. One way to study is think about what question you would ask.

0:39 Like, what sorts of things are the big themes? And then practice answering it. Maybe, like, pair up. Have three people. Divide.

0:45 Think about what the big questions are so far. I'm not going to ask you about the first few lectures. The first few lectures are to help you think 0:52 about what it is like to be involved in history. The subject of the exam are the events 1:00 from roughly the ninth century to roughly the seventh century.

1:05 So the thing we're doing today is we're taking a deep breath.

1:11 We're taking a deep breath. Yeah. I mean, at this point in this semester, maybe we should all physically take a deep breath, 1:18 a few deep breaths. I'm not going to do that because I'm very conscious about how that's going to look.

1:24 Professor leads cult at Yale. (students laughing) Makes students perform breathing exercises.

1:31 But what we're doing is, to change metaphors, what we're doing is we're going to zoom back today and we're going to think about empire in general 1:41 and empire in the world. And the reason why there's no handout today 1:46 is that this lecture is really much more about situating the events in Ukraine in world history, 1:54 because without world history, it doesn't make a lot of sense, and let me just give you three reasons 1:59 why I think this is true. Number one is the point that we have reached 2:06 in the class chronologically, where we are now working in the period of 1500, 1600, 2:15 where we are really in the Age of Exploration, right? 2:20 We're in the Age of Discovery, which coincides with the Renaissance in European history.

2:26 We are in the period where Europeans are looking for trade routes, finding lands that are new to them, 2:34 discovering them, from their point of view, of course, making claims on them, setting up these new trade routes, 2:40 destroying states that already exist, doing all these very important things which for the first time make of the world a single unit.

2:49 So obviously the world is always a single unit. There's always weather. People are always moving.

2:54 But somewhere around the age of 15 or around the year 1500, the pace of this picks up, right? 3:01 The pace of this picks up so that events on one side of the world can affect people 3:07 on the other side of the world, not on the scale of thousands of years or hundreds of years, but on the scale of, let's say, one year.

3:12 So in your lifetime, multiple things that happened on the other side of the world could actually affect what happened to you, right? 3:19 So there's a change in pace. There's another change in pace in the 19th century, another change in pace in the 21st.

3:25 But this is a very important thing, a kind of first globalization, if you'll indulge that.

3:30 And I'll give you some examples of what I'm talking about from our own little corner. When we think about, for example, 3:37 the British trying to find a passage to China, to the East, through the Arctic Ocean, 3:43 which, let's face it, shows creativity if nothing else... And there isn't one yet.

3:48 I mean, you know, in you guys' lifetime, there are going to be plenty of passages through the Arctic that there aren't now.

3:54 But in 1555, there wasn't, and the British then stumbled upon Muscovy, and that opens up a trade route 4:00 where suddenly Muscovy is trading with Britain, which means trading with the world in a westerly direction.

4:06 And then by 1647 or so, the Muscovites have reached the Pacific Ocean. So in that century, suddenly, Muscovy, 4:14 which is becoming Russia, of course, Muscovy is connected to both the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, and that's one of the reasons 4:21 why Russia becomes the state that it becomes, is that Russia manages to have an Atlantic and a Pacific connection 4:27 as the world is becoming connected, right? And that's one of the ways that Russia is distinct from, 4:32 let's say, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth or the Kazakh state that we'll be talking about on Tuesday.

4:38 By the way, on Tuesday, I'm going to pick up where we left off, roughly 1648, and we are going to talk about the Crimean Tatars.

4:44 We're going to talk about the Ottoman Empire. We're going to bring that into encounter with Russia. Okay.

4:53 So the timeline that we are on is coinciding with a much bigger timeline.

4:59 If we think of 1648 as the moment of the Kazakh rebellion, 1648 is also roughly the moment when a Muscovite explorer, 5:07 this guy Dezhnev, gets to the Pacific Ocean and actually crosses into North America 5:12 as the first person to do so in that direction, at least in the modern period. Obviously it'd been done before 5:18 or there wouldn't be people in North America, but that's a different story. So we are thinking about how our events connect 5:27 to world history, and we don't really have a choice, right? It's not that I'm trying to be cool and avant garde with this global history thing, which is, by the way, 5:33 it's not cool and avant garde anymore. It's that these events don't actually make sense.

5:39 So in the next lecture, for example, in 1721, Russia is going to be, 5:45 Muscovy is going to be renamed the Russian Empire at almost exactly the same time that Moscow bans Ukrainians 5:52 from selling grain except through Muscovite ports, right? Those two events are connected, right? They're connected.

6:00 The fact that it is Moscow that's controlling the world trade of grain 6:05 from the most fertile part of Europe, namely Ukraine, is very important. The myth of what Russia is, 6:12 which we're also contending with, has to do not just with claiming the name Russia. It also has to do with controlling the land.

6:19 And I'm sure you can see the connection to the present war. It's 2022, and those two things are still very much connected.

6:26 If it's Russia, then of course there's nothing wrong with Russia controlling the land 6:31 and controlling the export of grain. Okay, so the first reason is that we can't really make sense 6:38 of what's happening unless we connect it, at least in a very preliminary way, to world history.

6:43 The second reason is that this is also a time of the intellectual reconfiguration 6:49 of how people see themselves in the world, which I realize is a very, very big notion, and I'm going to have to give it to you very briefly.

6:56 But thus far, when we think about geography, we've been thinking about geography in terms of what classical authors knew 7:04 and how classical authors described the world and how land explorers in our part 7:11 of the world describe the world. But basically, the framework of the people who, you know, who we're talking about is an ancient Greco-Roman framework, 7:19 and the maps of Ukraine, such as they were, were from, you know, Ptolemy or Herodotus.

7:24 And if you remember, the ancient Greeks had this nice habit of projecting things onto Ukraine, 7:31 like, so griffins and fields of gold and so on, which weren't, like... They had some basis in reality.

7:36 The Scythians actually did make beautiful things out of gold, which are currently being plundered. But the notion is that the Greeks projected, 7:45 you know, a lot of things that sort of happened onto the territories that they didn't know.

7:51 The Age of Exploration is also a time when the Poles are mapping Ukraine.

7:56 We're going to get... So we've talked about Polish colonization. You can't separate colonization from mapping.

8:01 The Poles and other people are mapping Ukraine in the 16th and 17th centuries. And by the way, the word they use for it is Ukraine.

8:08 The Poles say Ukraine. The whole idea of Ukraine is not a new idea at all, as I'm sure you've already understood.

8:15 But in this mapping which the Poles do, they are going beyond classical knowledge, 8:21 going beyond classical knowledge, which is a very important thing locally but also globally, 8:28 because classical knowledge did not include something which is very important about the world and which Copernicus, you know, 8:35 was the person to actually get clear, which is that our world is actually not especially interesting.

8:40 I mean, okay, it's interesting from our point of view, because here we are, right? But it's not interesting in the sense 8:46 that it's the center of anything. The sun doesn't orbit around it. Everything doesn't orbit around it. It turns out we're not the center of the world, 8:52 which is a discovery, frankly, that's still sinking in, you know, many centuries later.

8:57 But the age of discovery of the world is also the age of discovery that the world is not the center of everything.

9:03 So there are major intellectual transformation happening at the same time, right? There's a kind of loss of innocence.

9:09 The same moment when Europeans are discovering in the world, they're also discovering or trying to take in the reality 9:15 that the world that they're discovering is not the center of the universe. So that's a lot to happen, right? That's a lot to happen, and I think it's just, 9:21 it's worth bearing in mind. The third reason why I'm going to give you this very general introduction 9:27 to empire as world history is that a thought that we're meant to be having 9:33 over the course of this class is how Ukraine might bridge European history and global history.

9:42 A major theme of European history and global history is the theme of colonialism, 9:50 and in this story, it's the Europeans who are colonizing and it's the rest of the world who is being colonized.

9:57 But do we want it to be that simple, or should we look closely about 10:02 and see who is colonizing who in an empirical way? It's hard to get away from the impression that, 10:09 both in the early modern and, as we'll see, the modern periods, the idea of being colonized applies pretty well to Ukraine, 10:16 although it's sitting there in the middle of Europe. When the Russian Empire becomes the Russian Empire, 10:23 when it defines itself as an empire, well, what's the center, and what is the periphery? 10:29 But of course, there are some interesting twists to all this too, which, again, are relevant to the present situation.

10:35 What does it mean to become an empire and to colonize Europe, right? 10:41 What does that mean? There's a lot of ambiguity in that. So there's no question from the point of view of the 18th century or, for that matter, 10:47 the 21st, that Moscow's perspective on Ukraine is in some way colonial.

10:53 But what does it mean to colonize a place which you also recognize came before you 10:59 in some important sense? What does it mean to colonize a place which you recognize as being more European than yourself? 11:08 That is not so common, right? That is not so common. And if you grasp that, then it's a little bit easier 11:14 to get your mind around the weird ambiguities and ambivalences that are involved even in the discussion 11:21 of Ukraine on Russian television in 2022. And then the final thing is that when we get 11:27 to the modern period, or the 20th century, the 21st century, which we will get to, I promise, 11:33 a major question of world history is, and American history, for that matter, is what do you do after empire, right? 11:41 What do you do after empire? And one way to look at this conflict that is happening now between Russia 11:46 and Ukraine is in that framework. What do you do after empire, where one answer can be "Let's have more empire," right? 11:54 One answer can be "Let's concentrate all kinds of imperial thought and try them out in the 21st century. " 12:01 And then there can be another answer, which I think is the Ukrainian answer, which is "Look for something that is not anti-imperial 12:06 but which is some way post-imperial. " And I'll talk more about that, but it's worth thinking about that big question of what happens after empire.

12:13 Okay. So what is empire? What's an empire? Very briefly, we've talked about this, 12:19 I'll give you two very simple ways to think about empire. One is that it's the opposite of a republic.

12:25 So if you remember the last lecture, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth... In Polish, it's the Jrzeczpospolita.

12:31 It's a (speaking in Polish) or (speaking in Polish). It's a republic, which means it's a common matter, right? 12:37 Oh, America's supposed to be a republic, by the way. And the thing about republics is that republics are meant to have a group.

12:44 Now, that group might not be everybody, and usually, it's not, but there is a group of people who have rights, 12:49 as opposed to, for example, on autocracy. This notion that a republic and an empire are in some kind 12:54 of dialectic, of course, comes from Rome, right? This is a Roman notion. You have a republic.

12:59 What happens to your republic? It falls and it becomes an empire. So George Lucas didn't invent that, right? 13:07 That whole pattern of politics where you have a republic and it's very flawed, and, like, the parliamentarism, it's really boring, and, like, there's all this bureaucracy, 13:14 and then someone comes and he has quick solutions and maybe a cloak. All plagiarized, right? 13:20 Like, this whole notion of a republic, the republic that fails and becomes an empire, 13:26 that's a classic historical trope. And then even the notion that the people who want to restore the republic are doing so 13:32 because of some kind of commitment to ideals, which is the whole theme of the movies I'm talking about, that is also very familiar from history, right? 13:39 The notion that... Well, maybe I can't actually justify the republic institutionally, but a republic has a moral advantage over an empire, right? 13:46 That's an argument which is also 2000 years old at the very least. Okay, so second definition of empire 13:53 is that you can find a center and a periphery. So in an empire, you know where the center is, 13:58 and the center is politically superior to and economically exploitative of the periphery.

14:04 Okay. So Rome is the paradigm of all this. I'm now going to spend just a few minutes reviewing some of the things that we know 14:11 about the first thousand years of this class, but within this framework.

14:16 So the Roman Empire... We did all this. Does it fall? Does it not fall? 14:22 Depends on your point of view, right? From the point of view of what the Franks say 14:28 and then what, you know, the European Renaissance says, it fell and then it was recreated as the Frankish state 14:35 and then intellectually as the Renaissance later on. From an East European point of view, 14:40 of course, Rome doesn't fall. Byzantium is the Roman empire, and Byzantium lasts until 1453.

14:48 And in our class, the way we're thinking about the emergence of East European states and in particular Kyiv and Rus is that there's contact 14:56 between these two empires, Byzantium, which is clearly an empire, the Frankish state, which later calls itself the Carolingian Empire, 15:03 which just means the Charles-ian Empire, they're coming into contact, 15:08 they're competing politically but also in terms of missionaries, conversion to Christianity, 15:14 and that there's a third interesting force that comes in between them, which are the Vikings, right? That is our story of state creation, 15:21 and it has to do with empire. Now, here is where we get into a very important point 15:29 which I'm going to emphasize later. These empires are associated with a monotheistic religion.

15:38 And of course, the thing which makes Christendom or the thing which makes Europe is that it is one, 15:44 it's one dominant monotheistic religion and not others. The ancient world is a Mediterranean world, right? 15:50 The ancient Christian world is a Mediterranean world. Christendom or Europe is the world which happens 15:56 not only after Islam but after Islam in general fails to get through the Pyrenees on one side 16:02 and through the Caucasus. I say in general because of course there are huge exceptions, right? Like the Bulgar Tatar state, 16:09 which then becomes later the Kazan khanate, which today is Tatarstan and Russia, right? 16:16 But in general, the idea is that Christendom is going to be northerly and Islam is going to be southerly, in general.

16:24 And so these monotheistic states recognize one another as monotheistic states, 16:31 and they recognize their own peoples as people who you do not enslave.

16:36 This notion of statehood is so fundamental that it often gets overlooked. When we talk about the state, we often go very quickly 16:44 into very reified things about what the state might be, but one basic notion of a state is that a state is a zone 16:51 in which you do not enslave your own people, right? So the larger the state is, the larger the zone 16:57 in which you do not enslave your own people, of course, which raises interesting questions about when the United States becomes a state, right? 17:04 Or when the United States becomes a republic, just to give you a very familiar territory. But one way to think about state formation 17:11 is that you have elites that are no longer enslaving the people around them but instead are comfortable having them work the land 17:17 and taxing them, right? Having some people work the land and be taxed, have other people work the land and become the warrior class, roughly speaking.

17:25 So that's what a state means, and that's going to be very important as we move through, 17:32 because always in the back of your mind, you should have the theme of slavery, because slavery, 17:39 it's not some kind of marginal topic. It's not something you have to kind of sneak in at the end. Slavery and statehood work together very carefully.

17:47 Slavery and recognition work together very, very carefully. Like, this theme, which is a major theme still 17:53 in the history of the United States in the 21st century, about who is recognized as belonging to the state, 17:58 has everything to do with slavery and the history of slavery. What I'm trying to suggest is that this is actually a very old theme.

18:04 It goes back to what the purpose of a state was from the start. Okay, so now I want to remind you of the Mongols, 18:14 but in a slightly different way. So we're going to talk more about this on Tuesday, but the...

18:19 If I'm going too fast, you can just stop me and say, "I need to take a breath because you promised deep breaths. I need a deep breath. " 18:25 You can just say that and I'll... Okay, sorry. Cult thing. Gotta stop. All right.

18:31 But no, seriously, if you have a question, just, and need me to pause, just ask and I'll pause. Yes? 18:36 - [Student] So, like, these states, obviously they don't enslave people, but if they're doing things like Russia where it's, like, all serfdom- 18:42 - Yeah. - How is that much different? - Right, no, so that's a very interesting question.

18:51 So if you enslave... Good. If you enslave, that generally involves, 18:57 not always, but it generally involves mobility. So I'm about to talk about one of the biggest slave markets in Europe, which is Kaffa in the 14th century in Crimea.

19:07 So slavery involves, not always, but often involves mobility and commerce, so I enslave you, which means 19:14 I can take you somewhere and sell you, whereas serfdom fundamentally is about binding people to the land.

19:22 So if I own serfs or own souls, I don't actually have the right to round them up 19:27 and sell them to my neighbor. What I do have is the right to say they cannot leave my land. But you're right to raise that.

19:33 I mean, that's another question which redounds over the centuries in these comparisons between Russia and the United States, 19:40 where people who are concerned with serfdom were reading the American abolitionist literature and vice versa, 19:46 and there's a whole interesting literary story there. So thanks for that question.

19:51 So it speaks to what it means to belong to a state. So did the serfs belong to the Muscovite state? 19:59 Right? Okay. So again, that's another... A third way to think about republics and empires is, 20:05 if it's a republic, then theoretically, you can belong to the state. Not everybody does. In an empire, mmm, there's not really, 20:12 that promise is not really contained in the notion of the state. All right, so let's think about the Mongols, but now in a slightly different way.

20:19 The Mongols, as you know, come in and lay waste to what remains of Kyiv and Rus in the 13th century, 20:27 and then they stick around, and they stick around in their state, which is called the Golden Horde, 20:32 breaks up into various other states, including the Crimean Khanate, which we're going to talk more about in the next lecture.

20:39 But the moment that I want to pause on here is in the 1340s where something very important happens, 20:47 and it has to do with slavery. So the most important or one of the most important centers 20:54 of the slave trade was a city which used to be known as Theodosius but which at the time 20:59 in the 14th century is known as Kaffa, K-A-F-F-A, Kaffa, on the eastern edge of the Crimean Peninsula.

21:08 And at this time in the 14th century, it is the Genoese 21:14 who are trading in Crimea. So when we do the history of Crimea, this is all going to become clear, 21:20 but when people talk about, like, what Crimea always was, that's extremely suspicious, 21:26 because Crimea has been a whole, even compared to the rest of Ukraine, it's been a whole lot of things in a very interesting sequence.

21:33 But in the 14th century, it is the Italian city states, and in particular Genoa, that are dominating the trade, 21:41 and, you know, either by purchasing or by force, are trying to control some of the territory 21:48 which belongs to the local khanate. So there is a battle in the 1340s 21:53 between Genoa and between the Golden Horde, 21:58 and according to history, although it's a little bit too good to be true, 22:04 it's one of these things that's a little bit good to be true, the way the Black Death spreads... Have you heard this story? 22:09 The way the Black Death spreads is that the people on the side of the Golden Horde are dying of the Black Death.

22:16 This is 1346, 1347. And so in order to... So they invent biological weaponry.

22:22 Again, as I say, slightly too good to be true, this story. And they catapult the corpses of their own dead soldiers 22:29 and commanders over the walls against the Genoese. And this spreads the Black Death, and then the Genoese spread it throughout Europe.

22:35 Okay, that happened, but the reason why it's a little too good to be true is that, of course, there were other routes by which the Black Death could enter Europe.

22:41 I'm sure there was... There wasn't only one vector. You've now all lived how this works. Like, there isn't...

22:47 There doesn't have to be just one plane from China. There are probably going to be more vectors of how the disease spreads.

22:52 Ah, nods of recognition. But I want to spread this because I want to...

22:58 I don't want to spread it. (students laughing) I want to convey this because it helps us to see a moment 23:05 where we have the Golden Horde, we have the Europeans in the 14th century, 23:10 and we have a very important change, which is that roughly a third of Western Europe is going 23:17 to die of this disease. So roughly a third of the population is going to be wiped out.

23:23 And this is very important for our Age of Exploration, which is what we're trying to set up now. After so much of the European population is wiped out 23:33 and avenues are cleared for innovation... This is an optimistic story 23:39 of what happens after a plague, by the way. So after avenues are cleared for innovation and social advancement and after traditional barriers 23:47 for changing ways of life are broken because of all of the death and disease, then you have this incredible European century 23:55 of revival after the Black Death. Meanwhile, dun-dun-dun! 24:01 Something very important happens in Byzantium in 1453, which is that... - The Ottomans take it over.

24:07 - Yeah, it falls. Finally, right? Finally. Okay, from the West European point of view, 24:13 it's a thousand years late, but... And a thousand years, let's face it, as a long time.

24:18 A thousand years late, but it finally falls in 1453. And it falls to the Ottoman Empire, which is an entity 24:27 which we're going to cover in the next lecture. The Ottoman Empire is very important for Ukraine.

24:32 In all these relationships, which in our reading tend to look like Poland and Russia, 24:38 you know, west and east, the hard part to force into the story is the southern part, 24:44 which is the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Khanate, and I'm going to try to force that in in the next lecture, 24:49 because none of it makes sense without the Ottoman Empire. But the Ottoman Empire takes over Byzantium, 24:55 replaces Byzantium. Istanbul becomes Constantinople, 25:01 and I was reminded by one of, like, the many people who now email me about this class that They Might Be Giants did not write that song.

25:08 Okay, I know they didn't write the song. I was looking for, like, some reference which maybe you guys would possibly get.

25:15 Probably failed. But anyway, Istanbul rather than Constantinople, and what this means for Europe...

25:23 And this is where we get to our world historical turning point. What this means for Europe is that the Ottoman Empire now controls 25:30 the standard trade routes to Asia. And because the Ottoman Empire controls the standard land routes to Asia, 25:38 if you're in a reviving Europe and you need those trade routes, what do you do? 25:44 You do crazy things. Like, if you're England, you say, "Hmm, maybe I could find a passage to China through the Arctic Ocean," right? 25:50 And then you find Russia instead. Oh, and by the way, I mean, this is another example of globalization.

25:57 When the Russians sweep through Asia, basically in a hundred years, 26:02 I mean, it's incredibly fast, they're doing that in part because they have access to European technology, namely the musket, right? 26:11 The musket. Very simple gunpowder weapons. They have access to that because they also have contact 26:18 with the Atlantic World. The Atlantic World comes in and then they make their way all to the Pacific with a very simple technological advantage.

26:26 I mean, summarizing it, they go with muskets and they collect tribute in furs, mostly sable.

26:32 That's simplifying it, but that's a big part of the truth. And then they sell those sables to China and around the world.

26:39 And so it's the... And that is, in a microcosm, a big part of the history of the Age of Discovery.

26:45 You have a technological edge and you use that technological edge to control a lot of territory really quickly 26:51 while that technological edge lasts. That technological edge will eventually wear itself out, 26:56 and when it wears itself out, then the tables are going to be turned on you, and all of your stories about how you're superior are going to turn out not to be so true, right? 27:03 It was the technological edge, really. Okay. So you do crazy things. Like, you might, like, okay, 27:08 so you go over the Arctic Ocean. Why not? That didn't work out.

27:14 But two other things did work out which you've probably heard of, like Vasco da Gama going around the Horn of Africa 27:21 and finding his way and defeating Arab sailors and landing in South Asia, in India, right, 27:27 for the Portuguese, and Christopher Columbus, with the even, if possible, wackier idea 27:33 of going across the Atlantic Ocean to make his way to China, 27:38 or the Indies, rather, and discovering, you know, something else which he called the Indies. And so it's now still called the Indies, weirdly, 27:46 or it's now called America. So all of these things, right? The British, the Portuguese, the...

27:53 Columbus wasn't Spanish, but it was a Spanish mission. All of this is because of Ottoman Empire blocking trade routes, 27:59 and the trade routes then in turn generate new things. So after these unexpected encounters 28:05 with new places in America, there are new supplies of precious metals, 28:11 and of course there are new people to colonize and to convert. Now, I realize this isn't really our main story, 28:19 but the reason why we have to have this in the back of our mind is because we are in, as I've said, 28:24 we're entering into this world of empires, and you can't understand Ukraine inside empires 28:30 unless we understand what empires are at this particular moment in history.

28:35 Okay, so some of this history is going to be familiar to you from other classes. The leading imperial powers 28:41 at the very beginning are Portugal and Spain. They divide the whole world between them ambitiously.

28:47 Spain destroys some other really important states, the Aztecs, the Incas, kill maybe 10 million people in the New World.

28:55 The Dutch rise and replace to a large degree the Portuguese in Asia.

29:02 They take over the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. The Portuguese are pushed back to Brazil. Okay.

29:08 And then this brings me to a theme which I'm sure you've kept in mind the entire time, which is slavery.

29:16 So the nature of slavery... Again, you know, it's not like I'm going to ask you this on the exam.

29:23 It's just that our history fits into this larger history and it helps the larger history make sense.

29:30 So if you remember, our history is partly about how slavery in a certain part of the world comes to an end.

29:37 The conversions to Christianity are about slavery coming to an end.

29:43 When you convert to Christianity, that is one of the first things that happens. Other Christians... I mean, rules are broken, but in principle, 29:50 other Christians are not going to enslave you and your neighboring Christian powers are not going to think they can raid your country and enslave the population.

29:58 It's not the most glamorous thing about Christianity, and this is not the thing that rises to the top in the narrative of conversion, right? 30:04 But it's perhaps the fundamental thing. If you create a Christian state, other Christian states are not going to enslave your people.

30:10 You've decided not to enslave your people. You're going to tax them instead. Very important, very important transition.

30:17 So our class in a way starts with this riddle of slavery, 30:22 because you have to, like... You can't get away from slavery. If you're going to study human history, you can't get away from slavery, 30:28 because at any moment where you try to start history almost anywhere in the world, 30:34 you then have to ask the question of when you get from this form of economic organization to another form of economic organization and why 30:40 and under what ideological and political premises and auspices, which is a way of understanding 30:45 the first few lectures of this class. This doesn't mean that slavery comes to an end, of course.

30:53 What it means is that the slave markets, like the Genoese one that I mentioned in Kaffa, the slave markets are trading different people, 31:01 from the Caucasus, for example, from Asia, and then, of course, from Africa.

31:08 The Ottomans are increasingly going to be getting their slaves from Africa, 31:14 not that they won't enslave Europeans occasionally, but increasingly, they're going to be getting their slaves from Africa.

31:20 And so this all connects, right? Because the demand for slaves, it's going to be present, 31:25 but where the slaves are coming from is going to change. And so again, I realize I've, like, 31:31 pounded this point into the ground, but the language can help you remember something 31:38 which subsequent events will then bury. So our word for slave, right, the English word for slave, 31:43 which comes from the German Sklave, Sklave, which comes from the Arabic (speaking in Arabic), and (speaking in Arabic) comes from Slav, right? 31:50 Following the language can remind us of an origin of something, or an early phase of something, let's call it, 31:56 that we might otherwise forget.

32:01 So this is connected to our class because of the formation of states and because of the spread of Russian power southward, 32:10 which is going to be in the next lecture. But as the Russian state moves southward, 32:16 enforcing serfdom, to be sure, it becomes harder and harder to raid for slaves in that direction.

32:21 So the slave markets or the source of slaves, in general, it's going to move southward.

32:27 And this coincides, this shift coincides with the emergence of the demand for slaves in the New World, right? 32:35 And so then the slave markets are going to shift to the New World. The demand for slaves is coming from the New World 32:42 as the slave trade in general has moved southward towards Africa. So again, this is not a connection 32:49 that we need to push too far. It's just that I want you to see that there is a kind of logical chain of events, 32:55 and this larger question of who belongs to the state and who can be enslaved is a question 33:02 which you can follow if you want. You don't have to. I'm not going to make you do this. But it's a question that you can follow 33:08 from the 10th century in Eastern Europe to the 18th century in the United States 33:13 if you want to, right? It's not just a logical question. It's not just a kind of similarity.

33:19 It's also a chain of events over time that one can follow. Okay, so the African slave trade...

33:30 Yeah, so of course, like, the expansion of the slave trade to Africa involves massive death and trauma, including by suicide, 33:36 the destruction of local states and local cultural groups, the destruction of the position of women.

33:43 It slows down. The trade slows down in the late 18th century, early 19th century, as first the French 33:48 and then the British end the African slave trade. The slave trade in the Ottoman Empire comes 33:54 to an end in 1882. The Civil War in the United States is in 1863.

34:01 Okay, so what I... The last thing that I want to do 34:06 is to try to bring the history of empire through the period where we are now 34:12 a little bit into the 18th and 19th centuries so that you can then, as we do the 17th, 34:17 18th, and 19th centuries in Ukraine, you'll have a kind of world perspective of what's going on.

34:24 I'm going to again pause and ask if I'm going too quickly and see if there are any questions.

34:31 Just taking the feel of the room here. Okay, you're all at the edge of your seats. That's good. The camera can't see 34:36 whether you're on the edge of your seats or not, so I can just, like, say stuff like that. Okay, so after Spain...

34:44 So the first wave, Spain and Portugal, are the most important, and then the Netherlands is the most important, 34:49 and then it's going to be the British and the French who are the most important colonial powers.

34:54 In the 18th century, it's going to be the British and the French who are competing for world domination.

35:00 A side effect of the British-French competition for world domination is this country, right? 35:07 If you remember the sort of general thesis that states can come into existence because of a sort of friction between two greater powers, 35:14 in the case of the United States of America, that would be the friction between the British and the French empires.

35:20 It's particularly a side effect of what the world calls the Seven Years' War 35:25 but which American history calls the French and Indian War, slightly obscurely.

35:31 So that war, 1756 to 1763, which is also a European war, and we'll get to it, 35:37 is when the French and the British redivide and where it's going to be clear that the British control Canada, the British control India.

35:49 It was the threat of the French that kept these colonies, the American colonies, close to Britain.

35:56 When the French threat was removed, then, structurally, the colonies could start to relax their attitude towards the British.

36:03 It made rebellion possible. And then, of course, the French came in at the end of the Revolutionary War.

36:09 Now, why is that interesting? I mean, because, you know, American history, I don't know about you guys, but okay, 36:16 well, okay, maybe it's really interesting. Okay, I find it more interesting all the time. I admit it. I find American history more interesting all the time.

36:22 But one of the things which is interesting about 1776 is that it's Europeans liberating themselves from Europeans, 36:30 Europeans who are defined as colonists liberating themselves from a European empire, right? 36:36 And as they liberate themselves, they of course preserve longer than the imperial power 36:43 one of the features of the empire, which was slavery, right? But so it's an interesting moment where Europeans are, 36:52 people of European origin define themselves as an independent state and they actually win.

36:59 Now, I just want you to mark the 1776 date because the 1776 date, 37:05 that's when the Revolutionary War took place in the United States. Then you're in the same world historical moment 37:12 not just as the French Revolution, okay, I admit that's important too, but you're also in the same historical moment 37:18 as the end of the Kazakh state, which we're going to get to in the next lecture, and you're in the same historical moment 37:24 as the end of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. So back in Europe, you're in a moment where this question 37:31 of European empires controlling Europeans is also relevant but in a slightly different direction.

37:37 So one way to think about the end of the 18th century is that it's an interesting moment of exchange involving European empires 37:43 and European empires controlling Europeans. It's also an interesting moment about...

37:50 So roughly at the same time is the moment when the Ottoman Empire starts to withdraw from Europe.

37:56 The first couple of decades of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire is going to be withdrawing from Europe, and that power is going to cease to be an imperial power 38:04 over part of the Balkans, Greece, and Serbia. Okay, the next thing...

38:11 And I realize this is a lot. I hope this, like, feels more like entertainment than, you know, than oppression, 38:16 or at least ideally entertaining oppression. But the next thought that I want you to have, 38:23 it has to do with how empire continues to work in the world in the age of nationalism.

38:30 So it's very easy to say the nation is against the empire, right? 38:36 And that's a very convenient sort of position to be in because in that case, empire bad, nation good, right? 38:43 Empire big, nation small. Empire old, nation new. Right? The nation can start fresh, 38:49 has no historical baggage, all of that. But the truth is that in the 19th century, 38:56 empire and nation are very much entangled with one another.

39:02 So when Jefferson describes the United States, for example, as an empire of liberty, that doesn't, I mean, that doesn't really make any sense conceptually, 39:09 but you can see why he's saying it. It is because the United States is an empire, and you know, the liberty part is restrained 39:16 to a certain group, of course. On the European continent, maybe the best example 39:21 of this entanglement are the Napoleonic Wars. On the European continent, the idea that you can start fresh 39:30 is most closely associated with the French Revolution. The idea that we're now in a new period 39:36 where we understand humanity and we have a science of humanity and we can start fresh, we're enlightened, 39:42 is most strongly associated with the French Revolution. And when the French Revolution leads to Napoleon Bonaparte, 39:49 the notion of his wars across Europe is that these are wars of national liberation.

39:55 And that's not entirely false. All over Europe, he, you know, dispatches his various brothers-in-law 40:01 and they start new countries with new names and new currencies, and Napoleon is seen by many people as a national liberator.

40:09 But at the same time, what Napoleon is building is also an empire where the metropole is clearly going to be Paris.

40:18 So you have this ambiguity about what is national and what is imperial and how the two work together.

40:25 And you also have this very powerful idea which is characteristic of the 19th century and forward 40:32 that I can build an empire 40:39 by talking about your national liberation. The French pioneer that, not just Napoleon Bonaparte, 40:46 but actually Napoleon II in the 1860s, 1870s.

40:53 1859 is really when it starts. I can create an empire by liberating you nationally.

41:00 I mean, I don't even have to tell you how much continuity that idea has had, right? 41:06 Right down to the war in Ukraine, because after all, what is one of the core Russian arguments for why they're invading Ukraine? 41:12 That in fact, Ukrainians need to be liberated nationally from other empires, 41:18 that what's really happening in Ukraine is that... Okay, it's not the Habsburgs anymore, 41:26 but it's still the Poles and it's also the Americans and the European Union and so on. Someone else has made an empire, 41:32 and I'm going to liberate you nationally. You may not be aware that this is what is happening, but this is what is happening.

41:37 And so it's not really an empire. I'm actually liberating you nationally. And so that argument, 41:43 which comes out of the middle of the 19th century and particularly out of France, is very powerful.

41:49 And another connection between the national and the imperial is the economic one. So Marx and Engels, who you may have heard of, 41:56 had this idea that the workers of the world would unite. You've heard of that, right? 42:02 1848, "Communist Manifesto. " One of the problems with this, as Marx and Engels had to wrestle with, 42:08 is that the workers of one country could be very much in favor of imperialism because from their point of view, 42:14 imperial control over other territories kept prices down, created other economic opportunities, opportunities for immigration and so on, right? 42:21 So you could be a worker, but you wouldn't necessarily sympathize with a worker in another country because your country is exploiting another country 42:28 and that has improved your standard of living. And so in that way, nationalism and imperialism could work together 42:35 because the working classes could become more national because their countries were empires, 42:40 which is something which got tangled up in Britain and is still before our eyes being disentangled.

42:48 Empire could be seen... In other words, as mass politics comes into existence 42:53 and as workers and others get to vote and as workers and others can take part in politics, empire could be seen as a solution to social problems.

43:01 And so in this way, nation and empire also get tangled up. Okay, let me just bring this through the 19th century 43:12 and say a word about land empires and sea empires, and then I promise you we will be done.

43:19 By the time we get to the late 19th century, 43:25 who is a land empire and who is a sea empire has more or less been sorted out. Russia is a European and Asian land empire.

43:33 It controls Poland and Finland as well as all these territories down through the Pacific.

43:39 Actually, it controls California into the 19th century.

43:44 The Americans after 1823 and the Monroe Doctrine see themselves as controlling the Western Hemisphere.

43:53 The Russians are stopped from becoming a world maritime empire by the Japanese, 43:59 who are a non-European country which defeats a European country in war in 1904 and in in 1905.

44:07 That's one of the kinds of lines when empires run out of territory, 44:13 is when the Russians lose to the Japanese. The very last thing which happens 44:18 in the European imperial history is the race for Africa. So Japan is a line which isn't crossed by the Europeans.

44:26 The Japanese defend themselves and promptly build their own version of empire in East Asia.

44:32 The very last step in European empire is the race for Africa, which is the late 1800s, 44:38 the late 19th century. And the way the race for Africa works is that...

44:44 It's interesting. After slavery is no longer profitable because the slave trade has been banned, 44:51 the countries which are on the West African coast 44:57 push further into Africa in pursuit of other things to trade and make different kinds of arrangements, 45:03 very often also involving domination, with the states that they find there. And so the end of the slave trade, 45:10 in this kind of historical irony, leads to a different form of exploitation which now involves territory, because if you're trading agricultural goods 45:17 or mineral goods, then you want to control territory. If you're trading slaves, you just have to have connections on the coast.

45:23 But so what happens is the slave trade morphs into trade in minerals and agricultural goods, which requires control of territory, 45:29 and so then we have this race for Africa which takes place 1870s, 1890s, 1900s.

45:35 And it's at that moment when Germany joins the French and the English and also the Portuguese 45:41 and the Spanish and so on, the Dutch, as an imperial power beyond the boundaries of Europe.

45:48 Why does that matter? And this is really the closing thought. Of course it matters in and of itself. I mean, the history of Africa is absolutely fascinating.

45:56 But it also matters because of the way that Africa affects the European imagination 46:04 of what empire is going to be. And now, you know, now we're getting towards the end of the class. The purpose of this lecture has been 46:10 to kind of just prepare the way for thinking about empire in the context of Ukraine. But because the race for Africa happens 46:18 in the late 19th century, it influences the way that Europeans think about how they're going to colonize Europe 46:24 when Europeans start to colonize Europe again in the 20th century.

46:30 In the First World War, when the Germans and the Austrians control Ukraine, 46:36 they will have no hesitation whatever in seeing Ukraine as a breadbasket, which is the phrase which is used, Kornkammer.

46:42 "Ukraine is a breadbasket. Ukraine is going to feed us. The peasants will have no trouble with this. They're going to love it," 46:48 which turns out not to be true, incidentally. The peasants don't love it. So the German and Austrian plan for winning the First World War 46:54 was "We're going to take the grain, we're going to take the grain from the Ukrainians, and then we're going to feed our own civilians, 47:01 they'll be happy, and we're going to feed our soldiers and they'll win on the Western Front. " That's the plan. It doesn't work out 47:06 because the Ukrainian peasants don't play their role. But to make a long story short, and don't worry, 47:11 I'll tell the longer version, Hitler thinks this too. Hitler thinks that Ukraine is a Kornkammer.

47:18 It's a breadbasket. It's an unlimited supply of food. He thinks that the Ukrainian peasants are, 47:23 in his imagination, the way that the Africans are, and his analogies towards Ukraine, 47:29 although he has many, he uses India, he uses America, he applies India and America as well, but the main way he thinks about Ukraine 47:36 is from a colonial imaginary that comes from Africa. So he describes the Ukrainians in Africanizing terms 47:44 for a very simple reason. This is when Hitler grew up. This is the kind of European imperialism which was going on. Those are the colonies that Germany lost 47:51 in the First World War, were African colonies. So all down the line, 47:57 until we get to the end of this class, it matters, you know, it matters in three ways, 48:03 as I've been trying to say, that the period between, let's say, 1500 and 1950 is a period of European empire.

48:12 It matters because events happen on a different pace, that things simply are connected in a way 48:19 that they aren't before 1500. It matters because of the various ways people can think 48:26 about the world now that the world is all connected. But thirdly, it also matters because of the kind 48:32 of empire or the ideas of empire that are relevant.

48:37 Neither Hitler, and we'll get to this, nor Stalin could've thought about Ukraine the way that they did without the European domination 48:44 of the rest of the world. Hitler thinks of Ukraine in an Africanizing way. When Stalin thinks of Ukraine, he says, 48:53 "We don't have far-flung maritime empire the way the British and the French do.

48:58 Therefore, we have to carry out something called internal colonization," right? So that thought, how everyone judges that thought, 49:05 that thought is not possible without the existence, the transparent example, 49:11 the simple everyday facticity of European empire. Okay, so as I say, I hope that that wasn't too oppressive 49:18 and that if it was oppressive, it was also at least somewhat entertaining. This is background, right? 49:23 This is structure. These are things that, if we have them in mind, it will help make some of the events 49:29 in our region make more sense. And don't worry. I'm going to get back to the Kazaks and the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Tatars in earnest on Tuesday.

49:37 I'm looking forward to it. Thanks for being here.

49:44 (soft music)

back to TOC


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Lecture 11 Ottoman Retreat, Russian Power, Ukrainian Populism

0:00 (dramatic music) 0:13 - Okay, everyone, greetings, happy Tuesday. Thursday is the exam.

0:23 There's not, you know, what is there to say? Think about what you would ask on the essay question.

0:31 Also, think about the year 1699 and what it means to you. It's a very easy year to remember, 1699.

0:39 Lots of things happen in 1699. We're gonna cover some of them today. The thing that we're trying to do today 0:47 is difficult for a couple of reasons. The first is that the 18th century is just tricky.

0:55 I don't know how often you guys think about the 18th century, but the 18th century is somewhere before we get into the comfortable, 1:02 modern categories of mass politics. But it's also somewhere after we're in the things 1:08 we think we understand, like Middle Ages and Renaissance and reformation. The 18th century is very tricky, 1:14 but it's also fascinating to historians who I admire very much, the late Tony Judt and my colleague here, Paul Yushkovich.

1:21 Both, you know, have always insisted to me that the 18th century is the best century. And I'm working on that.

1:27 I'm working to try to make the 18th century good, and hopefully I can make it accessible.

1:32 The other reason that this is tricky is that 1:38 if we're gonna understand what happened to Ukrainians in the 18th century, even more than other times, 1:44 we're gonna have to keep geography straight. And this is why I've handed out, in addition to the the term sheets, 1:49 I've handed out the two maps because the thing that we have to understand in the 18th century is how Russian power 1:58 ends up dominating the zone from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, which is new.

2:05 Up until now that zone between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea has had all kinds of powers in it, 2:10 but it hasn't been the Russian Empire. In the 18th century, beginning from 1699, 2:16 or beginning from 1700, we see a turn of events, which leads to Russia, the Russian Empire 2:23 dominating that zone. By the end of the 18th century, you know, if you're not gonna pay attention for the next 54 minutes, 2:30 this is where it's gonna go. By the end of the 18th century, the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth is gonna be outta the picture.

2:36 The Ukrainian Cossack states are gonna have lost all their autonomy and basically be working for Russia.

2:41 And the Crimean Khanate, which we're gonna be talking about today, is going to cease to exist.

2:46 So three major entities, which have been around for centuries in one form or another, are going to be dominated or dismissed 2:53 by the end of the 18th century. If this were a class about the Russian Empire, you know, this would be about the spread of Russia, 2:59 and of course we'll be talking about that. But from our point of view, what we need to have in focus is 3:04 the kind of simultaneous weakening and disappearance of these three entities.

3:09 Because as these three entities disappear, they don't do so gracefully.

3:15 They do so in conflict with one another. And that's one of the reasons, of course, why they do disappear, is the conflict with one another.

3:23 The other reason, which you can just have in the back of your mind is that it is Russia, 3:29 the Russian Empire, which breaks out into the European age of discovery, right? Not the Crimeans, not the Poles, 3:36 not the Ukrainians, but it's Russia which breaks out into the European age of discovery, which becomes an empire 3:41 in the fully global sense of the word, in having access to the Pacific Ocean and having access to the Atlantic by way of the Baltic.

3:49 In a sense, that's the big picture, that Russia becomes this kind of modern empire, which is exactly how Peter and Catherine 3:55 were thinking about it. But in our picture, what's happening is that these other three entities are diminishing, 4:01 they're fighting one another, and by the end of the 18th century, they are essentially gone.

4:06 Now, this geography is a mess. It's a mess, it's a mess, it's a mess because we have to have in mind the zone 4:14 from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea the entire time. And we have to have in mind inside Ukraine, 4:22 and this is where things really get hard, we have to have in mind the Black Sea, the Azov Sea 4:27 and then when we're thinking about Ukraine, you might have noticed in your reading that there's constantly this mention of right bank and left bank.

4:33 Okay, now I'm now gonna blow your mind. The only way to understand right bank and left bank 4:40 is that you have to think like a river. Yeah, exactly. You have to think like, this is serious.

4:49 You have to think like a river. You have to know which way does the river flow? It flows from north to south.

4:54 And so what is the left bank, right? The left bank is the Eastern bank, 5:00 and the right bank is the Western bank. And so it's not, you know, when you say right bank, left bank, 5:06 it's not right and left on the map, it's the opposite because right bank and left bank are the banks of the river.

5:11 And it's from the point of view of the river. And if you can, you know, I don't have time to do all the zen work 5:18 that's necessary here, but if you can think from the point of view of the river, 5:24 you're also doing something very important in terms of understanding the people. Because there's a reason why right bank, left bank 5:30 seemed like a sensible way to describe reality, which is that so much of what we're talking about 5:35 in terms of economics and power had to do with who was controlling the river, who was making use of the river, right? 5:41 The river is so important to Ukraine, the Dnipro is so important to Ukraine, that right bank, left bank seemed like a sensible way 5:48 to describe the country for hundreds and hundreds of years. And of course, that is still true. This is where the fighting is going on right now, right? 5:56 This is the Ukrainian army is trying to get to the Dnieper River in Kherson Oblast right now.

6:01 Okay so all of these terms, I'm afraid we sort of have to keep in mind. So let me begin with what I promise to do 6:09 at the beginning of the class in which I'm now gonna try to pay off that promise, which is to make sense of the Muslim world 6:14 and the Turkic world in Ukraine. Because as Serhii Plokhy reminds us 6:19 in the reading, the unification of Ukraine is primarily a north to south type enterprise.

6:26 And we've gotten to where the northern boundary is going to be, when we get to 1569 6:33 and the Union of Lublin and the Polish crown taking a great deal 6:38 of what had been Lithuania away from Lithuania and putting it under the Polish crown, then we're getting to something like the northern boundary of Ukraine.

6:45 We're getting to a difference between modern Belarus and modern Ukraine. But the south, we still have a lot of work to do in the South.

6:52 And it's complicated work because it involves seeing the Crimean Khanate, seeing the Ottoman Empire, 6:58 and then watching how they get pushed out. And they're gonna get pushed out, again jumping ahead a little bit, 7:03 they're gonna get pushed out by Ukrainian Cossacks working for the Russian imperial army, right? 7:11 So the pushing out of the Tatars, right? The beginning of a process of de-Turkification 7:18 and de-Islamization of the Crimean Peninsula is gonna be work that's done by Cossacks 7:25 when they are already dominated and ruled by and taking orders from the Russian Empire, right? 7:31 So, but to make sense of all this now, to do the South, to bring the South in, I wanna start with the Crimean Khanate.

7:37 Okay, so the southern border of today's Ukraine, which is the northern coast of the Black Sea, 7:45 is a very special zone from our point of view, because this is the zone where we do have sources, 7:50 basically the entire time, like as much as, so long as there's been like a classical, ancient history, we have sources for this little zone.

7:58 It's different with Kyiv, it's different from the north. There when we talk about Christianization, we're also talking about the beginning of written sources.

8:04 Before Christianization, the written sources are very sparse, they're Muslim visitors, they're Jewish visitors, 8:10 but there aren't that many written sources. On the coast of the Black Sea, this is totally different 8:15 because the Greeks have been there for 2,500 years and they've left a written trace.

8:22 The Greeks have been there since 5,000 BCE. And they're there the entire time, right? 8:28 They're still there, although not in great numbers. They're there the entire time.

8:34 We can't go through all of ancient history, But they're there through Alexander, they're there through Rome, they're there through Byzantium.

8:44 When Constantinople is sacked for the first time in 1204 by Western Crusaders.

8:50 So one thing one has to remember when we're doing non-Western European history, is that there were a lot of crusades, 8:55 and the crusades went in directions that you might not have expected. So it turns out that if you're on the way to liberate the Holy land, 9:01 it's a nice pit stop to sack Constantinople, which is what happened in 1204, right? 9:07 That isn't necessarily something, or you know, the crusades that we did earlier with the crusaders trying to kill slash convert the pagan Balts, right? 9:17 Those are crusades. The history of the crusades also involves Europeans trying to convert Europeans, 9:23 or in the case of Constantinople, just stealing a lot of nice things, which you can now visit if you go to Italy or France, 9:30 because Napoleon then stole some of the good stuff again, a second time later on. Okay, so the point is that 9:36 the Greeks are there the whole time. There's a classical world which is durable, 9:42 linguistically, the entire time on the South coast.

9:48 So that's one part of Crimea and that's what makes it special And I want you to just mark that.

9:56 So because it's gonna be important later on. It's gonna be important later on when we talk about 10:02 how Russia legitimates its claim. So the Crimean Hinterland though is generally not touched 10:11 by Greek settlement. The Crimean Hinterland is also not touched by Rus.

10:16 So this is very important. We spend a whole lot of time trying to understand Rus, you understand how Rus is a kind of synthesis of 10:23 Vikings coming from the north, Byzantium coming from the south, all of this. But Rus does not control territorially Crimea.

10:32 Rus does not control territorially, what's now Southern Ukraine either. So just note, you know, this whole thing about 10:39 who does Rus belong to in this war has this kind of strange feature that the war is actually taking place 10:44 with the exception of a little bit around Kharkiv, it's generally taking place where Rus was not, 10:50 as neither side is very keen to mention. Rus did not get this far south. It certainly did not get to Crimea.

10:57 So Rus did not get to the Crimean Peninsula, but the Mongols did, okay? 11:04 So in our world, in our class, in East European history, the Mongols are basically coming in 11:10 and they're breaking things up, right? But from the Mongol point of view, that's not what they're doing. They're establishing trade routes, 11:16 they're establishing states, and the Mongols don't care if you're Rus or you're not Rus, I mean they're indifference to what other people are 11:23 is quite extraordinary. What they're doing is establishing big states. The big state in the region was called the Golden Hoard, 11:31 which is a kind of unforgettable name. And then the history of post Mongol statehood 11:36 is the Golden Hoard breaking up into smaller units. One of those units is Moscow, as we've discussed, right? 11:46 The Moscow state is a post Mongol state, a post Mongol vassal state.

11:52 Another one of these states is called the Crimean Khanate. So Khanate, K-H-A-N-A-T-E.

11:58 It's called a Khanate because the ruler is called Khan, K-H-A-N. So, Muscovite is a post Mongol state 12:05 as we've seen in the sense that there were princes of Rus there who were able to maintain power by collecting the tribute 12:13 for their Mongol overlords. And then eventually after a couple of centuries, 12:18 they break free, and then they break out spectacularly against other European cities and then southward 12:24 against Muslims, and then eastward all the way to the Pacific in a kind of spectacular moment of expansion, 12:30 which is not really our subject, but which is very important for our subject because it explains how the Russian Empire is gonna be able to dominate by the 18th century.

12:38 The Crimean Khanate is a successor state in a different way. The Crimean Khanate is ruled by princes 12:44 who are direct successors, direct descendants of Genghis Khan, the Princely class and the Crimean Peninsula 12:51 and the Crimean Khanate are direct successors, by blood, at least so they claim, of Genghis Khan 12:58 and they are ruling the people. The people who were there before are Turkic speakers mainly, I don't think I put this on the list, 13:05 mainly from a group that we call the Cuman. And the people who come into being as the Crimean Tatars, 13:13 who were still known as the Crimean Tatars are a synthesis of the local Turkic speakers 13:19 plus the Mongolian ruling classes who come in later. Okay so the Crimean Khanate has a political system, 13:29 which is interestingly not so different from Poland, Lithuania.

13:35 They have an assembly of nobles, which is called the (indistinct).

13:42 The Assembly of Nobles theoretically elects the Khan, just like the Polish Lithuanian parliament 13:47 theoretically elects the king, although in both cases, strangely, it's the same family 13:53 that gets elected again and again for a couple of centuries, which is nice if you can work it out.

13:59 We know that the Khan who is the ruler had a second in command who was called the (indistinct).

14:05 We know that state functions were held by nobles from various post Mongol families.

14:11 We know that women played a public role until about the 1560s when they disappear more or less 14:18 from the sources. And then we also know, and this is where things get very interesting, 14:24 that the Crimean Tatars and the Crimean Khanate had a centuries long encounter with Lithuania, 14:32 which, if you look at your map, will begin to make sense. If you remember in the 14th centuries 14:39 on one of your maps, on the one from Magoshi, you can see the dates he gives for the Lithuanians 14:45 moving south into what's now Belarus, what's now Ukraine. The Lithuanians move relentlessly south 14:52 as a result of the pressure of Teutonic Knights, right? Remember, they move relentlessly south, 14:57 they gather in the lens of Rus, to coin a phrase. And they also, so if you gather in the lens of Rus, 15:04 you are going to push up against the Crimean Tatars. So the Lithuanians and the Crimean Tatars 15:09 are fighting regular wars against each other for decades and decades and decades.

15:16 And the Lithuanians, as one does, are also constantly trying to take advantage of the various power struggles and succession crises 15:23 inside the Crimean Khanate, which means that the Lithuanians are actually recruiting 15:29 dissenters, the people who lose in these power struggles. There are also prisoners of war. They're recruiting Crimean Tatars into their own state.

15:37 So up until now, we've talked about Lithuania as being, oh, it's not just a little Baltic state, look it also controls Belarus, 15:43 look, it also controls Ukraine, look, most of the population is Orthodox. Oh, and hey, the Lithuanian Grand Duke 15:48 married the Polish King, who was a girl. And so Lithuania becomes a much bigger, bigger, 15:53 much bigger historical entity than we're used to thinking about. But I now wanna add one more dimension. The Lithuanians had a very meaningful encounter 16:00 with the Crimean Tatars, which meant that among other things, inside the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, 16:05 there were lots of Muslims. For centuries, for centuries, there were mosques in (indistinct), 16:12 there were mosques in basically every meaningful town in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. We've come across the city of Ostroh, 16:20 which one of the students kindly asked about, which is the place where the first full Slavonic Bible 16:25 was printed. When the first full Slavonic Bible was printed, there was a mosque in Ostroh.

16:31 The famous romantic poet, Adam Mickiewicz, was born in a town called Novogrudok, 16:36 or in Belorussian, Navahrudak. That town also had a mosque 16:42 because of the Crimean Tatars, right? Every town that mattered in the Grand Dutch of Lithuania had a mosque because of the Crimean Tatars.

16:50 So the point here is that for centuries, there's an encounter between Lithuania and the Tatars 16:57 because they are at war and because they have a common border. And when Lithuania and Poland come together, then Poland Lithuania, we can think about it like that, 17:04 from 1386 onward, Poland Lithuania also has durable contact with the Crimean Tatars.

17:09 And this is a very important part of Polish Lithuanian identity. If you go to the Royal Museum in Warsaw, 17:17 which I recommend, and you walk into it, you'll wonder why like you were in the first room 17:22 and suddenly there are all these scimitars with gems and things like this, and you think, wow, this must be like war booty that the Poles 17:28 took from their enemies. But it's not, it's the swords they used themselves because they synthesized what they learned 17:35 from their long encounter with the Crimean Tatars. Okay, so the Crimean Tatars are an important state 17:43 for several hundred years. The tragedy of the Crimean Khanate is that they fall under 17:50 Ottoman dependency at about the same time that the Ottoman Empire itself begins to weaken.

17:59 That's it in a word. So somewhere around 1650, the Crimean Khanate yields to the Ottomans 18:08 in terms of setting its own policy. There had been a kind of interaction of equals for a couple of hundred years where the Ottomans 18:15 basically farmed out their northern foreign policy to the Crimean Khanate 18:20 and the Crimean Khanate, you know, decided what was going to happen with Moscow, with the Poles, with the Lithuanians. Around 1650, it looks like the Ottomans 18:27 are basically taking control. And the problem with this is that it's around this time that the Ottoman Empire becomes weak.

18:34 Okay, so let me briefly now try to do the Ottoman Empire. From our point of view, what's crucial for the Ottomans 18:42 is the Ottoman Empire as a European power. Of course, the Ottoman Empire also controls Northern Africa.

18:49 It also controls Arab lands. It also controls the Near East into Persia.

18:55 But the Ottoman Empire, from our point of view in this very brief synthesis, 19:00 we have to think of it as a European power which is pulling back from Europe in the 17th century, okay? 19:06 That's the crucial thing. The Ottoman Empire is gaining control over the Crimean Khanate, but losing control of everything else.

19:13 So you can justify thinking of the Ottoman Empire as a European power. The Ottomans, so the Osman family, 19:19 that's why they're called the Ottomans, the Osman family, O-S-M-O-N, they gain control of Anatolia, today's Turkey, 19:25 for the same reason that the Lithuanians gain control of territory north of the Black Sea. The Osman family gains control of territory 19:32 south of the Black Sea, because the Mongols fragment and pull back, right? So whereas the Lithuanians rush in north of the Black Sea, 19:39 the Ottomans rush in south of the Black Sea, and they conquer Anatolia.

19:46 The next thing they do is they conquer the Balkans. So the Ottomans are a European power, 19:51 basically from the beginning. They conquer other things as well, but they're a European power from the start.

19:57 From our point of view, again, there's much else to say, but from our point of view, the crucial struggle, 20:03 and I'm afraid this is where the geography has to add one more dimension. The crucial struggle is between the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs.

20:11 The Hapsburgs, who we're gonna hear a lot about after the exam a week from now, the Hapsburgs are the family that rules from Vienna, 20:19 which also has a big age of exploration, age of discovery, 20:24 world empire, which we're gonna talk about. The Ottomans are a very important land empire, 20:31 which has been boxed up in the Eastern Mediterranean by superior navys, 20:36 and never breaks out into the wider world, right? So the Ottomans are in this category of powers 20:42 that don't make it into this, if you want, globalization, this age of discovery.

20:47 They're very powerful, they control an awful lot of land. But unlike the Russian Empire, unlike, and of course, unlike the Portuguese, the Spanish and so on, 20:54 they don't break outta the Mediterranean. They're stuck in the Mediterranean. So from the point of view of Istanbul, 21:01 the natural vector of expansion is northward. And the story of the 16th and 17th centuries 21:09 is a couple of attempts to besiege and control 21:14 the Hapsburg capital, which is Vienna. In my other class, I spent a lot of time talking about this.

21:19 Here we can only do it very briefly, but the crucial point is that a couple of times 21:25 the Ottomans try and fail to take Vienna. They try and fail in 1526.

21:33 In 1526, they gain control of a lot of territory.

21:39 They gain control of the land which is on the west side of the Black Sea, Moldavia, 21:46 Wallachia, the west side of the Black Sea. They gain control of most of Hungary, but they don't take Vienna.

21:53 They're gonna sit in Hungary for 150 years, but they don't get to Vienna.

21:59 They try again in 1683. And this is a crucial turning point for a lot of people.

22:07 1683 is the famous moment when the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth 22:13 lifts the Ottoman siege of Vienna. In sort of conventional histories of Europe 22:19 and how Europe is built, this is a hugely important moment because it's counter-reformation, Catholicism, 22:24 Vienna and Warsaw together defeating this Islamic army around Vienna.

22:30 So huge amounts of Baroque painting and symbolism and recollection along those lines of this event.

22:38 From our point of view, this has some different resonances. So the king of Poland, who liberates Vienna, 22:48 who raises the Ottoman siege of Vienna, who's called Sobieski, I probably forgot to put his name on there. By the way, there are two sides on the term sheet today, 22:56 because that's the kind of day we're having. Jan Sobieski is the king of Poland.

23:02 When he liberates, as Ukrainians will tell you, so you should visit this if you're in Vienna, 23:08 which I know you all now will be, if you're in Vienna, the little mountain from which the Polish Lithuanian army comes down 23:14 is called the Kahlenberg. And you can walk up it, it's a nice hike. You can take the bus up and walk down, 23:20 if you're not that energetic, there's ice cream at the top. Lovely views, strongly recommend. Oh, and on the way down there are these places called 23:27 (indistinct), which have fresh wine and like very simple food, and it's lovely. So you should definitely all do this. But as any Ukrainian will tell you, 23:33 when the Polish Lithuanian army comes crashing down that mountain, they have 5,000 Ukrainian Cossacks with them, 23:39 okay? 5,000 Ukrainian Cossacks. And then this brings us to the more interesting thing.

23:46 There was a problem, there were many interesting problems between the Austrian command and the Polish command.

23:55 And one of the problems was that the Austrians could not tell the difference between the Poles 24:01 and the Crimean Tatars. They literally could not tell the difference.

24:07 And so, because in dress and attire and also in tactics, they were very similar.

24:12 And the Crimean Tatars, of course, oh, I didn't say this, but the Crimean Tatars were there in 1683 24:20 on the Ottoman side, right? On the Ottoman side. So these Poles, Pol Lithuanians and Crimean Tatars, 24:28 who've been fighting on their own border for a long time, are now fighting in somebody else's border. Like if you imagine Crimean Tatars, 10,000 of them 24:35 in and around Vienna, fighting the Polish army coming down from the mountain, right? 24:40 And the Viennese cannot tell the Poles, cannot tell the Lithuanians from the Crimean Tatars, right? 24:46 Because of the hairstyles, because of the scimitars, right? Because of the calvary, they cannot tell the difference.

24:52 And so the decision that was made was that the Poles are going to put a bit of straw in their helmets.

24:58 You know, the way modern armies will have a color on their sleeves or whatever. Like the Ukrainians and the Russians today, 25:04 the Poles will put a bit of straw in their helmets, so that the Austrians could tell who they were. So it's an anecdote, it's funny, 25:10 but it reveals something which is deeply true, which is that this long, centuries long encounter 25:16 between the Lithuanians and the Tatars, and then the Poles and Lithuanians and the Tatars, mark them just as it marks the Cossacks, right? 25:23 The Viennese, of course couldn't tell the Cossacks from the Tatars, right? That goes without saying, 25:28 because the interaction between the Cossacks and the Tatars has been even more intimate for even longer, because the Cossacks are precisely the people 25:35 who found that free spot between Polish Lithuanian power and the Crimean Tatars and lived in that spot, 25:41 lived in it geographically, lived in it culturally. Okay, so the 1683 victory is most important for us 25:50 because it leads to 1699. If we're off in central European history, 25:56 1683 is the moment when the Austrians turn the tables on the Ottomans.

26:01 And not only do they defend themselves in Vienna, but between 1683 and 1699, they fight their way southward through the Balkans, 26:08 and they establish themselves as a land power in the Balkans, which is the beginning of the story, which will eventually lead to the First World War, 26:14 different class. But for our point of view, when the Ottomans have to sign a peace tree in 1699, 26:22 which by the way is the first time they have to sign a peace treaty as a defeated power, when they have to sign a peace treaty in 1699, 26:28 that changes the balance of power in our part of the world, right? The Ottomans have been defeated, 26:35 their armies have been defeated in Southern Europe. The treaty which is signed 26:40 is the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, the Treaty of Karlowitz, that's the time when the Ottomans sign a treaty 26:45 as a defeated power. Hugely important turning point in the balance of power, 26:51 because as I said, the Crimean Tatars they're now basically hitched to the Ottomans.

26:57 They're hitched to the Ottomans at a moment when the Ottomans then lose this big important war. And Ottoman power has been driven southward, okay? 27:06 Now that changes everything. That changes everything for the Russians as we're gonna see in a moment.

27:11 Okay, now, before I get to the Russians, we've gotta briefly talk about Cossacks, 27:19 the Ukrainian Cossack state. So the Ukrainian Cossack state gets blurred out of Polish history, 27:26 gets blurred out of Russian history. We have 1648, which everyone is keen to treat as a violent, 27:32 you know, moment of violent rebellion, which of course it was, but that's not the only thing that it was, it was also the construction of a new political order 27:39 in which the governing elite has been driven away or physically eliminated or discredited, right? 27:45 So it's also something like a revolution in which a new class emerges to control territory, 27:51 which are the Cossacks and the Cossack officers. Now, these Cossacks and Cossack officers, however, 27:59 are not in the position after 1648 to rule territory themselves.

28:04 They are constantly forced to align with the Russians as in 1648, sometimes still with the Poles, 28:10 sometimes with the Ottomans, which is why this lecture is called "The Triangle". There is something like Ukrainian statehood, 28:17 it's called the Hetmanate, after the Hetman. But the Hetmanate is constantly bending and turning 28:24 and being turned against itself, right? So you have right bank Hetmans, you have left bank Hetmans, 28:30 you have Hetmans who are trying to rule both the right wing and the left wing. You have a Hetman called Doroshenko, 28:37 who I hope I put on the list, tell me if I didn't. But Doroshenko in 1669 becomes a vessel of the Ottomans 28:47 in order to try to unite the right bank and the left bank where the right bank is controlled by 28:54 the Russians, the left bank is controlled by the Poles. So if you're a Hetman, your great project 29:00 is to bring these things together and then ideally to shove everybody else out. But that they're not able to do.

29:08 So, okay, this is another date and treaty. So I'm gonna tell you right off, 29:14 if you're paying attention, you're right here with me, these dates and these treaties are gonna be on the exam, all right? 29:20 They're gonna be on the exam, know the dates of the treaties. So the Treaty of Andrusova, 1667, 29:26 that is when the Poles and the Russians, lots of inspired note taking now. That's when the Poles and the Russians divide Ukraine, 29:34 left bank and right bank, 1667 Treaty of Andrusova. Which means that now you have Hetmans, 29:40 you have leaders of the Cossacks on both sides, right? And of course, if you're on one side, your greatest aspiration is to be also on the other side.

29:47 And then your next aspiration is then to get clear of whoever was sponsoring you, whether that's the Russians or the Poles or the Ottomans.

29:54 That's the triangle. You wanna bring it all together. And then you wanna drive out whoever sponsored you. They don't manage to do this, but that's the pattern.

30:00 So 1672, Doroshenko helps the Ottomans 30:05 to defeat the Poles in Podolia, okay? Podolia is this region in South Western Ukraine.

30:15 And then after that happens, so the Ottomans then control Podolia, which I'm gonna, you guys write down Podolia, please, just like it sounds.

30:24 They control Podolia and then at the end of the 1670s, the Ottomans make peace with Poland.

30:30 In 1681, you're gonna see how this fits together, in 1681, the Ottomans make peace with the Russians, okay? 30:38 So now the Ottomans are at peace with the Poles and the Russians, it's 1681, what do they then do? 30:43 They make their big move northwards to Vienna and fail, right? So important.

30:49 Their move is to go to Vienna and they fail. Okay and so then everything turns around.

30:56 After 1683, the Ottomans are driven south. The Crimeans have been defeated. The Crimean Khan, by the way, 31:02 takes personal responsibility for the defeat and retires. And in 1699, the Poles take Podolia back.

31:13 The Poles take Podolia back. And the reason why, there are many reasons why we're concerned about this, 31:18 but one of the reasons why we're so interested in Podolia is because of the way that Brooklyn looks like now, 31:27 so have you heard of the Hasidism, right? 31:33 So it's a version of Jewish orthodoxy.

31:38 It's present on Yale's campus. You don't have to look too hard to find it. So, okay, I gotta stop myself, that was a tangent.

31:46 See, in the 18th century, you have no time for tangents. That's what the 18th century is like.

31:52 So no tangents, but Hasidism, which is a version of Orthodox Judaism, 31:59 which is still let's say thriving. It's one of the reasons why Yiddish still exists 32:05 as a language is created in Podolia after the Poles come back.

32:11 And the reason why, I'll tell you what Hasidism is in a moment very briefly, but the reason why it arises is that it's in this territory which has shifted 32:19 from Muslim Ottoman control back and forth to Polish Christian control.

32:24 And this whole Polish system of coming in with the aristocracy and the serfdom, and then going back out with the aristocracy 32:30 and the serfdom, then coming back in with the aristocracy and the serfdom, is very disruptive for the Ukrainians who rebel against it.

32:35 And in this whole boiling atmosphere in Podolia is what gives rise to Hasidism.

32:42 Where Hasidism is created by someone who's called the Besht. Besht means the Ba'al Shem Tov, the Master of the Good Word.

32:51 Very briefly, the idea of Hasidism is to give to Judaism 32:59 a kind of a more earthly and more corporeal component where joy and direct contact with the mystic 33:07 are more important. It's also a movement which has to do with the printing press and access to the book by people who are not necessarily 33:15 completely literate. Which let's admit, like not everybody is completely, you know, there's a funny moment, right? 33:20 'Cause the printing press runs ahead of literacy by several hundred years, right? 33:25 Kind of like the internet now, you know, like the technology is way out ahead of what people, it's a good analogy actually.

33:31 Because what people did with books when they're first published, they did things like, oh look, I know that letter.

33:36 Maybe it stands for something. And that's kabbala. That's one way of reading the Bible, right? 33:43 Is you don't, like, you take various combinations of letters and you say, okay there's a hidden meaning 33:48 in this biblical verse, right? That's a way of interpreting the Bible, a much more accessible way, which is associated with Hasidism precisely.

33:55 So it also has to do with printing press at a time of limited literacy. So the reason why I mention this is because 34:03 it's the next step in the history of Jews in Ukraine, Hasidism. And Hasidism is also a version of Orthodox Judaism, 34:11 which is going to break out of Podolia and into Ukraine and into Poland and eventually into North America.

34:18 Okay, so no time for tangents. There was time for a parenthesis on the Hassids. Now I'm closing that parenthesis 34:24 and we're getting back to where we need to be, which is Russia. Okay, so now let's think about all this 34:31 from the point of view of Russia. What the Russians are able to do, 34:36 what the new Russian empire, as it's called from 1721.

34:42 And by the way, Russian Empire is a conscious rebranding exercise, right? 34:47 It's called Russia because of Russ, not the other way around, right? I mean, I realize you're history students, 34:53 so you know that like chronology is very important. So Russia is called Russia because it's named after Russ.

34:59 Russ was not called Russ because it was named after Russia. And once you get that straight, a lot of other things fall into place.

35:05 Okay, so in the 18th century, Russia makes its move back into Europe with tremendous success 35:13 under two great rulers, Peter and Catherine. So how does this happen? 35:19 The Ottomans are down, right? They're defeated and they're in the south.

35:25 Between 1683 and 1699, they're being driven southward and Russia takes advantage of this by going north, 35:34 going to the Baltic again. We saw how Ivan the Terrible 35:40 foundered on the shores of the Baltic, he starts the Livonian wars, which he basically loses the Livonian wars, 35:46 bring the Poles and Lithuanians closer together, Union of Lublin, all of that. And then there's terror inside the Muscovite state.

35:54 This time, the move to the Baltic succeeds. The great northern war that begins in 1700, 36:01 which is only one year after 1699, by no coincidence, the Great Northern War which begins in 1700, 36:06 it turns out to be a Russian victory. But this great northern war turns out to be Russian victory, 36:12 partly because the Cossacks are fighting there, but they're fighting with the Ukrainian Cossacks, 36:18 but they're fighting there in conditions which are highly unfavorable, right? So the Cossacks have been fighting for hundreds of years 36:24 with and against the Polls, with and against the Lithuanians, with and against the Tatars, right? 36:30 That's with the Tatars too. The Khmelnytsky Uprising was with the Tatars against the Poles, it's a triangle.

36:35 You have to lie with pretty much everybody in different circumstances. So, but anyway, 36:41 that is their home turf down there, right? With the Tatars, with the Poles, with the Lithuanians.

36:46 When they are brought up to fight in Sweden, in northern Europe, they're facing a modern army 36:52 with modern weapons, they're taking huge casualties, they're far away from home and they're taking orders from Russian imperial officers, 37:01 all of which leads to a great deal of discontent. Meanwhile, while they're up north, 37:06 Poland threatens to invade Ukraine. And the Hetman, who is the Hetman of the left bank, 37:15 the Hetman of the Russian part of Ukraine, who is a man called Ivan Mazepa, 37:21 realizes that we're now in a moment of crisis. And so Mazepa makes a decision, which is quite fateful.

37:28 Mazepa makes the decision in 1708 to switch over to the Swedish side, okay? 37:35 So there are operas about this, there's lots of Russian literature about this. And it's like, it's the great betrayal by, 37:41 it rings down the century, literally rings down the centuries, because Russian bells were supposed to ring out because of Mazepa's betrayal.

37:50 Mazepa had been a kind of counselor to Peter, okay? Mazepa is older than Peter, 37:55 Mazepa had this fantastic European education. He'd been the counselor to the King of Poland.

38:00 He'd been educated at the Kyiv Academy. Then he was educated by Jesuits in Poland, then he was the counselor to the King of Poland, right? 38:07 And so he then became a kind of counselor to Peter in his turn.

38:13 And Peter trusted him. So in 1708, when Mazepa switches sides, 38:18 which he believes he has no choice but to do, to try to preserve his homeland, Peter sees this understandably as a huge betrayal.

38:25 And it's remembered as a tremendous betrayal, as a moment where the Ukrainians betrayed the Russians. So Mazepa switches sides to the Swedes, 38:34 right before they lose, right before they lose. In 1709 at the Battle of Poltava, Russia defeats the Swedes, 38:42 reaches the Baltic and becomes a North European power that is then gonna be followed 1721, 38:49 founding of the Russian Empire, the creation of Petersburg, new European capital, window on Europe, all of that.

38:59 Mazepa dies in 1709. So this is a turning point for the Cossacks.

39:05 I mean, Cossack power probably wasn't gonna persist much longer anyway, but it's a turning point.

39:11 Mazepa dies that same year, 1709.

1719, the Cossacks are banned from selling grain, 39:21 not a detail. They're banned from selling grain on their own. They can only sell grain through Russian ports. And since we know that part of the deep history of Ukraine 39:29 is that Ukraine has the most fertile soil in this part of the world, that ban is a big part of their dependency on Russia.

39:37 1722, the Russians create something called the Little Russian Collegium, 39:42 which is going to co-rule or eventually rule the Cossack lands. Little Russia, Malorussia 39:48 is then a Russian term for which I'll talk more about later for referring to Ukraine.

39:55 So after these turning points, right? After 1699, Battle of Karlowitz, sorry, 40:01 the Treaty of Karlowitz, and after 1709, the Battle of Poltava, the Ottomans are down and the Swedes are down, 40:09 and the Russians have basically a free hand with the Cossacks and they're using the Cossacks to fight the Swedes.

40:15 And then they're using the Cossacks to fight the Crimean Khanate and to fight the Ottomans.

40:21 That's the way it goes. So you can see the Cossack power is being spent northward 40:27 and being spent southward. In the 18th century in a series of battles, 40:33 the Russians managed to drive Crimean power out of what is now southern Ukraine.

40:39 And then eventually they manage to conquer Crimea itself. This happens in a couple of wars, 1735 to 1739, 40:47 then 1768 to 1774.

40:53 Crimea becomes a protectorate that year, 1774.

1783, its annexed by the Russian Empire.

41:00 Now, while this is happening, while the Cossacks are being played out, right? 41:06 Cossack power is being spent in these wars southward, it's not that it's new that the Cossacks are fighting the Crimean Tatars, 41:12 they've been doing that forever. What's new is that they're doing it under Russian command. And when that job is done, 41:19 all that remains of their autonomy is taken away, right? So you're seeing this triangle kind of crushes in 41:25 on everyone at the same time. The Crimean Khanate is being defeated by Ottomans, 41:30 but in that defeat, sorry, it's being defeated by Cossacks. And, but in that defeat, 41:35 the Cossacks are also being defeated by Russia, right? The institutions of the Cossacks are going to disappear 41:43 at basically the same time that the institutions of the Crimean Khanate are going to disappear.

41:48 And then they are swept up. And here's where things get intellectually very interesting. They are then swept up by Catherine's idea of a new Russia.

41:59 Okay, so this is fascinating because what Catherine does, 42:05 educated woman, German, by the way, her real name is Sophie.

42:12 And there's nothing Russian about her except the husbands who had to be murdered so she could rule, that's it.

42:20 So Catherine has this idea, which is very elegant.

42:25 It's also a classically colonial idea that these lands that have just been conquered, 42:32 there wasn't anybody there, right? These are virgin territories.

42:37 So the place is renamed what's now Southern Ukraine where the Cossacks had had power and the Crimean Peninsula 42:47 where the Crimean Khanate had had power, these places are renamed New Russia, okay? Now that word new is magical, right? 42:55 Like with New England or New South Wales or New Caledonia, that word new is magical because it suggests 43:03 this is our new Russia. It's powerful, right? It's powerful.

43:08 More than 200, you know, 200 years later, 300 years later, 43:14 people are gonna be still drawn by this notion of New Russia. But when you say something is new, 43:19 you're not saying it's yours, you're saying that we want it to be ours, right? That's the whole point.

43:24 So Novorossiya does not mean something which is Russian, it means something that we're gonna make Russia, 43:30 we're gonna pretend that nothing else is there. And how do you do that? Well, you send multiple, and the Russians did this, 43:37 they sent four expeditions of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences to Crimea 43:43 to name everything, find all the species, map everything, right? Because science is one of the tools 43:50 by which you gather imperial knowledge. And then the naming, I mean, this is, one has to admit this is quite brilliant 43:57 on Catherine's part, they rename everything. So all the Turkic names, the Muslim names, 44:03 the Crimean Tatar names are replaced. And what are they replaced with? 44:10 Greek names or names that sound Greek, like Kherson, okay? 44:16 Like Kherson, that city that's being fought over right now. Kherson, completely invented name, right? 44:22 Or it comes from the Greek city of Kherson, which is in Crimea.

44:27 Mariupol, sounds Greek sorta, right? That's the whole idea.

44:32 They took the old names and then they replaced 'em with Greek names. And when they founded new places, those two examples I gave are new places, 44:39 Kherson and Mariupol, they gave them Greek or Greek-ish, Greek sounding, Greco whatever names. And the point of this is to say 44:46 Russia is connected with the classical world, right? And in that we're European, right? 44:53 We're in the enlightenment. Connecting Russia with the classical world, 44:58 going back all the way 2000 years, means that you obliterative everything that happens in between.

45:04 So the Crimeans don't matter, the Ukrainians don't matter, it's Russia here alone with its historical destiny, 45:11 which goes all the way back to Greece. And so it's new Russia, but it's justified 45:18 by this connection to the classical world. Okay, that brings us to where we need to be.

45:25 The Crimean Tatars themselves are going to be physically displaced. About a third of them, roughly 300,000 of them 45:33 are going to immigrate while Russia takes control of the peninsula, most (indistinct) Ottoman Empire. During the Crimean War of the 1850s, 45:40 another 140,000 Crimean Tatars are going to leave. Jumping ahead a bit, 45:45 the remainder of the Crimean Tatar population is going to be deported every man, woman and child in 1944 under Soviet rule, 45:52 so that the entire peninsula is deprived of its indigenous population.

45:59 The Ukrainians, and this is the very last thing, when this is all over, when the Cossacks have been disbanded, 46:06 when the territories have been integrated into new Russia districts, as soon as that happens, 46:12 in the spirit of romanticism, the Ukrainians from a new university in today's Kharkiv, 46:19 what was called Kharkov in Russian back then, from a new university, which is founded in 1805, 46:24 the first move is going to be classical traditional European style romanticism, 46:30 where they start looking back to the Cossack past and start writing about Cossack state continuities.

46:36 And in the 19th century, they will move into a mode where they turn their own past into something like 46:42 a usable national story, which we're gonna talk more about in the weeks to come.

46:49 For the Crimean Tatars, for various reasons, this wasn't possible. The Crimean Tatars aren't gonna be able 46:55 to make a move like this. They're going to be largely dispersed and they're gonna be treated as alien and their domination is gonna be much more complete.

47:03 I'm gonna talk more about that when we get to the 20th century, 'cause it's really interesting in itself and it's very important 47:08 for the way that the war is being fought. Just one closing thought. People find it easier to think that Crimea is really Russia 47:16 than Ukraine is really Russia, right? Today. And why is that? 47:21 I mean, it's because the history of Crimea has been, although the history of Ukraine has been pretty successfully obliterated, 47:29 the history of Crimea has been very successfully obliterated. And so the idea that Ukraine is always Russia, 47:35 maybe like, you know, you might ask a question, but Crimea is always Russia? People are more likely to believe that, right? 47:43 And so part of the work that we have to do in history is to fill in the gaps and get things where they were in the past 47:50 and make these always claims, whatever they might be, seem unbelievable. And in that way, prepare ourselves for the exam.

47:58 Good luck.

1699, 1699 is definitely gonna be on this exam, 100%, 1699.

48:04 Okay, thank you everybody, thanks for listening. The 18th century is tough work and I appreciate that you're here with me.

48:15 (soft music)

back to TOC


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Lecture 12 Habsburg Curiosity

0:00 (deep tones resonating) (tape fast forwarding) 0:12 - Okay, everybody, greetings. Welcome. Happy Tuesday. Our job today is to get through the Habsburgs.

0:19 I wanna start with making a few remarks about mistakes, my own and those of others.

0:25 Okay, so the funny thing about giving a class where there were two million views online is that I can hear from a large number of people 0:32 about things that go on in this class. So I just wanna say to those of you who are watching online, 0:38 you are right. Milorad Pavic, the author of "Dictionary of the Khazars" was a Serb and not a Croat.

0:44 I'm very sorry. And on etymology of punch, obviously, 0:49 I should have said that's a common Indo-European root that is shared in the Slavic and other languages. Okay, as far as errors in the transcription, 0:57 please do not email me about errors in the transcription. Email the people who are doing the transcription, 1:03 and that email address is right over there, and the cameraman is going to give you that email address there. So if you find errors in the transcription, do not email me.

1:11 Thank you very much. (class chuckling) (chuckling) Okay, so we have a really important 1:18 and interesting job today, which is to get through the Habsburg family. So families matter a lot in history.

1:25 Larger forces matter too. Structural forces matter too. Climate matters, geology matters, economics matter, 1:32 but individuals and families matter very much as well. This would be a very different war if someone 1:38 besides Volodymyr Zelenskyy were president of Ukraine. This would be a very different war if someone besides Joe Biden were president in the United States.

1:43 Individuals do matter, families do matter, and it's important to have them inside history as well.

1:49 It's an especially easy case to make for the Habsburgs because they were in power in some form or other 1:55 for about 600 years, one place or another, and for sometimes they were in power over much of the world.

2:02 So the historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote that for about half a millennium, 2:08 it wasn't that the Habsburgs turned around the history of Europe, it was that the history of Europe turned around them, 2:14 and for about a hundred years, you could even say as much about the history of the world. So if you are going to be a history major 2:20 or if you're going to be someone especially who's focusing on the history of Europe, and there's one family name that you should know, 2:26 this is probably the family name that you should know. So we are going to get around to why the Habsburgs are so important 2:32 to the history of Ukraine, but we're gonna make sure first, and this is gonna be the bulk of the lecture, that we have a sense of who the Habsburgs are.

2:40 So if the Habsburgs were so important, why is it that no one talks that much about them, 2:46 or, more interestingly, why is it that of all the peoples around the world, 2:51 the people who remember the Habsburgs fondly tend to be in Western Ukraine? 2:56 So the Habsburg touched, the Habsburgs touch all kinds of people, including the Aztecs, including the Inca, 3:04 they touched all kinds of people, but they're remembered fondly in Western Ukraine. By the end of the lecture, you should have a sense 3:10 of why it is that they're remembered fondly in Western Ukraine. In terms of the overall arguments and method 3:17 that we've been using in this class, this is gonna be one more example of how friction or contact between larger powers, between empires, 3:26 has to do with the creation of the nation. The Habsburgs are going to turn out to be very important 3:33 in the origins of Ukraine, and yet, and yet, and yet, when the Habsburgs, when Maria Theresia takes part 3:41 in the First Partition of Poland in 1772 and brings in a tiny bit of territory 3:48 where most people speak Ukrainian, she is thinking many things, but she is certainly not thinking about Ukraine 3:55 or the history of Ukraine, or the future of Ukraine. Nevertheless, this little encounter, 4:01 one tiny part of where Ukrainian is spoken in the world and also one tiny part of the Habsburg monarchy, 4:08 that overlap between one tiny part of the zone where Ukrainian is spoken and one tiny part of the Habsburg world, 4:15 that little tiny overlap, which is called Galicia, is going to turn out to be very, very important 4:21 for the history of the Ukrainian nation. It's gonna be important 4:28 for a certain kind of, a especially certain kind of moment. I'm gonna say the 1880s to the 1980s, for about a century, 4:36 Galicia is going to be the most important part of what's now Ukraine.

4:42 That period comes and that period goes. It's already gone, so with all due respect 4:48 to those of you who are from Halychyna, that period is now passed. The center, the natural center, of European politics, sorry, 4:56 of Ukrainian politics is actually the East. It's the East now, and it's the East for most of the time 5:03 that we're teaching in this class, but for a century or so, Galicia is extremely important, 5:08 and you might even argue necessary, right? So you can imagine there might be an essay question, 5:15 which would be something like, if Galicia had not been part of the Habsburg monarchy, what would've happened to Ukraine, right? 5:21 That's how important this zone is. So we're talking about a moment. We're talking about a moment 5:26 when some Ukrainian-speaking territory is part of the Habsburg monarchy. That moment lasts from 1772 to 1918.

5:34 And then we're talking about a moment where that zone, we will be later talking about a moment where that zone is crucial to Ukraine as a whole, 5:40 which is roughly the 1880s to the 1890s. Okay, so, but my goal here 5:48 is to make sure you know who the Habsburgs are because if you walked away from this class saying the Habsburgs, 5:53 I mean, with all due respect to the history of Ukraine, if you walked away from this class thinking the Habsburgs are important 5:58 because of this thing they did in Galicia for a few decades, that would be an unfortunately nationalistic interpretation 6:05 of this family, so we're gonna make sure that we know who the Habsburgs are. We have talked about a couple of kinds of empires so far.

6:13 We've talked about empires that break out into the Age of Discovery and empires that don't.

6:18 So when we think about the success of the Russian Empire in the 18th century, one of the broad factors behind that 6:24 was that Russia managed to reach the Pacific and also that Russia, by way of English traders first, 6:30 manages to trade West as well into the Atlantic. Russia breaks out into the world, not just on land, 6:36 but also by making contact with the oceans. A couple of other empires or large states 6:41 that don't do that are the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which comes to an end in the 18th century, and the Ottoman Empire, which is weakening.

6:48 The Ottoman Empire can't break out of the Mediterranean. The Habsburgs are a very interesting kind of middle case 6:55 because the Habsburgs do break out into the wider world. Indeed, they break out into the wider world more effectively 7:02 and more extravagantly and more spectacularly than any other family.

7:07 In the early 16th century, they are governing Spain. By the late 18th century, sorry, 16th century, 7:15 they're also governing Portugal. They're governing the Netherlands for much of the 1500s and 1600s.

7:22 Why does that matter? Because the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the Dutch are the major exploring powers at the time.

7:30 If you cast a glance at the bottom part of the map that I handed out, which is entitled Habsburg Earth, that gives you an idea.

7:38 We think of these things as Spanish history, the Spanish Empire, Portuguese history, the Portuguese Empire.

7:44 We think of the Dutch traders, but the Habsburgs actually ruled these countries 7:50 in the 1500s and in the 1600s. So the Habsburgs ruled domains 7:55 which break out into the world more powerfully, more spectacularly than any other single family, 8:01 but then it's all broken in 1700, that the Spanish branch of the Habsburgs dies out, 8:09 and the Habsburgs at that point are basically reduced to being a European power. That year, 1700, one year after 1699, 8:17 which, as you all know, is the time of the Treaty of Karlowitz, which marks when the Habsburgs break out 8:23 into Southeastern Europe. So 1699, 1700, you can remember as a kind of turning point 8:28 when the Habsburgs are ceasing to be a world power, but at exactly the same moment becoming a Southeastern, 8:35 East Central, or East European power. The final thing I wanna say about the Habsburgs 8:40 before I get into the chronology is that I would ask you 8:45 if you have a vision of the Habsburgs in mind, maybe you don't, maybe this is all completely new, but if you have a vision of the Habsburgs in mind, 8:51 and you come from a francophone or an anglophone background, the vision that you have in your mind is probably 8:57 very much people who were mad, bad, and unfit to rule, that you probably have in mind the idea 9:04 that this was some kind of antique, cantankerous, doomed monarchy which was anachronistic 9:11 because it had lots of nations inside of it at the same time and fell apart during the First World War.

9:17 That's the stereotype, and that stereotype comes from American and British and French propaganda during the First World War.

9:25 So if you come from, if you happen to come from those traditions, a French or a British or American tradition in education, 9:30 probably insofar as the Habsburgs figure at all, it's as a prison of nations, yada, yada, yada.

9:37 I mean, I'm gonna puncture that just for a moment, just one moment.

9:42 When the Habsburgs were fighting the Americans at the end of the First World War, when Wilson gave his famous speech 9:50 in which he was announcing the principle of self-determination, there were, okay, I'm gonna put this as a question 9:55 'cause you guys look awake. There were how many African Americans in the American Congress listening to that speech? 10:04 Come on, you can do it. It's the safest possible guess. Zero is correct, right? 10:10 Zero is correct, whereas in the Habsburg Parliament at the same time, 10:15 all the nationalities were represented, right? All the nationalities were represented. So in many ways, the Habsburg monarchy was actually 10:22 a more liberal country than the United States of America at the time when they were waging war. That's just one little detail.

10:29 And when you think about the Habsburgs today, and you think about that stereotype, you could also think about it in these terms.

10:35 Were the Habsburgs behind the times or, 10:40 insofar as these ways of thinking about things are acceptable, maybe they were ahead of their time? 10:46 Because by the time you get to the 19th century, the late 19th century, early 20th century, the Habsburgs were a multinational, 10:53 pluralistic liberal zone with very messy politics, 10:59 but a growing economy and not entirely unlike the European Union of today, right? 11:05 So is that model of being multinational and having cranky politics based on compromise among nationalities, is that a thing of the past, 11:12 or is that maybe a thing of the present or the future? Okay, so, so much for the repair of the image of the Habsburgs.

11:17 Now we're gonna zoom back into the history of the Habsburgs, and you can make your own judgements. So the Habsburgs go all the way back.

11:27 They really are an old family. They're not as old as they say they are. They don't actually go back to Remus and Romulus and the wolf, 11:34 but they do go back to the year 1020. They built a castle called the Habichtsburg, 11:40 which is the first sign of their existence, and that's the year 1020. So basically their existence is contemporaneous 11:46 with the foundation of Kyivan Rus' as we know it, which is 988. The Habsburgs have been around for a long time.

11:54 Most of this history isn't gonna seem to have much to do with Ukraine, but we need to know who they are before they get to Ukraine.

12:03 These people make their money by not from glamorous conquest, and this is sort of a theme.

12:09 They make their money at the beginning by tolls over bridges and by taxing travelers and things like that 12:15 in what's now Austria, what's now Switzerland. The one great or the greatest Austrian Habsburg warlord 12:24 was Rudolf von Habsburg, who was born in 1218 and is elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1273.

12:30 He's the founder of this dynasty as a major European dynasty. What's the Holy Roman Empire? 12:38 The Holy Roman Empire is the, so the title of Holy Roman Emperor is given 12:43 to the King of the Franks. If you'll remember, the initial geopolitics 12:49 of this class are the Franks in the West and the Byzantines in the South or in the East.

12:54 Charlemagne is the great King of the Franks. The idea that there is an emperor is revived in the West 13:01 with the Kingdom of the Franks, and then when that line dies out, it's restored again in the year 962, when Otto, 13:09 who is king of Germany, is named Holy Roman Emperor, crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 962.

13:17 From that point forward, until Napoleon does away with it, there's going to be something called the Holy Roman Empire.

13:24 The Habsburgs are going to claim superiority over other families largely by being Holy Roman Emperors 13:32 and by claiming that they always should be Holy Roman Emperors. But many interesting things about the Holy Roman Empire, 13:38 that one of them is that the emperor was elected, admittedly, by a very small group of electors, 13:43 of a handful of electors, but nevertheless elected. The way elections work though 13:49 is that they're very closely associated with bouts of violence, which is, of course, something we in America don't know anything about.

13:57 When Rudolf of Habsburg was elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1273, and this was immediately contested 14:03 by probably the most impressive king of the most impressive kingdom of the time, which was the wonderfully named Otakar Premysl II, right? 14:13 The name Otakar Premysl was so good that there had to be at least two of them, right? So Otakar Premysl II, who was king of the Czechs, 14:21 he really was the probably the most impressive ruler of Europe at the time.

14:26 The Czechs have just done this funny thing where they've claimed that they've hosted, did you see this? They've claimed that they've hosted 14:32 a referendum in Kaliningrad? (student speaking faintly) Yeah, that goes- - [Student] Královec. - Yeah, sorry, Královec.

14:40 This goes back to Otakar Premysl II and the great Czech kingdom of the Middle Ages.

14:48 So he immediately contest this, and there's a huge war in which Rudolf of Habsburg actually wins 14:55 and Otakar Premysl II is killed, which is one of these turning points, right? I mean, this class is not about this, 15:02 but by rights, you could say, the Czechs probably should have been the dominant power in Eastern Europe, 15:07 and they just had some bad luck at a couple of moments, and this was one of them.

15:12 After Rudolf dies in 1291, his son is not elected, 15:17 so his son then contests the election. That seems like a strangely euphemistic way of putting it. It makes it seem like I'm holding up a ballot or something 15:23 and say, "You didn't count this one," but that's not what you mean by contest the election. I mean that he killed the man who was elected 15:30 on the battlefield with his own hands, spearing him through the face, and finishing him off with a much feared ballock knife, 15:37 which is exactly what it sounds like, after which he was elected, right? After which he was elected.

15:43 So you can see the history of elections. In the history of elections, there's a lot of disentanglement to do between the peaceful procedure 15:49 and the violence that attends elections, and it's a lot of hard work.

15:56 The run of the Habsburgs ends in a meaningful way in 1346 when another great Czech king, 16:03 the greatest Czech king, Charles, the one after whom the university and the bridge, if you've ever been there, is named.

16:11 King Charles is elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1346.

16:17 This is very important for the history the Czechs and history of Central Europe, but for our purposes, we just wanna note that the Luxembourgs, 16:26 that's Charles' family, yes, the same as the country, the Luxembourgs now become Holy Roman Emperors for a while, 16:31 and this is a big problem for the Habsburgs, not least because the Luxembourgs do an extremely good job of it.

16:37 Charles promulgates something called the Golden Bull in 1346, which is a statute of imperial governance, 16:43 which straightened things out, which includes electoral procedures. I want say that it says no ballock knife, 16:49 but it doesn't actually say that, that would be too good to be true, but it includes electoral procedures so the transitions 16:55 could be a little bit easier in the future. The Habsburgs respond to this in a way which is poetic 17:01 and characteristic, in which I want you to mark because it is a feature of this family, as you'll know if you've read "The Red Prince. " 17:07 They respond to this with a beautiful kind of, a beautiful nostalgic attack.

17:12 They invent something called the Privilegium Maius. They just make it up. They just make it up, which is not an unknown theme 17:20 in East European history, by the way, people just making up documents. There's a lot of this later on, 17:26 which is good fun for historians. So they just make up something called the Privilegium Maius in 1359, 17:31 and the idea is that the Habsburgs are the oldest family, and the Habsburgs have the right to rule Rome, et cetera, 17:37 because they have land grants from Nero and land grants from Julius Caesar.

17:42 Okay, that is not true at all. It's just completely made up, but it's a nice story, right? It's a nice story, and if you have a nice story 17:49 and you have power, then sometimes you can make your nice story seem like it's true.

17:54 So the Luxembourgs are gonna be ruling these Holy Roman Emperors until 1437, 18:00 at which point a crisis and a marriage are going to flip the Holy Roman Empire back to the Habsburgs.

18:09 The crisis, which we've run across before, is the Black Plague, which begins in 1347 in Europe, 18:15 wipes out maybe 1/3 of the population. This crisis, the pestilence, this crisis of disease, 18:23 is associated with a spiritual crisis. This is the time, if you ever had like a survey European class, 18:29 you'll remember there was one pope, then there were two popes, and there were three popes, and the popes were in various places, 18:34 and they were hostage to kings and so on. This is that period. In the 14th century, multiple popes.

18:42 As the Black Death had died down, a council was called in Constance for 1414 to 1415, 18:49 and the purpose of the Council in Constance was to make order in the Christian Church to make order in what? In the Catholic Church.

18:55 And one of the ways that order was to be made were that these annoying heretics 19:00 from Bohemia were going to be brought in, and the most annoying of these heretics from Bohemia 19:06 was a fellow called Jan Hus. So Jan Hus, J-A-N H-U-S, I think he's on the sheet, 19:12 he was a sort of, I mean, this is anachronistic way of putting it, but he was a kind of pre-Protestant. He had many ideas which would be familiar 19:20 from radical Protestantism, like that you can preach in the language of the people, you can preach in the vernacular, 19:25 you should preach facing the people. He also had the idea that, this is a really radical idea, 19:30 the church is not an institution. As such, the church comes from the people, right? Therefore, all the property of the church 19:37 is kind of up in question. The church shouldn't be wealthy. The wealth of the church should be returned to the people.

19:42 These kinds of ideas, that's just a sample, but you can see how that would be understood as a threat to the established church as it was.

19:51 So on the 6th of July, 1415, Jan Hus was burned at the stake at the Council of Constance 19:57 after a trial, which he found unsatisfactory. And it's for this reason if you go, 20:03 again, if you go to Prague, which I urge you to do, there's a fine statue of Jan Hus with the slogan, 20:12 (speaking in foreign language) the truth with triumph. The truth will be victorious.

20:18 So this is relevant for us because this precipitates the situation in which the Habsburgs come back.

20:26 The Czech nobility in much of the Czech bourgeoisie, and many Czechs in general, including peasants, 20:32 identify with Hus' version of Christianity. By the way, what was Hus' job? 20:38 He was basically the dean of a university. Interesting, right? So Hus, oh, and when he lectured, 20:46 just fun detail, he lectured in Czech a lot of the time, but his notes were in Latin.

20:53 Yeah, interesting, right? Okay, so anyway, so Hus is killed, but many Czechs believe in his version of Christianity, 21:01 and they rebel against their own Luxembourg king, who by this time is called Sigismund, 21:08 Sigismund Luxembourg from Luxembourg. And he picks up the challenge. He says the heretics will be washed away.

21:15 And so there's a kind of civil war in the Bohemian lands against the Luxembourgs, 21:21 which was led by this fantastic guy who I wish I had more time for, Jan Zizka, 21:26 who was a one-eyed military genius, who invented a whole bunch of military tactics which were later used by other people, 21:33 like, well, stealing all the gold from the churches is not original, but he did that.

21:40 He did things like take, he would take wagons full of hay and make circles of them, right? 21:47 So as kind of mobile fortresses, and then shoot out from the inside. Clever things which people hadn't seen before.

21:53 He took good advantage of firearms. So this war goes on for a long time, and now you see the opening.

21:59 This is the opening for the Habsburgs because the Habsburgs, good Catholics, 22:04 volunteer to come in on the side of the Luxembourgs, and as the Habsburgs tend to do, they manage to get, 22:11 they manage to connect it with marriage. They always managed to, this is their secret.

22:17 There's a Hungarian king I'm gonna mention later called Matthias Corvinus who wrote, of course in Latin, "Let others fight wars.

22:24 Thou, happy Austria, marry. " That slogan, which is sort of beautiful and concise, gives you a sense of how they got on 22:31 for those 600 years of power. So the Habsburgs come in on the side 22:36 of the Luxembourgs in this war. They don't actually help very much on the battlefield, 22:43 but the leader of the Habsburg family, the Habsburg family at the time, who is Albert IV, 22:50 gets himself the daughter of the Luxembourg ruler, whose name is Elizabeth, gets her promised as his bride.

22:59 And they marry in 1422, which means that Albert von Habsburg is gonna become the successor, which he does.

23:06 He becomes Holy Roman Emperor in 1437, and then the Habsburgs are going to be Holy Roman Emperors 23:11 for the next three centuries after that, right? So Black Death, religious confusion, religious rebellion.

23:19 The Habsburgs sneak in at the last moment, marry the right person, and suddenly they're Holy Roman Emperors again 23:25 for the next three centuries. And as Holy Roman Emperors, what do they do? 23:30 They promulgate this Privilegium Maius. They just issue it. They say, "This is true.

23:36 This is official. This is law. We have a special right to rule. " Okay, so I mentioned Corvinus.

23:44 He's the one, he mounts the next challenge to the Habsburgs. He's the greatest of the Hungarian kings, Matthias Corvinus.

23:52 He actually drives the Habsburgs from their own Austrian lands for a while and does the sort of classic thing 23:58 of taking up residence in Vienna. So he lives in Vienna from 1484, 24:03 but he dies in 1490, and he's succeeded by Wladyslaw Jagiello, who is, I hope, on your sheets, 24:10 because he features four of this fantastic Polish letter, which Wladyslaw 24:22 Jagiello, who is, of course, from that Lithuanian family which is now ruling Poland.

24:28 He becomes king of Hungary. Now, so interestingly, Corvinus says, "Thou, happy Austria, marry," 24:36 but it's the happiest marriages actually come after Corvinus dies. There are two unbelievably fortunate marriages now 24:42 for the Habsburgs which consolidate their place in Europe and in the world.

24:48 The first has to do with Wladyslaw Jagiello.

24:53 Wladyslaw Jagiello enters into a marriage pact with the head of the Habsburg family, 25:01 who at that time is Maximilian I. Then, unhappily for him but happily for the Habsburgs, 25:08 he dies fighting the Ottomans in 1526 at the Battle of Mohacs in a stream under his horse.

25:19 That death triggers a marriage pact, which means that the Habsburgs then get to claim Hungary 25:26 as well as the Czech lands, which they do. They claim those lands. The Ottomans actually rule most of Hungary 25:33 for the next 150 years until 1699, 25:38 but the Habsburgs then claim those lands, and they will eventually effectively rule them.

25:45 Then there's an even more extraordinary marriage pact, which is that Maximilian I's son 25:54 marries a daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Ferdinand and Isabella, the ones who united Spain.

26:01 That Ferdinand and Isabella. She's sixth in line to the throne of Spain, 26:06 so there's no way this is gonna happen. I'm sure many of you are married to people 26:11 who are sixth in line to some throne or another, right? That's just casual, right? You probably didn't even mention that in your Yale interviews.

26:16 You're like, "Ah, no, I'm gonna talk about, I'm gonna talk about intramural rugby instead.

26:21 Don't wanna brag. " So note to video, they all laughed, right? 26:28 (class chuckling) You can't tell when they laugh at my jokes. They all laughed, including the ones who are married to someone who's sixth in line.

26:35 So but what happens? All of the men who are ahead of her die. They all die.

26:40 All five of them die, conveniently just in time for Maximilian's son to become king of Spain, 26:46 thereby bringing the Spanish Empire and, shortly thereafter, the Portuguese Empire and the Netherlands 26:51 and all the lands controlled by the Netherlands under the Habsburgs. So two unbelievably lucky marriages.

26:58 Okay, so that's who the Habsburgs are until we get to about the year 1700.

27:04 The year 1700, 1699, 1700, is when they're established as a European power, but not an American, 27:11 not a world power anymore 'cause the Spanish Habsburgs die out in 1700.

1699, Treaty of Karlowitz, 27:18 they control the Balkans as well as the Czech lands, as well as as Hungary. They take on a distinct European shape, 27:25 which they're more or less gonna have until 1918 with some additions of lands from Poland, 27:31 which we're gonna talk about. After 1700 and the extinction of the Spanish line, the male line of the Austrian Habsburgs 27:39 is also extinguished. In 1740, there are no more men. There's no male Habsburg to take the throne.

27:45 What do they do? And again, this is another one of these moments where a particular person comes to power, 27:52 and if it had been somebody else with maybe a little bit less intelligence and determination, things would've gone differently.

27:57 What the Habsburgs did was they came up with the aptly named pragmatic sanction, which meant that if there are no male Habsburgs, 28:04 how about a female Habsburg? Very pragmatic, right? Pragmatic, I mean, pragmatic from their point of view 28:10 because what's always happening to these families is that the male line dies out and then there's a war, and then somebody else's male line takes over.

28:16 Why not a woman? So Maria Theresia takes over as empress 28:22 of the Habsburg lands in 1740. She's immediately challenged in a way which we would now refer to as highly gendered 28:29 by Frederick of Prussia, who says that, he says, this is how it's gendered.

28:35 He says, "Sure, you have the right to rule, that's all fine, but I think I need to decide for you which territories you get to rule. " (chuckling) 28:42 So the Prussians make war on the Habsburgs. Who were the Prussians? If you can just remember from a couple lectures ago, 28:48 Prussia on the Baltic Sea, successor state of Teutonic Knights, little tiny thing which the Poles allowed to survive, 28:57 but then when the Poles get into trouble, the Prussians become a kingdom, they start to expand, and their ruling family, the Hohenzollerns, 29:04 are just gonna keep expanding, keep expanding, keep expanding, until in 1871 they're gonna unify Germany.

29:09 So we're kind of in the middle of that story with Frederick. So Frederick makes war on the Habsburg monarchy in 1740.

29:17 The Habsburg monarchy defends itself very well. They lose one territory, which Maria Theresia will always want back and never get, 29:23 which is called Silesia. But meanwhile, and there's a lot of meanwhile 29:29 for Maria Theresia when it comes to bearing children. Meanwhile, she does bear a son in 1741, 29:34 beginning a new house, Habsburg-Lorraine, which is gonna rule until 1918. As the English wits then put it, 29:41 the enemy has lost its chance for Austria now wears pants. So when I tell you all the things 29:47 that Maria Theresia has done, I want you to bear in mind that in the next 19 years, she's going to have 15 more children, right? 29:54 So 16 children in 19 years, plus the things we're talking about, and, yes, she had childcare.

30:00 Okay, so 1756 to 1763 is the next major conflict 30:06 between Prussia and the Habsburgs. On the world scale, this is the Seven Years' War. This is the British and the French fighting 30:12 in North America. This is the British gaining dominance over India. The Seven Years' War, like, it's a world war.

30:18 It's a legitimately global conflict, but for our purposes, it's one more time when the Habsburgs fight the Prussians to withdraw 30:25 under Maria Theresia and continue to survive. Then politics turns in 1772 30:32 with the First Partition of Poland. Now the slightly unfair thing about the partition of Poland, 30:37 as I'm sure all of you Polonophile will have noticed, is that it's not that long before, 30:42 it's 1683 when the Polish armies have come to Vienna and raised the Ottoman siege and protected Vienna, 30:49 and then help the Austrians to begin this series of victories, which will end in 1699 with Karlowitz.

30:55 Less than 100 years later, 89 years later, 1772, the Habsburgs are going to take part, 31:02 along with the Prussians and along with the Russian Empire under Catherine, they're gonna take part in the First Partition, 31:08 the First Partition of Poland. And it is in this partition 31:14 that the Austrians take this territory which they call Galicia, which is a beautiful example 31:19 of imperial naming and renaming. If you are Ukrainian, you'll know that there's a town called Halych 31:25 and that there's a region called Halychyna. And from Halych, Halychyna, 31:30 there's a Latin name, from which you can make in German, Galytsiya for which we call Galicia, right? 31:36 And so they name the territories that they claim in 1772. They named them Galicia and Lodomeria.

31:43 Lodomeria is even more wonderful. So there's a historical, they're historical crown lands.

31:50 As you know in this class, of Galicia, we call them Galicia and Volhynia. Volhynia has a town in it called Volodymyr.

31:58 From that town Volodymyr, you get the Latin name Lodomeria, which, let's admit, it sounds kind of cool.

32:04 And so the Habsburgs claim that they're ruling Galicia and Lodomeria.

32:10 Galicia and Lodomeria. In fact, they don't actually rule Lodomeria, which is another part about imperial. Always err on the side of claiming more than you actually...

32:18 The Habsburgs also were kings of Jerusalem. You might not have known that, but they were kings of Jerusalem, right? There's always a long, no, I mean, this is how you rule.

32:24 There's always a long list of things, and somewhere in that middle of the list, like it kind of blurs from things that you might control 32:30 to things that your uncle controlled, to things that you never really controlled, right? But there's always a long list of stuff that you ruled.

32:36 Okay, so, okay, where are we? So Maria Theresia, the partitions.

32:43 So it's the First Partition of Poland that brings Galicia into the Habsburg monarchy, 1772. The last thing on her mind 32:49 were all the Ukrainian speakers there, or, for that matter, all of the Yiddish speakers there. This is not this class, but just FYI, 32:57 adding Galicia to the Habsburg monarchy brings in all the families who then a couple of generations later 33:03 are going to create German modernity in Vienna, right? So for example, the Freud family, right? 33:08 All these families are going to start in Galicia, take a station stop in Moravia, end up in Vienna, 33:15 and then they're going to create. They're gonna create Art Nouveau. They're gonna create German modernism, 33:21 zivilisation basically, circa 1900. So this partition also had that meaning, right? 33:27 If the Austrians don't take this territory, and, let's say, the Russians do, then there are not gonna be, there are not gonna be German-speaking Jews in Vienna 33:34 around the year 1900 to make Vienna the city that you're all gonna visit this summer, basically. Right? Okay.

33:42 So there are three partitions of Poland: 1772, 1793, 1795, and by the time the dust settles, 33:49 Russia has taken most of it. Very roughly speaking, 33:55 the Left Bank, that is the western part, is added to what Russia already gained a century before, 34:02 which is the Right Bank or the eastern part. Almost all of Ukraine is now under the Russian Empire. The exception, the very, very important exception, 34:09 is Galicia, which is now under the Habsburgs in this new zone.

34:15 And this Galicia in the Third Partition is extended to include what is now basically south-central Poland.

34:22 So Krakow. Krakow, after a little while, is going to be inside this Galicia.

34:29 So this Galicia has Polish speakers, Yiddish speakers, Ukrainian speakers, and it's now a district in Austria.

34:35 So the very last thing we have to do is talk about what is special in Austria in the 19th century.

34:42 Skim over the first part. The first part is the post-Napoleonic part 34:48 when all the European dynasties are embarrassed, and then they tend to crack down afterwards, the Age of Metternich, 34:54 the age when Austria invents the police state, the age of systematic censorship, the 1820s and the 1830s.

35:02 This comes to an end with the Revolution of 1848, which is a broad European conflagration 35:09 from Belgium through France, through Austria. It's the time when Karl Marx wrote 35:15 this little thing called "The Communist Manifesto. " That was also 1848. At the end of 1848 in Austria, 35:22 the most interesting thing that has happened is that a teenager, he's 18 at the time, I believe, 35:28 Franz Joseph comes to power, and Franz Joseph is going to be the ruler of Austria from 1848 to 1916.

35:35 He's going to be setting the political tone during all that time. From our point of view, an interesting thing that happens 35:43 in the Revolutions of 1848 has to do with the Poles and the Ukrainians, and it reveals an Austrian tactic, 35:50 which is very important to nation building. So it's not the most heroic part of nation building, 35:56 but it's a very important part of nation building. In 1848, the Austrians have some reason to be concerned about the Poles.

36:03 Less the Ukrainians, more the Poles. The Poles have had their own state until 1795. The Poles have a nobility. They have some wealth.

36:10 Some of the Poles have gotten into the Austrian bureaucracy. And so what do they do in 1848 in Galicia? 36:16 They encourage the Ukrainians, right? They encourage the Ukrainians. They encourage the establishment 36:23 of something called Ukrainian National Council, which then makes Ukrainian political demands. So rather than directly suppressing 36:29 or intimidating the Poles, they say, "Oh, look what we can do over here. Oh, there's some Ukrainians who also live there.

36:34 I bet they would like some things. " And so the Ukrainians issue political demands like dividing Austria in half, which is gonna be, 36:40 I mean, not Austria, Galicia in half into a western, eastern part, which will be a Ukrainian idea all the way through, 36:45 all the way through 1918. And so this is, I mean, this is going to be, 36:51 this kind of idea of compromise is gonna be crucial all the way to the end, and I just wanna set it up for you structurally.

36:58 The Ukrainians were not exactly a national minority in Austria.

37:03 A national minority would be more like in interwar Poland, which we're gonna talk about soon enough, where it really is a nation state 37:10 for the Poles and the Ukrainians. Five million, six million Ukrainian speakers are a minority.

37:16 But in the Habsburg monarchy, it's more like the Ukrainians are one group of people in Galicia 37:21 and where they're contesting things with the Poles. And when they contest things, 37:26 they have somewhere to go besides violence or besides direct confrontation, which is Vienna.

37:32 They can go to Vienna. The Habsburgs are at the top, and the Habsburgs are always gonna be capable down to the end of saying, "Okay, as a matter of fact, 37:40 let's make another compromise. Let's redo this. Let's redo that. Let's redo this. Let's redo that," which isn't the most exciting form of politics, I admit, 37:48 again, cross reference to European Union, but it might be a form of politics, of national politics, 37:53 which is more durable than people thought in the 19th century or the 20th century. So this form of politics 37:59 comes alive after 1867. So the other part of the famous saying of Corvinus, 38:06 "Let others fight wars. Thou, happy Austria, marry," the slightly unkind part would be the suggestion that maybe 38:11 that the Austrians are going to lose a lot of wars, which is also true, right? 38:16 They didn't exactly cover themselves with glory in the wars of the 19th and the early 20th century.

38:23 They got embarrassed in 1859, and which began the process of Italian unification.

38:28 They really got embarrassed in 1866 with the Germans, which is the beginning of the story of German unification.

38:34 After they lost a war to Germany, the Habsburgs had to make a compromise 38:40 from position of weakness with the most important nationality within their borders, which is the Hungarians.

38:46 And this is the famous Ausgleich of 1867. That's one of these words, like later on Anschluss.

38:52 They're five German words you have to know, and two of them are Ausgleich and Anschluss.

38:58 I don't have time for the jokes about the other three. We're running out of time. Hopefully it's some other lecture, but, anyway, ausgleich just means compromise, just means compromise, 39:06 but in this context, it means the Compromise of 1867 in which the Hungarian nobility 39:13 was basically given the right to become a state within a state of the Habsburg monarchy and to do as they please with the Slovaks, 39:19 the Slovaks, the Croats, the Romanians. The remainder of Austria, 39:24 which is in a funny kind of sea shape around Hungary, from Galicia through Moravia, Bohemia, Austria itself, 39:33 down the Adriatic Coast, what's now Slovenia, what's now Croatia, that Austria was governed after 1867 39:40 by a kind of constitutional law which promised things like freedom of speech, 39:47 which promised equal rights for individuals and equal rights for nations. Never quite defined what a nation was, 39:52 but equal rights for individuals, equal rights for nations. It's in this particular version of Austria, 39:58 not the Hungarian part, the non-Hungarian part, that the story of Ukrainian nationality plays out.

40:05 And by now you will have noticed the timing, right? The timing, the timing, the timing.

40:11 After 1867, many things are possible. After 1867, freedom of speech, individual freedom.

40:18 After 1867, Austria is gonna move until by 1907, there's gonna be full manhood suffrage, 40:25 which is pretty advanced for the standards of the time. The United States didn't have it, for example.

40:31 And that means that along with full manhood suffrage, the right of all males to vote, comes political parties, 40:38 and with political parties come political campaigns and political demands, and with political campaigns and political demands come newspapers, right? 40:45 Because there's freedom of speech. And that includes, among many, many other things, Ukrainian newspapers, Ukrainian political parties, 40:53 Ukrainian political demands, which even if they're not fulfilled, they're out there and they're aired.

40:58 And again, the timing, this is from 1867 to 1914. The timing is the same moment when Ukrainian culture 41:06 and any kind of politics becomes impossible in the Russian Empire. That's so important to everything 41:13 because after 1867, the leading thinkers and activists from the Russian Empire, 41:19 when they are banned after 1863 and again in 1876, when they're banned by the Valuev Circular 41:27 and the Ems Decree from using Ukrainian language, where do they go? They go to Galicia.

41:33 They go to the Habsburg monarchy, right? And the timing is that the timing is so important here. Absolutely crucial.

41:39 The Habsburg monarchy is becoming a place where you can do Ukrainian politics at exactly the moment the Russian Empire is becoming a place 41:45 where you can't do Ukrainian politics or, for that matter, Ukrainian culture. And because the center of Ukrainian intellectual, political, 41:53 and cultural life was actually the Russian Empire, this means that all these people are coming into Galicia 41:59 who can do things like occupied share in East European history, right? There's a fellow called Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi, 42:06 the most important historian of Ukraine, who basically applies the methods of what we would call social history 42:12 and writes a continuous history of Ukraine from the Middle Ages. Hrushevs'kyi leaves the Russian Empire, comes to Galicia, 42:20 and, lo and behold, he has a chair in Lviv. He has a chair, and he's able to teach this version of history, 42:29 which that's actually incredibly significant, right? The difference between nobody and one, and nobody having to share in Ukrainian history 42:37 and the most important Ukrainian chair having to share in Ukrainian history and lecturing and publishing his books, very, very important.

42:43 But that's just pars pro toto. That's just one example of many other things.

42:49 Very important thinkers, like Panteleimon Kulish, like Drahomanov, 42:54 they all come from the East and they go to the West, and they bring radical political ideas.

43:01 They bring the idea, for example, a fundamental idea, which I'll just mention and then we'll move on, that politics belongs to the people as such.

43:08 So in the Russian Empire, the serfs were freed in 1861, 43:14 which raises the basic question of, okay, if they're free of bondage, who now owns them? 43:23 Whom do they belong? Are they gonna be loyal to the czar? Are they gonna be loyal to something else? And the main radical political reaction, 43:30 the end of serfdom, was something called, in the Russian Empire was called populism or going to the people.

43:36 The Ukrainian populists were the ones who went to the people and found out they were Ukrainian, essentially, 43:43 which coincides in time with the emergence of a new discipline of science which we call anthropology, 43:51 but at the time was called ethnography, which we think of as the method of anthropology. At the time, they said ethnography for the science.

43:59 Going to the people, recording their songs, recording their stories, recording their history, recording everything you can, taking the people seriously 44:06 as an object of science coincides with taking the people seriously as an object of politics.

44:11 And it leads to the notion that in addition to history and politics and power mattering for a nation, 44:19 also the people and its culture and its durability matter. So if there are songs, if there's a culture, if there's a language, then that means there's a nation.

44:27 This is the ethnographic idea of a nation, a very powerful idea, and that ethnographic idea of a nation 44:34 is obviously very useful in Galicia, not against the Russians, Russians don't matter in Galicia, 44:42 but against the Poles because in Galicia, I mean, this is so important, it's not that the Ukrainians 44:48 are a national minority struggling against the center. No, no, no, no. The Ukrainians are struggling against the Poles 44:54 and the Polish gentry. After 1867, the Poles as a historical nation, 45:00 as people said back then, as a gentry nation, they are also the beneficiaries of a compromise.

45:06 They get control over schools, very important. They get a local parliament.

45:12 They get some control over local administration. And what does that give for the Ukrainians? It gives the Ukrainians something to struggle for, right? 45:20 And in some of that, they're gonna claw back and get control of, especially at the level of schooling.

45:25 They're gonna claw back and try to get control of that. In the free politics, it was possible, 45:30 the Habsburg monarchy. But what are the intellectual or ideological weapons they're gonna use? The Polish argument is that we're a nation 45:38 because we always were. It's not that the Polish speaking peasants are the nation. They didn't think that, right? The nation are the gentry.

45:45 The nation are the people who used to be able to vote in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the gentry, the historical nobility.

45:50 That's the nation, the historical nation, as people said.

45:55 But the Ukrainians now have a different kind of argument to make. Their argument can be, well, maybe we don't have the gentry.

46:03 Maybe we weren't the political class a hundred years ago in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but at least in certain parts of the territories, 46:09 we have the people, we have the majority, we have the culture, and that is the nation.

46:14 And that's a very powerful argument, right? That's a very powerful... That version of the nation, by the way, 46:20 is broadly victorious. I mean, people can disagree about this and that, but you wouldn't generally say like, 46:26 there are very few countries now where you can say, "I belong to the nation because I belong to nobility. " In general, if I say nation now, 46:32 you're not gonna think of some elite. You're gonna tend to think of everybody or at least some large group, right? So Ukrainians, with the help of the, 46:39 Ukrainians and Galicia with the help of the Ukrainians coming for the Russian Empire can make this argument. They can say, "We're the majority. " 46:45 And this argument also has, it also has political ramifications. It means if you mobilize enough people to vote, 46:50 you can send your representatives to parliament, as they do. You can have debates in parliament You can make your camp.

46:56 They never win this argument, but they make it to the end, but we should divide Galicia into East and West, and have our own Eastern Galicia.

47:02 And so with the help of these people, with the help of, with the help of these arguments, but above all with the help of the very specific Habsburg political system, 47:10 the period between 1867 and 1914 becomes the period when Ukrainian politics explodes.

47:17 Ukrainian politics becomes mass politics. There are suddenly Ukrainian nationalists and Ukrainian socialists and Ukrainian liberals, 47:23 and Ukrainian every possible thing, and Ukrainian newspapers, Ukrainian civil life. Civic life, in other words.

47:30 That in turn is going to be incredibly important when we get to the moment when the empires begin to break up, 47:35 which is the First World War, which is where we're gonna start again next time. So thank you very much.

47:46 (bright tones resonating)

back to TOC


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Lecture 13 Republics and Revolutions

0:00(gentle music) 0:12 - Greetings, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We are now making the transition 0:20 into the 19th and the 20th centuries. By the end of this lecture, we should be in 1918, 1919, 1920.

0:32 The the premise of this lecture is that we are talking about revolutions and republics.

0:39 The tricky thing about the revolution of 1917, 0:44 the Bolshevik Revolution, like all revolutions, is that it pretends to start new.

0:51 And in some way, revolutions do start new. Old elites are overthrown, violence is applied, 0:57 regimes are changed, and so on. But nevertheless, there is a weighty inheritance, 1:03 which will have to be dealt with in one way or another. And so before we get to the revolution, 1:09 we are going to make sure that we have the 19th century down. I'm gonna spend some time on the 19th century first.

1:16 Something similar could be said about republics, perhaps in a minor key.

1:22 The republics that are founded in 1918 are founded as new states, 1:27 as states that have broken completely with their imperial past. So the most important republic for us is going to be 1:34 the Polish Republic, which we'll be talking about also on Thursday. But are also two attempts to start Ukrainian states, 1:43 there's a West Ukrainian National Republic, and a Ukrainian National Republic. And Republics, as new state forums 1:50 also a bit have this idea that we've broken with the past, we've started something new.

1:56 And naturally, as people studying history, we're going to be a little bit suspicious of this 2:02 when we try to understand, for example, why the two Ukrainian attempts at founding republics failed 2:09 it will help to know about the history, right? So, if we just talk about the principle of the matter, 2:14 there's no reason why the Ukrainians wouldn't have had a republic when, say the Czechoslovaks did.

2:19 If we were just going to talk about measuring the political devotion of people in 1918, many more people died for Ukrainian independence in 1918, 2:27 then died for Czechoslovak independence. That can't be the explanation either, we're gonna need some other sort of explanation.

2:33 And whatever explanation it's going to be history is going to help. It is true of course, that, 2:39 and I'm sure you'll be sad to see their passing, the empires we've been studying do come to an end.

2:45 They are going to come to an end. We're gonna bring them to an end in this lecture. The Habsburg monarchy, which has existed 2:52 in some form or another for more than 500 years, will come to an end in November of 1918.

2:59 The state based in Muscovy, which in some form or another, has existed since the 15th century, 3:05 and as the Russian Empire has existed since 1721 will come to an end in 1917.

3:10 Those two state forms will come to an end and they'll be attempts at a fresh start.

3:15 But our thesis here is, there really isn't such thing as a fresh start. So, I wanna try to begin by making really clear 3:22 a point that I was making last time about the significance of the division 3:28 of Ukrainian territory. It would be really, really easy if we could teach classes, 3:35 and you can kind of see, like in history textbooks sort of dream of this too, where there was one territory and there was one state, 3:43 and there was one people, right? Of course, if I say that, it sounds rather fascist and it should, but it would be really simple 3:49 if there were just one territory and the boundaries never changed, and there was one people there and there was a state the whole time.

3:55 That's never how it's been for any country. And we've been trying to explore the idea that the divisions in what will later become 4:03 the national territory are not just a problem, but also a source of friction, sometimes creative friction.

4:11 That the differences between different parts of a territory, depending upon what empire it belongs to, 4:16 matter not just as differences, but sometimes as constructive components of what will later become a national society.

4:23 And so to follow this, to make this argument, we have to be really sure about which parts of the country 4:29 belong to which territories. We are now in the 19th and 20th centuries moving for the first time into the moment 4:36 where what matters is the east-west division. Where there is, you could reasonably say, there's something called Western Ukraine 4:44 centered in Galicia, which has a different experience than the rest of Ukraine, 4:49 which is in the Russian Empire. So, to review, you'll know that this is, 4:57 I know it's so hard, like I still struggle with this and it's been 30 years, but the left bank, the left bank is the eastern part, 5:09 and the right bank is the western part, right? Because you have to look at it 5:14 from the point of view of the river. And if you look at it, and the river's flowing south. So if you can, you know, 5:22 I was about to make a drug joke, but I didn't because the camera's on, 5:28 but you can laugh anyway, thank you. (student laughing) I appreciate that.

5:33 So you just look at it from the point of view of the river. The left bank, the eastern part comes under Russian rule 5:41 in the late 17th century, along with Kyiv.

5:46 The right bank, right, the western half comes under Russian rule a hundred years later.

5:54 So it's all under Russian rule, but there's a meaningful difference of a hundred years there. And then of course, there's the third little part 6:01 with Galicia, which never comes under Russian rule at all, but which falls under the Habsburgs.

6:06 So I wanna pause and say a bit more about some themes in the history of Ukrainian territory 6:13 under Russia, because all we managed to really do last time was to get the territory straight, which is already a lot.

6:18 But there are a couple of important themes here, which I wanna make sure we get through. Having to do with social history first of all.

6:25 In 1861, serfdom is brought to an end. Russia has lost this war in Crimea, 6:31 a period of great reforms follows. The most important of these great reforms 6:36 is the abolition of serfdom. So the vast majority of the population is no longer compelled to work for the people 6:43 on whose land they live. There is a problem with the end of serfdom 6:50 which you can probably anticipate, if you've ever thought at all about how, you know, capitalism works, it's kind of a familiar problem.

6:56 People are freed from their personal bondage to local landowners, 7:02 but they're not given enough land themselves to survive, right? Or to do well in general.

7:08 So you have people who are, and so this raises this perpetual question about liberalism, right? 7:13 Like, is negative freedom enough? If I say, "You don't have to do anything for me, 7:19 but I own all the land," what's our relationship gonna be? Well, you are, on Monday, you are freed, 7:24 you got negative freedom, but on Tuesday you have to come to me and like, take my conditions for working my land, right? 7:29 So I'm simplifying a bit, but that's the problem at the end of Serfdom. People are personally free, but how well they do 7:36 and de facto how free they're going to become and what their political attitudes might be, will depend on how much land they get.

7:42 So from 1861 forward this land question is gonna be a major theme until industrialization, 7:47 which is second half of the 20th century for most of this region, land reform is a major question.

7:52 In Ukraine in general, peasants got very small land allotments, smaller than the rest of the country, 7:58 at a time of growing population. So there was a lot of social economic pressure 8:05 on the bulk of the population, which is in the countryside. And most of the population, this is an important point, 8:12 stays in the countryside. So there's a stereotype that the Ukrainians are in the countryside, and that stereotype is generally true.

8:17 And there's a reason for it, which is that because the land is so fertile, it makes sense for me, I'll go back to being the landowner, 8:24 it makes sense for me to keep you on that land working for me to export that grain if I can, 8:30 because I can make a profit that way, right? And that means that when when industrialization takes place 8:38 in what's now southeastern Ukraine, in the familiar part of Ukraine which we call the Donbas, 8:43 you probably heard of the Donbas right? It just means the Donetsk basin. Like a lot of these like apparently tricky, you know, 8:49 Russian conglomerations, it just means Donetsk basin, right? So you can like impress your friends 8:54 with that bit of of knowledge. So, when the Donbas industrializes, beginning of the 1870s, 9:00 most of the peasants who come to work there are actually not Ukrainian. Most of the peasants who come to work there 9:06 will be coming from Russia, where the land is less fruitful, where the landlords have less of an incentive 9:11 to keep people on the land. And this is at the beginning of a very important 9:17 social and economic change in Ukraine, which is industrialization and urbanization.

9:24 There's coal in the Donbas, there still is, in the 1870s, 1880s, this becomes a source 9:30 of most of the coal, about 70% of the coal for the entire Russian Empire.

9:36 In a familiar pattern, the coal is mined under the auspices of foreign companies, 9:41 usually British or French, although one of the most famous of the industrialists 9:49 of the Donbas was a man called John Hughes, who was Welsh. And he got a city named after him, which is sort of cool, 9:57 Iuzivka, right? Which sounds like sounds like a sort of deeply, Iuzivka, right? Like what could be more Ukrainian than Iuzivka, 10:04 is named after John Hughes. That city was later renamed Donetsk, and then later renamed Stalino 10:10 and then later renamed Donetsk. And it's currently a few miles behind the lines in this war.

10:17 Another city which grows from nothing during the period of industrialization 10:22 is called Kryvyi Rih, which, you know, just means kind of twisted corner.

10:30 It's a beautiful name, right? Kryvyi Rih is where Zelens'kyi was born, if that helps you at all.

10:35 It's in south central Ukraine. And it was the, when the railroad was built 10:41 from the Donbas to Kryvyi Rih, then Kryvyi Rih is where the iron was spelted.

10:46 So this gives you an idea of what this industrialization was like. It was nationally or ethnically a bit strange 10:53 because it was largely not the Ukrainian peasants who were working there, but largely Russian peasants. And also it was constrained by internal tariffs.

11:02 So the Ukrainian part of the Russian empire was producing coal and it was producing iron, but it wasn't producing finished products.

11:09 The finished products were sold back into this part of the Russian Empire at higher prices, right? 11:16 So this is a kind of classical form of colonial exploitation. There were internal tariffs inside the Russian Empire, 11:23 also applied to Poland, by the way. Okay? So this industrialization combined with Catherine the Great's project 11:32 of a new Russia earlier on, means that there are essentially new cities in what's now Ukraine.

11:38 Iuzivka, which becomes Donetsk, new city. There's another city called Katerinaslav, 11:43 which of course is after Catherine the Great. Katerinaslav is later called Dnipropetrovsk 11:49 and it's now called Dnipro. And it's also also a major industrial city of the southeast.

11:55 So you have these, and Odesa, which is again, that's Catherine's, you know, 12:00 delight for these Greek sounding things. So Odesa is the, you know, the major port in Ukraine now, 12:06 Odesa is a new city, Iuzivka new city, Katerinaslav new cities, and during the 19th century, 12:13 Kyiv and Kharkiv, which are very old cities, are culturally Russified.

12:18 They move in the opposite direction of cities like Prague, which is very interesting. In the same decades where Prague, 12:25 the main city in the Czech lands, moves from being German speaking to Czech speaking, that is, it takes on the language of the countryside, 12:32 in Kyiv it's the opposite. In Kharkiv, it's the opposite. In both of those cities in the middle of the 19th century, 12:37 most people probably still spoke Ukrainian and the second most important language was probably Polish 12:42 by the end of the 19th century the most important language in these cities is going to be Russia.

12:48 So as these cities grow, they become more culturally Russian.

12:53 And the new cities in the southeast also are largely Russian speaking. Okay? 12:58 So that introduces you to an issue which you can see is still present more than a hundred years later.

13:05 Notice that in all of that, I am talking about the eastern part of Ukraine, right? The right bank.

13:11 In the left bank matters are a bit different. There isn't much urbanization over there. Yeah, I know, it's hard, pause.

13:19 I don't know what to do. It's tricky. The western part, right? I may have even reversed it, sorry.

13:24 But the western part, right? The right bank is a different story.

13:30 There the Polish landlords still own most of the land.

13:36 There the key crops are things like beets. This is before sugar is being exported 13:41 from the Caribbean all over the world and so on. So beets are raised to make sugar and this is a world center of that.

13:49 The old land structure, in other words, is largely preserved in the right bank, 13:55 in the western part, with the Polish landlords pretty much all the way through.

14:00 With severe land hunger and all the rest. After 1861, the next important turning point 14:06 in the Russian Empire is the revolution of 1905, which we can't skip over.

14:12 So there's a pattern here, it's a pretty important historical pattern, if you want to have your country reform, lose a war.

14:19 It's kind of a difficult plan, like it's a difficult plan to follow because you rarely say, "Let's go out and lose a war. " But if you wanna lose a war there's a trick, 14:26 which is start one. That's like, that'll usually get you there. No, I mean, well, okay, at least half the time 14:33 it'll get you there. So this may sound slightly familiar, in 1904, 14:39 I have to shorten this a lot, but in 1904, the Russian Empire was sure that it would defeat Japan 14:45 because Japan was an Asian country, obviously inferior from the point of view of the Russians.

14:51 So they sent their fleet all the way around Africa, all the way over to Asia 14:57 in order to be sunk by the Japanese right away. And they didn't do much better on land, they lost the war with Japan, which set off, 15:04 and the war itself set off protests. So when people talk about how this war is a risky business for Putin 15:10 this is what they often have in mind, that Russia lost the Crimean War and reformed, that Russia lost the war with Japan, 15:16 and then was forced to reform, that Russia was about to collapse under the weight of the First World War and that led to revolution, right? 15:22 So when people say like this, like the Russian state historically has been, has faced pressure during war time, 15:29 these are the examples they have in mind. The Japanese example's very important. So under the pressure of this defeat 15:35 the Russian state forms a parliament, which lasts for a couple of years.

15:41 The restrictions on Ukrainian newspapers and publishing houses are released, 15:48 there are student strikes by Ukrainian students which lead to the introduction, over the short term at least, 15:54 of Ukrainian subjects in universities at Kharkiv and then Odesa. Okay? So that's the Russian Empire.

16:01 Many, many, many more Ukrainians than in Galicia. Much, much more territory. The specific forms of Russian rule, mostly peasant country, 16:10 and I should have said this before, almost completely illiterate, which is very important for national self consciousness.

16:19 It's very hard to do national politics without the written word, right? You can have the printing press, 16:24 you can have the political parties and so on, not that Russia had the political parties, but you can have all the apparatus, but you also need literacy.

16:30 In the Habsburg monarchy you have much greater rates of literacy than the Russian Empire. Okay? So, now let's do the Habsburgs, again, very, very quickly.

16:38 Circa 1700, the Habsburg's shift from being a world power to being a European power.

16:46 And the key turning points here are 1526, which is unbelievably complicated, 16:52 I probably rushed through it a little bit last time. There's a marriage compact, it's made by this guy, Wladyslaw Jagiellonczyk, his son, 16:58 who was going to inherit the crowns, instead dies under his horse at the Battle of Mohacs in 1526, 17:04 which allows the son's brother-in-law, a Habsburg, to lay claim to Hungary and Croatia and so on.

17:09 That claim is eventually realized by 1699, 17:15 the Habsburgs then become a European power just at the moment when they cease to be a world power. They're enabled in that by the Poles in 1683, 17:23 who save Vienna from the Ottomans. Less than a century later, 1772, the Habsburgs nevertheless 17:29 take part in the first partition of Poland, which gets them this territory of Galicia.

17:35 Which is important for us because Galicia, the Poles call, okay, this is like even the TAs 17:42 are allowed to answer this one, what do the Poles refer? How do you refer to that territory in Polish in the 18th century? I'm raising the stakes.

17:54 It's like, now there's somebody out there who's like watching this on YouTube who's tortured because they know and they're like in their living room, 18:00 raising their hand at the screen. Ruthenia, right? Rus, the Poles said Rus, they said Czerwona Rus, 18:08 they called this Red Ruthenia, right? So that word Rus is also in Polish, century, century, centuries later to designate, 18:14 designate Eastern Orthodox territories. Galicia is the Habsburg term for these territories.

18:21 Okay, so the Habsburgs control Galicia, they also control a territory I didn't mention before, 18:27 a smaller territory called Bukovina. Bukovina is a mixed at this time, Ukrainian speaking, 18:33 Yiddish speaking, Romanian speaking territory. If you've ever, I'm gonna try to make this familiar 18:39 the best I can. If you've ever heard of the poet, Paul Celan, who wrote the most famous poem about the Holocaust 18:46 which is called is called "Todesfuge", death fugue, Celan was from Czernowitz, or Chernivtsi, 18:52 which is the main city in Bukovina. Bukovina is like the, it's now like the south, the southern part of western Ukraine, 18:59 a little bit of the southern part of western Ukraine. The point is that Bukovina, like Galicia was also under the Habsburgs, also like Galicia, 19:07 there were politicians, there were parliamentarians, the language was allowed to be used. There were newspapers.

19:13 All of these things that I said about Galicia also apply in lesser measure to Bukovina.

19:19 Now, another thing which I didn't talk about though enough, I made this argument, which I hope we all got, about how secular politics flourishes in Galicia, 19:29 in part because the moment when the Russian Empire is most repressive towards the Ukrainian language, 19:34 remember Valuev, Ems, 1863, 1876, is during that moment, 19:40 the Habsburg monarchy is opening up new basic law, quasi constitution 1867.

19:46 And so at that moment, these very intelligent politically, very sophisticated political intellectuals 19:52 move from the Russian Empire to Galicia and stay there for the next several decades, right? 19:57 But that's all about secular politics and secular politics is not the only story. There's also a very important story in Galicia, 20:06 which has to do with religion and with another east west division, right? 20:11 East west divisions are like, that's new, right? East west divisions are 19th century, 20th century. There's an east west division now 20:18 in Eastern Christianity, okay? So Eastern Christianity, right? 20:24 You remember Byzantium, it's Byzantium that converts Kyiv.

20:29 Kyiv is the historical center of Eastern Christianity in the world. It is where the Metropolitanate, the Metropolitan sat 20:37 for hundreds of years. It was also where orthodox theology and orthodox thinking, 20:46 along with, along with Chernihiv, Kyiv is the place where orthodox thinking, 20:51 orthodox theology, orthodox disputes became very impressive, especially in the 17th century.

21:00 And interestingly, this is just, I mean a fascinating thing, which is in the dissertation of a Yale PhD, actually, 21:07 Levgeniia Sakal, I don't have her name on the sheet, but her name is Geniia Sakal.

21:13 But in her PhD she shows how a lot of the ways that the Russian church now identifies itself 21:20 emerged in the need to carry out disputes with Kyiv.

21:25 So in the late 17th century, I mentioned this earlier, in the late 17th century Kyiv and Chernihiv 21:31 are suddenly within Russia and in Moscow they have orthodoxy, but they don't have theology, right? 21:38 They don't have dispute, they don't have that tradition. Whereas in Kyiv, they have a lot of it because of reformation, counter reformation, 21:44 renaissance, having to deal with the Poles, having to deal with all of Europe, having to deal with all of this mess.

21:50 All possible variations of Protestantism, the counter reformation, having to deal with the Jesuits. I mean, probably some of you went the Jesuit schools, 21:57 but having to deal with the Jesuits always, you know, tends to sharpen the mind, right? So, I'm gonna get an email about that.

22:03 (students laughing) So, but the point is that all of these, all of this necessity of disputation over the generations 22:12 meant that Kyiv was a center of religious dispute whereas Moscow was not.

22:17 In Moscow, they learned to argue about religion from Kyiv and they came up with the arguments which now characterize 22:25 what they say about the Russian church, namely that the Russian church is a kind of pure continuation of Byzantine traditions, 22:33 blah, blah, blah. Which is not true at all. It's simply not true. But it's a kind of cool position to take, 22:39 like we are the pure, unadulterated version of the way Christianity was supposed to be. We got it directly from Byzantium a thousand years ago 22:45 with this baptism and so on. That argument, they made up as they were disputing with Kyiv.

22:50 And in order to make that argument, they of course borrowed all kinds of arguments from Kyiv and from Europe, and they learned languages.

22:56 In other words, they became very sophisticated European, you know, theologians in order to make this argument 23:03 that they weren't sophisticated European theologians. So, okay, but that's, anyway, it's really, 23:08 it's an interesting thing about the Russian church, right? And all of these stories about how we are pure, and we've been the same way forever, right? 23:14 Those stories usually emerge in contact with someone else. In fact, they always do, interestingly enough, Okay? 23:20 So, but so the point here is that we also have an east west division now in Christianity 23:26 because the Metropolitanate in Kyiv, the center of Eastern Orthodoxy in Kyiv 23:34 is gonna be liquidated in 1721. Kyiv becomes, in a very complicated story, 23:39 subordinate to Moscow. Moscow takes on the role, which you're probably familiar with as the center of Eastern Orthodoxy.

23:45 But meanwhile, there's another church, another Eastern rite church, which exists, 23:54 but effectively only in the Habsburg monarchy. And that's the church which is called Greek Catholic, 24:00 or Uniate, U-N-I-A-T-E. It was formed in 1596 by the Union of Brest 24:08 as an attempt to bring all of eastern and western Christianity together. It failed to do that, 24:15 but it succeeded in creating a third church. So, the people who stayed with this project 24:21 were called Uniates and they were and are characterized by an Eastern rite, 24:29 you know, so icons and song, right? Whereas, but they were subordinate to the Pope in Rome.

24:36 They're part of the Catholic Church, right? The Catholic Church is not the same thing as the Roman Catholic Church. Roman Catholics may be many of the Catholics, 24:44 but technically Roman Catholicism is only one way to be Catholic and there are many other ways to be Catholic.

24:50 And so the Greek Catholic Church is inherited by the Habsburgs. They actually rename it Greek Catholic, it's called Uniate.

24:57 They rename it Greek Catholic. They create an academy in Vienna to educate these Greek Catholic priests. Very important.

25:04 And then for decades, they use the Greek Catholic priests as the kind of informal messengers of small e enlightenment 25:12 in the Galatian countryside. Spreading literacy, spreading general knowledge, spreading knowledge about politics, right? 25:19 And so that makes the Habsburgs very different. And it creates a tradition which becomes 25:25 a kind of Ukrainian tradition, especially thanks to the work of one man whose name was Andrei Sheptyts'kyi.

25:32 Andrei Sheptyts'kyi was a fantastically interesting fellow from a Polish aristocratic family who converted to both Greek Catholicism, 25:38 technically not a conversion, shifted to Greek Catholicism, converted to being Polish, 25:44 okay also not technically a conversion but became Polish, right? Went from being a Polish aristocrat, Roman Catholic 25:51 to being a Ukrainian churchman man of the people with great success.

25:56 It's a long story, I wish I had more time for it. But one of the things that he succeeded in doing was connecting the idea of the people with the church.

26:05 And the people as a kind of national idea with the the Greek Catholic Church. Okay.

26:14 Watch this segue. At the beginning of the First World War, he was abducted by the Russians. Okay? 26:21 It's about, that's as good as my segue is gonna get here. So he's, so you have to imagine Sheptyts'kyi, 26:27 so you already have in your mind, right, that there are these secular Ukrainian politicians who are operating the 1880s, 1890s.

26:33 And you have to think alongside that there's also this Greek Catholic church, which is headed by this man Sheptyts'kyi, 26:39 which is becoming more Ukrainian by the year. That's important too. Both the secular part and the religious part 26:45 of the national movement in Galicia are important. And they're both different as you see, 26:52 significantly from what's happening in the Russian Empire. Russian empire, more important, more Ukrainians, will always end up being more important, 26:58 but they're these specificities about Galicia, which we have to know. Okay. So this brings us to, 27:04 now I'll do it entirely without a segue. This brings us to the First World War. Very briefly, what was the First World War? 27:13 This is not one of these questions where I'm gonna make you answer. The First World War was a kind of sorting out 27:18 of European empires. So if you think back to the earlier lecture about the four or 500 years of empire 27:25 where I was trying to just establish the basic principles and realities of European empire. The First World war was the moment 27:31 when basically the countries which governed the planet, ruled the planet, decided to have a terrible war 27:36 on the tiny bit of territory they were from, kill each other on the scale of millions, and then tens of millions and then see what would happen, right? 27:43 That's the First World War. If you think about it, it's like if you were looking at the history of earth 27:48 or the history of humans from an alien point of view, there would admittedly be many strange moments, but this moment is one of the stranger ones.

27:55 I mean, you have a handful of countries who are profiting from ruling the rest of the world. Economic growth is actually doing quite well.

28:02 The first globalization is basically a big success for the Europeans. And nevertheless, they decide to fight each other 28:08 and kill each other for four years with the most modern weapons they can think of over trenches, right? That's the First World War.

28:14 So the First World War is a kind of sorting out of empires in which, I can't tell the whole story, but in which by the end, 28:20 the maritime empires are winning, France, Britain, the United States 28:28 and the land empires are losing. And this is despite the fact, 28:33 this is despite the fact that the land empires weren't all on the same side. So the Russian empire loses 28:41 in the sense that it falls apart in 1917, the Russian Empire was on the side of the French and the British.

28:46 The Ottoman Empire falls apart, the German empire falls apart, the Austrian empire, the Habsburgs all fall apart.

28:52 They are allies, the Habsburgs, the Germans and the Ottomans, they lose, they fall apart.

29:01 So, the basic story here is the story of a kind of sorting out of empires.

29:08 Now, the interesting question here, just like if you were gonna write an exam, 29:17 well, maybe not for this class, but something to think about is this, this is what historians ask, 29:23 in the 19th century they asked, "Did the Habsburgs have to fall apart because of nationalism?" And basically everybody said yes.

29:32 Then a 150 years later, people ask the same question and they basically, they say no. So, it's something to think about, right? 29:39 There's good evidence on both sides. But was the nation state a result 29:44 of some kind of long national trajectory and the First World War just sort of an occasion? Or was it rather that entities like the Habsburg monarchy 29:52 could have trundled along for a while longer, but the First World War was such a horrible cataclysm that it broke them apart and then nation states 29:59 emerged as kind of a default alternative, which weren't really that interesting just nobody could think of anything else. Okay.

30:07 So in the Ukrainian question, I'm gonna be specific about this for a minute.

30:12 The Habsburgs, oh, we can't have this, 30:18 we can't do this without Franz Ferdinand. Okay. So Franz Ferdinand, he's in love, he marries, 30:23 you know who Franz Ferdinand is, he's the heir to the throne. He's the heir to the Habsburg throne. He's not the monarch, he's the heir to the throne. He falls in love.

30:30 He's in love with somebody who's of lower status. They're in Vienna. They can't even like walk together holding hands 30:36 because of procession protocol. She's all the way back here. It's very awkward.

30:42 Not making any yell jokes at all right now, in the least. So in order for him to be together with his wife, 30:49 who he loves, he goes to Sarajevo. In Sarajevo, they can ride around in a car in public 30:55 and sit together in the front seat, which is very nice. Everybody loves it, especially if the car is open. But if the car is open, 31:00 that makes it a lot easier for the young university students who happen to be Serbian nationalists 31:06 to throw bombs at them. Which in fact is what happens. Serbia at this time is making claims to Bosnia Herzegovina, 31:13 which is the last European territory which Serbia doesn't have that might want. And as a result, an organization called The Black Hand, 31:20 I know it sounds like I'm making this all up, but I'm not. This is how it actually happened. An organization called the Black Hand recruits Serbian students inside Bosnia, so inside Austria, 31:28 one of them was a fellow called Gavrilo Princip. At the moment when the procession was riding by 31:36 a bomb was thrown, it bounced off the hood of the car and it exploded somewhere else. Other people were hurt.

31:44 The couple was fine. Franz Ferdinand goes to the hospital, visits the people who are wounded.

31:49 Coming back from the hospital, his driver gets lost stops to ask for directions. One of the Serbian national students is sitting in a cafe 31:56 drinking because he's missed his chance to assassinate Franz Ferdinand. He looks up, there's Franz Ferdinand, shoots him dead.

32:02 That's how we get the First World War. Okay? Just like when you're in political science 32:07 and international relations and they're telling you about the structures and like, just remember that, just remember that, 32:14 remember that story. 'Cause that's like the First World War is the most important thing that happened in the world in the 20th century.

32:19 And if like Franz Ferdinand doesn't go to the hospital to visit the wounded and the driver doesn't get lost, probably no First World War. Okay.

32:26 So, but the point then, I had a point and the point is that the Habsburg monarchy begins the First World War by attacking Serbia.

32:34 But the very next part of the First World War is in Galicia because Russia comes in on the side of Serbia 32:41 and then everyone comes in, right? Then France comes in with Russia and Germany comes in on the side of Austria. But for our class, what's important is Russia comes in 32:50 on the side of Serbia and invades right away Galicia, invades Galicia right away, September of 1914.

32:56 Takes it, treats it as part of one of the United Russia.

33:03 Oh, and they take, Okay, Sheptyts'kyi, that was my segue. Sheptyts'kyi along with the hundreds of other Greek Catholic priests, gets exiled deep into Russia.

33:11 The Habsburgs then take Galicia back in May of 1915.

33:16 And in 1917, the Habsburgs are able to go on the offensive along with their German allies 33:21 and take much of what is now Ukraine. Okay. How are they able to do that? Lenin, okay? 33:30 So there's a reason why this theme, there are many reasons why this theme of empire is so important in this class.

33:36 One of them is that you can't understand the Bolshevik Revolution or why anybody thought it could happen without a concept of world empire.

33:42 Lenin thought that Marx was right. You guys know about Karl Marx, right? 33:51 I'm sorry, Thank you. So Lenin thought that Marx was right, 33:57 that capitalism had created this kind of homogenizing monster, which went around the world, flattening cultures, 34:03 turning social groups into classes, 34:09 making everything basically the same everywhere, leading to a tension between workers and property owners.

34:15 Lenin thought that was all correct, but, said Lenin, and this is a really interesting move, says Lenin, 34:22 "Marx thinks we have to have a revolution where there are lots of workers in factories," but, says Lenin, "Marx also says that the whole thing 34:30 is one big world system. So if it's one big world system and we're revolutionaries, 34:35 we are therefore allowed and indeed required to push wherever the capitalists are weakest. " 34:41 And how do you know where the capitalists are weakest? You push and you find out, right? 34:46 And applying that logic in 1917, it was acceptable for Lenin and his Bolsheviks 34:53 to try to overthrow the existing order in Russia. Russia at that time, from the point of view 34:58 of the Marxists themselves was backward. It was a country of peasants and nomads. There were very few workers.

35:03 Marx did not think there would be a revolution in Russia. But with this argument, you could say, well, Russia's part of the world's system, 35:10 if it's a weak point, then we're allowed to push on it. And then, here comes the next very important thing, 35:17 we'll be like, it's like a powder keg. We start the revolution and then the English and the Germans 35:23 and all the more advanced comrades will have their revolutions and then they'll come and rescue us. So the people who made the Russian Revolution 35:30 never intended to make a Russian revolution they intended to make a world revolution. They believed that what they were doing 35:35 was starting a world revolution. How does Lenin, okay, how does this guy Lenin, 35:40 I mean, what is? Lenin is like drinking coffee in, you know, he's drinking coffee in Zurich during the First World War, which is a perfectly, you know, reason, 35:47 well, Zurich's kind of boring, but it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. What does he, how does he get? 35:53 So the German, again this is not quite as good as the Franz Ferdinand story, but it's still worth knowing 35:58 when you wanna think about, like, if someone's telling you it's all about structures and things have to be the way they are and be a realist.

36:05 So, Lenin's drinking coffee, the foreign minister of Germany is a man called Arthur Zimmerman, 36:11 like Zimmerman, Zimmerman. He convinces the German emperor, the Kaiser, 36:16 that this fellow Lenin can disrupt the war effort. And the Germans arrange for this fellow Lenin 36:23 to be transported across Germany, into the Russian, into Russia in April of 1917, famously in a sealed train, 36:32 whatever that means. I don't think the train was actually physically sealed. It's just like once you hear the phrase sealed train, it sounds cool.

36:38 And so it like survives and the historiography down to this day. But that train was not physically sealed. Like people got off, they got on, they went to the bathroom, 36:45 they bought snacks, you know, but you get the idea. They put Lenin on the train, he didn't get out the train 36:51 until they got to Russia. By this time, the Russian State had already collapsed.

36:56 The Tzar had already abdicated. There had already been one revolution, 37:01 a kind of undefined revolution. What Lenin succeeded in doing was turning this revolution, 37:07 which had led to a provisional government into a new form of revolution in November of 1917.

37:13 It's called the October Revolution because of the different datings, Julian and Gregorian. But it actually happened in November, 37:18 just like the previous revolution, which is called the February Revolution from the western point of view happened in March.

37:25 Lenin made this revolution because he believed he was allowed to do so because of his own ideas about globalization, right? 37:31 Ideas matter quite a lot. As tactics, it turned out not to be bad, they did manage to make a revolution.

37:39 And in their revolution, they entered into a larger conversation, which was going on about what happens after empire, 37:47 in which everybody gave the same answer and they were all insincere, but in slightly different ways.

37:54 The answer to the question, what you do after empire? Is national self-determination, right? 37:59 So this is why the imperial background is so important here, because then there's this big question of, 38:04 okay, empires fall and they break, and then what do you do next? Lenin, with Stalin actually, 38:12 has been working on this problem, and he has the answer. The answer is national self-determination.

38:17 "Every nation" says Lenin "has the right to its own sovereign existence, unless", 38:24 it's a pretty big unless, "unless such aspirations interfere with the class struggle" in which case, no. Right? 38:31 And this is a very important, you know, this is a very important solution, It like, it runs through the whole Soviet project actually, 38:39 that we declaratively, we accept that nations are real and we declaratively support them 38:44 but we're always gonna be trying to use those national energies in ways that suit us. But if they don't suit us, 38:50 i. e. they're not consistent with the class struggle, it's the same thing, then we're allowed to crush them. We're allowed to starve them, we're allowed to have terror, 38:56 whatever it might be. Okay? So that's, so Lenin is saying, yeah, national self-determination, Poland, Ukraine, Finland, 39:04 you know, whatever, it's all fine. Meanwhile, at the same time in the United States, 39:10 the Americans are also talking about national self-determination. When the Americans come into the First World War, 39:16 the ideological cover which is given, and an argument from principle had to be made in America for why there could be a war, 39:23 was for national self-determination. But the American idea of national self-determination was basically limited to Poland 39:30 and to countries of the Habsburg monarchy. And it's tactical design was to break apart 39:35 the Habsburg monarchy. So notoriously, 39:40 and it's notorious because the Japanese actually brought this up later and made a thing about it, notoriously, Wilsonian self-determination 39:47 did not apply beyond Europe. But, for the purposes of this class, you should note 39:52 that it also didn't apply to everywhere in Europe. So it did not apply to Ukraine.

39:58 Nobody was making the argument for national self-determination for Ukraine on the Entente side, but on the other side they were.

40:09 The Germans, meanwhile, right? So isn't it really, it's interesting how like national self-determination, 40:15 like it seems like it would be somebody's, like, it's just Wilson's idea. Maybe it's just Lenin's idea, but actually it was everybody's idea.

40:23 It was just a question of how it was applied. So in 1917, when the Bolshevik Revolution 40:28 breaks the Russian Empire and the Germans then experience terrific battlefield success on the eastern front 40:37 because the Russian revolution has just taken place and they push all the way deep into Ukraine, 40:44 Belarus the Baltics, and they sign a peace treaty with the Ukrainian National Republic in February of 1918, 40:52 they do this according to the principle of national self-determination. They say, look, no one else is recognizing you Ukrainians, 40:58 but we recognize you because we believe in national self-determination. The Bolsheviks are obviously just joking, 41:05 the Americans don't care, but look at us, we recognize you. But that agreement, the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 41:12 February, 1918 is contingent upon something very important, 41:18 which is Ukraine delivers millions and millions of tons of food stuffs to Germany immediately. Okay? 41:26 So it's a peculiar kind of national self-determination where you're not actually determining, for example, your own trade policy, your own economic policy 41:32 because the first thing you have to do is you have to give all of your food to Germany and Austria. Now, if we can just get the timing of the war right 41:39 we'll be in business. This is early 1918, the Germans and the Austrians 41:45 are winning on the eastern front because of the Russian Revolution. Meanwhile though, the Americans have entered the war, 1917, 41:53 the Americans are gonna bring, and this is a formidable number, a million men to fight in Europe.

41:59 The Germans make a last ditch attempt to defeat the Americans, the British and the French on the western front 42:05 and their idea is they're gonna do it with Ukrainian food. That's the idea. The Ukrainian food is gonna make this possible.

42:12 So they make the effort, they mount a huge offensive in late summer of 1918 and they lose 42:19 and the First World War comes to an end. Or, so this is famous, if you study west European history, 42:25 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the guns fall silent, the war is over.

42:32 A new chapter in French and German history begins, et cetera. But if you're studying Eastern Europe, 42:37 like the fighting just continues. It just continues for another several years after that.

42:43 And because you're in this power vacuum, there's been a revolution in Russia and there's chaos. The Germans who had been dominant are just, 42:50 they pull back, right? And then suddenly what's going to happen? And what happens, and you have to read about this in detail 42:56 in the reading because it's just too much for me to get into here. But what happens here is that in this chaos, 43:05 two Ukrainian states are formed. Two Ukrainian states are formed. According to different logics, 43:12 which are themselves dependent upon the different empires. Within the Russian Empire, 43:18 there's something called the Ukrainian National Council, which is largely young people, sometimes very young and largely educated people, 43:28 intellectuals, but the Ukrainian National, oh, and the Chair of the Ukrainian National Council, so the defacto president or head of state 43:33 is Mykhailo Hrushevsky. So the historian, the person who wrote this kind of social history of Ukraine.

43:39 I don't know whether this is true, but supposedly while he was basically the president of the country, 43:45 he would take his phone off the hook in the mornings 'cause he needed to do his reading. Which again, I don't know if it's true, but it's like, 43:52 it's a lovely thought. Like I kind of wish I, you know, like wouldn't it be cool? Like if you were the President, but no, I actually have to finish my, you know, 43:58 I gotta do my historical work. Okay? You guys are not as seduced by this as I am. So there's Ukrainian National Council, 44:05 which as the situation in the Russian empire radicalizes itself takes more radical positions 44:11 until it finds itself basically backed into declaring full national independence with the so-called 44:16 Fourth Universal in early 1918. Meanwhile, there is also a different progression 44:24 in the Habsburg monarchy, where the state is functioning till the, really till the very end.

44:29 But the moment the state is over, Ukrainian soldiers and Ukrainian bureaucrats immediately declare the night, actually right around now, 44:38 the last night of October to the first day of November, they declare a west Ukrainian National Republic with a capital in Lviv, fly the flag, 44:45 declare that they exist and immediately begins a war with the Poles.

44:50 And the Ukrainians do okay in this war with the Poles until essentially the whole Polish army shows up, 44:55 or in particular an army of Poles, 45:00 I know the First World War, it's a mess, but an army of Poles who had been prisoners of war 45:06 from the Russian Empire, right? 'Cause most of Poland is in the Russian Empire. So Poles who were taken prisoner, 45:14 Poles from the Russian empire, Poles from all over the place. Poles end up fighting, 45:24 so it's a much bigger country, right? And the Polish army, when it gets rid of its other distractions, 45:30 is able to concentrate its force in Galicia. Where they basically, you know, so all in all, Poland out numbers Galicia by a lot.

45:36 So the West Ukrainian National Republic lasts for about half a year. But the West Ukrainian army 45:42 is still the best Ukrainian army in the field because the, you know, not to be too blunt about it, 45:48 but because, I will be blunt, because the left wing, you know, is basically like PhD student, sorry, intellectuals 45:57 who ran the Ukrainian National Republic, they were not so big on administration and the army, right? 46:04 There were other reasons too, but they didn't, their first priority was not setting up an army, it took 'em a while to figure that out.

46:10 So when the West Ukrainians lose and they move east which is the middle of 1918, sorry, middle of 1919, 46:17 they're still the most important Ukrainian fighting force in the field. They find themselves 46:24 in this incredibly complicated situation because in 1918 to 1919 the territory of Ukraine 46:32 is being contested by a Ukrainian State which has gone through various permutations, 46:38 which I'm gonna have to let you read about, but which slowly builds up its own army, its own army is very confederated and disorganized 46:46 and generally run by local warlords, many of whom carry out terrible, terrible mass killings of Jews, 46:53 that's part of this history as well, and it's part of the history that the reading doesn't do a good job with, and I'm gonna assign some more reading.

47:00 Another contestant is the Red Army, which invades Ukraine not once, not twice, 47:05 but three times before it finally succeeds. And then there's another contestant, which is the so-called White Army, 47:12 which means the pro restoration of Russian Empire Army, right? And there's the Poles.

47:20 So the Whites, the Reds and Ukrainians fight it out in Ukraine. And you can see how difficult, I mean, 47:25 apart from anything else, the fact that you're fighting the Red Army and the White Army and the Reds and the Whites are fighting on your territory, 47:32 it's a very complicated situation. And the murders of the Jews have a great deal to do with that chaos.

47:39 But, so by the end of 1918, by the end of 1919, 47:45 the Ukrainians have basically lost, the Reds have basically won, 47:50 and then the Poles intervene. So, and this is just, that's just an interesting thing to think about.

47:55 Like we're now a hundred years on and there's another war in Ukraine and the Poles are not intervening.

48:01 Like as a historian, I always think, I mean like you guys all think this is normal because like Poland is just a normal bourgeois country 48:07 and of course they would, but you know, that's a very recent development. Like the Poland that exists today, 48:12 where the life expectancy is longer than in America. And the roads are much, much better than American roads.

48:18 That's only existed for a few years, right? So the historical Poland is a much more 48:23 east European country, deeply involved in Belarus, deeply involved in Ukraine. But anyway, just the very last thought here.

48:31 In late 1919, the Poles agree to ally 48:36 with the remnants of the Ukrainian Army for one last attempt to take Ukraine, 48:42 and they succeed for a while. In May of 1920, they capture Kyiv, 48:48 the Poles then do a very characteristically Polish thing, which let's face it, it's kind of cool.

48:54 They take their, so the main avenue in Kyiv is called Khreshchatyk.

48:59 At the end of it is the thing which is now called Maidan. So what the Poles did after they arrived in Kyiv, 49:05 was they took all their calvary and they marched it down Khreshchatyk, very impressive. And then they like went around the block a few blocks, 49:12 came back and made a circle. So it looked like they had just like these endless, endless, endless troops invading Ukraine, 49:18 which they didn't in fact. And they were quickly driven back out by the Bolsheviks.

49:24 By August of 1920 the Red Army was actually in the suburbs of Warsaw, 49:30 which was defended by the Polish Army, but also by the Ukrainians, which is why if you visit the Polish military cemetery 49:36 in Warsaw there will be quite a few Ukrainian graves, which would be otherwise mysterious.

49:42 At the end of all that and now we really are at the end, at the end of all of that, it will be Poland and the Soviet Union 49:48 which sign a treaty at Riga. And that treaty will create a new east west division, 49:55 but again, east west division, where Galicia and another territory called Volhynia 50:00 are gonna be part of Poland and the rest of what's now Ukraine is gonna become part of the Soviet Union.

50:06 So I've taken you as far as I can take you this time, I realize this is hard going. I appreciate you guys paying attention 50:13 and we'll pick up again on Thursday. Thanks.

50:20 (gentle music)

back to TOC


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Lecture 14 Interwar Poland's Ukrainians

0:00(static crackling) (thoughtful music) 0:12 - Okay, greetings. Happy Thursday. I would take us outside except for the whole recording business, 0:20 which we can't take outside, which makes me a little sad because it's a beautiful day.

0:27 This has been one of those New England falls that they promise you with the nice days and, like, the leaves falling from the trees.

0:34 I was driving last night back from Boston, and it was very dark and I was on country roads 0:40 and there was nobody else out there and it was very foggy, and the leaves were kind of swirling down, 0:46 and I kept thinking, like, there's going to be a guy with no head in my rear view mirror, like, riding me down on his black horse.

0:52 That really did make me think of that story. So thank you for being inside. Thank you for coming to this lecture.

0:59 What we're going to try to do today is get into interwar Poland and, in particular, 1:05 interwar Poland's Ukrainian question. I'm going to start by setting the scene, 1:11 and then we'll spend the rest of the lecture trying to figure out how that scene makes sense.

1:17 So here's the scene to imagine. It's December of 1933.

1:23 A Polish border guard is at work, but he's not at work protecting the border. He's at work carrying someone, leading someone 1:31 towards the border to cross the border into the Soviet Union, into Soviet Ukraine, 1:37 not far from the Volhynian town of Dubno, very close to border post 1,381.

1:45 The two men are speaking to each other in Russian. The border guard is the more assured, 1:51 the border crosser the less assured. As they reach the border, the border guard gives the border crosser a gun.

1:58 The crosser nervously puts the safety on and off. The border guard gives the border crosser a white coat 2:06 so he can't be seen in the snow. He gives him a compass and reminds him that in Polish compasses, 2:13 the black is the north end of the needle. And with these supplies and with a few words of reassurance, 2:19 the border crosser makes his way across the border into the Soviet Union.

2:26 How does it come to that? I mean, isn't it interesting that Poland is sending people illegally 2:31 into the Soviet Union in 1933? What kind of Poland is doing that? 2:36 What are Poland's aims? So let's start with what kind of Poland, 2:42 because now that we're into the 1920s and 1930s, 2:47 the territorial distribution of Ukraine has changed again, as we said at the end of the last lecture.

2:53 Most of what's now Ukraine is inside the Soviet Union as a republic which is named Ukraine.

2:59 Much of what is now Ukraine, in particular districts called Galicia or Volhynia, Galicja, 3:05 Wolyn, Halychyna, Volyn, are inside Poland. So there's a new east-west division.

3:12 There are five or six million people who speak Ukrainian who are now inside Poland, 3:17 roughly 15% of the population of Poland, which is a pretty sizable national minority.

3:22 For comparison, that's two or three percentage points more than there are African Americans in the United States.

3:28 So we have to contend now with Poland. If we don't understand Poland, 3:33 we can't understand the position of these Ukrainians, but we also can't understand how the Poles might be trying 3:40 to answer the Ukrainian question. So you'll all remember Poland had been a great power.

3:47 There was this thing called the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that existed from 1569 to 1795.

3:54 You'll remember from just a couple lectures ago that the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late 18th century is the central part 4:02 of the advance of the Russian Empire into Europe. The late 18th century is the time of the collapse 4:08 of the Crimean Khanate. It's the time of the collapse of the Ukrainian Cossack state, and it's also the time of the collapse 4:15 of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. So the late 18th century is the moment 4:20 when Russia becomes a European power, which is symbolized with a shift of the capital from Moscow to St. Petersburg, 4:27 actually the creation of St. Petersburg, which Pushkin famously calls a window, 4:32 a window into Europe. So the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is gone, 4:37 but it has left certain very important legacies for Ukrainians.

4:43 I mean, I've stressed this point over and over again, but it's very important to remember that most of Ukraine was connected to Lithuania or Poland 4:52 much longer than it was connected with the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. So just these hundreds of years 4:58 that we've spent studying that, that's a sort of legacy. But I'll mention three particular political legacies.

5:04 One would be the existence of the Cossacks themselves. So it's not as though the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 5:09 created the Cossacks, but the Cossacks existed in a particular form inside and at the edge 5:14 of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. A second is the general idea of a republic 5:21 as a state form, right? So when Ukrainians try to found states in 1918, 5:27 they take the form of republics. They take the name of republics. That is in some way natural because it's the European norm, 5:34 but it's also natural because a republic is also an important part of Ukrainian history.

5:39 A third legacy is the rule of law. So the rule of law in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 5:45 didn't apply to everybody. It applied to the nobility. The Cossacks were well aware of this, which is why they wanted to be treated like the nobility, 5:52 and much of the conflict between the Cossacks and the Polish state had to do with the rights of the Cossacks, that Cossacks should have some kind 6:00 of rights vis-a-vis the state. They were dissatisfied with their legal position, but they were aware that it was a state 6:06 which had the rule of law, and that is also a kind of legacy.

6:11 Okay, so in the case of Ukraine, I've tried to make the argument, 6:17 a little bit counterintuitive, that it was a good thing to be divided, right? So it always seems painful 6:24 and it lends itself to images of martyrdom when, you know, the national body is divided into multiple pieces and so on.

6:30 But if you're going to be occupied by empires, 6:35 I'm not recommending this, but if you're going to be occupied by empires, there are certain political advantages 6:40 to being occupied by more than one empire, right? So just logically speaking, one of them is going to be less repressive than the other.

6:47 I mean, that may be a slightly depressing way to look at it, but one of them will be less suppressive than the other, and it's always possible that the two of them will 6:53 in some way compete over you, right? Or they'll try to use you against the other, which might turn out to be to your long-term advantage.

7:00 I tried to explain the dynamics of this with the Habsburgs and the Russian Empire. With Poland, there's a similar situation, 7:07 but the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is divided between three empires. It's divided between Prussia, which becomes United Germany, 7:15 and this is a big story which is sort of on the periphery of what we've been talking about, but it keeps becoming more central.

7:20 Like, you can ignore the Germans for a while, but eventually, they make their way to the center of your attention.

7:28 I mean, that's kind of a general truth, but it's true in this class. So we started with this little state, 7:34 Royal Prussia, on the Baltic, which the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth kind of tolerates. After the ruin, after the weakening 7:40 of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, this little state Prussia decides that it's a kingdom.

7:45 It decides that its ruling family are kings. That state, Prussia, will become much larger 7:51 in the 18th century, and in the 19th century, that state Prussia, in 1870, 1871, will unite Germany, 7:58 will create a unified German state. So the partitioning power of Poland is actually not Germany, 8:04 which doesn't exist yet, but Prussia. But when Prussia unites Germany in 1871, 8:10 the Poles are then the most important national minority inside that new German state, 8:15 and they're subject to various repressive policies, which they respond to in a way which we would think of as involving organized civil society.

8:23 So the Germans try to buy up all the land. The Poles organize their own groups to collect money and to preserve the land.

8:29 The Germans try to build libraries. The Poles build libraries. The Germans Germanize the schools.

8:35 The Poles set up their own reading societies. The Poles publish their books. So there's a certain style of resistance in German Poland.

8:42 We've talked a bit about the Habsburgs. The Habsburgs are the second partitioning power of Poland.

8:47 In the Habsburg monarchy, other conditions prevail, and the Polish gentry, the Polish nobility, are able to gain experience as administrators, bureaucrats.

8:56 Some of them are elected to parliament. They gain experience of freedom of speech. They gain experience of publishing as they wish.

9:03 All of that experience will also matter for a reunited Poland later on. Most of what had been Poland becomes part 9:10 of the Russian Empire, and there, the political tradition is much more revolutionary, 9:15 as one would expect. The kinds of things that were possible in the Habsburg monarchy or even in Prussia 9:20 are not possible in the Russian Empire. The only kinds of politics that are really possible in the Russian Empire are underground, 9:27 very well organized, conspiratorial, which leads to certain habits of mind and certain habits of practice.

9:32 So you have three different traditions, all of which have advantages and disadvantages, coming together in Poland when it is created in 1918.

9:41 One more advantage I should really mention. So as I'm sure many of you have been thinking about, 9:47 an interesting feature of the war in Ukraine now is that the people on the Ukrainian side know the language 9:52 of the aggressing state, right? So basically all the Poles I'm going to be talking about in this lecture 9:59 are native or close to native speakers of Russian. And so in a tale which is going 10:04 to be largely about espionage, this matters an awful lot, right? So all the Poles that I'm going to be talking about 10:10 in this lecture, with maybe one or two exceptions, were educated in the Russian Empire and went through Russian schools 10:16 and therefore as adults in the '20s and '30s were native or very close to native Russian speakers. Some of them have spent time in Siberia, 10:22 like Jozef Pilsudski, which only, I mean, that improves your Russian in certain ways, right? I mean, it gives you the prison part 10:28 of the Russian language, which can come in handy. Okay, so the two main traditions 10:35 in Polish politics that had formed by 1918 already are the Polish Socialist Party, 10:42 in Polish, the PPS, Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, PPS on your sheets, and the National Democrats.

10:50 So interestingly, the two poles, sorry, in Polish political life, it wasn't intended as a joke, 10:57 it just came out that way, are already established before there's a Polish state. And these two poles are basically the same today, 11:04 by the way. It's a very coherent development. So the Polish Socialist Party is obviously center left.

11:12 Its dominant view is there should be a state first and then we'll build socialism later. The Polish Socialist Party tends to be nostalgic 11:20 towards the old commonwealth and to believe that some future Poland will be a federation, 11:26 not a nation-state, so a kind of modernized commonwealth in which the Belarusian, Lithuanian, 11:34 Ukrainian nations will somehow be present and in which the Jews will have some kind of autonomy. That's the idea.

11:40 That's the idea. On the center right, the National Democrats, 11:46 there's a very different vision. Their attitude towards the history of Poland is very different. The National Democrats say, "Forget about the commonwealth.

11:53 It fell. It was worthless. The nobility was not the nation. The nation is really the peasants.

11:59 They just don't know it yet. Our job is to take the Polish-speaking peasants and to make them into Poles.

12:05 That's what a movement is for. That's what the state is for. We're not concerned about the Germans and the Jews and the Ukrainians and so on.

12:12 They're not really Poles. They probably never will be Poles. Maybe the Belarusians and Ukrainians will be, 12:17 but certainly not the Germans and the Jews. " So their attitude is very different. The Germans and the Jews are national enemies, 12:23 and the Slavs are maybe assimilable, but if they're not assimilable, then they can also be national enemies.

12:29 The National Democrats are thinking about a nation-state. They're thinking about a nation-state where the nation in question is the Polish nation.

12:38 So these are the two currents in Polish politics which are already present, and when I tell the story 12:44 of the '20s and '30s, it's really these two currents which are going to be alternating in power, 12:49 very much like today. Okay, so Poland, 12:56 unlike Ukraine, at the end of the First World War, is regarded by the Entente as an ally.

13:03 This is really important. By the Entente, of course, I mean the French, the British, the Americans, the victorious Western powers.

13:10 In the Paris peace settlements, they regard some countries as effectively their allies and some countries not, 13:17 and this is only vaguely related to what actually happens during the war itself, and it has a lot to do 13:23 with the interests of those countries, especially France, in the years to come.

13:30 So the French take the most punishment in the First World War. It's largely fought on French territory.

13:35 The French are most concerned about the balance of power on the continent after the First World War.

13:40 The peace talks are held in Paris or in nice spa towns around Paris nearby.

13:46 And it's generally French interests that prevail. In Poland, you have an overlap 13:53 of the principle that was announced, national self-determination. Woodrow Wilson specifies 14:00 that Poland will become an independent state. So the principle of national self-determination is applied.

14:05 But also France wants Poland to exist because France wants an ally to the east of Germany, right? 14:13 If you are France... I'm trying to think of, like...

14:18 You're playing Risk, right? Okay. So if you're France, you always want the ally 14:25 to the east of Germany, and if you're Germany, you're always afraid of, right? It's that classical situation.

14:30 So if you're France, you're not so concerned about who that is and what their regime is.

14:37 France had been allies with the Russian Empire, right, for this reason. So the Russian Empire is done with, 14:43 and what do the French do? The French say independent Poland, and they ally 14:49 or they try to support the Whites in the Russian Civil War. So they're supporting the pro-imperial forces 14:55 in the Russian Civil War. They lose, as we already know, but that's what the French we're banking on. So the French want allies to the east of Germany.

15:02 So those two things come together this time, principle and practice, in the creation of Poland. So the Western allies are going to support the creation 15:09 of Poland, not that the Poles don't fight for it, they do, but they have two things which the Ukrainians don't.

15:16 Nobody is saying that Ukraine has the right to self-determination except for Germany in 1918, and that doesn't count for very much, 15:22 and nobody thinks that the existence of a Ukrainian state 15:28 is in their strategic interests except for Poland, and that in a very limited sense, 15:34 which we're going to get to. Okay, so this brings us to, 15:39 you know, the basic relationship, it's kind of an intellectually beautiful thing to think about, the relationship 15:46 between a revolution and borders, right? Because a revolution doesn't have borders.

15:53 A revolution is a total transformation. When you talk about a revolution, you don't say "I want a revolution in my backyard," right? 16:00 You don't say, "I want a... " A revolution is about total transformation. So the French Revolution wasn't, 16:05 I mean, it was about France, but it was also about invading the rest of Europe, right? Because it was about principles.

16:12 The Russian Revolution, as we talked about last time, was not meant to be about Russia at all. It was meant to be a global revolution 16:19 which just happened to take a starting point in Russia. But then we get to the very practical question 16:25 of what happens when the revolution that you've made turns out not to be global. Where does it end, then, right? 16:32 That very mundane question. Where does it end? And that question is going to be decided largely 16:37 by the use of force between Poland and the Soviet Union in 1919 and 1920.

16:44 So if we think of the stretch of territory between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, 16:50 Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, that stretch of territory is a kind of power vacuum 16:58 at the end of the First World War. The Entente has won the war, but they won it on the Western Front.

17:04 The German Army was exhausted on the Western Front. The German Army is exhausted fighting in France 17:10 against the Americans, the British, and the French. So the Germans lose, but they lose the war 17:16 having never been defeated in the East, which is an odd situation and very important for everybody.

17:21 From a Western point of view, it's easy to forget about. But from an East European point of view or even a German point of view, it's central.

17:27 It's central to the Nazis, by the way, too. It's central to everything that's going to come next. From the point of view of German soldiers in the East, 17:36 there never was a defeat. They just had to come home at some point. They were never beaten. They just had to come home. Okay.

17:44 So after 1918, there's a power vacuum because there's been been a revolution. In 1917, the Russian Revolution destroys the Russian Empire.

17:53 In 1918, the German and Austrian armies move in to support their version of Ukraine, 17:58 and then they're defeated, so they move back out. And what's left is a vacuum which, on the Polish side, 18:07 Jozef Pilsudski, who is the leader of the Polish Socialist Party and also the leader of the Polish state, wishes to fill, and on the other side, 18:17 Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik party and de facto of the Russian state, also wants to fill.

18:24 But the interesting idea here which I want you to notice is that neither of them wants to fill it 18:30 on behalf of nation-states. That's not the kind of idea they have in mind. Lenin is thinking of a global...

18:38 Where did I lose you? Where did I lose you? Know that I'm sensing confusion in the middle of the room.

18:43 No? You're okay? You're fine? Okay. They can't edit that out, by the way.

18:50 That's going to be on the video. It's there forever. So Pilsudski is thinking 18:56 about some kind of vague federation. He's not thinking Poland for the Poles.

19:01 That's not his idea at all. His idea is somehow the Lithuanians, the Belarusians, and the Ukrainians somehow also in this, right? 19:09 Whether they would be equal partners or not is less clear, but somehow, some kind of larger state which is not just Poland for the Poles.

19:15 He wants more Lithuanians, more Belarusians, more Ukrainians, more Jews in the state.

19:21 Lenin's idea is also not... Obviously it's not a nation-state. Lenin's idea is global revolution.

19:27 And so by the moment we're talking about, 1919, it's already clear that the world isn't going 19:34 to have a revolution just because Russia did, okay? And this is the key to the, like...

19:40 This is like the original sin, if you want, of the Soviet Union, or it's the key to how things work out later, because Lenin and Trotsky, the Bolsheviks, 19:48 they didn't think they were starting a Russian revolution. They thought that they were the powder keg for a global revolution. Then what do you do when the global revolution doesn't come? 19:56 Well, your next move is to say, "Okay, we're going to help it along," right? "We're going to help it along. " 20:02 So once they have won the Russian Civil War, their next move is to think, "We're going to go into Europe 20:10 and we'll help out the German comrades, because obviously, Germany's the most important country in Europe. If we can get to Berlin, 20:16 then there can be revolution in Germany, and then there will be world revolution. " So stage one is, your theory is there should be global revolution.

20:23 Stage two is that your practice is, you've got to get to Europe and help out the German comrades. But what's in the way? Poland.

20:30 And the Poles aren't just in the way. They're moving east. So this sets up the Polish-Bolshevik War of 1919 to 1920.

20:38 As I mentioned last time, the furthest the Poles ever get 20:43 in this war is Kyiv in May of 1920, 20:49 the victory in Kyiv with the, you know, the circular march of the Polish cavalry around Khreshchatyk.

20:56 That is followed by the Red Army's march on Warsaw, where what's called the miracle, 21:02 the Vistula, the Poles' defeat... It's called the miracle. The Vistula is the river that runs through Poland. The miracle on the Vistula was originally sarcastic, like, 21:11 in the sense of "after what you did, we needed a miracle" because this war was contested inside Poland itself.

21:18 The National Democrats, the right, opposed the war. They didn't want to expand Polish territory.

21:23 They wanted the nation-state, right? And so for them, this was a dangerous adventure. "Why are we going all the way to Kyiv? 21:28 Look what you did. You brought the Red Army to the suburbs of Warsaw. We need a miracle. " But that sarcastic miracle on the Vistula 21:34 eventually became a non-sarcastic miracle on the Vistula. It's now just a kind of neutral name of the achievement.

21:41 So the Poles hold off the Red Army at the gates of Warsaw, basically, and stage a very successful counterattack, 21:48 drive the Red Army deep into Ukraine and to Belarus, at which point both sides are exhausted 21:53 and a peace is signed, and that's the Treaty of Riga of March of 1921. So the Treaty of Riga creates an effect...

22:06 And you know, and this is something to think about when a war is being fought. Where the border is in large measure defines 22:12 what kind of states are then going to exist. Because on the Polish side, 22:17 what you end up getting is not a federation. It's not big enough for that. There are a lot of Belarusians, a million.

22:25 There are a lot of Ukrainians, five million plus. There are a lot of Jews, three million.

22:30 But there aren't enough for a federation, right? This is a state, nevertheless, which has a clear majority of Polish speakers, 22:38 and so what it becomes is a Polish nation-state with big national minorities.

22:43 It's not exactly what the National Democrats wanted and it's also not what Pilsudski wanted, but that's what the borders of Riga create.

22:50 They create this Poland with big national minorities, substantial national minorities.

22:55 On the Soviet side, what the Treaty of Riga does is that it creates a border.

23:01 It means the revolution has stopped. For now, at least, the revolution has a border, which is to say the Soviet Union has to become a state, 23:10 which it does. And the Bolsheviks are making this up as they go along. They're making this up as they go along, 23:15 their response to the defeat. And they were defeated. The Poles defeated them. They're not going to be defeated again 23:22 until Afghanistan in 1979, but the Red Army is defeated by Poland in 1920.

23:28 And so the response to Polish defeat is to create this thing that we take for granted, which is the Soviet Union.

23:34 The Soviet Union is the state which contains the revolution. So it's not supposed to be a normal state. It's not a nation-state.

23:40 From the Soviet, from the Bolshevik point of view, it's certainly not an empire. It's something completely new. It's a kind of container for revolution, 23:46 a revolution which at some later date will get spread throughout the world. In the meantime, it becomes the task 23:52 of the Soviet comrades to complete the revolution inside their own borders and to model it for everyone else.

23:59 Okay, so now that's, so in Poland, what follows from this 24:06 is a certain fundamental difficulty for democracy.

24:14 In Poland, you have two basic questions which make parliamentary democracy difficult 24:21 right from the beginning. One of them and the most important is the land question. And I realize I keep beating you over the head with this, 24:28 but in the first half of the 20th century, land was the most important question in politics, 24:33 not anything else but land, because most people in the part of the world that we're studying, at least, were peasants, 24:40 and in general, they wanted to have more land than they did. This was still an economy, and we're, you know, 24:45 in much the world, it's still true, but in Europe, in our part of Europe, this is still an economy where most people have small plots of land 24:51 and want to have bigger plots of land or have no land and want to have more land. And because, you know...

24:57 The economy itself is still agrarian, right? This is the center of politics.

25:04 If you want to, you can think of everything that happens in Poland, Soviet Union, and even Nazi Germany 25:11 as an answer to the land question, where the Poles try to do land reform and kind of fail.

25:17 Land reform means you take from people who have more land, give it to people who have less land. The Soviets at the end of the day take everyone's land 25:24 and create collective farming. Even Hitler's ideas that you should invade Eastern Europe and take the land, that's a solution 25:32 to the land question, right? So the key to a lot of this is land, 25:38 people wanting more land. So in Polish politics, as in Eastern Europe, as in democratic Eastern Europe in general, 25:44 the key question was land, and the difficulty was trying to get the peasants interested in politics, 25:51 trying to get the peasants to see that democratic politics somehow serves their interests. And the best way to do that is land reform, right? 25:59 That's something the state can do for you if you're a peasant. It can take some land from your wealthy neighbor, 26:04 from that person who owned the plantation that your grandfather was a serf in, 26:11 take some land from that person and give it to you. That's something the state can do. The Poles do that to some degree.

26:17 But here's where the national question comes in. In Poland, there was a peasant party, 26:22 but it was a Polish peasant party, right? It wasn't just a peasant party.

26:28 This is really, really, really important. There was no class party for the peasants of Poland.

26:35 And even more than in the Polish areas, in the Belarusian and Ukrainian areas, 26:42 most people were peasants. So this means that basically, in democratic elections, 26:49 the Belarusian and Ukrainian peasants were excluded because there was no party they could vote for which really had a chance 26:54 of exercising any kind of influence. Had there been a peasant party representing peasants as such, that party would've won every time, right? 27:02 But there was no such party, and so therefore, everything switches around, and if you're a Belarusian peasant or a Ukrainian peasant, you can think, 27:09 "Well, the Polish peasants seem to be getting some land, but I don't seem to be getting any land," right? 27:16 And so then the land question is magnified by the national question. And this is one of the ways that Polish politics turns 27:24 in the first half of the 1920s where, when Poland is being ruled by coalitions 27:30 of National Democrats and the Polish Peasant Party, right? 27:35 So you can see the setup for this. The setup for this means that you have, 27:43 if you're the Soviet Union, we'll talk more about this, but if you're the Soviet Union looking at Poland, 27:49 there is a huge opening for you. You can speak to Ukrainians and to Belarusians 27:55 about national liberation, and you can speak to them about land reform. Now obviously, at the end of the day, 28:01 we know that the Soviet Union is not going to be the homeland of national liberation or land reform. But in the 1920s, this was propaganda.

28:09 This was an approach that the Soviets could take. And in the 1920s, it seemed pretty reasonable, 28:15 we're going to talk more about this, because in the 1920s,, the Soviets were engaged in something Poland was not engaged in, 28:20 which was affirmative action for Ukrainians, giving Ukrainians educational opportunities, 28:25 building schools and universities, pulling Ukrainians up through the ranks of the administration. They were also engaged in allowing Ukrainian peasants 28:34 to keep the land they took from Polish landlords. So this is a very basic way that Poland and the Soviet Union were different, right? 28:40 In the revolution, 1917, '18, a lot of what happens in Ukraine, 28:46 especially Right-bank Ukraine, is that Ukrainian peasants take land from historic Polish landlords 28:52 and then those historic Polish landlords flee west to Poland, which from the point of view of Poland is ethnic cleansing and oppression, right? 29:00 But from the point of view of the Ukrainian peasants, it's "We finally got the land that we've been working. " 29:05 And so from the point of view of a Ukrainian peasant, that was a good revolution, right? That was a good revolution.

29:11 That was a revolution or a part of the revolution that we want to keep. And in the 1920s, the Bolsheviks were not able 29:16 to do anything about that and so they allowed it to maintain itself. That was called the New Economic Policy.

29:22 So in the 1920s, Ukrainian peasants got more land, they got fewer Polish landlords, 29:28 and Ukrainian educated people were getting affirmative action, none of which existed in Poland, right? So in the 1920s, if you're the Soviet Union, 29:35 you can make propaganda against Poland because of these basic realities. Okay, in Poland, there is, if we get more specific now, 29:44 there is a big difference between the two Ukrainian districts, 29:50 and now we're getting to the stuff that, like, 30 years down the line, you're going to be making cocktail party conversation with 29:55 when you explain to people about the difference between Galicia and Volhynia, right? 30:01 And you guys are already halfway there because you know, (laughing) because you know that Galicia is the part 30:09 that came from the Habsburg monarchy, right? You know that the name Galicia, Galizien, was invented basically by the Habsburgs 30:15 to name territory they took in 1772 and that territory, Galicia, ends up being part of Poland.

30:23 The Poles call it something completely different. They call it Malopolska Wschodnia, Eastern Little Poland. But it's the eastern part of Galicia.

30:31 Volhynia is something very different. Volhynia has been part of the Russian Empire 30:36 this entire time. Volhynia has been part of the Russian Empire for more than a hundred years. In Volhynia, unlike Galicia, 30:43 people belong to the Orthodox Church, not the Greek Catholic Church.

30:49 In Volhynia, there are far fewer Poles and fewer Jews than there are in Galicia, 30:57 and also the standard of comparison is very different. So one of the main problems 31:04 for the Poles trying to govern Galicia is that if you're a Galician Ukrainian, after 1918, 31:12 everything got worse for you in a couple of ways. So politics is very much about expectations.

31:18 If you're a Ukrainian in Galicia, you might have expected "We are going to get our own state" 31:27 because between November of 1918 and the spring of 1919, there was a West Ukrainian National Republic, 31:34 and it was defeated by none other than the Polish Army, right? And so if you're a Ukrainian, 31:40 that's a disappointment, right? And there's nothing the Polish state can do to repair that, because from the point of view of the Polish state, 31:47 this is Polish territory. The second frame of reference is the Habsburg monarchy.

31:53 So if we're going to be governed by someone else, we're used to having certain things, freedom of speech, 31:58 freedom of assembly, free political parties. We're used to having schools. We're used to being able to serve in the administration.

32:04 Under Polish rule, a lot of that will be taken away. There will be fewer Ukrainian-speaking schools.

32:09 Ukrainians in general will be excluded from the state administration in Poland, which they were not in the Habsburg monarchy.

32:16 The Greek Catholic Church will not be treated as equal. So in all these ways, the positions 32:22 of Ukrainians in Galicia is actually worse than it was in the Habsburg monarchy, and they're very well aware of this, and they're used to talking about this.

32:28 And it's not easy for them to situate themselves in the Polish state. Eventually by the late 1930s when things are very bad, 32:35 the main position among Ukrainians will be something like "Poland is better than the alternatives. " But better than the alternatives is not a rallying cry 32:43 for everyday politics in general. So the main force in Ukrainian politics 32:49 is something called Undo, U-N-D-O, it's on your sheet, which takes a kind of centrist position, 32:54 not sure about the Polish state in the 1920s. Many people thinking that maybe the Soviet Union might be better, 33:01 feeling left out of Polish politics with justification. There is a right-wing fraction, a very small group, 33:10 called the OUN, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which is a typical, looking at this from the point of view 33:16 of, you know, political science, a typical reaction to exclusion from democracy. If, you know, if you go from a more democratic 33:24 to a less democratic situation, there will probably be some group which decides that the answer to this is violence 33:29 against the institutions, and that group is the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. In interwar Poland, they were not very significant.

33:37 They were not very numerous. The Poles did a pretty good job of locking them up. They did assassinate a few Polish officials after 1926.

33:45 In general, they assassinated, as one does, the people who were in favor of some kind of accommodation or compromise, right? 33:51 You don't assassinate the radicals on the other side. I mean, I feel like I'm now giving you a training course, 33:57 so don't take it that way, but you see the logic, right? You assassinate the moderates on the other side 34:02 because if you're a radical, you prefer the radicals on the other side. You prefer conflict.

34:08 You don't want the compromisers because the compromisers might make a deal with your compromisers and then you'd be out of business 34:13 and your radical vision wouldn't seem like it makes a lot of sense. I mentioned the OUN because it'll become more important 34:18 during the war, but it's actually not that important during the '20s and '30s. So the early '20s in Poland are a time 34:26 of democratic politics in which the land question 34:32 is only very unsatisfactorily answered and the national question, if you're not Polish, 34:37 is not answered at all. This changes a bit in 1926. In 1926, Poland becomes much less democratic, 34:45 but the people who come to power are more open on the national question. In 1926, Jozef Pilsudski, the former head of state, 34:52 comes back to power by way of a military coup and installs what we, I think, 34:59 would be very comfortable calling, borrowing some Russian terminology, a managed democracy, right? 35:07 I mean, it's managed better than the current Russian democracy, non-democracy, is. But there are political parties.

35:12 There is voting. There's a certain amount of massaging of the vote. There's a certain amount of disenfranchisement.

35:20 It's kind of a democracy, but you also kind of already know who's going to win before the elections take place.

35:26 So he overthrows a democracy, installs a kind of managed democracy with his own political party and then, 35:34 you know, governs from behind the scenes. It's not really a dictatorship, but it's an authoritarian regime.

35:40 From our point of view, the difference here, the relevant difference, if you remember between, 35:46 you know, the basic orientations, center left, center right, the center left is more open on the national question, 35:52 more tolerant of Jews, more open on the national question. And what Pilsudski then begins to do, 35:59 with no democratic legitimation, this is never talked about at all, everything I'm about to talk about was kept entirely secret 36:05 from the Polish population, with no democratic legitimation, he then undertakes a policy of trying 36:11 to tolerate the Ukrainian national identity in part of Poland, partly with the hope 36:19 of undoing Soviet influence. So the Soviet influence, as I've already tried to suggest, was very real.

36:26 The Soviets in the 1920s are in a rather beautiful strategic situation with respect to Poland, as I've already tried to suggest.

36:33 In 1923, the Soviets promulgate their doctrine on colonialism and nationalism, which is very clever.

36:41 It basically says that nationalism is reactionary inside the Soviet Union but outside the Soviet Union 36:47 is progressive, right? Which is a very convenient position. So, you know, it's the Leninist view 36:56 of national self-determination that, sure, everybody has a right in principle to a nation-state, it just...

37:03 In practice, it depends on whether this serves us or not, right? So anti-colonial movements in India are great, right? 37:11 As are anti-colonial movements in Poland. Super. Anti-colonial movements in Central Asia 37:16 or the Caucasus or Ukraine, not at all, right? But so what this allows them to do 37:22 is it allows them to use the national question and the question of land against Poland 37:29 but also against the British Empire. I mean, the Soviets were engaged with the British Empire as well.

37:34 But for our purposes, Poland is what matters. So what they do is that they try to present Soviet Ukraine 37:42 as a sovereign Ukrainian state where peasants have land, where there are national freedoms, and try in this way to draw the millions 37:50 of Ukrainians in Poland towards the Soviet Union and destabilize the Polish state.

37:57 And as I say, this was carried out with a great deal of success. What Pilsudski does is that he tries to reverse this.

38:06 So in Galicia, he never has a chance. In Galicia, there is already, 38:12 when they come to power in '26, the Ukrainian nationalists assassinate the Polish officials 38:18 and you get a spiral of reprisals and counter-reprisals which discredit the Polish state in Galicia.

38:24 In any event, in Galicia, there just wasn't a kind of fresh terrain to work in. What they do is they take Volhynia 38:31 and they try to educate a generation of pro-Polish Ukrainians in Volhynia.

38:38 They carry out a policy known as the Volhynian Experiment from 1928, led by a man called Henryk Jozewski, 38:47 who's on your sheet. And what Jozewski does is a kind of, it's kind of a capitalist or a bourgeois 38:54 or a liberal version of Soviet affirmative action. So he places Ukrainians 39:02 in Volhynia in local government. He encourages the use of the Ukrainian language 39:11 in the Orthodox Church. He encourages a movement 39:18 towards autocephaly in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church on Polish territory.

39:25 And he talks about Ukrainian independence. He talks about a replay of the Polish-Bolshevik War 39:33 in which this time, Poland would win and the creation of a Ukrainian state.

39:40 Now, Jozewski was a true believer in all of this. He was from Kyiv.

39:49 He was authentically in love with Ukrainian culture and songs, literature. He spoke Ukrainian like a native.

39:55 He deeply believed that Ukrainian and Polish culture were fundamentally very similar and that Russian culture was something different.

40:03 But in general, one of course has to ask, you know, one has to be a little bit critical all the same.

40:10 Is this idea of Ukraine, you know, is it for the Ukrainians or is it about creating a buffer state? 40:15 Because if you're Poland, it's better to have something between you and Russia. And for the Poles who were involved, 40:21 it was a mixture of motives. I mean, there was certainly idealism involved, but there was also this notion that it would be better 40:28 to have Ukraine for our own strategic interests. So what the Poles do is under the cover 40:35 of this toleration project, they're also educating young Ukrainians, training them for espionage missions 40:43 inside Soviet Ukraine. And they also, and this is not widely known, 40:49 but they also revive a government in exile for Ukraine.

40:54 They revive the Ukrainian National Republic on their own territory. They set up a staff for a Ukrainian army in 1927 41:04 with sections for propaganda and for intelligence. And in 1928, this Ukrainian army on Polish soil begins 41:11 to run its agents across the Soviet border.

41:16 From the point of view of Poland, this is part of a larger project 41:21 which is known as Prometheanism. And this, again, you should, like...

41:28 It's a really interesting point of contrast to Poland of today. A lot of the ideas that I'm talking about now 41:33 have a faint echo in Polish policy today, but it's a pretty faint echo. The Poles in the '20s and '30s were a lot more adventurous 41:41 on these issues than the Polish state is now. The idea of Prometheanism 41:47 was national self-determination, national self-determination for the oppressed nations 41:55 of the Soviet Union. And so the Poles, in secret, this was not an open-forum policy at all, 42:01 but in secret, they funded and helped with the publications of and sometimes helped 42:06 run people across borders for Caucasian nations, for Georgia, for Chechens, and also for Ukrainians.

42:16 And the basic idea of this is that it's trying to flip what the Soviets are saying.

42:23 So the Soviets are saying, "We have national self-determination. Look at our beautiful national liberation.

42:28 Look at these republics. " And the Poles are saying, "No, actually, the national question is your weakness, 42:34 and there are all these immigrant politicians who agree with us and we're going to support them. " 42:40 And this larger policy of Prometheanism had connections with the British and the French and even, 42:45 interestingly, in the Japanese, all of whom, for their various reasons, had reasons 42:52 to try to weaken the Soviet Union.

42:57 Now, so up until 1933, 43:03 if you read the files, which, one summer, I was able to do... There was a summer when the Polish military archives 43:10 were entirely closed, but for some reason, they let me just sit there and read them all, which was great. I literally used a shopping cart, 43:18 which is not normal archival practice. I had a shopping cart and I filled up the shopping cart with files, and then I read all the files, 43:24 and then I went and got another shopping cart. That is the research which is in "Sketches from a Secret War," and that is why there's a lot 43:29 in "Sketches from a Secret War" which you're not going to find anywhere else. But the general drift, as you'll see 43:35 when you do the reading, is that from 1926 to 1931, '32, there's some really interesting Polish intelligence work 43:42 going on in Ukraine under this overall auspice of the Volhynian Experiment, under this overall auspice of Prometheanism.

43:51 We know a lot about the agents and the rings that the Poles were running inside Soviet Ukraine 43:57 led by this man with the close-to-unpronounceable name of Jerzy Niezbrzycki, 44:03 who is a very interesting character. He, like a lot of these men and women, because a lot of the agents and officers 44:09 in Polish intelligence, by the way, were women, was a Pole from Ukraine, so someone who knew the territory, 44:15 knew the languages, was bilingual. Some of them were trilingual.

44:20 So he ran these agents, and one of the stories which stays with me 44:27 because it reveals an important difference is... So a lot of this stuff is about sex.

44:34 I don't know how you guys feel about that. Like, is it okay to talk about sex? (laughing) 44:41 I wish I could share with the camera, like, the various reactions that that got. So a lot of the operations involve sex, 44:48 so Polish male officers having sex with Soviet women and Polish female officers having sex with Soviet men, 44:55 or they involve relationships in which sex is somehow in the picture, right? 45:01 And so there's one example which I found really interesting because it gets us 45:07 to a kind of difference between two systems is when one of Niezbrzycki's female friends, 45:15 who was a Polish intelligence officer operating inside Ukraine... This is not going to be directly about sex. I'm sorry.

45:21 It's all in the reading, though. If you get, like, deep into the reading, you'll find there's a lot of sex with spies.

45:28 Okay. But so he had a friend who I'm going to call X22, and what she did 45:35 was she exchanged consumer goods, in particular nylon stockings, 45:42 which was something which was trivially easy to get in Poland but which did not exist in the Soviet Union. She would trade nylon stockings and other similar things 45:49 for files and books from, you know, her female friends' mail, like, from their husbands' libraries 45:55 and their filing cabinets, right? That was one of her methods. She had other methods of operation, it's in the reading, but that was one of her methods of operation.

46:02 And what this reveals, you'll see where I'm going, is that by 1931, '32, we really have two very different systems.

46:11 Poland is a capitalist country. It's a poor capitalist country. It's a capitalist country. In the Soviet Union, by 1931, 1932, 46:18 we are in the middle of collectivization, which will be our big subject next time. We're the middle of a transformation of the Soviet Union 46:26 into a form of industrialized country, which involves taking all of the land away from the peasants and putting them under the control of the state.

46:34 And it is in this moment of collectivization, especially '28, '29, '30, 46:39 that Soviet Ukraine is probably most at risk. In early 1930, the Soviet secret police records 46:49 more than one million acts of individual resistance by peasants on the territory of the Ukrainian Republic 46:57 against collectivization, and it's during this time also that thousands upon thousands of Ukrainian peasants 47:06 or peasants from Soviet Ukraine flee to Romania and flee to Poland to escape collectivization.

47:14 And when they come to Poland, they plea for war.

47:19 So, I mean, we'll talk more about it in the next lecture, but it is a very dramatic situation 47:25 to suddenly lose your land and to see everyone else losing their land and to realize that you have no recourse.

47:31 So just to quote one peasant... This is from Polish archives. So it's interesting, right, because thousands and thousands 47:37 of Ukrainian peasants fled into Poland and the Polish border guards and other officials took notes, right? 47:44 And we have all of those notes. So we have, like, this report of what was happening inside collectivization from the perspective of the peasants themselves.

47:50 So one peasant says, "And if a war broke out, the mood of the people is such 47:56 that if the Polish Army appeared today, they would kiss the soldiers' feet and the entire population would attack the Bolsheviks. " 48:02 Now, why is that interesting, right? That is not the normal Ukrainian peasant attitude towards Poland at all, right? 48:10 That's from 1930, so it's only a decade or so after the Polish landlords were kicked out the first time, right? 48:16 So it's a sign of how bad collectivization is that the peasants would be calling for a Polish invasion.

48:23 And this is that moment. March of 1930 is when the Soviets actually feared war.

48:29 On the 17th of March... It was March of 1930 when Stalin calls a temporary halt to collectivization.

48:35 He gives one of his speeches that is most remembered, it's remembered as "Dizzy with Success," 48:40 in which he basically says it's going so well that it's going badly, right? 48:46 He says, like, "Some of the comrades are a little bit overenthusiastic. Collectivization was always supposed to be voluntary.

48:51 Let's just have a little pause, right?" And that is because of the resistance, especially in Ukraine.

48:57 It's also the same time, 17 March 1930, that the Red Army is put in full battle readiness 49:06 because they're expecting an attack from Poland. This is the moment when they're most vulnerable. It's also the moment where they're most afraid.

49:12 So you have refugees fleeing Ukraine to Poland. You have the Soviet Army in full battle readiness.

49:17 You have fear, but what you don't have is a Polish attack.

49:24 The Poles look upon this and they say, "Well, the Soviet state is mobilizing. It's more powerful than we thought. " 49:31 The Poles were always interested in having more information about Ukraine and about having a Ukrainian alternative, 49:38 but the most they were ever planning for was to use their Ukrainian agents if the Soviet Union fell apart.

49:45 They were never actually planning an offensive war against the Soviet Union. That was never part of their plan.

49:50 So I can say this pretty definitively because I've read the stuff. So what happens is that collectivization proceeds 49:59 and the Soviets ask Poland for peace talks, 50:04 and the Poles say yes. And in July of 1932, Poland and the Soviet Union 50:10 sign a mutual nonaggression treaty, which is all well and good, and it's a nice moment in Polish-Soviet relations, 50:18 but from the point of view of a class about Ukraine, you see the consequences. It means that the Ukrainians are left all alone 50:27 in the middle of collectivization. There's no one to whom they can appeal. The kind of statement that I read, 50:34 there are hundreds upon hundreds, thousands upon thousands of statements like that of Ukrainian peasants going to foreign consulates 50:40 and saying, you know, "Please let me out or please invade," right? That's what they say to the Germans 50:45 and the Poles in the early 1930s. "Invade. Let us out. Invade. Let us out. " 50:50 Over and over and over again. But after Poland signs a peace treaty with the Soviet Union in 1932, 50:56 there's no one to whom they can appeal. So that scene that I set at the top of the lecture 51:01 when the Polish border guard is sending the Ukrainian agent across the border into Soviet Ukraine, 51:08 that is in December of 1933. By December of 1933, it's impossible 51:13 that Poland is going to come to the aid of Ukraine, and by December of 1933, 51:18 about four million Ukrainians will have starved to death in the collectivization famine, which is our subject next time.

51:25 Thanks.

51:31 (thoughtful music)

back to TOC


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Lecture 15 Ukrainization, Famine, Terror: 1920s-1930s

0:00(foreboding music) 0:11 - Okay. Greetings, everyone. One of the things you learn when you become a historian 0:16 is that most of the great quotations 0:22 that people cite were never actually said by the person. So, and the internet has only made this worse 0:29 because the internet filters for what sounds right, and what sounds right is very difficult 0:34 from what a specific person actually said at the specific time. So, if you track down, like the 100 most quoted things, 0:42 especially by people like Einstein in general, they didn't ever actually say those things.

0:47 Somebody said they said those things, it sounded right. So the example I'm thinking of, 0:52 I don't think Stalin ever actually said that a million lives is a statistic, 0:59 and one life is a tragedy, or a million deaths is a statistic, one death's a tragedy.

1:04 He's quoted to that effect all the time, but I have never actually seen the source where Stalin says that, the primary source, 1:12 and this is by the way, this is how historians work, is that we are always working our way back towards the primary sources 1:18 and then building our way back up to stories. So if I, like everything that I tell you here 1:24 is the product of, almost everything is the product of somebody else's research at some time 1:31 in some archive, finding things out, making new arguments, working it into a book, right? 1:36 So the things that, the things that I'm trying to present to you here is general arguments, are the result of the work of an awful lot of historians, 1:43 generally Ukrainian historians. And then we try to make it all make sense in a big class.

1:48 But the reason I'm thinking about this is the difficulty of the subject today.

1:54 So our subject today is the death by starvation, or malnutrition, 1:59 or hunger-related disease of about 4 million people in the Soviet Republic of Ukraine 2:05 between the middle of 1932 and the end of 1933.

2:11 One of the worst manmade famines in modern history, at least, and a turning point in history of the Soviet Union.

2:18 But it's inherently hard to think about. It's, even the number 4 million is hard to think about.

2:26 But then also, unless you've had very specific kinds of life experiences, 2:31 the idea of one person starving to death is also very difficult to think about, right? 2:37 And so the combination of those things, 1 million person, one person starving to death, but 4 million times, 2:44 4 million different people. So it's a very hard reality to try to imbibe, but I'm not asking you to imbibe it now, as I speak to you, 2:50 you know, just for a couple of minutes, I'm just trying to give you a sense that there are certain kinds of subjects that, 2:57 you know, as humanists, we don't just blur over. As scientists, we go to the primary sources, 3:02 and we check those quotations, and we work our way up to arguments. But as humanists, we have to be attentive to human life 3:08 and the meaning of human life and the way that human life ends. And this is largely a lecture about 3:13 how human life ends. I'm gonna begin it with an authentic quotation 3:19 from the period, from January of 1933. I'll tell you where it came from a little bit later.

3:25 The quotation is, "There are villages in which a significant part of the adult population has left for the towns 3:32 to seek money and bread, leaving the children alone to their fate. In many villages, the tremendous majority of kholkoz,' 3:39 that's collective farm workers, "and their families are starving. And among them are many who are sick and swollen 3:44 as a result of hunger. And a series of cases no help is given them since there are no reserves whatsoever.

3:50 in connection with this, many people die every day. " So that is not from, 3:58 a letter from a Ukrainian to a family member abroad. It's not from a Ukrainian 4:05 talking to another Ukrainian in Ukraine. It's actually from a report, 4:11 it's a handwritten note appended to a report to the head of the secret police in Ukraine.

4:18 The authorities in Ukraine knew exactly what was happening. They were there watching it, 4:23 they were there carrying it out, they were there talking about it, reporting on it to one another. It's a handwritten appendage to the report, 4:30 because it's not essential. The lives of the people concerned, the deaths are not really essential.

4:36 It's not important to the overall five-year plan collectivization, the Soviet project.

4:41 It's just noted, so it will be known. Which leads me to the first point 4:47 that I want you to understand, which I'm sure many of you do, it's that famines are political.

4:54 Very rarely do you confront a situation where a famine is a direct result 4:59 of a physical lack of food. It's the result of a political decision about distribution, 5:07 which is based upon priorities, where the priority of preserving human life may be very low, 5:12 or as in this case, it may not exist at all. It may not be a priority.

5:19 And so, if famines are political, then you know, that opens one's eyes 5:24 to the possibility of how famines can be created in the present or in the future, right? So if, for example, a country invades another country 5:33 and blockades its ports and says that food will not pass from these ports 5:38 out into the rest of the world, that is not a lack of food, right? It's not that Ukraine right now isn't growing food, 5:44 it's that a political decision has been made to try to block the export of that food. And therefore, in the Sahel, or in Ethiopia, 5:53 or in Lebanon, there might be food shortages as a result of political decisions, okay.

5:59 So, from the point of view of the Soviets, the decision to have people starve in Soviet Ukraine, 6:09 we see it as political, right? From their point of view, what they think is that 6:17 everything should be yielding to politics. So this is, I mean, 6:22 I'm gonna get into the details, and the backdrop, and all the arguments about this, but there are a few fundamental things to understand 6:28 about the way Soviet leaders understood the world in the early 1930s that are crucial here.

6:33 One is the Leninist idea that everything yields to politics.

6:39 That an elite party, a small group of people with the right ideas can push history forward 6:47 in the right direction. That there's a natural direction that history is moving, it's moving towards socialism, 6:53 it's moving toward the domination of the proletariat, and the right people can push it forward.

6:59 And as they push it forward, everything else has to yield because we know that this is the correct way that history has to go.

7:08 Within this worldview, it's very important to see that the individuals who actually exist in the world do not have any value.

7:17 So, you know, you might have been exposed to some sort of human rights framework or civil rights framework, 7:23 or you might think that that's natural, right? All these things are historically contingent, and we learn them or unlearn them, 7:29 take them in or not, in this way of seeing the world, an any individual, any particular individual, 7:34 doesn't really matter. Because what matters is, where we're all going to get together.

7:40 Not necessarily us even, but some future generation. At some point, humanity is going to be restored to itself.

7:46 Alienation's gonna come to an end, private property is gonna come to an end, that's everything, right? 7:51 That is everything. The goal is everything.

7:56 And means are generally justified. And this has, this has another implication for truth, 8:03 which is really important when we talk about this famine. So this famine is one of the blunter bigger truths of the 20th century in European history, 8:10 but nevertheless, extremely controversial, at least for decades, and one of the reasons for that, 8:16 is that the people who carried it out, had a specific idea about truth. And their specific idea about truth 8:21 is that just as these individuals don't matter, also the facts as such, don't matter.

8:28 They matter selectively insofar as they can help a narrative, right? 8:34 That's what facts are for. But facts as such are not so interesting. And the narrative has a shape, and it's the shape of history that I've described before, 8:41 which is that there's a revolution, the revolution is going to bring, eventually going to bring about human harmony 8:47 and solidarity. That overall shape is what matters. And if it so happens that millions of people die 8:55 along the way, those individual facts are less important than the overall shape.

9:00 In fact, if we have to, if those individual facts amount to something that we can't ignore, 9:06 which is what happened in 1932 and 1933, the scale of the famine was so great, it couldn't really be ignored, 9:11 then you have to argue that this was necessary, right? So at the Congress of Victors, 9:18 the Party Congress of 1934, the argument that was made to great success and fanfare, 9:25 was that the famine in Ukraine was part of breaking the back of the international Bourgeoisie 9:31 by way of its Polish agents, and its Ukrainian nationalists, that the very, 9:38 all of the pain and suffering actually demonstrates that the revolution has been successful.

9:44 And that's a form of argument, which I'm sure is not entirely unknown to you. The idea that precisely because there was pain, 9:49 it was therefore, it was therefore worth it, but on a grand scale.

9:55 And then related to this, again, before we get into the details, one has to remember that if you are a Bolshevik 10:02 in the 1920s and 1930s, you are taking for granted that whole groups of people who exist on the earth will soon not exist anyway.

10:11 So, you know, you shouldn't be caring about individuals, you should be caring about the future proletariat.

10:16 But in caring about the future proletariat, you have to understand that the peasants, for example, are going to cease to exist.

10:24 That's just the way history works. And so if they cease to exist a few years earlier 10:29 or a few years later, that's not your fault, right? It doesn't really mean anything, whether they cease to exist at one point or another.

10:36 So it, so this is, I mean, it's hard to get these things across now because, you know, there are some capitalists 10:43 who have this kind of confidence about the way the world works, but there's nobody on the left anymore who has this kind of confidence 10:48 about how the way the world works, so it's hard to sort of think your way back into this, but if you are sure that the world works this way, 10:54 and has to work this way and should work this way, then the conclusion that, you know, yes, the peasantry is doomed, I know it's doomed.

11:02 Science says it's doomed. This is the way history has to work, then you're going to look differently upon the deaths of millions of peasants 11:09 than you would otherwise, because that group was doomed anyway, as you see it. It's not you, you're not exercising the agency, 11:15 history was gonna move in this direction, You know, you're just playing your part.

11:21 So those are just, those are general things to keep in mind. The second thing that I wanna get across is the background 11:30 of the 1920s. So one way to think about the famine is the way that I've just given you, you know, let's see the world a little bit the way 11:39 a Bolshevik leader might see it. Taking a step downwards, a little bit less abstract, 11:45 another way to see the famine is as a contrast from the 1920s to the 1930s.

11:51 So the Soviets, after the revolution of 1917, were trying to do something in the 1920s, 11:57 which didn't quite work out the way they expected. And that leads to harsh repressive policies in the 1930s.

12:05 Or, in the 1920s, the Soviets were taking a kind of pause 12:11 from a revolution, which they always knew they had to carry out, by the end of the 1920s, they knew that they had to carry it out.

12:18 And that revolution, the economic part of the revolution is what brought collectivization, 12:23 the end of private agriculture, and famine. So I want you to think now about this kind of contrast 12:29 between the 1920s and the 1930s. The trick to the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, 12:36 as I mentioned to you before, is that it was never meant to be a Russian revolution.

12:41 It only became a Russian revolution in retrospect after it failed to be a world revolution.

12:47 And that sets up the tension, which is inside this revolution, and indeed inside this state, from the very beginning.

12:54 It was, the idea was, we are going to set off the powder keg in Russia, the rest of the world will join in, 12:59 and then the rest of the world will help us take care of the rest of the revolution. Because let's face it, 13:06 the political part is the easiest part, right? Transforming the political system, overthrowing a regime, 13:13 is easier under almost any circumstances than transforming an entire economy. It involves fewer people, 13:18 you can take advantage of war, and so on, and so forth. So you have a world revolution, which doesn't help, which doesn't happen.

13:24 And you have then the need for socialism in one country.

13:30 So how do you build socialism in one country to take the slogan? How do you, now that there's not a world revolution, 13:37 how do you carry out your own blueprint on the scale of the Soviet Union? 13:43 So there are a few parts to this. One part of this is you barricade yourself off from the rest of the world.

13:49 So the Soviet Union, as of the Treaty of Riga, is is a state with borders, and as we're gonna see over the course of this lecture, 13:55 these borders will become stronger, and stronger, and stronger, one way to do this is to not let the outside in, 14:00 not let the bourgeois world corrupt you, not let in all the spies and the wreckers.

14:06 The second thing that you do is that, you take advantage of the scale of your own country.

14:12 So the Soviet Union was not, you know, the Azore Islands, it was not, you know, 14:17 the Soviet Union covered, you know, a sixth of the earth, the Soviet Union was the largest country on the planet.

14:24 And so when you look at the Soviet Union, you can say, well, some of these places are, will be like the colonial periphery, 14:31 and some, it'll be more like the Metropolitan Center. That's not the way they usually talked about themselves, I should caution you, because that's the capitalist way of talking about things.

14:39 But Stalin occasionally did forget himself and say things like, What we have to do is carry out a policy 14:44 of internal colonization. The French and the British, says Stalin, have far-flung maritime colonies 14:51 that they can exploit, we don't have that, but we do have all of this landmass. And so we can exploit parts of it 14:57 to industrialize other parts of it. So you don't have the whole world anymore, but you do have a very big country 15:03 with more and less developed parts, and you can exploit the less developed parts.

15:09 And then the third thing that you can do is that you can make a play for time. So the play for time is the 1920s.

15:16 The play for time is the New Economic Policy, the trick of which in Ukraine, 15:23 to make it very, you know, to simplify a little bit, is that Ukrainian peasants get to keep the land 15:29 they took from Polish landlords, right? That was their revolution. Where Ukrainian peasants get to keep land 15:35 that somehow they ended up with after the revolution. The revolution didn't make that happen directly, 15:40 like, no Bolshevik in Petersburg made that happen, but it happened. And they get to keep the land now.

15:47 And of course, they're pleased with that. The second way you buy time is the national question.

15:54 You're aware that there is a Ukrainian nation, as I think I've said before, this kind of odd difference between the 1920s and the 2020s, 16:03 is even the Bolsheviks, I mean, even the most, you know, radical, ruthless, 16:08 doctrine error internationalist, of the early 1920s, like, they were aware that there was some Ukraine there 16:13 that they had to somehow deal with, they disagreed with how they're gonna, but they were aware that it was there. And then weirdly, 100 years on, 16:20 when Ukraine is much more clearly there, it's existence is denied. But so you try to buy time with the national question.

16:29 And this was not, I mean, this is an interesting policy, and it didn't happen just in Ukraine. I mean, around the Soviet Union, it was called like, 16:37 "Korenizatsiya," like rooting, in Ukraine, It was usually called, "Ukrainizatsiya," 16:43 "Ukrainizing. " The idea was, yeah, maybe the nations are hostile to us, 16:48 or they don't know, or they don't see the benefit. But what we will do is we will give them a kind of capitalist stage of development.

16:56 We're giving the peasant a capitalist stage of development, we're gonna let them keep the land, they'll like that. We're gonna give the nationally-minded elites 17:03 a capitalist stage of development, because we're gonna give them university education, we're gonna give them jobs in the bureaucracy.

17:09 They're gonna have social advancement, you know, they're gonna move from the countryside into the cities, right? 17:16 Ukrainian writer, Valerian Pidmohylny wrote a whole novel about this. So, we're gonna give them 17:21 the capitalist stage of development, basically. 'Cause remember, the whole scheme here is that the Soviet Union has to find its way 17:27 on its own to socialism. So this has a kind of coherence. So in the 1920s, inside Soviet Ukraine, 17:35 you have affirmative action for Ukrainians as against Russians and Jews, chiefly, 17:41 the Ukrainians moving in from the countryside to the cities up, up through the ranks, and then you also have a very sophisticated, 17:50 very interesting movement in Ukrainian culture. Just to name one person, if I can name, I'll just name one, 17:58 which is, Mykola Khvylovy, who was from the Kharkiv region. Again, remember, like in general, 18:04 the Ukrainian nation comes from the east, that's kind of the default. He comes from Kharkiv, the Kharkiv region, 18:11 a little town, Trostyanets, I think. In the Kharkiv region.

18:17 I should never say like, "I think," in front of the camera, 'cause now like there will be a million Ukrainians, did Khvylovy become from a place called Trostyanets or not? 18:24 And is one of my TFs, checking that online right now as we speak, perhaps, yes.

18:29 So I can be corrected in real time. Anyway, but the point about Khvylovy is that he was a wonderful writer, 18:37 he was in charge of a series of literary organizations who carried out, or was in the center of something called the Literary Discussion, 18:42 which was about what is the orientation of Ukrainian literature gonna be? World literature, European literature, 18:48 Western literature, Khvylovy's big thing for which he later, as you can imagine, got in trouble was that, it shouldn't have a colonial relationship 18:55 to Russian literature, right? It should be a literature on its own.

19:00 The second major figure of this period, whose name is on your sheet, is Mykola Skrypnyk, 19:05 who was a fairly orthodox Bolshevik in most respects, but who took the Ukrainian question more seriously.

19:11 He was the commissar for education from 1927 to 1929.

19:17 He was from Bakhmut, which is, you might have heard that name, just because it's where there's a lot of engagement 19:22 between Ukrainian army and Russian mercenaries from Wagner right now, that's where a big part of the front is, 19:27 in Donetsk, Bakhmut. So in the 1920s, there was a play for time 19:34 with the national question, and the idea was, if we make our version of Ukraine, that will bring people into the system, 19:41 and they will be loyal, and then also it will make Ukraine attractive to those Ukrainians in Poland, 19:46 who you remember from the last lecture, those five or 6 million people who had reasons to be often disenchanted with Poland. Okay? 19:53 The problem with this play for time is that this play for time had to come to an end. And it had to come to an end as the Bolshevik saw it, 20:01 in a certain way, which was with the collectivization of agriculture.

20:06 You know, it's, again, it's hard to get yourself into this mindset because I realize the way that we see things a century later is different.

20:13 But, if you really think that history's on it, actually, it's not so different.

20:19 Like there are a lot of people after, I mean, this is a kind of loose analogy, but just stay with me for a second. There are a lot of people after 1989 20:25 who thought that absolutely, for sure, capitalism was gonna lead to democracy. Like, 100%, we know it, 20:30 Like, that's the way it's gonna work. That's a little, that's of course, not true. I mean, as an empirical matter, just not true.

20:37 It's been a great century for capitalism, but not so much for democracy. If you've, you know, like I'm talking about like your lifetimes, 20:43 or since you got out of kindergarten, basically. Since you got outta kindergarten, democracy has been going down.

20:48 Coincidence? I ask you, right? (students laugh) So that, like, but if you've ever been in that groove 20:56 where people say that like, a certain kind of economics has to lead to a certain kind of politics.

21:02 That will help you see what they thought, which is that, there was one form of capitalist development 21:08 and they had to get through it at an accelerated rate. And so, and they could not imagine any other way 21:15 to do that besides extracting from the countryside, and building up in the cities, building the factories, building the mines.

21:22 And the way to do that was to collectivize agriculture as they saw it. Again, they couldn't think of any other way to do it.

21:28 And by the way, like these things which seem inevitable, although they're not, I mean, you could have gotten, 21:34 Ukrainian agriculture would've been much more profitable had it never been collectivized, obviously, they could have taxed probably, 21:39 and made more money from it. But, you know, the things which, things seem inevitable and happened because people think they're inevitable then become models.

21:46 So just a little excursus here, the whole Chinese Revolution does not happen in the form that it happens without the Soviet Revolution, 21:53 And that the whole idea that you have to collectivize agriculture as a form of development, that wouldn't have happened in China 21:59 without the Soviet model. And likewise, without the famine that we're talking about here, 22:04 there wouldn't have been a similar famine, although on a much greater scale in China, a couple of decades later on. Okay, close excursus.

22:10 So, the only argument at the top of the Soviet state was, 22:18 at what time to do this, and how quickly. And this is a very interesting juncture because in the second half of the 1920s, 22:25 after Lenin is dead, and Stalin and others are jockeying for power, Stalin shows the intimate relationship 22:33 between bureaucratic politics and theories of everything, right? 22:39 Because what, we don't have this anymore, we just have bureaucratic politics, we don't have theories of everything, right? That's why everything seems so blah.

22:46 But so when Stalin is arguing, what he says is, "You know, these comrades, 22:52 these comrades are saying that, you know, that collectivization should happen too soon.

22:59 And these colleagues or these comrades are saying it should happen too late, right? And I'm right in the middle, I've got it just right. " 23:06 And so this is an argument about who is the best scientist of history because it has to be done in exactly the right way.

23:13 But in fact, what he's doing is, he's getting rid of some rivals, and then getting rid of some other rivals, 23:18 defining himself as being in the middle, which is, that is how this kind of politics works.

23:24 The party is supposed to represent history. So okay, here, 23:29 the sequence would be, there's history, which brings you the proletariat, and the proletariat brings you the party, 23:36 and the party brings you the central committee, and the central committee brings you the politburo. And then the politburo is then dominated 23:42 by one individual or occasionally a small group, right? And so the who gets to be that one individual 23:48 is then determined by these, like, who is the best at these kinds of games, which was Stalin. But the way you make the argument is, 23:55 we're talking all, and you believe it probably to some degree. You're talking about the whole development of human history, 24:00 and who is right about how to advance human history. Those are the terms in which the argument is made.

24:07 So Stalin on the argument of collectivization, manages to consolidate power. And this is very important because, 24:13 and there's nothing solely about this, this is just normal politics, normal tyrannical politics. Once you're attached to a policy that is disastrous, 24:21 what do you do? Right? You don't say it's disastrous, you say, actually it's the triumph of human history 24:28 and civilization, and so on, and so forth. It had to be this bad. So the fact that this is Stalin's signature policy 24:34 is very important. This is the policy on which he rides to the top position 24:39 in the Soviet, in the party, and therefore in the Soviet state. But collectivization as such, doesn't go very well.

24:48 They start off slowly in '28, '29, in early 1930, they race forward in a couple months, 24:54 in early 19, in early, sorry, early 1930, they collectivize, 24:59 at least according to their own statistics, about half the country. And that led to, as we saw before, a lot of resistance.

25:07 In Ukraine, you had a million acts of resistance recorded in this period, you had whole villages walking towards the Polish border, 25:13 trying to leave, a lot of resistance, including armed resistance and attacks on party members.

25:19 As we saw before, it's in March where Stalin gives this "Dizzy With Success" speech, 25:24 it's in March of 30 when the Red Army is placed in full battle readiness on the western front for fear of a Polish attack.

25:33 But there is no Polish attack, right? There is no Polish attack, as we saw last time, 25:38 the Poles react to the five-year plan by saying, "Wow, the Soviets state is stronger than we thought. " 25:45 When the Soviets propose peace talks, they accept, there's a draft of the treaty 25:50 between Poland and the Soviet Union in August of 1931, the treaty is signed in July of 1932.

25:57 I mention this again because it's gonna be important for how the famine is discussed.

26:02 And so now I'm gonna let you in on a secret about how totalitarians do things.

26:08 it's really smart to talk about threats, 26:13 which you have already resolved, right? You don't talk about a threat which is actually a threat, 26:20 because a threat which is actually a threat is a problem for you, which you don't wanna have out there in the world. But talking about threats that you've just resolved 26:29 is very helpful because they're under your control already, and so they only exist discursively.

26:35 So that's stuff that we talked about in the last lecture, The Volhynia Experiment, the spies going across the borders, that was all very real.

26:40 But by the end of 1931, latest early 1932, that had all been taken care of, 26:46 those people had gently been arrested. The Soviets were running more spies in the other direction, they were not afraid of Poland, they signed a peace treaty.

26:53 That was pretty much done for, I mention all of this because when the famine comes, 26:58 what is Stalin going to blame it on? He's not gonna blame it on a real threat, right? 27:04 You don't talk about real threats because real threats are actually out of your control. You talk about fake threats, 27:10 or you talk about threats that you've already mastered because then they become, at least you think ,purely under your control.

27:17 Although, and this is now not a trick, but a reality of totalitarian systems, but not only.

27:23 Once you inject a very big lie into the system like that, like for example, 27:28 that the Polish nationalists and the Polish spies are ultimately behind the famine, once you get that into the system, 27:34 and people live and die on that lie, that lie can then take on a life of its own, right? As we're gonna get to by the end.

27:41 Okay, so how does the famine happen? Partly, the famine happens because of expectations.

27:49 1930 was a very good crop, the requisitions targets for the next year 27:55 were therefore set very high. And 1931 agricultural conditions, weather, 28:01 was all worse, and most of the farms have by then been collectivized, and collective agriculture just doesn't work 28:08 as well as private agriculture, especially in the transition year, when you're doing it for the first time.

28:13 So the famine begins in late '31 as the peasants refused to surrender grain.

28:18 Local party activists in Ukraine, completely, truthfully report up the ranks that there is famine, there are shortages, 28:24 they ask that requisitions targets be, so requisition is when you take grain away, right? 28:30 They ask that the requisitions targets be decreased. At this point, 28:36 the crucial thing is interpretation, right? And here we get to a big irony about these systems, 28:44 which is that they end up relying on personal explanations.

28:50 So the irony of that is that supposedly, Marxism-Leninism is a science, right? 28:55 It's a science of society, a science of history. But then if something doesn't go your way, 29:02 doesn't go the way you predicted, who do you have to blame? You can't blame yourself, you can't really blame science, 29:09 you can't blame the method because that would call Marxism into question, and therefore, your legitimacy. So you have to somehow imagine that particular individuals 29:18 have almost superhuman powers. And this happens over and over and over again, those categories that I mentioned half-ironically earlier 29:23 of like the spy and the wrecker, certain individuals turn out to have, you know, 29:30 in order to explain these things, extraordinary, extraordinary power.

29:35 You might catch this in things that seem like conspiracy theories, right? Or the notion, you know, that people are crossing borders, right? 29:43 Or that one or two spies inside the party can make a whole system. You see this there examples all over, 29:49 but in the show trials later on, when like people would confess to doing a whole range of impossible things 29:54 that you have to be a super-villain to do, to be both a Nazi and a Zionist at the same time. You know, these, 30:00 and then, or you know, when Khrushchev says that the whole problem with the Stalin period was Stalin himself.

30:05 Like even that's not true, right? Even Stalin is not responsible for all the problems of the Stalin period, right? 30:11 And so the way the system deals with things going wrong is actually, ironically, to give superpowers to evil individuals 30:19 and to call them names, and so on. So I'm pressing that point home because this is the way that Stalin handles in 1932, 30:25 the famine in 1932. He says that like it's somebody's fault, right? So it starts with, 30:31 it's the Ukrainian party's fault, they've gotta work harder. They're not going out there to get the food, but it's the fault of the individuals in the party.

30:39 Stalin says they have to be held, I'm quoting from July 1932, "Personally responsible. " 30:46 So this is, you know, this is detached from reality. They're doing the best they can, 30:51 but they're an impossible situation. He then moves from there to the reason why 30:58 these individuals in Ukraine are not doing what they should do. And the reason why they're not doing what they should do 31:04 is Poland. It's that they're corrupted by Ukrainian nationalists, and Ukrainian nationalists are in turn running, 31:11 you know, they're being run from the Polish state, and actually, Pilsudski is in the back of it, you know, with his hands on the marionettes 31:19 running everything. Which, you know, in "Sketches From A Secret War," I make the point, this would've been news to Pilsudski, 31:24 because at this time, the Poles were not really able to do anything that they wanted to do in Soviet Ukraine, and they were appalled and confused 31:30 by the spectacle of the starvation that they saw in 1932 and 1933, 31:35 In August of '32, Stalin writes an important letter to his, to one of the two other important members 31:43 in the politburo, Molotov and Kaganovich, Stalin referred to them as "Our ruling group. " 31:49 He wrote to Kaganovich, his trusted collaborator, and the great thing about this period, by the way, 31:54 is that people still wrote letters. So, alright, I won't, I don't have time to wax nostalgic 32:00 about the 1930s and the typewriters, but Stalin wrote to Kaganovich, "The chief thing now is Ukraine.

32:05 Things in Ukraine are terrible, it's terrible in the party, they say that in two Ukrainian Oblast, I believe, Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk, 32:12 that around 50 Raikom may have spoken out against the grain requisitions plans considering unrealistic. In other Raikom," 32:18 meaning, local regional party commissions. "It appears situation's no better, what's this like? 32:23 It's not a party, but a parliament, a caricature of a parliament. It's terrible in the Soviet organs, 32:29 Chubar is not a leader, It's terrible in the GPU," secret police. "And Redens is not leading, 32:34 is not up to leading the fight with counterrevolution in such a large and unique republic as Ukraine, If we don't make an effort now to improve 32:40 the situation in Ukraine, we may lose Ukraine. Keep in mind that Pilsudki is not daydreaming, and his agents in Ukraine are many times stronger 32:46 than Redens or Kosior think, keep in mind that Ukrainian Communist party, 500,000 members, haha, 32:52 even includes a few, yes, not a few, not a few rotten elements, conscious and non-conscious Petlurites 32:58 as well as direct agents of Pilsudski. As soon as things get worse, these elements will not be slow in opening a front within and without the party, 33:04 against the party. " So this is Stalin's personalist interpretation. It's Ukrainian party members, 33:10 so it's not the laws of history, and of course it's not him, it's not the policy of collectivization, it is that these guys are deliberately 33:16 sabotaging the harvest in order to break Ukraine off 33:21 from the Soviet Union. Now, this interpretation is very important 33:26 because it's not, I mean, it's not, it's not everyday reality which drives policies, right? 33:34 It's, and this is true in any system, it's the elite interpretation that's going to drive policies.

33:39 And in a system like this one where there is no, like, there's no not much feedback to the politburo, 33:44 the feedback to the politburo would've been local party secretaries, right? And that feedback has been cut off 33:50 because Stalin says we can't trust them. They're precisely the people who didn't take responsibility. They're the ones who're the agents of Pilsudski, right? 33:57 We can't trust them. So now there's no way, there's no informational feedback to the top of the system. This interpretation is what's going to drive policy.

34:04 And the policy, I broke this up into seven, It's on the other side of your notes. There are seven specific policies which I think, 34:12 clearly authorize us to characterize this as a political famine. Seven particular things that happen 34:19 in just a few weeks in late 1932 and early 1933, which mean that rather than 34:26 a few hundred thousand people dying, which was at this point, like in late fall of '32, is still possible, 34:31 4 million people die. Again, these are political choices about what to do with available food.

34:38 During this time, the Soviets had food reserves, during this time, the Soviets were exporting food, they were exporting food from ports in Soviet Ukraine 34:46 at this time. People could have been fed from the food that was, it's not that there was a lack of food, it's a decision about how you treat particular people.

34:53 So this cluster of policies, it's kind of extraordinary condensation of things 34:59 that happen from the end of November 1932 to the end of January 1933.

35:07 At the first is the return of grain advances, this meant that, 35:13 if you had met your grain requisitions targets that year, you were then given some grain back 35:20 to live on and to plant for the next year. In November of 32, this was reverse, 35:27 which meant that suddenly, everybody was vulnerable. But also, you have to think about what this means in practice, 35:32 which is a hard thing to convey. The famine is being carried out by, 35:37 by local party members, local state officials, policemen, enthusiastic university students coming back, 35:46 people who believed in the revolution, coming back to their villages, sometimes their very own villages, it's being carried out by people.

35:52 The food is being physically taken away by people. So every one of these measures, or most of them, 35:57 it involves people rushing to the village, rushing to a collective farm with the authorization to take things away, 36:03 and in practice, this often just meant taking everything. Right? Just taking everything. Second measure is the meat penalty.

36:11 it's 20 November, if you didn't make the quota, 36:16 then you had to pay your tax in meat. And so if any of you have any kind of rural background, 36:23 do you understand what that means? Like, if you are living on a farm, the goat or the cow is the kind of last resort, 36:30 so you'll slaughter that goat or you'll slaughter that cow if you have to, but in the meantime, you're gonna take the milk, but if you have to, 36:35 you have that meat that might get you through the winter. Everyone, so all of these collective farms, 36:41 villages that couldn't make the quotas then had to turn in their goats, 36:46 or their cows. Just to quote a peasant girl from "Bloodlands," who says, 36:52 "Whoever had a cow didn't starve. " Right? It's a kind of basic, but then they lost their cows in late 1932.

36:59 Third specific policy, the blacklists of 28 November, 37:04 according to the blacklist, if you hadn't met your target, then you had to surrender 15 times as much grain, 37:12 which of course is impossible, and was a complete authorization of all the party 37:18 and state forces to come and take literally whatever was there. The blacklists also meant that you were cut off 37:25 from the rest of the Soviet economy, so it was illegal for you to exchange in any kind of way with any part 37:30 of the rest of the Soviet economy. Number four is maybe the most diffuse, but it's incredibly important.

37:36 It's the national interpretation of the famine. And this has to do with this character of Vsevolod Balyts'kyi, 37:43 who was the head of the state police in Ukraine at this time. And at this time, later it was different, 37:50 but this time, quite close to Stalin and had personal conversations with Stalin about all this.

37:56 He comes back to Ukraine in December with a message, that Ukrainization has been carried out in the wrong way, 38:04 right? Ukrainization has been carried out on in the wrong way, Ukrainization has promoted the wrong people, 38:10 Ukrainization has been dangerous, and there are a bunch of, so there are a bunch of details involved with this.

38:16 Like party commissions now come from outside of Ukraine to run the party. Stalin sends in about a hundred of his own trusted people 38:23 from the outside to run the party. But the gist of it is that, 38:30 now, if you are in favor of Ukrainization, you're in danger, 38:35 but also if you're not being enthusiastic about requisitioning the grain, 38:41 you'll be called a Ukrainian nationalist, and then you'll be sent to a concentration camp. Or perhaps worse, right? 38:47 So this whole, a right-wing nationalist deviation is being defined.

38:52 And the method which every party member would've understood was, if you don't go through with requisitioning the grain, 38:58 even in these conditions, you will yourself be punished personally, and you will likely be sent to a concentration camp.

39:07 That was a standard punishment. And you know, this.

39:12 and then with this, with the whole plot that like, also the Ukrainian communists are informed that many of them are in fact, secretly Polish agents, 39:21 there's the Ukrainian military organization, which is run by the Polish military organization, the Ukrainian military organization doesn't exist.

39:27 The Polish military organization hasn't existenced since 1921, but Balyts'kyi, who was a very creative individual, 39:35 explained the existence of all of these groups. So right around, so that's December-January '32, '33, 39:42 at this point, about 1 million people are dead. But this interpretation, which says the you and the party will be punished.

39:50 That's one of the big things, which turns it from 1 million into about 4 million. Fifth measure, 20 December, 1932 39:57 is the affirmation of the existing grain quota. So they could have reduced the quota, 40:04 nothing in the scheme of things, that wouldn't have meant anything except that fewer Ukrainians would've died.

40:10 Maybe they would've exported a little bit less grain. They could have reduced the quota, they didn't, they forced it upon the protesting 40:17 Ukrainian party leadership in late December 1932. Number six, January of '33, 40:24 the peasants were banned from going to the cities. This is an unusual situation.

40:30 In general in a famine, or in any, like, let's say there's a food shortage caused by bad weather.

40:36 You wanna be in the countryside, right? It's always better in those situations, almost always, 40:41 to be a farmer than it is to be in the city. But this famine was different 40:46 because the state had taken total control over the countryside and had been very successful in extracting food from the countryside, 40:52 so you actually had this unusual situation where peasants were fleeing to cities to beg for food.

40:58 Or peasants, and this happened over and over again. Peasants would send their children to the cities to beg, 41:05 to beg for food. Thinking that that was the only chance their children had of surviving. So as of the middle of January, 41:11 peasants were banned from doing this. And then at the end of January, 22nd January, 41:18 the Ukrainian Republic of the Soviet Union was separated from its neighbors, Belarus and Russia, 41:26 it became illegal to leave the Ukrainian Republic. So again, a natural response to hunger 41:32 is to go somewhere else. This blocking, the internal board of the Soviet Union, 41:37 made this impossible. It also clarifies to what extent this is a specifically Ukrainian event, by the way.

41:43 The fact that Ukrainians knew that if they went north to Belarus or to Russia, they'd be more likely to be fed.

41:50 And it has the same kind of irony as begging in the cities does, by the way, because Ukraine produces food for Belarus, 41:55 it produces food for Russia. But Ukrainians in this situation, were going to Ukraine, 42:01 were going to Belarus and to Russia. So by the summer of 1933, 42:09 and again, we don't have time, you know, and maybe there are words, it'd be very difficult to describe what this means.

42:14 But by the summer of 1933, we're at about 3 million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine dead.

42:21 In addition to this, the Ukrainian party itself, the Ukrainian party has been purged. About 120,000 people are forced out of the Ukrainian party.

42:32 and particular focus is on the people who had carried out the Ukrainization policies of the 1920s.

42:39 Mykola Khvylovy commits suicide on the 13th of May 1933 after learning of the arrest, 42:47 he was this very important writer, the one who led the Literary Discussion.

42:53 After he learned of the arrest of one of his friends, another writer, he committed suicide.

42:59 He would certainly have been killed otherwise, he was not wrong to believe that. The Ukrainian writers were taken 43:05 to a specific concentration camp in Karelia, where a number of them were later executed.

43:13 There's a term for this, which is the "Executed Renaissance," captures the phenomenon very nicely 43:18 'cause there was a renaissance. The 1920s really were a renaissance. It was the most interesting decade in Ukrainian culture, 43:26 at least until 1914, at least until 2014, to the present, which is also very interesting. But the 1920s were extraordinarily productive 43:33 in basically all fields of culture. And then almost everybody who was, not almost everybody, most of the people involved were executed.

43:40 Okay, and then a few weeks later, Mykola Skrypnyk, the guy who had been the commissar for education 43:47 is himself accused the national deviation and also commits suicide.

43:52 So those two suicides are symbolic of, you know, the end of the 1920s, 43:57 the end of this idea that Ukraine could somehow move forward into a communist future.

44:04 The postscript to this, as I wanted to suggest at the very beginning, is the Great Terror.

44:10 So the Great Terror is a separate chapter in "Bloodlands," and you'll read about it. But there are a couple of odd ways in which the Terror, 44:20 the mass shootings and deportations of 1937, 1938, are actually kind of an afterword to the famine.

44:28 Or they're another example of this principle that, especially in conditions of extreme tyranny, 44:34 you will find yourself doubling down on the terrible policies that you made rather than altering them, 44:40 rather than, you know, rather than taking some kind of responsibility. I mean, you could say, I mean, from an ethical point of view, 44:47 one of the most interesting things about this kind of ideology is that it allows you never to have to take responsibility, right? 44:53 The word responsibility never appears or to put in the converse way, when people in the sixties and seventies begin to, 45:02 in the communist world, say interesting things in opposition to communism, the the moral vocabulary which they draw from 45:11 is centered around the word responsibility. Which I mean, if you just sort of flip that around, you can see one of the attractions 45:18 of being on the inside of this, right? That you don't have to take responsibility. Okay. So the Terror.

45:24 In two ways, the Terror is connected to the famine. The first is that the five-year plan 45:32 includes in February 1930, the idea of "de-kulakization. " 45:40 So a "Kulak" is a more prosperous peasant, or somebody whose neighbor says he's more prosperous, 45:47 and de-kulakization means a kind of artificial class conflict in the countryside 45:53 where the middle peasants and the poorer peasants are supposed to denounce the better off peasants, 46:00 and then the better off peasants are sent to this emerging system of concentration camps in the Soviet periphery, 46:06 which we know is the gulag. So as a result of de-kulakization beginning the 1930, 46:12 a lot of peasants, the disproportionate Ukrainian peasants were sent thousands of kilometers away to Siberia, 46:21 to camps, for five-year terms. Where, 46:29 Stalin gets the idea, they were vulnerable to being recruited by Japanese military intelligence.

46:37 Not quite as crazy as it seems, Japanese military intelligence was actually quite active and skillful, 46:44 and they were thinking about the national question inside the Soviet Union. So it's not pulled from nowhere, right? 46:50 I mean, the thing about all of these ideas behind the Terror is that they're not, they're never pulled from nowhere, 46:55 they just take some element of reality and exaggerate it to grotesque proportions. But so the idea was these peasants 47:03 are serving five year terms, they're gonna be coming back to the Western Soviet Union, and they may cause trouble, right? 47:08 1931, so 1935, 36, 37.

47:14 This is one of the origins of the peasant action, which is the major action in the Great Terror.

47:19 So when you think of the Great Terror, if you think about it at all, you might be thinking of the intellectuals, and the show trials of the party members.

47:25 That was about 60,000. The Great Terror was about 700,000 people. The biggest group affected by the Great Terror 47:32 were actually the peasants, and the suspicion of the peasants goes back to collectivization.

47:38 Or, you know, if you like, the notion that, "We did something drastic and terrible to them, maybe it wouldn't be so surprising 47:44 if at some point they might wanna do something to us. " That's the fundamental logic.

47:49 The second set of major actions in the Terror are the national actions.

47:55 Again, the details are all in "Bloodlands. " And the most important of the national actions, the bloodiest one, 48:00 which more than 100,000 people are executed, which is a big number. Is the Polish action.

48:06 And the roots of the Polish action go back to the famine. Because the explanation that was given for the famine was, 48:14 there's the Polish state, there are Polish espionage, the Poles have recruited the Ukrainian communists, that's why they're carrying out all this sabotage.

48:21 That is not true in anything like social reality, but it remains true inside the Soviet apparatus 48:29 of repression. That story, if I can torture you, 48:34 that's not how I want to put it, if people are tortured on a very large scale, according to a scheme in which the idea 48:40 is to get them to repeat a certain story, like, "When were you recruited by Poland?" And so on. then those documents become part 48:47 of the internal bureaucratic reality of the apparatus of repression. And then the Polish, or the Polish plot, 48:53 although it didn't really exist in reality, only gets bigger in the internal bureaucratic reality 48:59 of the apparatus of repression. To the point that this fellow Balyts'kyi, 49:04 who I mentioned earlier, the guy who made it up in the first place, right? The creative intelligence chief who made it up, 49:11 he was then caught himself according to this logic. "If the Polish penetration of Ukraine and the Soviet Union 49:18 was so incredibly important, comrade Balyts'kyi, why weren't you onto it earlier? 49:25 Perhaps that's because you yourself are a Polish spy, right?" So the person who invented this idea 49:30 was himself executed as a Polish spy. But that's just a, that's an individual example of a much larger phenomenon, 49:36 which is that in the national actions, roughly 100,000 people will be killed as being a spy, as spies for Poland.

49:44 And this, although it's a horrifying event in its own right, in some sense also goes back to this original 49:51 set of collectivization. But it's the suspicion of Poland, the story of Poland, and the inability 49:57 of the regime to admit mistakes, take responsibility, and the way that a big lie then metastasizes 50:03 and remains inside a system, all of that lead us towards these events in the Great Terror.

50:09 Okay, Thank you very much.

50:14 (calm music)

back to TOC


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Lecture 16 Colonization, Extermination, Ethnic Cleansing

0:00(ambient music) 0:12 - Okay. Greetings everyone. Thank you for joining me on this beautiful day when there are so many lovely things 0:18 that you could be doing outside. Where did the picnic tables come from? What's up with the picnic tables? 0:24 Where do those. - [Student] Morse College was closed. So commons went sideways.

0:30 - Okay. Okay, okay. - [Student] It went this way. - Okay.

0:38 Right. Class. So, again, I would take you guys outside if it weren't for the fact that there's this technology 0:45 which is keeping me fixed right here.

0:52 The way that I wanna talk about the subject today is to broaden it a bit and think about the German factor 1:00 in Ukrainian political history. Because the German factor has a kind of strange shape to it 1:09 where actually Germany, German culture, the German language doesn't mean very much 1:16 in Ukrainian history until quite late in the day, until the 19th and especially the 20th century.

1:23 And then suddenly it means quite a lot and most of it quite negative. Most of it quite destructive.

1:29 So, I wanted to start by just going back over a few of the themes from previous lectures 1:36 just to set the stage for this kind of sudden on rush of Germany in Ukrainian history.

1:43 Because I have this, I have the feeling that if I just start with 1939 or 1941 1:50 in a way that will be too abrupt and we won't understand the depth of the contrast.

1:56 'Cause something new really begins in the 20th century. There isn't... When Germany begins to contact Ukraine, 2:02 something new happens and to see the novelty I think we have to start earlier on. So, I'm just gonna now just do a real quick 2:10 series of stopping points along the previous several centuries.

2:15 Oh, sorry, the other thing I wanna tell you guys in case you haven't figured it out is I have a cold, so I'm at like 85%.

2:20 So hopefully I'll go at 85% speed and that will be more appropriate and everybody will be happy.

2:26 I always feel stupid when it's nice outside and I have a cold, right? (students laughing) You know what I mean? 2:32 I don't feel stupid when it's like January and I feel great but when it's like, anyway. So, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna review 2:39 the last six or seven centuries and just remind us of some of the stopping points that we've marked.

2:44 One of them is the Holy Roman Empire. So if you think back to the beginning of the class and the conjuncture in which the Kyivan state is formed, 2:53 Christianity is coming from two directions, from the west and from the south, 2:59 from the Holy Roman Empire and from Byzantium. And roughly speaking, all of the new states that are formed then are either 3:05 in a relationship to the Holy Roman Empire like Poland because Western Christian or to the Byzantium because Eastern Christian 3:12 or what we're later gonna call orthodoxy. So, that rivalry, the presence of Holy Roman Empire 3:17 does have something to do with our story. And that rivalry generated this contest for Moravia 3:28 back in the eighth century where those gentlemen, Cyril and Methodius made that trip northwards to Moravia 3:34 and they brought the language with them. They brought the language with them 3:40 which we call Old Church Slavonic. And they were the ones who created an alphabet for Slavic languages.

3:45 That has to do with the German factor in some sense because it's this contest 3:52 between Western and Eastern Christianity, the friction between them, which forces people to be creative 3:57 and come up with new solutions like for example, Church Slavonic, like the Cyrillic language which comes, the Cyrillic alphabet which comes a bit later.

4:05 It's a bit of a stretch but I hope you'll buy it if I say that the Viking factor is also 4:11 in some way the Germanic world. So the Scandinavian languages, except for Finnish of course, the Scandinavian languages are Germanic languages.

4:19 And so Kyivan Rus' is in some way connected to a broadly speaking Germanic world by way of Scandinavia, 4:26 by way of the Vikings, by way of the Viking contact which begins eighth century, ninth century, and has to do with the creation of a state 4:33 in the 10th and especially in the 11th century. And so you can think of Ukraine as being part of 4:39 a kind of crescent of Scandinavian or Viking state building attempts 4:45 which ranges from England through Scandinavia itself, and then all the way down to Kyiv.

4:51 The next moment which I didn't really bring out is the Reformation. So, the Reformation is largely a German 5:00 and then Swiss and then French event at the beginning. The Reformation, the emergence of versions of Christianity 5:07 is relevant to Ukraine, is relevant to our story because it is that friction between Protestantism and Catholicism.

5:13 The Reformation in later the Catholic, in later Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Reformation, which forces our churchmen in places like Chernihiv in Kyiv 5:22 to take up many languages, to take up the Renaissance, to take up Disputation, right? 5:28 It is those things which make those churchmen in Kyiv, Chernihiv different, for example, 5:35 than Churchmen in Moscow who don't have contact with the Reformation, don't have contact with the Renaissance.

5:41 And will eventually have contact with those things but by way of Kyiv itself.

5:48 It's also interesting in that Protestantism and Orthodoxy sometimes formed a kind of alliance, 5:54 at least a kind of brief practical alliance where the Orthodox would borrow arguments from the, 5:59 the Orthodox would borrow arguments from the Protestants against the Catholics. So there was some kind of cross-fertilization 6:05 and there were also very, there were some very important Ukrainian families, families of Ukrainian magnates, 6:12 wealthy magnates from old Rus who converted to Protestantism. But in general, that only lasted for one generation 6:18 and the next generation they converted to Catholicism, and then are remembered as Polish families.

6:25 So, that's interesting. I hope you agree but it's relatively meager.

6:33 The connection if we compare it to the connection with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania or with Poland, right, 6:40 or with Byzantium, the connection with Germany is fairly meager until we get into the modern period, 6:46 the modern period of the nation state. And it's here where Germany starts to become very important 6:53 because Germany's not the most imperial, most important imperial power in Europe. Never, right? 6:59 Germany, this is a key fact about Germany. Here come your five minutes of modern German history.

7:04 A key fact about Germany is that it comes into being after the world has been colonized.

7:12 And this is something that the Germans themselves are very aware of. The German unification of January 1871 7:20 takes place at a time when almost all of the world that's going to be colonized is already colonized from the European point of view.

7:27 There are a couple of more decades of the Race for Africa that Germany takes part in. It has colonies in Southeastern and Southwestern Africa.

7:34 But in general, the world has already been divided up by the time that Germany becomes a state 7:41 in the late 19th century. So you remember some points on the basic trajectory of this 7:48 that Germany is unified not from Vienna, not from our Hapsburg friends, but by Prussia.

7:56 I've been trying to kinda note along the way in each lecture when Prussia turns up because eventually Prussia is going to be important.

8:03 The Ducal Prussia breaks free of Poland in 1657 during a difficult time for Poland, 8:09 a few years after the Cossacks have rebelled that Prussia declares itself to be a kingdom in 1701.

8:16 And then you may, you remember this fellow Frederick the Great of Prussia who's ruling from 1740 to 1780, 8:22 he turned up in our class as the rival of Maria Theresa of Hapsburg, when Maria Theresa of Hapsburg 8:29 becomes the first female ruler of the Hapsburgs. He challenges her, he declares war.

8:34 They come to power about the same time, he immediately declares war as one does on the logic that he's just protecting her as one says.

8:44 And that period of Prussian history is the moment when Prussia begins to gather in 8:51 other important lands such as Silesia. This moment in Prussian history is also, 8:58 if I can just make a brief connection to the history of philosophy, this is also the moment of the great German philosopher 9:04 Immanuel Kant, who you just might have heard of in some other class, the foundational philosopher of ethics and many other things 9:12 at least in the western tradition in the modern period.

9:17 Kant is the fellow who argued among many other interesting things that when you act, 9:24 you should act as though you were making a rule. So that as though everything you do, 9:29 you should be able to categorize and think of it as a rule. So for example, for example, 9:35 if you're watching this class not live but on video and there are 3 million views of this class, 9:44 and every single person who watches it sends me an email and expects me to respond, 9:52 the rule that you are creating is that Timothy Snyder should spend 60 years 9:58 responding to your emails. I've done the math. (students laugh) 10:03 So that's an example of Kantian reasoning. If you think it would be a good world in which Timothy Snyder spent no time with his children, 10:10 didn't sleep, didn't eat, did no research, but responded to emails for the next 60 years, 10:17 then what you should do individually is write me an email and expect me to respond.

10:23 I say that with a smile, I appreciate your nice emails, but just think about the rule that it would be created.

10:31 So then to think of a different rule. If every time someone watched a video from this class, they made a donation to Razom, R-A-Z-O-M, 10:40 you would be creating a rule that Ukrainians should get warm clothing over the winter. Or if every time you watched a video of this class, 10:49 you went to my United24 site and made a donation, you'd be making a rule 10:54 that Ukrainians can protect themselves from drones. So there are lots of rules that you can make, right? 11:00 It's up to you. Okay. That was Kant. (students laughing) 11:06 That was Kant. So even those of you haven't taken intellectual history are now gonna remember Kant 11:13 and acting as though all of your actions create a rule. Okay. So Kant is the great 18th century philosopher, 11:19 So you'll remember that the Prussians and the Hapsburgs are rivals for the unification of Germany, right? 11:25 They're rivals for the unification of Germany and it's the Prussians, surprisingly, who win. They beat the Hapsburgs in the war in 1866.

11:32 They unified Germany then they beat the French in 1870, and then they unified Germany 11:38 at the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. They sign a treaty unified Germany in January of 1871.

11:45 So that's where Germany comes into being. But even in those decades, it's less Germany and more the Hapsburg monarchy 11:53 that matters for Ukraine, right? Insofar as there's a German factor in Ukrainian history 11:58 in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, it's the one that we studied under the rubric of the Hapsburgs.

12:05 When the German language comes into what's now Western Ukraine, it's by way of the Hapsburgs.

12:11 When the idea of enlightenment comes in, it's by way of the Hapsburgs, precisely.

12:18 I say I warm you all up with this just because I want you to see how drastic the change is in the 20th century when it comes.

12:26 In the First World War, as we've already seen, there is a moment when Germany controls most of Ukraine.

12:33 There's a moment in 19, from early 1918 to the middle of 1918 12:40 when Germany and the Hapsburgs together control most of Ukraine, occupy most of Ukraine.

12:46 Theoretically, what they are doing is national self-determination.

12:52 So this whole, this national self-determination business as you know and as you've seen in this class can work out in lots of different ways.

12:58 The German version of national self-determination was we are going to recognize you. No one else is going to recognize you but we will.

13:05 And in exchange we want you to deliver X million amount, X million tons of grain. And then in practice that grain was very often 13:12 forcibly requisitioned from Ukrainian peasants who very successfully resisted those requisitions.

13:19 So, what the Germans were after and the Austrians too was food from Ukraine in 1918 13:27 which would allow them to win the First World War. That's very crucial to the First World War 13:33 and what comes next. It's not the kind of thing which we, if you're studying the war from a British or French or American point of view you're gonna be thinking about 13:39 Ukraine and the food and that the Germans might win in 1918. But from the point of view of Central and Eastern Europe, 13:45 this idea that Ukraine was a (speaks in foreign language), that Ukraine was like an endless 13:52 chamber filled with food, right? Like it was a barn, a cornucopia. It was an endless supply of food.

13:58 That notion is very important, right? Because the idea that a land is not about its people, 14:05 but it's about all the things you can extract from it is a very attractive colonial idea.

14:11 And that idea is only going to be intensified in the mind of a German soldier 14:16 who served not on the Eastern but on the western front, and that would be Adolf Hitler.

14:23 So, the way that Adolf Hitler thinks about Ukraine becomes intensely important in 1941, '42, 1943 14:34 because that's when Germany's going to invade the Eastern Europe again. I wanna step back here and try to give you a portrait 14:42 of how Hitler saw Ukraine and how he came to power and then what, 14:48 then we'll see what the Germans actually did. So there is one way in which 14:56 what happens in the east affects Hitler. He's not a soldier in the east but he does have this general idea 15:02 that German soldiers generally have which was that we didn't lose the war in the east which they didn't. They didn't lose the war in the east.

15:08 What happened in the east? Well, the version of what happened in the east that they get 15:14 is very often coming from refugees coming from the east. So namely from the people we call white Russians 15:22 which is kind of an unfortunate name in a number of ways but by white Russian what is meant are the people who are fighting 15:27 for the restoration of the empire and lost. And so now many of them end up in France or in Germany.

15:35 And some of these white Russian emigres bring with them an interesting idea about, interesting for Hitler I mean, 15:41 interesting idea about Bolshevism, about communism, which is that it is all a Jewish plot.

15:48 So this for Hitler and for the development of German 15:53 extreme right ideology is a very important piece of what turns out to be Hitler's coherent worldview.

16:02 Up until that time, Hitler had been saying that the Jews were responsible for capitalism, right? 16:09 That capitalism was a Jewish conspiracy. After 1919 or so, he begins also to say 16:17 that the Jews are responsible for communism.

16:23 And the reason and so then this is sort of an old punchline, like how can they be both the capitalist and the communists? 16:29 But from Hitler's point of view, this isn't actually contradictory at all because what Hitler argues in his book "Mein Kampf" 16:38 is that the Jews are responsible for all ideas which allow humans to regard one another as humans.

16:47 And so, capitalism with its social contract and so on, capitalism with its contracts, 16:54 capitalism with its legal recognition and so on is one way that we see each other in non-racial terms.

17:03 Likewise, communism with its class solidarity and its idea of revolution and so on 17:08 is a way of seeing ourselves in non-racial terms. For Hitler, any way of seeing ourselves in non-racial terms 17:16 is Jewish and anti-human and anti natural. So the Jews are responsible also for Christianity.

17:23 I mean, you can multiply, I mean there may be a stronger argument there actually but you can multiply the list of things 17:31 that Jews are responsible for. They're responsible in Hitler's mind for any notion which sets us apart from racial competition.

17:39 Because for Hitler, and this is a crucial thing, the racial competition is nature. That's the way we're supposed to be.

17:46 We are divided up into races, races are like species. They shouldn't be interbreeding, they should just be starving one another to death.

17:51 That is good, that's natural. That's the way nature is supposed to work. That's what the future's going to look like.

17:57 And that's going to be as good as things get. So, how does this lead to Ukraine? 18:03 Oh, so just to make this clear, this is why Hitler's antisemitism is so intense 18:08 because what he's saying about the Jews is not, as you sometimes read, he's not saying they're like racially inferior 18:14 or anything like that. What he is saying is that the Jews have a kind of supernatural power to turn the humans 18:21 into non-racial brain slaves basically with their communism, with their capitalism, 18:27 with their Christianity, with whatever it might be. They come and they take the healthy humans who should be engaged in racial combat the entire time 18:35 'cause that's what they're supposed to be doing, that's what nature says, and turn them into beings who are capable of conversation and so on, right? 18:43 So, the Jews have spoiled nature. He's very clear about this. And what follows from that is that the Jews 18:48 then have to be removed from the planet one way or another, right? They rule by way of ideas 18:55 and you can't extract the ideas from everyone's mind without physically getting rid of the Jews. All this logic is entirely clear 19:01 and explicit in "Mein Kampf. " What does it have to do with Ukraine? Has a lot to do with Ukraine.

19:08 Because the racial element of all this leads to Ukraine.

19:13 From Hitler's point of view, Ukraine is Lebensraum Like Lebensraum is one of these German words 19:19 that you have to know. It just means living space or habitat, right? 19:25 So, in ecological context it would just mean habitat. So Lebensraum means like, oh, or ecological niche.

19:33 Like it's where a species, or in Hitler's mind, a race belongs. Living space. It literally means living space, space for life.

19:41 Ukraine is the best Lebensraum because it has the most fertile territory, right? It has the most productive agricultural soil, 19:48 the black earth. And therefore the Germans should be there because the Germans are the superior race.

19:54 And if the Germans are not there, then that requires some explanation which appeals to the Jewish factor, right? 20:01 So the reason the Germans are not there, the reason we lost the First World War, for example, is that there was a Jewish conspiracy, 20:07 the Jews stabbed us in the back behind the lines. Whatever it might be, right? The Jews were behind the British and their blockade.

20:14 Whatever it might be. If the Germans have not achieved what they should be achieving, it must be the fault of the Jews.

20:20 So the idea of (speaking German) leads directly to Ukraine. Hitler's notion is that Germany's gonna become 20:25 a large empire or a frontier empire. He compares it to the United States more than once.

20:32 The idea is that Germany is gonna control a frontier, dominate a frontier, and the central part of that frontier 20:37 is going to be Ukraine. Ukraine is also very important 20:43 in the antisemitic part of this analysis. Why? Because Hitler thinks it's going to be 20:49 relatively easy to seize Ukraine. Why? Because in his way of seeing the world, 20:57 the Soviet Union is a kind of Jewish empire, right? From his point of view, the communists are all Jews, 21:03 the Jews are all communists, and therefore the Soviet state is a kind of Jewish exploitation of 21:09 the simple Slavic and other masses, right? The simple Slavic and other masses, those are the racially inferior people 21:15 from Hitler's point of view, incapable of politics, incapable of serious culture, ripe for colonization.

21:21 Not capable of anything besides being colonized. But they will probably prefer German colonization 21:27 to Jewish colonization. And Hitler's ideas about this are quite, I mean, they're really straightforward.

21:33 We'll come, we may be starving them to death. Actually we're planning to starve tens of millions of them to death.

21:38 But if we give them beads, they'll be happy. And also if we have, if we put up a pole in the middle of the village 21:44 and put a radio on it and play music, they'll be astonished and they'll dance around the pole and they'll be happy. That sort of thing, right? 21:51 That sort of thing. His notion is that the Soviet Union 21:56 seems strong but it's weak. And the reason it's weak is that it's just governed by the Jews.

22:02 The Jews govern with ideas. And if you hit them with violence, the whole edifice will collapse 22:08 and then the happy masses will accept a new colonial master because it's better than the old colonial master.

22:14 I note the strong structural resemblance of this to the Russian war planning of late 2021 22:22 where the assumption again was that there wasn't really Ukrainian state, there was just a kind of exotic elite 22:28 which was perching on top, and one burst of violence would destroy that exotic elite. And then the happy masses would accept 22:34 a new colonial master, okay? Closed parenthesis. So both by way of the antisemitism 22:41 and by way of a (speaking German), Hitler's ideas lead directly to Ukraine.

22:50 Very briefly, how does Hitler come to power? How does Hitler come to power? 22:55 How does Hitler come to Ukraine? One of the nice things about teaching Ukrainian history instead of German history is that I don't have to spend all this time 23:01 on like German public opinion and like all these debates, ugh. That's in another class.

23:08 No, it's an important thing because if you take a class, okay, now I'll make a serious point. If you take a class about Nazi Germany 23:14 or about the Holocaust, it's gonna be about Germany, Germany, Germany, Germany, Germany, Germany, Germany.

23:19 And the thing about that is that there aren't that many Jews in Germany, and most of them survive.

23:25 And so, if you wanna be serious about understanding the Holocaust, you have to understand something about the countries beyond Germany where the Jews actually lived 23:32 like Poland or like Ukraine or like Belarus, or like Lithuania or Hungary or Czechoslovakia, right? 23:37 So I'm giving Germany far too short shrift here, of course, but there is a kind of justification for all of this, 23:44 which is that you can't actually figure out the Holocaust just by looking at Germany and German Jews.

23:49 You have to move into German colonization and the German destruction or attempt to destroy neighboring states 23:56 because that's where the territory is where Jews live and that's where the territory is that Jews die.

24:03 So I'm gonna give this the rise, Hitler's rise to power, very short shrift.

24:08 The one factor which enables it is the Great Depression. Germany is formed as a republic.

24:15 It is a moderately successful republic in the 1920s. It has a hard time with the Great Depression 24:21 in which 6 million people roughly are unemployed. Political factor.

24:26 The left is divided between the socialist party and the communist party.

24:32 That makes it much easier for Hitler to come to power. This, by the way, is a sort of universal 24:38 tactical political lesson that the 21st century is supposed to take from the 20th, which is that when there's a far right threat, 24:45 the left should not be divided, right? No, I mean that, 24:52 I mean, like I'm just stating what is out. Like that's something, that is a lesson that people, 21st century tacticians 24:57 have tried to learn from the 20th century, and this is sort of exhibit A of this. Now, the reason why the German left was divided is a bit, 25:06 is interesting from our point of view because the German left had to be divided because the German communists were not permitted to cooperate with the German socialists.

25:13 The German communists were told what to do by Moscow and because...

25:20 How does this hook up? It hooks up because at this time the Soviet Union is trying to build socialism in one country.

25:26 It has to defend itself, right? It very nervously looks on the actions of communist parties in Europe.

25:31 And what it tells them to do is almost always determined by what it thinks Soviet security interests are.

25:37 And those things change, right? But they don't change in a way which makes it very easy for communist parties to do well inside their own countries, 25:44 let alone take power. So the socialists are divided, that's another important thing.

25:50 The third important thing is that the German republic had already significantly compromised itself.

25:56 It was being run largely by emergency decrees. The parliament had already been largely marginalized.

26:02 So, when Hitler is named as chancellor in early 1933, he inherits a situation where 26:07 executive power was already inflated, legislative power had been suppressed, and all he really needed was one good crisis, 26:13 which he got with the Reichstag fire, the burning of the German parliament, which he uses to declare a state of emergency, 26:20 which stays in power until until he dies. By the summer of 1933, they've established primitive concentration camps.

26:28 They're hunting the socialists and the communists and the Nazis are the only legal party.

26:34 From our point of view, the more interesting shift or equally interesting is the shift in foreign affairs.

26:40 Where to put it slightly brutally, much of Europe swings in the direction 26:46 of this new Nazi German state. That's not how people like to talk about it in retrospect. In retrospect, we were all in the resistance.

26:54 We're always all in the resistance in retrospect, right? But at the time, this seemingly innovative, dynamic, 27:02 new German colossus drew a lot of positive attention even when it wasn't positive.

27:08 People compromised in its direction one way or another. So, the Germans rearmed and nobody stopped them.

27:15 The Germans took back some territory that the French were supposed to be occupying. Nobody stopped them.

27:22 The East European countries, which if you'll remember from what I said about Poland, the East European countries who are having a hard time 27:29 as agrarian economies during the depression, some of them tend towards Germany because Germany is the rare country 27:36 right in the middle of Europe, then as now, which needs to import food, but it has lots of industrial goods to export.

27:42 And so Germany makes deals with Hungary and Romania in which they agree to buy German industrial output, 27:48 and Germany agrees to buy their food at a certain price, which during the depression is incredibly attractive.

27:55 In March of 1938, everyone looks away as Austria is absorbed by Germany 28:01 in the famous Anschluss which is another one of those German words you have to know.

28:13 In September of 1938, Italy, Great Britain, France, and Germany 28:19 agree that Czechoslovakia has to be partitioned in Germany's favor 28:24 in the famous agreement at Munich which the Czechs always call the zrada the betrayal at Munich.

28:32 So in all of these different ways which I'm just kind of skimming over, everyone is tilting towards Germany, 28:38 if not necessarily ideologically then maybe economically. But if economically, the ideologically tends to follow.

28:45 Not necessarily ideologically but maybe geopolitically. But then once you've made the geopolitical deal then maybe your partner isn't so unreasonable, 28:52 and maybe the Bolsheviks are much worse which is how a lot of people saw it at the time. But speaking of the Bolsheviks, 28:59 the most radical tilt towards Germany was 1939 when the Soviets and the Germans signed 29:07 in August and September in two different agreements, a de facto military alliance and agreement, 29:13 an agreement how to occupy Poland and the Baltic, and the Baltic states.

29:19 So everyone looking back, we all resisted of course looking back and then looking back, everyone has a different history.

29:25 But there is this general drift which interestingly often braces almost everybody in some way or another 29:30 from the British to the Soviets to the French. Everyone is drifting in some way towards Germany.

29:36 And this only stops or this only changes tone I should say when someone agrees to fight a war.

29:43 And that someone in this case agrees to fight a war is kind of a strange way to put it, but the country that resists Germany is Poland.

29:53 And this matters hugely for Ukrainian history. It's hard to say exactly how 29:58 but the reason why it matters is that Hitler's plan for Ukraine was 30:04 we ally, we the Germans ally with Poland.

30:09 And together with Poland, we invade the Soviet Union. After which of course we marginalize the Poles, 30:18 keep them under control, occupy their country, whatever. But that's the basic idea. The war for Hitler is the war in the East.

30:24 This is something that's very hard for Western people to understand. Like if I say that France was 30:31 a second rate concern for Hitler and that he didn't wanna fight the British at all, 30:36 people don't... Obviously now it's very important in French and British memory but from Hitler's point of view, that was secondary.

30:43 The only reason he needed to fight the French from his point of view was to make sure that he didn't have a second front when he went to Eastern Europe.

30:49 That's why he had to fight the French. And he only had to fight the British because they came in on the side of, oh yes, the Poles.

30:55 Okay, so the reason why the Poles are so important in the story is that 31:00 by not agreeing to be a German ally, they force Hitler to change his plans.

31:06 And how does Hitler change his plans? He changes his plans by hastily making 31:13 an alliance with the Soviet Union. Not what he meant to do, right? But he does so in August and September of 1939.

31:21 So instead of invading the Soviets with the Poles as an ally, he invades Poland with the Soviets as an ally 31:28 in September of 1939, right? Not how he meant for it to happen. But because it happened that way, 31:34 then Ukrainian history will take a certain turn which I'm gonna return to in just a second. I wanna repeat the thing I said a moment ago.

31:40 If the Poles don't fight in 1939 then it's unclear at what point the French 31:47 or the British ever would've gotten into the war. Because the reason the French and the British got into the Second World War was that 31:53 they had by that time given Poland a security guarantee which they honored in a very abstract way.

32:00 The French, this is literally true. The French went into Germany a couple of miles 32:05 and then pulled back out, and so then they had technically honored the terms of their agreement to set up a second front.

32:11 The British didn't do anything at first but they waited for a while, decided what to do. But the crucial thing is they got into the war.

32:18 And if the British and the French don't get into the war in 1939, it's unclear when they would ever have gotten into the war.

32:24 And if the British don't get into the war, it's very, very unclear how the Americans ever get into the war.

32:31 Maybe the Americans get into a war in Asia with the Japanese, but without Britain it's hard to see how Roosevelt 32:37 gets the Americans into the war in Europe. It's hard to see what line leads to that. And if the Americans don't get into the war in Europe, 32:44 it's not only just that you don't have the Americans fighting, it's also that you don't have the Americans supplying the Soviets which is a huge X factor 32:51 which everyone forgets about 'cause it's very inconvenient. But the reason why the Soviets or one of the reasons why the Soviets 32:57 were able to hold back the Germans at all was that the Americans were hugely supplying them with Studebaker and Jeeps 33:04 and all kinds of other things across the Pacific Ocean. So, if the Poles don't fight in 1939, 33:09 it's a very different world war. I just wanna just note that and now we'll go back to Ukraine, okay? 33:15 So for Ukrainian history, what this means is that we get 33:21 this strange period from 1939 to 1941 33:26 of what you could think of as Molotov-Ribbentrop Europe, Molotov-Ribbentrop were the commissar for foreign Affairs, 33:35 the foreign minister of the Soviet Union and of Germany. They're the ones who signed the pact, August 23, 1939.

33:42 The notorious, people call it the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is usually what it's called.

33:49 This creates a world where for almost two years, the Soviets and the Germans are de facto allies 33:55 and the country and most significantly for our region, the country of Poland is destroyed.

34:01 Poland wiped off the map. The Poles resist the Germans for about six weeks 34:07 with actually much more skill and dedication than they're usually given credit for, taking significant losses.

34:14 But they're facing an army attacking them from, not only from the west, but from the north, 34:19 from Prussia. Sorry about the geography. But Germany actually was north of Poland 34:25 as well as west of Poland because of Prussia. They were also attacking from the south because Czechoslovakia had been dismantled.

34:32 And Slovak soldiers joined in the invasion on the German side. And Czech tank, the Czechs had the best 34:38 military industry at the time. The best tanks, best explosives. So the Germans were invading Poland with Czechoslovak tanks.

34:45 All of that mitigated against Poland even before, so the Soviet Union joined in the invasion on the 17th of September.

34:51 So the Polish state is destroyed which is not a trivial thing. It wasn't actually, it's not actually normal.

34:58 It seems normal, I mean, again, there's a parallel here with 2022 and the idea of the state doesn't exist 35:04 and destroy the state, right? But it's not actually normal to invade countries and then say they don't exist 35:10 unless you're a colonizing power. So Europeans constantly invaded countries and then said they didn't exist.

35:15 That's the history of the Americas and Africa, right? But for European countries to invade other European countries 35:21 and say that they didn't exist, that was something new. And that's what the, both the Germans and the Soviets did that with Poland.

35:27 They invaded the country then they said it didn't really exist. And therefore, this is important, what we're doing is not an occupation 35:34 because you can only occupy a country. Which may just seem like a word game but it's actually, it's a legal maneuver 35:40 or an extra legal maneuver. Because if there's not a country there, then what you're doing is not an occupation.

35:46 You're not bound by the laws of occupation, by the conventions on occupation, by the customs of occupation. You're just saying that where you are 35:52 is a kind of undefined place inhabited by autochthonous peoples, right, who we don't really know very much about.

36:01 That is the German legal approach to the invasion of Poland. The Soviet approach was a little bit different. The Soviet approach was that there was a class war going on.

36:10 The Ukrainian and the Belarusian peasants were being oppressed by the Polish lords. The Polish state had collapsed 36:16 and therefore we just came in to aid our class allies. But again, the Soviets were also careful to say 36:21 that there wasn't a Polish state anymore. The Polish state they claimed had been destroyed. This wasn't an occupation, 36:26 this was just territory where there was a class war going on. So, from the point of view of Ukrainian history, 36:34 what follows is that the Ukrainian Soviet republic expands very significantly to the west, 36:42 pretty much to the borders that it has now. The Molotov-Ribbentrop borders of 1939 are pretty much identical to the western borders 36:49 of the independent Ukrainian state now. Another thing which happens on these territories 36:54 is a kind of rapidly, like a fast forward version of the Bolshevik policies 37:01 from 1917 to the 1930s. There the territories are next and then there are four waves of deportations.

37:08 The deportations tend to affect above all people associated with the Polish state.

37:14 So more Poles than anybody else, although later on there are quite a few Jews who didn't wanna take Soviet passports.

37:20 But the basic idea is destroy the Polish state and then take the people who have anything to do with the Polish state. The colonists, the landowners, 37:26 the bureaucrats, the soldiers, the foresters, and get those people to Kazakhstan. Get them to Kazakhstan, get them to Siberia 37:32 where they won't cause any trouble. And then the notion was that now we're carrying out a revolution 37:38 and so we are going to transfer land from these people to the oppressed Ukrainian and Belarusian peasants.

37:45 This revolution is really for you. Which is if you'll remember, that's a lot like the 1920s in the Soviet Union 37:51 where the peasants are brought in, invited into the revolution by the notion that they're gonna get land.

37:58 And as you remember, the most important political question in this part of the world in the first half of the 20th century is precisely land.

38:05 So the terrain is de-Polandized. Poles are deported from it and Poles lose their land 38:12 which is a bit like what had happened in 1937, in 1938. If you did the reading 38:19 in chapter three I think it is of "Bloodlands," the most important national action in the Soviet terror 38:24 was the Polish action in which 100,000 or around 100,000 Poles were shot. About twice as many were deported.

38:30 And so, Poles are being removed from these terrains where historically there had been Poles, right, 38:37 in sort of wave after wave after wave. But I said this was accelerated.

38:43 Not long after that in 1940, so the peasants get the land in early 1940 and then collectivization starts in late 1940.

38:50 So, the stage is very short and peasants are generally disillusioned by collectivization.

38:56 And even many West Ukrainian communists are disillusioned by this.

39:02 The West Ukrainian communists who had been part of the Polish Communist Party had been telling their people that 39:07 Soviet Ukraine is Ukrainian state, that you're all gonna get land, and our national culture is going to be respected.

39:14 Collectivization disillusioned them. The fake elections also disillusions many of them.

39:21 And they tend to fade from any kind of significance in the region. The reason I mention that 39:28 is to try to suggest something which is gonna be important in the next lecture, which is that there had been Ukrainian political life.

39:35 Not in the Soviet Union, right, but in Poland. It had been stunted and oppressed but it existed.

39:41 There were Ukrainian churches, there was Ukrainian civil society, there was Ukrainian educational society, 39:47 there were Ukrainian cooperatives, the Ukrainian newspapers. All of that. Under Soviet rule that becomes impossible, right? 39:53 There is a Soviet, it's called Soviet Ukraine but independent forms of civil society from whatever they might be are not allowed.

40:00 The way that Leninism works is that everything that one might think of a civil society has to be part of one larger structure, 40:05 has to be part of the state or of the party. So all of the legal political parties that had existed under Poland are now dissolved.

40:13 The communists are now discredited which leaves who? 40:20 Hmm? - Jewish nationalists. - Okay, among Ukrainian political parties. - [Student] The nationalists. - The nationalists, right? 40:27 The situation has selected for the nationalists. And you'll see why that's important later on 40:33 but I just wanna mark it right now. Okay. So, the last stage of this 40:39 and where I'm gonna leave you is Operation Barbarossa itself. Which is the Operation Barbarossa 40:44 is the invasion of the Soviet Union. It's when Hitler finally gets to do the thing which he wanted to do which is invade the Soviet Union, 40:50 try to seize Ukrainian grain, also try to seize the Azerbaijani oil fields, that's a secondary objection.

40:56 Destroy the Soviet state as such. There are three larger policies attached to this invasion 41:02 that are formulated by the Germans. The first is what they call the Final Solution, which is initially the idea 41:08 that the Jews will somehow be deported out of the way to Madagascar or to Siberia, who knows, 41:15 but somehow made to vanish. The final solution over the course of this war will become more immediate, more proximate, 41:22 and more directly lethal. Over the course of the war, it will move from this kind of vague notion of deportation 41:28 to killing them first over pits and then eventually in gas chambers. The second larger policy is what they call the Hunger Plan.

41:37 By the terms of the Hunger Plan, the Germans were going to keep the Stalinist collective farm.

41:43 They were going to try to control Ukrainian and general Soviet agriculture but direct the surpluses from Ukraine to Germany, right? 41:51 In a way, the same dream of the First World War, direct the surpluses, colonial exploit.

41:57 Direct the surpluses from Ukraine back to Germany and to the rest of Europe. And this will also be carried out 42:06 in the sense that cities are going to be starved, most notably Leningrad which is in Soviet Russia, 42:12 but also tens of thousands of people will die in Ukrainian cities such as Kharkiv and Kyiv. It's carried out most notably in the prisoner of war camps 42:21 where through early 1942, the Germans carry out a policy of deliberately starving Soviet prisoners of war, 42:28 almost regardless of ethnicity. Some ethnicities are treated a little bit differently than others. Jews are treated much worse.

42:34 But in general, Soviet prisoners of war starved. About 3.

1 million die of hunger and related diseases 42:41 which is a huge number, it's a terrifying number. By the end of, at the end of 1941, 42:46 this was actually the most lethal German policy. More people were starved to death in these open air prison, not even camps, 42:53 so just enclosures where people are left to die basically. Camp in a way dignifies it too much. More people had died this way than in the Holocaust 43:00 as of the end of 1941. In 1942, the Holocaust, the Final Solution will pass 43:06 in part because the Germans begin to think they have to recruit people from these camps in order to do various kinds of police work 43:12 and other work for them. Which by the way means that many of the local collaborators in the Holocaust 43:18 had been extracted from these camps, right, which gives you a sort of sense of some of the choices that 43:23 or non-choice that people faced. The third major policy was called Generalplan Ost 43:29 and that was the larger notion of colonization that over the course of the next decades, 43:34 tens of millions of Slavs would be moved out of the way, starved or dispersed, what we would call ethnically cleansed.

43:40 The Jews by now would be gone some way or another and Germany would establish a whole series of nice small towns, 43:47 everything very well-organized, white picket fences. The Ukrainians or the Slavs 43:52 significantly reduced in numbers but working as de facto slaves. That was the basic idea, that was the blueprint.

43:58 They never got there, right, because they lost the war.

44:08 The Holocaust which is the last thing I wanna talk about is the one of these three policies 44:16 which actually, so to speak, is worse than it was planned, right? The general idea was that 44:21 we're going to starve out everybody or disperse everybody that the Germans are never quite able to do that. They do starve quite a large number of people, 44:28 as you see in "Bloodlands. " They do disperse quite a large number of people but the most focus killing policy 44:34 and the one that accelerates consistently over the course of the war is the Holocaust. So I just wanna leave you with a couple of thoughts about it 44:41 and then we'll be done. The first thought about this is that 44:47 the Holocaust has to do with not only Hitler's general idea 44:52 that the Jews are responsible for everything, but the particular idea which follows from this, that if we're losing the war, 44:58 it must be the fault of the Jews. So for example, if we invade the Soviet Union 45:04 and the British and the Americans come in on the side of the Soviets, that must be explained not by Pearl Harbor or anything else, 45:13 it must be explained by the fact that the Jews are in charge on Wall Street and Fleet Street, as well as in the Kremlin, right? 45:20 So, defeat in war makes the conspiracy theory more necessary 45:25 and more pervasive. And also it should be said more sociologically useful to the German population as a whole.

45:31 The conspiratorial antisemitism becomes more important for Germans during the war, especially after they start to lose.

45:42 So this is specific to the end of 1941. When Germany, when it's clear that the Germans have lost the war 45:49 that they planned to fight which is 1941, that's when Hitler shifts the idea 45:54 that all the Jew are to be killed, late 1941, early 1942. When I say the German, the war they thought they were gonna fight, 46:00 this is very important, right? So this is not a military history class. You've heard me bemoan that there's not enough military history.

46:05 I'm just gonna make one little military history point which is that the wars never go the way you think they're gonna go.

46:11 They never go the way you think they're gonna go. And looking back, it's almost impossible to overstate just how dramatic that truth is.

46:18 The Germans invaded the Soviet Union thinking that it would fall within 12 weeks on the outside.

46:23 Six to 12 weeks, the Soviet Union was going to collapse. All of their preparations were made on that assumption.

46:29 They didn't have supply lines planned, they didn't bring winter clothing. The whole assumption is that 46:35 this is gonna collapse within a couple of months, right? And of course it didn't do that and they couldn't admit that they failed, 46:41 and they kept fighting and so on as one does. And they blame someone else and that's part of the history of the Holocaust, right? 46:48 But it's irrelevant for the politics of all this. When I say they didn't, 46:53 they lost the war they thought they were fighting, that's what I mean, right? They expected the Soviet Union to collapse in a couple of months.

46:59 The World War from Hitler's point of view is the war that happens because they didn't destroy the Soviet Union immediately.

47:06 Their thought was the Soviet Union falls immediately. There's nothing anyone can do about it. But it turned out that was not true.

47:12 The second point I wanna make about the Holocaust and then we'll be done is that even in the Holocaust, 47:17 and this is the reading in "Black Earth" which I hope you'll do carefully, but even in the Holocaust, 47:23 or I should say even especially in the Holocaust, there's never a moment when politics ceases to matter.

47:29 There's never a moment where you get into some sphere of pure evil or pure ethics or something 47:35 where human experience and human calculations don't matter. The way that people behave during the Holocaust 47:41 has to do not just with German intentions and German policies of mass killing, but also with their own calculations 47:48 about what might work out the best for them. And in the case of the population of the Soviet Union, 47:54 of the prewar Soviet Union where this is most relevant is Hitler's idea that Jews are communists and communists are Jews.

48:00 Now, most Soviet citizens know that there are certainly some anti-Semites in the Soviet Union 48:06 but in general, most Soviet citizens know that's not true because it's kind of their everyday experience, right? Like they're communists, right? 48:15 The vast majority of communists were actually not Jews, right? And if you're in the Soviet Union, you know that.

48:20 But the politics of this is that if the Germans come into the Soviet Union and they say, all the communists were Jews 48:28 and you're a communist, what do you say? I mean, unless you're heroic or you fled, 48:33 you say, yes, they were. Right? Because that shifts the responsibility from you 48:41 for this thing which is supposedly doomed communism onto the Jews. That's a form of politics, right? 48:49 The Germans were fooled by this. They sort of fooled themselves and other people fooled them. But that's a form of politics. The Germans come in with an idea of the way the world works.

48:57 People adapt to that idea of the way the world works in a way that suits them by shifting the responsibility for the Soviet system onto the Jews.

49:03 That's part of the history of the Holocaust. And then of course, in the Soviet Union as elsewhere, the vast majority of the work that's done in the Holocaust 49:10 is not done by the Germans. It's done by local people. And in taking part in this policy, 49:16 they're also expressing a kind of personal commitment to a certain view of the world, 49:22 which is that the Jews are communists, the communists are Jews, the Soviet Union has to be destroyed. All of this is incredibly awkward 49:29 after Soviet power comes back. And how Stalinism deals with all of this, 49:34 this very messy record of collaboration and resistance during the Holocaust 49:40 and during Soviet occupation in general, how Stalinism deals with this is gonna be our subject when we come back next week.

49:46 So, thank you very much.

49:52 (gentle music)

back to TOC


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Lecture 17 Reforms, Recentralization, Dissidence:1950s-1970s

0:00(mysterious music) 0:12 - So today, we're gonna, we're a little bit behind chronologically. I need to spend some more time on the 1940s and 1950s, 0:21 which is what we're gonna do today. And then the next lecture, we'll catch up to Khrushchev and Brezhnev.

0:27 What we need to make sure we understand because it's really important for everything that comes later 0:32 is the transition out of the war. And the reason why this is so important 0:37 is that the Second World War, I mean in addition to the ways that it's so to speak, objectively important, 0:43 the millions of deaths, the territorial changes, the movements of populations, it's also ideating, ideologically very important.

0:52 The Second World War is a kind of new starting point for the legitimation of the Soviet Union, 0:58 and it's also a starting point for many other stories of many other nations about who they are.

1:03 The United States is far away from the conflict. The United States lost relatively few people, 1:08 it entered the conflict very late. But nevertheless, the Second World War is very important for American self-formation.

1:15 The closer you get to the conflict, the more true this is, the state of Israel, Germany, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, 1:23 contemporary countries, run their stories of themselves through the Second World War.

1:28 And in the case of the Ukraine and other countries we're working on, it's through the Second World War, but then also through a kind of Soviet myth 1:35 of the Second World War. So we have to make sure that we get the Second World War right 1:40 in order for us to watch how that political memory forms and then we'll have some way 1:46 to evaluate what's going on today. So in the background of everything I'm doing today is 2022, 1:52 and the way we're thinking about nations and the war in 2022, I'm gonna be talking about the '40's and '50's, 1:58 but occasionally I'm going to lurch over and remind you to look for a connection.

2:03 Okay so was anybody else in New York over the weekend? I was in, see, oh yeah, 2:09 I was hoping I was gonna be the coolest one in class for once, all right. So I was in New York over the weekend 2:15 and I saw the new Tom Stoppard play. That's cool, right, that's cool? 2:20 Okay, good, I'm reassured. The new Tom Stoppard play is very, it's for him, 2:26 it's very straightforward, it's very historicist, it's about a family, an Austrian Jewish, 2:33 partly Jewish Austrian family in the late 19th century into the second half of the 20th century 2:39 and I don't want to spoil the end, but you know, in the end, most of them die at Auschwitz.

2:44 The problem with that is that most Austrian Jews didn't die at Auschwitz, 2:49 like that's an easy way to close a play because everyone thinks the Holocaust is Auschwitz and Auschwitz is the Holocaust.

2:55 And so naturally, if you're trying to bring it all to a tragic conclusion, which he does very powerfully, 3:01 having the children die at Auschwitz is the way to do that. The problem though historically 3:06 is that most Austrian Jews died in Belarus. And once you know that odd little fact, 3:14 then you are reminded that the Second World War took place on a territory. And you might move from there to remembering 3:21 that the second world war happened as a result of German imperialism towards the East.

3:27 So the actual geography of the Holocaust reminds you that the Germans were in a certain place, 3:33 they were trying to conquer a certain place, and that the killing began and actually continued in all sorts of places, which we often forget, 3:39 like Minsk, like Riga. Auschwitz of course, was a center of the Holocaust, 3:46 around a million Jews were killed there, more than a million people were killed there. But this little artifact of our culture 3:53 where everything leads to Auschwitz has the consequence of making this think that everything in some way leads to nowhere 4:00 because Auschwitz is not a place where you have to know where it is on the map, right? I mean, maybe you do, maybe you've been there, 4:06 but it functions as a kind of nowhere, as a kind of zero point, as a kind of kind of black hole where everything ends.

4:13 Right, literature ends, philosophy ends, thought ends. Right, Primo Levi says "Here there is no why".

4:19 But actually, the Holocaust took place in a place, and Auschwitz is also a place, and if this were a different class, we would spend more time 4:24 on what kind of a place Auschwitz was. But here, what I'm trying, the point I'm trying to get across is how deep in our culture it goes 4:31 that Eastern Europe isn't really a place, that these territories don't really matter. And that in extremists, 4:37 we will look away from the actual territories. And in extremists, we'll find this reference point, 4:42 which is familiar, but which gets us not looking at Ukraine or the Baltic states or Belarus or Poland 4:49 or western Russia, which is where the Holocaust was actually centered. The reason I'm dwelling on this 4:55 is that whether or not you think about the territories is going to affect how you think about responsibility for the war.

5:03 And if we think about the lecture, so if you think about the lecture last time about the German factor, right, 5:09 if you're a German and you don't know that there was a German factor in Ukrainian history, you're not gonna be thinking about the German factor, right? 5:18 If your view of the war doesn't have territory in it, then it also doesn't have most of the peoples in it 5:24 and your recollection is going to have those peoples in it, and you're not going to be concerned about how you come to terms with those things.

5:32 So part of colonialism is forgetting about colonialism, right, that's part of the trick. Part of being a colonialist, 5:37 a good colonialist forgets about colonialism, right, and has various devices of doing so. The European Union for all of its undoubted virtues 5:45 is a project of forgetting about colonialism. They're not the only people, there are other ways to do it, but what the European Union does is it tells a story 5:53 about how the Europeans fought the Second World War, they realized war was a very bad thing, and therefore they chose peace, 5:59 and unlike the Americans, they stopped fighting wars. Yes, exactly, exclamation point, 6:07 but that's not true, that's not true. What happened instead is that Europeans kept fighting wars until, 6:14 this is much more banal, until they lost them, which admittedly is like, 6:20 that doesn't really work as the beginning of the speech in Brussels, you know, it doesn't really work as educational curriculum in Europe but that's the truth.

6:27 The Germans lost the Second World War, which is a colonial war. The French lost in Southeast Asia, they lost in North Africa.

6:33 The Portuguese and the Spanish couldn't hold out in Africa any longer, right, and so on and so forth.

6:38 At which point, they then joined together to this European integration process, at which point they started telling the story 6:45 about how Europeans are very peaceful people, and we've always been very peaceful, and we integrate and look at us, and then look at the Americans, they're bad, right? 6:53 That's actually the European national anthem. It's set to a tune by Beethoven but those are the words. If you don't know German, 6:59 that's actually what they're singing, okay.

7:05 Don't email me about that. Okay. All right.

7:11 It's "Ode to Joy" of course, in fact. It's actually "Ode to Joy", the words are by Schiller.

7:19 But the point is that, there's a serious point here, which is that although the European Union is, 7:26 we'll talk more about this, but a theme of this class is the world of empire and what you do after empire, right? 7:33 And the European Union is an answer to what to do after empire. You go back to Europe and you don't talk about empire very much 7:39 and you cooperate with one another, which has many good sides. But what it means is that you don't talk about empire.

7:44 The Dutch don't talk so much about Indonesia, right? And the Germans do talk about the Holocaust, 7:50 one has to give them credit for that, they absolutely do talk about the Holocaust, and in that sense, they do better than everybody else, 7:55 but what they don't talk about is imperial territory. They don't really talk about empire or colonization, 8:01 which really is the operative framework for what they were doing in Ukraine. And so the tricky part of all this is that if you do, 8:11 if you do memory of the Holocaust, but without territory and without the other people, 8:16 you lose sight of the fact that you yourself were the colonizer. And since you lose sight of the fact that you yourself were the colonizer, 8:24 you tend to forget the things that colonization involves, like putting local people into awkward, difficult positions.

8:30 Right, so you don't colonize by yourself, there are always more local people involved than there are colonizers involved, 8:37 there have to be just mathematically. And when you're the colonizer, one of the things that you're doing is you are creating structures 8:43 that local people will be taking part in. And later on when you remember you're the colonizer, that's one of the things that you think about, right? 8:49 So if you're thinking about the European colonization of North America, you don't just think about what the Europeans did to the native peoples of North America, 8:56 you think about how they turned them against each other and how they used one tribe against each other and so on and so forth. That's part of the story, right? 9:02 Likewise, when Germany invades Eastern Europe and rallies collaborators, yes, 9:09 the nation should come to terms with their history of collaboration in so far as it exists, but the Germans also should recognize 9:15 that this is part of their history, right, the history of colonization. Now why am I talking about all this? 9:20 I'm talking about all this because in the 21st century, we have a kind of problem, 9:26 which this lecture is going to lead us to understand I hope, which is that before this war in 2022 broke out, 9:31 Ukraine didn't really exist as a subject in Germany. Ukrainians didn't really exist as a full-fledged people 9:38 from the German point of view. Insofar as they existed, they very often existed as a trigger for luxury, 9:47 like you do this better, you do that better, you do the other thing better. You learn your lesson from the Second World War, the way that we learned our lesson 9:52 from the Second World War. But that analogy doesn't make sense because the Germans were the colonizer in the Second World War, 9:57 and they colonized Ukraine, right? So you can't lecture, you know, you can't lecture, as an American, you can't lecture the Osage about this.

10:06 You have to sort of realize what you did to the Osage. And the Germans weren't there yet. And that had the odd consequence 10:14 that up until 2022, the Germans and the Russians were able to find a kind of common ground about Ukraine 10:21 along the lines of they don't really exist. They're sort of, they're kind of a problem for us, 10:26 they're sort of complicated, they don't really exist. And there was a divvying up of roles about the Second World War, 10:32 which I hope we'll be able to challenge after this class where Germany and Russia up to 2022, 10:38 this is now all being reconsidered, but up to 2022, the Germans and the Russians had this kind of nice deal 10:43 where they divided the good things about the war. What the German said was, we get the good thing 10:49 of having learned all about it and apologized. And the Russians said, we get the good thing of having been the victims 10:56 and the victors, right, which is a nice position to be in. And everybody else kind of complicates the story, right? 11:02 And so from from those positions, you know, you can see eye to eye like it's too bad that we invaded you 11:08 but it's a good thing you won and so on and everyone else in the middle kind of gets forgotten, all those territories, 11:13 those awkward territories get forgotten. Together, we can reproduce stereotypes about Ukraine, 11:19 together, we can talk about how it's all corrupt. Together, we can talk about how they don't really have a language, you know, and so on.

11:25 We can do all these things that are quite colonial and not notice it. together. We can build a pipeline. Together, we can become economically dependent upon you.

11:32 All of this goes back to the Second World War. All of it goes back to the German colonization, 11:38 which I talked about last time. This time, we're going to be talking about the way that the Soviet Union handled the Second World War.

11:45 Without this knowledge, we can't get to where we are now, the '70's, '80's, '90's, 21st century and 2022.

11:53 Okay, so I tried to make clear the memory stakes. Now let me talk about some of the, 11:58 some of the actual events. What we're gonna do today is we're gonna get through the war into the end of Stalin 12:06 so you can see how this all gets set up. And the basic story is going to be something like the war is processed as victimhood and victory, 12:15 but for Russians more than for other people, right? Once you know that that process begins and begins in 1945, 12:24 the rest of it step by step to Putin becomes less confusing.

12:30 And the way that the Russians and the Germans are going to come to this weird common understanding about the war also becomes less confusing.

12:37 Okay so history. I'm gonna take what seems like a big lateral step now 12:44 and talk about, and talk about the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists 12:50 and the ethnic cleansing of Poles during the Second World War. How is this not a big lateral step? 12:57 It's not a big lateral step because in order to understand the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists 13:03 and its ethnic cleansing of Poles during the war, you have to understand the war, and you have to understand Soviet and German policies 13:12 during the war. So, I mean to be very clear, if you're a Ukrainian and you are identifying yourself 13:18 with this tradition of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, then there are things that you need to know and things you have to consider 13:24 and they will be in this lecture. But analytically, if we're gonna understand where it came from, 13:29 we have to know what Soviet policy was and what German policy was because there's a sort of mystery here. I mentioned 13:35 the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists earlier as a minor, mostly imprisoned terrorist group 13:40 in Interwar Poland, right? If it hadn't been for the Second World War, we probably wouldn't remember them, 13:46 with all due respect, at all. They weren't that many people. They didn't matter that much in Poland except for the few assassinations, 13:52 and they didn't really matter anywhere else. I'm definitely getting email about that, 13:57 but that's the truth, right? The Second World War changed the setup dramatically.

14:03 How so? Well inside Poland, by the '30's, 14:11 there was a consensus among Ukrainian political life to accept the Polish state. That was hard, 14:17 it was disappointing that there was no Ukrainian state. But by the second half of the 1930s, people generally understood that the Soviet Union was much worse, 14:23 that Poland was threatened, and therefore we accept the legality of the Polish state, we try to function within it.

14:30 That position, which was the majority Ukrainian position by the second half of the 1930s, becomes impossible 14:38 when? - [Student] When Poland ceases to exist. - Poland ceases to exist, 100% exactly right.

14:45 I mean it seems like such an easy point, but the difference between a state existing and not existing 14:53 is traumatic for all of the citizens, but especially for the national minorities.

14:59 If this were a class on the Holocaust, I would now be spending a lot more time on that point with respect to the Jews.

15:04 Because membership in a state which treats you poorly is still very much different 15:10 than non-membership in any state, right, that's the argument in "Black Earth". For the Ukrainians, it suddenly means 15:18 there's no one to cooperate with that was a legitimate state a day before. The democratic parties, 15:24 like UNDO, which I mentioned last time, they melt away, the left wing parties or the radical left wing parties, 15:30 the communists and the cryptocommunist parties, they cooperate with the Soviets 15:36 in what becomes Western Ukraine. And as we saw last time or the time before, they become disappointed.

15:42 What's left after that is the extreme right. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, 15:48 the people who have experience, who have a coherent ideology of national superiority and discipline, 15:54 who have practice being underground, unlike everybody else except the communists, and the communists have now come above ground 16:00 and been disappointed, they have practice being underground. They are willing to do things like use violence, 16:06 which the other parties weren't necessarily willing to do. So they're advantaged in that way, if that's the word, by 1939.

16:14 They are also advantaged, or they're also transformed by the war itself. So by the time the Germans invade the Soviet Union, 16:24 the Soviets are just starting to find and deport the Ukrainian Nationalists.

16:29 Germany invades the Soviet Union, and the Ukrainian Nationalists declare a Ukrainian state.

16:36 That was not the German's idea at all, right? So you now know enough about the German understanding of Ukraine 16:42 to understand that it didn't require the Ukrainians to found a state. On the contrary, Ukraine was meant to be colonized by Germany.

16:49 If there were some Ukrainians who would be useful in that, all the better, but the idea was to create a colony.

16:54 So in early July, 1941, sorry late June, 1941, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists 17:00 decides to declare a state. This effort fails dramatically because the Germans don't support it.

17:06 Okay, this is a crucial point here, right? The Germans are all in favor of Ukrainian non-political collaboration, 17:12 but they have no interest in Ukrainian political collaboration. So the people who declare independence generally get sent to camps.

17:19 Roughly four-fifths of the leaders of the Ukrainian Nationalists now go to German camps or prisons, 17:24 including Stepan Bandera, who is the one who is most often mentioned. So Bandera spent the Second World War, 17:30 or most of the second world war in Buchenwald in a German camp. He wrote letters, it's true, but he had very, 17:37 I mean he's the figure that the Russians now fixate on, but he had very little to do directly with anything that happened in the war, 17:43 because he was in a German camp. But the reason this is relevant is that the, 17:49 what was already a very radical organization was stripped of its top leadership.

17:55 And very, no offense, very young people were suddenly in charge, people who had, just for the record, that got one smile, 18:03 okay, very young people were suddenly in charge. And this meant that 18:10 was what was already a kind of unpredictable, violent organization becomes more so.

18:15 What's worse, just before this happened, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists had split into two fractions 18:21 associated with these two leaders, Melnyk and Bandera, and those two fractions set about killing one another, 18:28 thereby further disrupting the leadership structure of the organization and making it more likely that it would carry out 18:34 other kinds of disruptive acts. Many of these people do in fact collaborate with the Germans.

18:40 We're talking about a few thousand people in a nation of tens of millions, but many of them do in fact collaborate with the Germans, 18:46 some of them are in the German police force. And this too, so this is where my earlier point comes in, 18:53 none of that could have happened without the German invasion. Right so these men, a few thousand of them, 18:59 get a specific form of training as a result of the war. Oh and it's more interesting than I just said 19:06 because I know this is the hard part, you see, it already messed me up, when Poland is broken, 19:13 the power that comes into Eastern Poland is the Soviet Union. And a lot of young men then join, 19:20 a lot of young Ukrainian men then join the Soviet militia. And those deportations of Poles, 19:26 which I mentioned earlier and will mention again, many times, the local militia men who carried them out were of Ukrainian nationality.

19:33 Here comes the part of the story that nobody likes, but which is, there are many parts that nobody likes, but this part particularly nobody likes.

19:40 When the Soviets are driven out by the Germans in summer 1941, 19:45 a lot of those Soviet militia men of Ukrainian nationality then joined the Germans.

19:50 Now from a human perspective, this is totally normal. If you're a young man who'd been making his living 19:57 as a kind of quasi police officer on the countryside and one power goes away and the other power comes, 20:04 and they also are in need of a job doing basically the same thing, you know, carrying a baton and driving people into deportation columns, 20:10 different people to be sure, you're probably gonna take the same job, right, a lot of it is as banal is that.

20:15 But in our world of ideology where we think like, oh, they're Stalinists and they're Nazis, and they're this nation and they're that nation 20:22 and that determines everything they do, it's very hard to get our minds around the kind of basic social fact of double collaboration 20:29 and the basic human realities, which led a lot of people to behave in that way.

20:34 But what this means is that a lot of these men who just had experience putting Poles and other people onto deportation trains 20:40 are now serving as German auxiliary police, mostly enforcing the German idea of law 20:46 on their fellow Ukrainians, but among other things, and this is very significant, taking part in the policy of the mass murder of Jews, 20:54 which we know as the Holocaust. So as always in a colonial situation, there are relatively few people from the colonial power.

21:01 About 1,400 Germans are directly involved in rounding up Jews. About 12,000 locals are responsible for the murder 21:09 of about 200,000 Jews in Western Ukraine. I'm talking about Western Ukraine because that's where the nationalists were.

21:16 The people who were the locals, by the way, they were Ukrainians, but they weren't only Ukrainians. There were also Poles, there were other people, 21:22 but they were predominantly Ukrainians in this part of the world. And then all of these Jews were murdered, 21:28 usually by Germans, but certainly with the increasing help, especially after 1942 21:33 of locals by bullets at close range. So that is the education 21:39 that several thousand young men got. They wouldn't have gotten this education in interwar Poland.

21:44 They certainly wouldn't have gotten it in an independent Ukraine. They got it as a result of a joint German Soviet invasion 21:51 and then as a result of a German invasion of the territory which the Soviets just took.

21:57 These men were then the ones who were directly involved in ethnic cleansing of Poles 22:05 in 1943. The conjuncture was that the Germans are being driven out, 22:12 it looks like the Soviets are coming. The Soviets, okay here comes another part of the story, which nobody likes, 22:18 but which is absolutely true and important, the Soviets are recruiting people for their own partisan movement.

22:24 They are not picky at all about who those people are, right? So plenty of German collaborators 22:30 go right into the Soviet partisan movement. The Soviets are recruiting them.

22:35 They're trying to recruit German policemen to the Soviet partisans. And one attempt to try to, 22:41 one attempt to try to recruit them negatively by a provocation ends up with a lot of Ukrainian policemen, 22:48 German policemen of Ukrainian nationality going over to what turns out to be a Ukrainian partisan movement.

22:55 And that Ukrainian partisan movement, the UPA on your sheet, these are the people 23:00 who carry out the ethnic cleansing of Poles in the summer of 1943, tens of thousands.

23:06 The Poles respond, they kill a fair number of Ukrainians too, especially in Galicia.

23:13 And this end, and so you can imagine this scene now, by 1944 when the Red Army appears, the Red Army appears on territories 23:19 where Ukrainians and Poles are busily killing one, killing one another, okay so.

23:28 Going back to where we are now, it is, it's just important to remember that these crimes, 23:36 which have to be known about, this history which has to be known whether you're Ukrainian or not, if you're German, 23:42 what you have to know about them is that they would never have happened without you, right? They would never have happened without you.

23:48 Without the German colonization policy, none of this would have happened. The men who take part in all of this, 23:53 if you're Ukrainian and you identify with Ukrainians, then you think about this and you think about responsibility, I think. But if you're a German, you think, 24:00 huh, it looks like we created the conditions in which something like this could happen, right? That is part of what doing colonial history 24:07 or doing imperial history reflectively involves. Okay and then yeah.

24:16 One more reflection about Ukraine. The OUN, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, 24:22 this small group which became important briefly during the Second World War and after, it had a very specific notion 24:27 of what the Ukrainian nation was. It was a hierarchical notion with a leader who would have absolute power, 24:33 or a small group of men who would have absolute power. The power would be exercised vertically. The Ukrainian ethnos 24:39 was thought to be a kind of super group, super, the ubermenschen among all the other people's.

24:45 That and more. I'm just gonna note that that is very different than the notion of Ukrainian nationality 24:52 which is prevailing now, right? And it's also very different, I'll note something else, they lost, the UPA lost, 24:59 and the Ukrainian state as it's currently configured, which is on a very different basis with a Jewish democratically elected president 25:06 and a very horizontally organized civil society, that Ukrainian setup is not only the one that we have, 25:13 but it's the one which is winning a war. Okay, I'm just gonna close with that and people can reflect on it 'cause we really have to get to where we're going now, 25:20 which is Soviet ethnic cleansing. So the Soviets, and this is another irony of the war or not irony, 25:27 the Soviets pick up in many ways where the Germans, or locally in West Ukraine, where the Ukrainian Nationalists leave off.

25:35 The Soviets ethnically cleanse with ferocity and determination and with purpose 25:40 at the end of the Second World War. You'll remember that in the '30's, 25:45 the Soviets were pioneers of what we now call ethnic cleansing with the national actions of 1937 and '38, 25:51 directed against notably Poles, Latvians, Koreans.

25:56 During the Second World War, '40, '41, there were these four major deportations from territories taken from Poland.

26:03 When the Germans invaded, Stalin deported ethnic Germans for the first time on mass 26:09 with such organization and such skill that the Germans themselves were envious, 26:14 which by the way is a theme. The Soviets had a deportation apparatus, which was very precise, which the Germans never actually, 26:21 never actually had. And in 1940, you can see the German policemen, who at that time were in a form 26:27 of cooperation with the Soviets and observing what they were doing, in their correspondence back to Berlin, they would express this envy.

26:33 Like we don't have an apparatus like this, we couldn't do this kind of thing the way that the Soviets are doing. But that's just to remind you 26:38 that ethnic cleansing as a operational habit 26:43 was already present. When the Soviets take back territory in '43, '44, 26:49 they take entire national groups and deport them deep into the Soviet depths.

26:55 I don't have time to go into all the examples now, but it's peoples of the caucuses 27:01 and then it's peoples of Crimea. And for the purposes of a class about Ukraine, the Crimean Tatars are the most important example.

27:10 The Crimean Tatars were of course, as we would say now, the indigenous people of the Crimean Peninsula.

27:16 As you'll remember from not so many weeks ago, the Crimean Khanate had been a state for 400 years 27:24 before the Russian Empire came in the late 18th century. In the late 18th century, there were essentially no Russians 27:30 in what was called New Russia, but the Crimean Tatars were about 100% of the population 27:35 of the Crimean Peninsula. By spring of 1944, that was zero.

27:41 That was zero because in March of 1944, 180,014 people identified as Crimean Tatars, 27:49 men, women and children, were all forcibly deported, most of them to Uzbekistan on the logic that the entire Crimean Tatar people 27:56 had collaborated with not to Germany. And this logic, this totalizing logic was applied also to Crimean Tatars 28:02 who returned from the front, including Crimean Tatars who had just been involved in taking Berlin.

28:07 They were all accused of being collaborators with Nazi Germany and all to a person deported far away from their home, 28:14 such that the Crimean peninsula became empty of its indigenous population as of spring of 1944.

28:23 Minor note, they were deported in Studebakers, American automobiles, 28:31 which is just another one of these interesting historical facts that are so essential for how things actually happen, but which everybody afterwards doesn't want to remember.

28:38 The Soviet Union was able to defend itself because of American economic aid. The role that the United States 28:44 played in the Second World War, at least on the European front, was mostly economic until close to the end and it was instantiated in our very relevant 28:52 material aid to the Soviet Union even across the Pacific. The Americans don't like to remember that because of the Cold War, 28:57 the Soviets don't like to remember it because of the Cold War but that's the truth. And if you think of the NKVD 29:03 deporting the Crimean Tatars in Studebakers, in Jeeps, it can help you remember that constellation, 29:09 which only a couple of years later would seem very strange. So this notion that you deport an entire people 29:17 because they supposedly collaborated as a people with the Nazis is helpful, 29:22 not just so that we understand the particular failure of the Crimean Tatars, to which we're gonna return because it's a part of the history of Ukraine, 29:31 but also it helps to place in context the general idea that I'm going to do something to you as a collective 29:36 because you're Nazis, right, or because you collaborated with Nazis. This is a very fruitful idea in Soviet and then Russian practice 29:44 beginning no later than 1943.

29:50 So a similar idea is applied 29:55 when the Soviets get to Western Ukraine where they then refer to Ukrainian Nationalists, 30:03 the partisans I spoke about before, but also self-conscious Ukrainians in general as collaborators 30:09 and associate them with Nazi rule. And here, of course, there's a case 30:16 thousands of these men and women had in fact collaborated. It would be wrong to say that the entire group had collaborated, many of them had, 30:23 but of course many other people had. As no one will ever say, Russians also collaborated.

30:29 Right, every national group in the Soviet Union to say something which is not, which is controversial, but shouldn't be, 30:35 every national group in the Soviet Union that was touched by German power collaborated. They all did.

30:41 And any attempt by one group in the Soviet Union to say, "Well, we were innocent and the other ones were guilty", wrong.

30:46 The statistical evidence of which we have a fair bit shows that the only group which might have collaborated a little bit more than the others, not surprisingly, 30:53 were the ethnic Germans themselves. And the only group which perhaps maybe did a little bit less than the others 31:00 as far as we can tell were the Belorusians. But in general, everybody collaborated.

31:05 And so in general, the claim from the Soviet side that we were innocent but the other ones were collaborators 31:10 is going to be wrong. But Stalin had power so he could make this kind of argument and it was made in Western Ukraine.

31:16 The way that the Soviets approached Western Ukraine has two parts. The first is defeat the nationalist movement, which they do.

31:24 The Ukrainian partisan army or insurgent army, this UPA, had been formed to fight the Soviets. It's remembered in Poland, 31:29 and it is remembered in Poland for ethnically cleansing the Poles, but it was built to fight the Soviet Union 31:38 and it did I mean with, it should be said, with incredible determination. They fought on for a very long time 31:44 against both Soviet power and Polish communist power into the late '40's or even the early 1950s, 31:50 although by that time, a lot of it was already controlled by the Soviets. This was beaten down with counterinsurgency, 31:56 which was just as violent as the insurgency itself. A man called Nikita Khrushchev defined the principle 32:02 that we should be more violent towards them than they are towards us because that's the only way to, 32:08 that's the only way to defeat them. That the Soviets use practices such as, you know, 32:13 they would kill, when they killed a nationalist partisan, they would bring the body and drop it in the local village 32:20 to see who would come out because whoever came out were the family and then the family would be deported because the principle 32:25 was that the families would be deported. So about 250,000 people were deported from Western Ukraine.

32:31 Probably a larger number of people were killed during this counter insurgency. So one approach to Western Ukraine 32:37 was to crush the insurgency, by killing the partisans and deporting their family members. At this time, the Gulag became disproportionately Ukrainian.

32:45 The other approach was to fulfill the nationalist agenda.

32:50 And this is a feature of post-war communism in Eastern Europe in general is that it makes a hard ethnic turn.

32:56 So they fulfill the nationalist agenda, number one, by giving Ukraine westerly borders.

33:02 In 1945, the Soviet Union basically gets the same borders from the Americans and the British 33:08 that they did from the Nazis in 1939. Again, a point that no one really is super comfortable with, 33:14 but with a few small exceptions. Basically, the border of 1945 is the border of 1939, 33:19 which means that once again, Soviet Ukraine is extended significantly to the west.

33:26 Some of this is is from other places, but most of this is formally Polish territories. And this deprived the Ukrainian Nationalists of an argument 33:33 because Ukrainian Nationalists were all about creating a larger Ukraine. And the Soviet Union 33:39 continues the ethnic cleansing of local non-Ukrainians. They basically, 33:45 the NKVD basically comes in and picks up in a more organized way where the Ukrainian Nationalists had left off.

33:52 About 1.

5 million pre-war Polish citizens will be deported 33:58 from what becomes the western part of Soviet Ukraine. And 1.

5 million is a pretty big number.

34:04 Incidentally, of those Polish citizens, roughly 100,000 were Jewish survivors of the Holocaust 34:14 who were deported westward to Poland because they were not Ukrainian.

34:19 And the reason this, there are many reasons that might seem strange to you, but one of them surely would be 34:25 that this is an ethnic deportation. So it wasn't about citizenship.

34:30 The Soviets were saying if you're an Eastern Slav, basically, if you're a Belorussian or a Ukrainian you can stay, 34:37 but if you're a Pole or a Jew, then you have to go, then you have to go. Right, so those people were deported.

34:45 Meanwhile, simultaneously, Ukrainians are being deported from Poland 34:50 in the opposite direction, right? So the ethnic cleansing goes in both sides.

34:55 The first major policy of the Polish Communist regime is to deport Ukrainians, right? 35:01 So they legitimate themselves on the basis of what had been a hard right Polish position before the Second World War.

35:07 Right before the Second World War the idea of deporting all the remaining Ukrainians would've been almost beyond the imagination.

35:12 It's the first thing that the communists do. And in that way, their polish communism is ethnic from the beginning.

35:18 It will be ethnic in other ways later on. For example, in 1968, they will try to deport the Jews. But the original sin, so to speak, is 1945, '46, '47.

35:28 In 1947, the Ukrainians who remain in Poland 35:33 after this deportation, most of them are deported inside Poland in an action which is remembered as Operation Vistula, 35:42 where the idea is to take Ukrainians and disperse them 35:47 around the so-called recovered territories of Poland, the lands that Poland got from Germany.

35:54 And the idea was to take them as individuals so that they couldn't form Ukrainian communities again.

36:02 So that's the way that, that's the way the Ukrainian question was handled in communist Poland.

36:07 And it was associated with the attempt of the communist regime 36:12 to legitimate itself quite openly from the beginning. And the idea that Ukrainians were the enemy or one of the main enemies, 36:18 the second enemy after the Germans, was very important to legitimating Polish communism all the way to the end.

36:24 The Ukrainians were demonized within Polish communism all the way through the 1980s.

36:30 The conflict between Poles and Ukrainians was very real, but it was exploited by the Polish communist regime.

36:36 And this was very convenient, of course, for the Soviets, right? Because the last thing the Soviets would want 36:41 would be some kind of Polish Ukrainian cooperation or understanding. And as we will see a few lectures down the line, 36:47 when you get to Polish Ukrainian understanding about history and many other things, that is one of the factors 36:52 that leads to the end of the Soviet Union, okay. So this is a very, from the Polish point of view, 36:58 this is of course a very real history. In the post '89 period, 37:04 both a president and a prime minister of Poland have had family members who were killed in Viluna, 37:10 which they may or may not talk about publicly, right? This is a fact about Polish political life, which makes, 37:17 I'm just gonna say this, just gonna note this, it makes the reception of the six or seven million 37:22 Ukrainian refugees in 2022 much more interesting because a lot of people when they look at that, they say, 37:28 "Oh, well, the Ukrainians and the Poles, well I mean surely they just like, they're friends, they look at them, they're white people, they must get along, right?" 37:34 From a distance, it can look like that, right? But in fact, Ukrainian Polish relations 37:39 are incredibly complicated, as you've probably gathered in this class. And 1943 is one of many, 37:46 and Ukrainians would point to others on the other side, of course, one of many very difficult moments in Ukrainian Polish relations.

37:52 So the 2022 thing is actually much, much more interesting than it looks.

37:57 A lot of Americans looked at it from our own optic and didn't see like, oh wow, like something special is actually happening here, 38:04 which I think it's fair to say there was. Okay, the underlying move here though, as you've noticed, 38:13 is a move towards, is a move towards what you could think of 38:19 as a quietly emerging Russian ethnic definition 38:24 of the Soviet state where ethnicity itself has become much more important.

38:32 Soviet Ukraine has been enlarged, it's been reformed, it has a slightly different, 38:37 has a different kind of population with fewer Poles, and of course, far fewer Jews who have been murdered in the Holocaust.

38:44 But underneath that, there's a notion that it's ethnicity that matters 38:50 and that it's the Russian ethnicity which is the most important. And to make this case, 38:56 which is the last thing we're gonna talk about, I'm gonna start with something that Stalin said at the end of the war, two weeks after the end of the war, 39:03 24 May, 1945. And this is when Stalin makes his famous toast 39:08 to the great Russian nation, which I'm gonna read to you in its entirety because it's important.

39:14 Okay, "Comrades, permit me to propose one more last toast. I should like to propose a toast to the health of our Soviet people, 39:20 and in the first place, the Russian people. I drink in the first place to the health of the Russian people because it is the most outstanding nation of all the nations 39:27 forming the Soviet Union. I propose a toast to the health of the Russian people because it has won in this war universal recognition 39:34 as the leading force of the Soviet Union among all the peoples of our country. I propose a toast to the health of the Russian people, not only because it is leading people, 39:40 but because it possesses a clear mind, a staunch character and patience. Our government made not a few errors.

39:46 We experienced at moments of desperate situation in 1941, 1942, when our army was retreating, abandoning our own villages and towns, et cetera, et cetera.

39:53 A different people could have said to the government, you have failed to justify expectations. Go away, we shall install another government, which will conclude peace with Germany 39:59 and ensure us a quiet life. The Russian people, however, did not take this path because it trusted the correctness of the policy of its government 40:05 and it made sacrifices to ensure the route of Germany. The confidence of the Russian people in the Soviet government proved to be that decisive force 40:12 which ensured the historic victory over the enemy of humanity, over fascism. Thanks to it, the Russian people for this confidence.

40:19 To the health of the Russian people. " Now there's something ironic about a toast to fascism 40:24 where you talk about how your nation is better than everybody else's. Yes? - [Student] Why is he saying this? He's Georgian, right? 40:30 - Yeah, yeah, he's Georgian, that's right, he's Georgian. But you don't, 40:36 you know, you don't have to belong to a nation to use or even believe in an ethnic idea.

40:44 But see, I want you to note the difficulties in all this. Russia was great, 40:49 and I'm now only slightly paraphrasing because it was less touched by German power 40:54 than Belarus and Ukraine. You see? The Russians are steadfast and patient, that's Stalin's spin, 41:01 because they're not occupied. Of course, the German war did kill many Russians.

41:07 The most atrocious example is the hunger, the terror siege, the hunger siege of Leningrad 41:13 in which more than a million people are killed. The scale of Russian death is horrible from a Western point of view, it's terrifying.

41:21 But it's much less proportionately than the scale of death in Belarus and Ukraine, much less, 41:28 even, not just relatively, but with respect to Ukraine, absolutely. It's fewer people, fewer civilians killed than Russians.

41:36 And the reason why, you know, the reason why the Soviet Union won the Second World War, isn't that just that Russians came running to the rescue.

41:44 You know, on the contrary, more Ukrainian soldiers die 41:49 fighting the Germans in the Red Army than Americans, British and French put together. And when the Red Army is pushing back through Ukraine 41:56 and taking horrible losses, which it does, of all of its peoples, including the Russians for sure, but it's picking up its reserves from Ukraine 42:04 as it's then moving into Poland and towards Berlin.

42:09 So what happens is ironically here by 1945, is that you have this capacity 42:16 to decide which nation is great, which nation is greater than the other nation.

42:21 And you have implicitly also the power to decide who's the collaborator and who is not.

42:27 And that's going to be the legacy of the Second World War, a major legacy of the Second World War for Soviet and Russian power for decades onwards.

42:34 And it's based on what I wouldn't hesitate to call a flat out totalitarian lie, 42:42 because you see what's happened by 1945. The man who after Hitler is most personally responsible 42:49 for beginning the Second World War, and indeed, the man who with Hitler began the second world war as an ally in 1939, 42:59 now has the authority to define who are the real collaborators, right? 43:04 And no one is ever supposed to think about that. And indeed, in Russia today, there's a law which forbids you from mentioning anything along those lines 43:10 in any kind of media, right? But this power to have been the ally of Hitler 43:15 and then to tell you who the ally of Hitler is is very important for Soviet practice and it also helps a great deal now.

43:22 If you're trying to understand the Russian rhetoric about Nazis and de-Nazification and fascism and so on, it helps a lot to know 43:29 that the Nazis are who we say they are, right? The Nazis are who we say they are and that's what it means, 43:35 the collaborators are who we say they are. So as the Cold War begins, 43:43 there's a new cultural focus on Ukraine, which is defined by a fellow called Zhdanov 43:53 in a larger cultural turn. And the attitude about Ukraine is something like this, 43:59 that there are two camps in the world, and the camps are, 44:04 they call them the democracies. Right, Zhdanov when he says the democracies, he means us, 44:12 he means he means the Soviet Union and its allies, and then there are the fascists, the capitalists.

44:17 And in these two camps, what's interesting about these camps, there's not really any longer a vision of progress.

44:25 And let me pause on that because it's really, really important. After the Second World War, the Soviet notion of legitimacy 44:33 is gonna be based much less on economics and much more on culture. And the reason for this 44:38 is that the Stalinist transformation of the Soviet economy has essentially been completed.

44:45 Awkwardly, the Stalinist transformation of the Soviet economy did not actually bring socialism 44:50 in any sense. I mean we can call it socialism if you want, we can call it state socialism, we can call it whatever, but it's not socialism in the sense understood by Marx.

44:58 We do not have harmony, we do not have equality. We don't have any of the things which any of the 19th century idealists, 45:05 or Marx in is more sentimental moments, described. None of that prevails in the Soviet Union. But the Stalinist transformation is over.

45:12 Collectivization has happened. The factories have been built, the mines have been dug. You can dig some more, you can build some more, but essentially the transformation has happened 45:19 and it hasn't brought the expected result. Instead, there's been a terrifying war, which the Soviet Union just barely won 45:26 with the help of the Americans, which has to be now forgotten very quickly. But this fundamentally, 45:31 the fact that the Soviet transformation is over, and you have this shift from economics to culture, means that the whole nature 45:37 of the way the Soviets are gonna define themselves against the West is now a little bit different. It has much more to do with a notion of cultural innocence.

45:45 So when Zhdanov says there are two camps, he means we are the good guys and the capitalists are the bad guys.

45:51 The capitalists who were our allies a moment ago now turn out to be fascists.

45:57 And by the way, the dance that the Americans do is almost as extraordinary, right? I mean Stalin's on the cover of Life Magazine in 1943 46:07 and there's a whole special issue which I have in my office, come to office hours, it'd be great to see you guys, 46:14 but there's a whole special issue about how wonderful the great Russian people are and how they're the leader 46:19 of all the peoples of the Soviet Union and how the great Russian people are just like America. It's really interesting if you're in American studies 46:25 because it's just like America, like the Russians are just like the white people, like they're in charge. And look, there's some pictures of people of color 46:32 and they're kind of subordinate, but they like being ruled by these white people, the Russians, who are just like the American white people.

46:38 But the point is that the Americans also had to make this turn where they went from being the allies of the Soviet Union 46:45 who were all Democrats in the sense of small D right, Hollywood was in on this.

46:50 There were great movies about how the Soviets were the greatest democracy in the world. We had this shift from nought to Cold War in just a few years. Okay, but the way the Soviets do it is they say, 46:59 this is all, you know, this is fundamentally about fascism. the fascists or who we say they are, 47:04 but here's the important point. The important point is that this then becomes about cultural innocence.

47:11 And the lodestone of what's special about the Soviet Union 47:17 is no longer the economic transformation. That's happened, it turned out to be a bit of a dud, 47:23 can't really say so. The lodestone of what's special about the Soviet Union is now much more Russian culture.

47:29 And Zhdanov, the same fellow who gives us this whole two camps idea, 47:34 is also responsible for a cultural policy in which the idea is that Russian culture 47:40 is basically good culture so long as it's not contaminated by outside influences. And the Russian writers and poets who are then persecuted 47:49 are persecuted because they've allowed alien influences, cosmopolitan influences into Russian literature.

47:56 And on this account of the way the world works, naturally, Ukrainian culture is going to be downgraded 48:01 because Ukrainian culture is closer to the west, it's been contaminated most recently by German occupation, right? 48:07 And so this becomes another way that Russia is elevated as against Ukraine.

48:13 And I just want to just give you one little thought about what this four ordains. We're not there yet.

48:18 Okay, Stalin's still in power, it's now the early 1950s, let's say, and we're not there yet, 48:23 but we're now going to be reach into the question of, well, if this is all about cultures 48:29 and Russian culture is the one that's central and pure and important and Ukraine is kind of a little bit defiled and on the outside, what is Ukraine? 48:37 Khrushchev has an answer to that. Khrushchev's answer, and we'll talk about this next time, is Ukraine is a slightly less important culture, 48:44 which always wanted to join Russia. So it exists but the point of its existence 48:50 was to join Russia, right? Which is an elegant answer and is taken up by many people and it becomes very popular.

48:56 And then Brezhnev will have another answer, which is that now that Ukraine has joined Russia 49:02 de facto and forever, culture, it's going to become something which is much less important, 49:07 culture is just going to become something that you have at home. The Ukrainian language will be something that maybe you have at home or on the countryside, 49:12 but the Soviet Union is gonna be run as a kind of very efficient technical administrative apparatus 49:18 in which Russian is going to be the neutral language that everyone's going to use and everyone's going to know. So Khrushchev and Brezhnev have different answers 49:27 about what Ukraine is going to be within the Soviet Union, we'll spend more time on them. But at the base is this is this thing which happens 49:34 during the second world war, which is that Ukraine, precisely because Ukraine is under occupation and Ukrainians suffer more, 49:40 has to be presented as contaminated and dangerous, and precisely because the economic transformation is over 49:47 and there's a shift now towards culture, there's the potential for a shift towards nostalgia, 49:52 where the Soviet Union is gonna become with time not just more about culture and economics, but more about the past 49:58 than about the present or the future, right? By the time we get to Brezhnev, 50:04 the cult of the Second World War will have replaced the revolution as the central focus of the Soviet Union as a whole.

50:11 And if everything's about the past and if everything's about nostalgia, then you're setting yourself up for actually, 50:18 you know, a very right wing view of the world. And then the process that you get when the Soviet Union falls apart and you get to today 50:24 becomes less mysterious. Okay, trying to do a lot today. Hope it came through. Thank you very much.

50:34 (gentle music)

back to TOC


.

Lecture 18 Before and After the End of History

0:00(dramatic music) (static buzzing) 0:12 - Okay everyone, greetings. Happy, happy Thursday. This is really a day when I would have loved 0:18 to take you outside. And I'm feeling more constrained than usual by the camera, which is making me stay inside.

0:27 I try not to be constrained by the camera at all but there are a few things that I can't do because of the camera and one of them is like, call out your names when I know that you're my class 0:34 and you're not sitting here. Like which I would totally be doing right now with some of you, but I can't because then like, 0:40 you know, 3 million people would email- Oh, one of them just showed up. (laughing) (audience laughing) 0:46 Okay, good. Okay, here's what I wanna talk about.

0:52 I wanna talk about time. So if we were outside, I could do this with the trees, 0:57 and I could talk about how the seasons are changing and the years go by and each year is a bit different than the one before.

1:03 And some things remind us of previous years, like the leaves changing, right? I could talk about time 1:09 because the argument that I want you to get from this lecture is that history doesn't actually end.

1:18 And if we can get that down, a whole lot of the politics of the 21st century 1:24 we'll see will make more sense than it does. History doesn't actually end.

1:31 Okay, why am I starting so grandly? I'm starting so grandly because I really think it's the case 1:38 that the decline in history and the decline in the humanities 1:44 in the last 30 years have a great deal to do with the collapse of democracy and the rise of other forms of politics.

1:51 I really think it's the case that the absence of bearings in the past 1:58 mean that people are easier to manipulate. Or at the very least, the absence of bearings in the past opens the way for myth-makers 2:04 who focus on the innocence of our group as the only thing which matters from the past.

2:10 I think also the idea that history has come to an end is a way of flattening or stultifying the imagination.

2:18 If history is over, then this is the one thing that you just kinda get, and there's not any point practicing your imagination 2:24 and trying to imagine how, trying to work with your own minds to see how things might be different.

2:30 There are, you know, you are- Don't worry, I'm gonna talk about Ukraine within like three minutes. You can set a timer if you want.

2:36 But, you have already been exposed to various kinds of ideas about how history comes to an end in your lifetime, right? 2:42 So one version of how history comes to an end is nationalism, right? 2:48 So everybody's sorted out into their own place and like we're all ethnically homogeneous, and then history comes to an end, right? 2:55 That version of history coming to an end is implied in any notion which says the outsiders are the problem 3:00 and only if we had fewer of them and it was just us, then everything would be fine, right? History would come to an end.

3:06 This hasn't really been a class about nationalism but if you think way back to the beginning, there's implicit in the idea of ethnic nationalism, 3:11 is the idea, is the assumption that, well, once we finally have our own state and it's just our people, 3:17 then history comes to an end. All tensions will come to an end, history will be over.

3:22 Another version of history coming to an end is consumerism, right? Fundamentally, it's all just Homo economicus, 3:29 there's just supply and demand. They're just desires that can be fulfilled. The market will fulfill them. History is over, right? 3:35 We're all basically the same, it's just a matter of like getting rid of the last few trade barriers. History is over.

3:41 Marxism is also an idea about the end of history. Marxism says that there is a way 3:48 that humans are supposed to be. We do have a kind of human nature. Human nature has been corrupted 3:55 by the wrong form of technology. It will be corrected by the right form of technology.

4:01 Human nature was corrupted when private property entered the scene. We were alienated from ourselves.

4:07 But once we build up industry, once we build up high technology, the working classes will inherit all of that, 4:13 and we'll be restored to our own nature and everything will be fine. And yes, history will come to an end.

4:20 Now, this is all, okay, maybe not in three minutes, gimme three more minutes. I'm gonna get to Ukraine.

4:26 This is all relevant to this larger trajectory that we're trying to follow in the 20th century 4:31 of how Ukraine gets treated in the Soviet Union. Because Leninism was a very special form of Marxism.

4:40 Marxism says there's a special role for the working class in bringing history to an end. Marxism says the working class, 4:47 because of its special place in history, absorbs, as it were, the suffering of everyone, 4:53 it has a special position, positionality, which allows it to see, as it were, objectively all the harm of capitalism.

5:00 And when the working class takes over, all that harm will disappear. Now, one of the problems in Marxism 5:07 is that you never know exactly when you're supposed to make the revolution. If the revolution is really about 5:14 the working class becoming big and powerful, isn't it then just gonna happen on its own? If capitalism is gonna produce more and more injustice, 5:20 then maybe there'll be more and more alienation and more and more workers, and the revolution will happen on its own. But surely the revolution is not gonna happen on its own.

5:27 There must be somebody who does something. And Lenin took the view that somebody has to do something.

5:34 And he took this view which is called volunteerism. He took it to kind of an interesting extreme 5:39 where Lenin argued that actually what is needed is a disciplined avant-garde party, 5:44 basically political experts working in the shadows, who know what they're doing, who understand reality better than the workers.

5:52 And that those people should make a revolution happen as soon as there's an opportunity.

5:58 Wherever there's a weak point in the world capitalist system, we should push on it, make a revolution.

6:03 So with Leninism, you get this weird mixture of determinism and volunteerism.

6:10 If there weren't Lenin, like if Lenin had tripped over the furniture in one of those cafes in Zurich and broken his neck, 6:16 or less demanding counterfactual, if Lenin had gotten off that train 6:21 which was going to Petrograd in 1917, and like, you know, 6:27 I don't know, got off the train. The train left without him, I don't know. But invent it yourself. But if Lenin is not on the train to Petrograd, 6:35 it's like that one guy is not on that one train at that one time, there is no Bolshevik Revolution and the 20th century looks an awful lot different.

6:42 So in that sense, you can say he's right. Individuals certainly matter in history. But, so there's this extreme volunteerism, 6:48 which is confirmed by experience, right? Lenin knows that he is right, that without him and Trotsky and Stalin 6:54 and, you know, Kamenev and Zinoviev and a few other characters, there wouldn't have been that revolution.

6:59 On the other hand, they believe that all their volunteerism, all this willfulness 7:04 is justified by their knowledge that history has to go a certain way. That there has to be feudalism, capitalism, socialism.

7:11 And now that they've carried out their willful act, they have to balance that willful act 7:16 by pushing the Soviet Union through these stages of history. Because there's only one way that history can go.

7:23 There's only one way that history can go. And the Soviet Union is behind, so we're just gonna have to push it very quickly.

7:30 The consequences of this view for Ukraine are dramatic, right? The whole idea that there has to be collectivization, 7:36 that agriculture has to be collectivized is a result of the idea that there's only one way that history can go.

7:42 And collectivization then is the precondition for the famine and the death of around 4 million people in 1932 and in 1933.

7:55 You see a similar issue with the national question itself, right? In the national question itself, you have the same swinging back and forth 8:02 between determinism and volunteerism. Where on the one hand, we are confident we know what's gonna happen, 8:09 and therefore, because we're confident in the 1920s, we're gonna let the Ukrainian writers write, we're gonna let the Ukrainian artists paint, 8:15 we're gonna have affirmative action for Ukrainians to drive them into the bureaucracy and as loyal administrators into the Soviet system.

8:23 We're confident that that's the way history is going to work. We're confident that capitalism is gonna produce nationalism anyway, 8:28 and so, therefore, we're gonna do it ourselves. We will contain it and we'll channel it and we'll sublimate it, and it will sublimate into loyalty to the Soviet system.

8:36 But then in the 1930s, they lose their confidence. And instead of being sure that history is on their side, 8:43 Stalin shifts back into this volunteerist mode. What's wrong with collectivization? What's wrong with collectivization 8:49 is that individuals are doing the wrong thing. Polish spies, Ukrainian nationalists, 8:54 individual records, people who for whatever malicious reason are trying to block by way of their own volunteerism, 9:01 the way that history actually has to go, right? So the swing from determinism to volunteerism 9:08 also helps you to understand how they're trying to understand or how they're dealing with the national question.

9:16 As we get into the Second World War with the national question, we see a new turn.

9:23 And the new turn is possible because the existence of the Soviet Union is itself in question.

9:29 So during the Second World War, Stalin and others take a much more benign view of Ukraine.

9:37 Why did they do this? Because the war is being fought largely in and for Ukraine, and they need Ukrainians to stay loyal to the Soviet Union.

9:44 The Germans, of course, do them an enormous favor by exercising more Terror in a shorter period of time than the Soviets did, 9:51 thereby turning most people inside the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, back towards the Soviet Union, at least in the sense that it is less bad than the Germans.

9:59 So during the Second World War, there's a lot of nostalgia. Ukraine is called a great nation.

10:04 Bohdan Khmelnyts'kyi is characterized as a hero of the Ukrainian past. The simple fact that a Ukrainian is even mentioned 10:11 as a kind of hero is striking. Then as we've seen in the immediate postwar period, 10:18 there's another turn in which the way the national question is handled is not just by nostalgia, right? 10:24 Which is characteristic of nationalism. It's also handled by ethnic cleansing. It's handled by taking right-wing nationalist solutions 10:32 and making them Soviet policy. And not just right-wing ones, perfectly mainstream ones 10:37 like the Ukrainian idea of Sobornist which means in a political context, it means Sobornist 10:43 means all of the territory of Ukraine inside the boundaries of a Ukrainian state, right? 10:48 A Soborna Ukraina is a Ukraine that contains all the territory that should belong to it.

10:54 That's what Stalin creates by extending the boundaries of Ukraine, Soviet Ukraine, to the west. But also there are these rather 11:00 extreme right-wing solutions, which we talked about in the last lecture as ethnic cleansing, 11:05 where it's not just that lots of people get deported to Siberia, that's traditional, right? 11:11 From it's been since the 1920s, people have been deported to Siberia. It's not just that a quarter of a million Ukrainians 11:19 are deported to Siberia right after the war. That's notable but it's not what I'm talking about.

11:24 What I'm talking about is something else, which is the deportation of Poles and Jews into Poland.

11:31 Because the deportation of Poles and the Jews into Poland suggests that the system no longer believes 11:39 it can assimilate everybody. So if you're deported to Siberia, there's a very good chance you're going to die.

11:44 But there is also at least the idea in principle that your body is going to be redeemed 11:50 for the Soviet system, right? You're gonna be a laborer while you're there, after 5 years or 7 or 15 or whatever it is, 11:55 you're going to come back and you will have been reformed. There's at least that idea. But if you were expelled across the border 12:01 of the Soviet Union into another country, the system's given up on you, right? And that is an even less confident system, 12:09 an even less internationalist system, an even more nationally-minded system than one had in the 1930s, 12:14 as we now get into the 1940s.

12:20 This logic is extended in a way, and, again, now I'm recapitulating, last time, 12:26 but this logic is extended in a way under Zhdanov and under this logic of the two camps, 12:34 where, you know, you can see this subtle shift in the second half of Soviet history, away from economic dynamism 12:40 and towards a kind of cultural conservatism, right? Where the economic dynamism of Stalin, of Stalinism, 12:46 is actually over. But no one of course can say that, right? You can't wake up in the morning and say that. But the economic dynamism has already happened.

12:54 The economic dynamism happened, the mines have been dug, the factories have been built, the big cities have been built. The countryside has been collectivized.

13:00 All those things have been done. And then there was this war. And now we have to think of a new way to justify the state.

13:07 And the way to justify the state after the Second World War has a great deal to do with suddenly Russian culture, 13:15 where the class war is defined. Zhdanov defines the class war as Us and Them, two camps, communists, capitalists, 13:22 or as they would say, the democracies and the capitalists, communists and capitalists. But what is the Us in this? 13:30 The Us in this, under Zhdanov's reasoning, is something like the purity of Russian culture, right? 13:37 The purity of Russian culture. And Russian writers are now being purged because they are quoting Charles Dickens, 13:43 or somehow they are too cosmopolitan, to use the word of the day, right? 13:48 Cosmopolitan. And that word, and this is something I wanted to mention last time but failed to, that word in the last few years of Stalinism, 13:55 especially from 1948 to early 1953 when he dies, that word cosmopolitan is very often used 14:01 as a code for Jews. So the Stalinist reasoning takes up a Nazi or fascist trope, 14:09 namely that, it is the Jews who are responsible for the permeability of culture. It's the Jews who open up culture to being perverted 14:17 and influenced by outside forces. That is what they do. And this means that, 14:23 especially after the foundation of the state of Israel, there's a turn in Stalinism against the Jews.

14:30 The last national action which was being prepared as Stalin fell ill and died was to be against the Jews.

14:38 And one of you asked me, and it's an important question, what does all this mean for the memory of the events that we refer to the Holocaust and the Soviet Union? 14:45 The events that we refer to as the Holocaust could not be referred, could not be defined as such in the Soviet Union.

14:50 In fairness, it took decades for that term to actually emerge as important in the United States. I mean, deep into the 1980s, 14:57 the Holocaust in the "New York Times" still meant nuclear holocaust, right? It's only actually fairly recently, 15:02 basically in your lifetimes plus a few years, in which Holocaust has the meaning that it does to you today, that is, the attempt at exterminating all the Jews.

15:10 So that's just, you know, just to keep perspective. But in the Soviet Union, the notion was that the Jews who were murdered were peaceful Soviet citizens.

15:18 And if you were a Jew and tried to draw attention to the fact that Jews were murdered as Jews, and many more of them were murdered than other groups, 15:25 then you were treated as someone who was a nationalist perhaps, or a cosmopolitan.

15:30 But in any event, you were going to be punished. The very people who Stalin sent to the United States in 1943 to raise money, 15:37 Soviet Jewish activist writers, he sent them here, Madison Square Garden, they were in a fundraising campaign all across the United States precisely on the logic that 15:44 Jews are suffering under the Nazis. Let's raise money for the Soviet Union. Those people were then purged and several of them were killed 15:50 on the logic that they had stood out, (chuckling) and that they had done something they weren't supposed to do. Okay, so this brings me to the first end of history that- 16:00 So I've already given away the game, right? So if I don't get to the end, you know that history doesn't actually ever come to an end, right? 16:05 So when I talk about these ends of history, I'm trying to give us some perspective on things which were presented as ends of history.

16:11 So my first end of history is the end of Ukrainian history. And what I have in mind is a kind of dialectical solution 16:21 that Nikita Khrushchev is associated with. By dialectics, so, I mean, for all of you, 16:26 you know, Anglo-Saxons out there who are used to thinking in a straight line, the dialectic is the idea, you know, if at all, 16:35 the dialectic is the idea that something can persist even as it is transformed, right? 16:44 So that things don't just move in a straight line, but rather something can meet its contrary and be overcome.

16:50 And in being overcoming, it becomes a kind of higher reality, which preserves elements of what it was before, but which is nevertheless qualitatively different.

16:58 So, right. So you needed like a- Okay. Drug joke cut right out of the lecture, right there.

17:05 Never happened. There was no drug joke at all. Yeah so, it didn't happen. Never happened.

17:10 I didn't make a drug joke. That was me not making a drug joke. (audience laughing) Okay, so. Okay. You needed to wake up an hour earlier.

17:17 You need coffee. So the example of the dialectic, which many people will be roughly familiar with, would be the Marxist dialectic, right? 17:24 So the idea that class conflict, capitalism is both good and bad, okay? 17:31 It's both good and bad. It's good because it builds up the structures that you need for socialism, 17:37 but it's bad because it makes the workers suffer. So if you say capitalism is bad, that's not quite true because in the seeds of that suffering 17:44 is the good of the revolution, right? And the revolution is gonna maintain, when the revolution happens, 17:49 it's gonna preserve elements of capitalism, but at a higher level, right? Transformed. Okay.

17:58 So Khrushchev has a dialectical idea about the Ukrainian nation, which I'm going to explain to you in just a moment.

18:04 But before I do that, I have to say a word about church history.

18:10 The incorporation of Volhynia and Galicia, 18:15 but especially Galicia, poses a durable challenge to Soviet Ukraine.

18:21 Volhynia and Galicia are these westerly districts that had belonged to Poland, whose citizens have been Polish citizens 18:27 in the '20s and '30s, and who had been exposed to many repressions on the Polish side, 18:33 but who had not been exposed to Soviet Terror and Soviet famine.

18:38 In Galicia, there was still a Greek Catholic Church.

18:43 And the Greek Catholic Church, what the Greek Catholic Church is, you know, it's a quintessentially Ukrainian institution.

18:49 I was at a fundraiser for the Ukrainian Catholic University on Sunday. Ukrainian Catholic Church is the institution 18:57 which was founded in 1596 by the Union of Brest, which was known as the Uniate Church 19:03 for a couple hundred years after that. After the partitions of Poland, the Habsburg took this church under their wing 19:08 and they renamed it the Greek Catholic Church. They educated the priests, they treated the priests as a kind of a conduit 19:16 for enlightenment in a larger population. So this Greek, and then this Greek Catholic Church 19:22 especially under Metropolitan Andrii Sheptyts'kyi, became something like a national institution 19:27 under the Habsburgs and remain so under the Poles. Sheptyts'kyi by the way is, 19:34 well, he's remembered for a lot of very interesting things, but one of the things that he's remembered for and that we ought to know him for in this class 19:40 is that he probably rescued more Jews during the Holocaust than any non-diplomat. So there were diplomats who rescued more people, 19:47 but Sheptyts'kyi rescued more than a hundred Jewish children in the St. George's complex in Lviv.

19:54 He died in 1944. He died just as Soviet power was returning. When the Soviets reenacts what had been Western, 20:04 what had been Western Ukraine is now Western Ukraine again, what had been Poland, they dissolved the Greek Catholic Church in March of 1946 20:12 and they subordinate the Greek Catholic Church to the Russian Orthodox Church based in Moscow.

20:19 The Greek Catholic Church continues to exist in hiding as they save themselves in the catacombs.

20:25 There continued to be sacraments, there continued to be priests until the end of the Soviet Union.

20:31 Now a striking thing about this little incident which I just want you to note, is that when the Soviet Union dissolves 20:37 the Greek Catholic Church, they do it in March of 1946, I'm not expecting any of you 20:43 to like do the math in your head but that's the 350th anniversary of the Union of Brest.

20:49 No, it's not my joke. This is on purpose because there's something about these round numbers 20:55 which is starting to draw the Soviet imagination, right? Something about these kind of negative anniversaries.

21:01 I say negative because when it was 1596 and the Union of Brest was made, nobody said, "Hey, in 350 years 21:07 there'll be a Soviet Union which is gonna undo this. " It's a negative anniversary 'cause it only makes sense looking back, right? 21:12 So in 1946, the logic was, a mistake was made 350 years ago, 21:18 which we are now, yes, it's weird, which we are now going to correct. I just wanna note this kind of secular thinking, right? 21:24 This treatment of the past, this non-historical treatment of the past as a kind of source of anniversaries where we confirm something or where we undo something.

21:33 This hasn't been a class on Marxism but that is not a Marxist way of looking at history, right? That's not a Marxist way of looking at history at all.

21:40 It's a very conservative way of looking at history. Okay, so this brings me to what Khrushchev did, 21:46 which is very interesting. So Nikita Khrushchev is the last leader of the Soviet Union/Russia 21:56 who you could say really knew something about Ukraine. We talked about this a few lectures ago, 22:02 this phenomenon of Russian workers who went to the Donbas.

22:07 Sorry, Russian peasants, Russian workers working in the Donbas. That was Khrushchev's family.

22:14 He was from, you know, as soon as I say this, you know, one of my TAs who shall remain nameless, will google it, 22:19 but he was from a little place I think called Kalinovka, and his family went into the Donbas and worked, 22:26 like a lot of Russian workers, right? Then in the party, he was in Ukraine, 22:31 Soviet Ukraine, during the Terror. He was in Soviet Ukraine during and after the war.

22:37 His, ugh, I'm not sure if concubine is the word if you're a communist but his longtime partner, 22:43 later his wife, was a Ukrainian from the far, far, far west, 22:50 from Vasylkiv, or Vasilkov, which is now actually in Poland. So she was a Lemko.

22:55 Lemkos being Ruthenian speakers of a language which can be seen as a dialect of Ukrainian.

23:01 Although if you speak Polish, it's strikingly easy to understand Lemko dialect of Ukrainian.

23:07 So she was a Lemko. There were the Lemkos, the Boykos, the Hutsuls, these are the Ruthenians from the extreme west of, 23:15 you know, what's now considered Ukraine. Also in Czechoslovakia, also in Poland. So she was a Lemko from the far, far, far west 23:23 of what you'd think of Ukrainian territory, who moved to Odesa, became a communist. And then she was in the West Ukrainian Communist Party, 23:28 inside Poland in the interwar period. So she was someone who understood Ukrainian politics from all the way from the west.

23:35 So why am I telling you all this detail about Khrushchev? Oh, Khrushchev was also involved in the suppression of Ukrainian partisans after the Second World War, right? 23:43 So Khrushchev knew that there was a Ukrainian question. He knew there was a Ukraine, he'd been deeply involved with it 23:49 in many angles for decades. So it's a little bit, it's a little bit like after the First World War, 23:56 when the Bolsheviks realized, okay, of course we have to deal with Ukraine in some way because we've just realized Ukrainians can field an army 24:03 and, you know, they lost, but they're real. After the Second World War, and Khrushchev comes to power 24:08 after Stalin's death which is 1953, he is someone who's been dealing with the Ukrainian question one way or another, on and off his entire life.

24:16 So he finds a solution to this question of how Ukraine can both exist and not exist.

24:24 Here's the solution. It has to do with an anniversary, okay? So imagine it's 1954 24:32 and Khrushchev has just come to power.

1954- See, it's like so handy that you've taken this class, 24:39 like, it goes back centuries, right? Because you're immediately thinking 1954, that's the 300th anniversary 24:45 of the Treaty of Pereiaslav, right? That's what you're thinking. You're like, you guys were right on that. And so was Khrushchev.

24:52 So the official interpretation which is given of Ukrainian history, and this is clever and it is very influential 24:59 and it has something to do with the war that's going on now, the official interpretation which Khrushchev gives is, 25:04 yes, of course, Ukraine exists, ancient history, distinct nation, Cossacks, all of that.

25:10 But in 1654, Ukrainians chose to forever bind their own history 25:17 with that of Russia, right? So they existed in order not to exist, 25:23 or they existed in order to exist at a higher level, right? Ukraine existed, but it flowed into Russia 25:29 and thereby exist at a higher level as part of now the Soviet Union, right? That's dialectical thinking.

25:35 If you kind of stretch your neck a little bit, it's easier. So this is kind of a brilliant solution 25:41 and it's connected with, 'cause it seems to solve this ideological problem the Soviet Union keeps having. Ukraine is real, but then like, we're afraid of it.

25:48 What are we gonna do? What's its future? Its future. Its future was chosen in 1654, 25:54 exactly 300 years before. The way this was done marks a couple of trends in the communist world.

26:02 The first I've already suggested, which is this anniversary business, right? The nostalgia, the justifying things on the basis of hundreds of years ago.

26:10 The second is consumerism. So in 1954, to mark this grand anniversary, 26:15 which they just, you know, invented. I mean, it's not that anybody was celebrating the 100th or the 200th, right? Only the 300th (chuckling) was somehow important.

26:23 So they produced consumer goods marked 300 years, 26:29 200, 200,000 I think it's Yekelchyk who writes about this in your reading, 26:35 2 million packs of cigarettes with 300 years written on them, which is kind of mysterious. It's like the opposite of the health warning 26:41 you get now, right? 200 pairs of men's socks, 26:47 200,000 bras and nightgowns. And I just like leave it to your imagination what impression it makes when a bra says 300 years on it.

26:55 (audience laughing) But I mean, in fairness, this was the beginning of consumerism in the Soviet Union.

27:00 Okay, the other thing which happens in 1954, and this is, again, very, 27:05 this is pregnant with meaning for what comes next, is that Khrushchev, again, someone who understands the Ukrainian question 27:12 and knows that, unlike a lot of, you know, unlike Brezhnev who's gonna come, unlike other people, he knows that it would make sense 27:19 to appear to be doing something for Ukraine. Khrushchev has the idea that the Crimean Peninsula 27:26 will be transferred from the Russian Federation to Ukrainian Republic, right? 27:32 When I say Russian Federation, I mean the Russian- The RSFSR, I mean the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, 27:37 the Russian Republic of the Soviet Union. Trends because none of these are independent states at the time. Of course, there's a Russian Republic, Ukraine Republic.

27:43 It's gonna be moved from the Russian Republic to the Ukrainian Republic. Why did that happen in reality? 27:50 Two reasons. The first is practical. As you all know from reading the news, Crimea is a peninsula, from the point of view of Ukraine.

27:57 It's connected by land. But it's an island, from the point of view of Russia. There's no connection to Ukraine from Russia by land.

28:03 Hence the big bridge. And so if you're going to, so in terms of just sheer administration, 28:09 the connection of water and electricity, the grid, work much better from Ukraine obviously then from Russia.

28:15 And so administratively, it made a lot of sense. The second reason why this sort of thing was plausible 28:21 is the ethnic cleansing of the Crimean Tatars. Because up until 1944, the reason why Crimea had a special status, 28:28 it wasn't just in the Russian Federation, it was an autonomous unit of the Russian Federation, because of the Crimean Tatars.

28:35 Once the Crimean Tatars were ethnically cleansed, as they were, that reason for that status disappears.

28:40 In fact, that status itself becomes a bit of an embarrassment. Why was it an autonomous republic? Because, you know, they're not even supposed to speak 28:46 about the Crimean Tatars at this point, right? All the Crimean Tatar, like the toponyms, 28:52 just like Catherine did, the toponyms, the place names, are now being renamed. Crimean Tatar war heroes are being described as Dagestani.

29:00 They're being given other ethnicities in Soviet press, just because the idea of the Crimean Tatars 29:05 is supposed to go away, it's supposed to disappear. And so that's another reason why the transfer of Crimea could seem plausible.

29:12 And it suggests a kind of, look, it suggests two interesting things at once.

29:18 That Ukraine is getting something, so Ukraine should be grateful. Russia is giving something.

29:25 But the idea that Russia is giving something suggests that it was Russia's to give, right? 29:30 And here you find the origin of this notion that Crimea was always Russian. Because how could Russia have given it to Ukraine 29:38 if it hadn't been Russia's to give? But maybe in some pretty profound senses, it wasn't Russia's to give, right? 29:45 Maybe in some fairly profound senses, Crimea had a diverse history, all of its own.

29:51 Okay, so this moment in 1954 with the gift of Crimea, the gift of Crimea from Russia to Ukraine, 29:56 you can see how that matters now. Because the idea that Crimea was always Russian 30:02 is based upon two things, the ethnic cleansing of the Crimean Tatars, and then the idea that Russia could give it to Ukraine, right? 30:08 That's the basis of that notion. Okay, so. But this from Khrushchev's point of view, 30:14 of course, this is a meant to be a kind of pro Ukrainian gesture. And towards the end of Khrushchev's period, 30:20 we actually do move into a period of something like national communism in the Ukrainian Republic 30:26 under a man called Petro Shelest. Shelest. I think I'll put his name on there for you.

30:32 Shelest. Shelest was a Ukrainian, native of Ukraine.

30:39 Unlike Khrushchev, he had nothing to do with Stalinist crimes. He was perceived as protective of Ukrainian culture, 30:47 or at least not as interfering with Ukrainian culture. The 1960s saw a minor renaissance of Ukrainian culture 30:54 led by young writers uncreatively known as the Sixtiers group.

31:01 One of the figures here who's gonna appear in a couple of different junctures in your reading is Ivan Dziuba who wrote an interesting text called 31:07 "Internationalism or Russification?" which raises the questions which I've been talking about here like, you know, for example, 31:13 well, it's about these tensions, right? About how you handle Ukraine.

31:19 And is Moscow actually internationalist or is Moscow actually Russifying? 31:25 Dziuba also in 1966, and this is in your reading, gives a little informal speech at the site of Baby Yar.

31:32 Baby Yar is the largest single massacre site in the Holocaust in terms of mass shootings.

31:40 In September of 1941, about 34,000 Jews were murdered over the course of two days over this ravine, Baby Yar, 31:48 at the edge of Kyiv. And Ukrainian Jews, survivors, other Jews, had been gathering informally at this site.

31:54 And in 1966, Dziuba gave this speech, which was, you know, which was a kind of breakthrough in Ukrainian-Jewish relations.

32:01 And that was all part of this moment of relative freedom of Ukrainian culture. Okay, so Ukrainian history came to an end, right? 32:08 You got it, 1654 Ukraine merged into Russia. Its only purpose was to merge into Russia. You also get that that's not really the end of history.

32:15 All right, so the third end of history, I've already suggested, is the end of Crimean history, right? 32:21 The end of Crimean history, which is implied in this transfer.

32:29 You know, as you know in this class, especially from that lecture of a couple weeks ago, actually a lot of the oldest attested material 32:36 we have from this region is from Crimea or from the southern coast. The oldest attested peoples, 32:41 not the oldest peoples but the oldest attested peoples who left behind a written trace are in or around Crimea, 32:46 and they're the Greeks and the Jews. We know that the Golden Horde and the Crimean Khanate 32:52 had a state in Crimea for about 600 years.

32:57 And that that came to an end in 1783 when New Russia, 33:02 when Russian Empire takes over and New Russia is declared. At that time, the population of Crimea 33:08 was about 100% Crimean Tatar. By 1944, it was 0% Crimean Tatar, right? 33:17 After the deportation. And so, you know, as I mentioned before, this is a kind of end of history.

33:23 Because it's not just that the people are removed, it is also that their property is given away, 33:29 the names of sacred sites, the names of towns, the names of everything are changed.

33:35 The Crimeans are not only deported, this might seem obvious, but they're not allowed to come back. And although Khrushchev generally 33:42 condemns Stalin's deportations of people, he does not change the rule that the Crimeans 33:47 are not allowed to come back. And, of course, in this transfer of 1954, 33:53 this grand, you know, gesture between Russia and Ukraine, the Crimeans are totally absent. Nobody goes to Uzbekistan and asks the Crimeans 34:00 what they think about any of this, right? And so this is a kind of end of history too, 34:07 the end of the history of Crimea or the end of history of the Crimean Tatars. And the notion that it was always Russia, 34:16 which, you know, has its intellectual origins around this 1954 transfer, it also is very appealing to Soviet citizens 34:24 who come to settle in the Crimean Peninsula. The Crimean Peninsula remains and becomes a even more important Soviet naval base.

34:31 And so it has that demographic. It also becomes a place where Soviet notables can retire 34:37 for the very simple reason that it's warm and most of the rest of Russia is not.

34:43 And when you're a recent arrival in a colonizing position, the notion that a place has always been yours (chuckling) 34:49 is very attractive, right? Very attractive. See, look, you're getting better at dialectics all the time, right? 34:54 So like, precisely because you're new, the idea that you've always been there is very attractive.

35:00 Because the thought that you're just there colonizing, literally taking someone else's property after they've been ethnically cleansed 35:05 is not very appealing. So the idea that you were always there is attractive precisely because you weren't, right? 35:11 So that's the end of Crimean history. Now the final end of history that I wanna do, 35:18 actually there's two more, the next one is the end of Soviet history, okay? 35:24 And the end of Soviet history, we're gonna talk more about this in a lecture to come, but the end of Soviet history has to do with Brezhnev, 35:33 Leonid Brezhnev who supplants Khrushchev in 1964. He makes his debut on the world stage really in 1968 35:41 when the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies invade Czechoslovakia to put to an end 35:48 a reform movement known as the Prague Spring. In 1968, he inaugurates what's called the Brezhnev Doctrine.

35:57 The Brezhnev Doctrine is the idea, and this has resonance today too, that whenever a fellow socialist state 36:05 is threatened by counterrevolution, the Soviet Union can arrive with fraternal assistance, right? 36:11 So this metaphor of brothers is a very interesting thing.

36:18 I mean, again, not to put too fine a point on it, but like being someone's brother is not a very Marxist idea, (chuckling) right? 36:26 At least not in this sense, right? I mean, fraternite, okay, that could be a revolutionary idea. But the idea that I'm your big brother 36:32 and then when something goes wrong, I get to come in and pound you, that is not an especially Marxist idea.

36:37 And that's the idea of brotherhood which is meant here. And it also raises interesting questions. Like, if you're my little brother, 36:44 who are the parents? Like, where's mom and dad? Like, where are they in all of this? Right? 36:49 So like, this move into the family, like it's actually a very conservative move, right? 36:56 It's kinda mysterious, right? There are just these brothers and there aren't new sisters and there aren't parents, but there are brothers.

37:01 And the little brother's always doing wrong and the big brother's always gonna come and help. That idea in 1968, but even more importantly than that in 1968 37:08 about the Brezhnev Doctrine is that it's no longer really about ideology.

37:14 So Brezhnev doesn't care about Marxism. He cares about it much less than we have in this lecture.

37:20 You know, Brezhnev, doing that thing about dialectics, he also would have like raised his, you know, eyebrows, which is more of an effort for him than for you guys.

37:27 And, you know, would have said, "Oh, what are you talking about" right? Brezhnev was not interested in Marxist theory at all.

37:32 The Brezhnev Doctrine is not really about Marxism, it's about power. And the Brezhnev Doctrine defines what is, 37:40 as what should be, right? So, you just follow the line, whatever it might be, and that's it.

37:46 We're not gonna justify it theoretically anymore. That's a big important breakthrough in the 1970s 37:51 in the Soviet Union, and not only. Because what it suggests is that 37:57 we are no longer moving into a future where these dialectics are still doing their work or into a future where Stalinist industrialization 38:05 is still producing dynamism and economic change and social mobility, which it did, for a couple generations. But no longer.

38:10 Social mobility is basically halted, right? In the Soviet Union in the 1970s, if you're an engineer, very likely your father was an engineer, right? 38:18 If you went to university, probably your parents did. In the early days of the Soviet Union, it wasn't like that, right? 38:23 It wasn't like that. The nice apartments in Kyiv, with all due respect, like in the late Communist period, they were owned by families that were elite families.

38:31 Okay, owned is maybe the wrong word. But in the early period, that wasn't true. There was lots of dynamism because of the economy, but also because of Terror, right? 38:38 Also because of Terror. One of the things, one of the attractions of Terror, if you're young, 38:43 I don't mean to give you ideas, but one of the attractions of Terror if you're young is that it- Stop nodding in the front row, it's troubling.

38:49 You're right like only a few feet from me. One of the attractions of Terror if you're young, 38:54 is that it clears up space above, right? So the Great Terror of '37, '38, among other things, cleared up a lot of room up above 39:01 for people to move through the ranks quickly and make careers. But both Khrushchev and Brezhnev, 39:07 and this is one of the few things that Brezhnev kept from Khrushchev, said we're no longer to have mass Terror, 39:12 at least that affects other communists, right? So that was another way that social mobility was halted.

39:19 So what Brezhnev is doing in the 1970s is he is proclaiming something like 39:24 what he calls really existing socialism. And really existing socialism, it's like that- 39:30 There's a Jack Nicholson movie in which he says like, "This is as good as it gets. " I've even forget the movie, 39:36 like maybe that was even the title, but he is in a dentist's office and he's like looking around. It's like there was an old guy sitting next to him. He's like, "You know, this is as good as it gets. " 39:43 It's like that. Like, this is it. Like, this is it. There's nothing else. We told you there was gonna be communism, 39:49 there isn't gonna be communism. This is it, right? Your little apartment, you know, whatever, that's it.

39:54 This is it. This is real existing socialism. This is what we've got. And we're gonna defend it.

39:59 And it's not gonna change. We'll keep it going, we'll tinker with the economy, but no major reforms, 40:05 certainly no theoretical discussion. This is it. And this has basic implications for the Ukrainian issue 40:13 because, if everything is just the way that it is, all you gotta do is kind of borrow from the West, 40:20 and this is how the Soviet Union gets itself into trouble. Talk about it next time. But you borrow money from the West, you borrow gadgets from the West, 40:26 you steal gadgets from the West, you steal technology from the West as best you can, and you try to make the system, as it is, function smoothly.

40:35 How does it function smoothly? Suddenly Technocracy is what matters. Not revolution, technocracy. We all have to speak the same language.

40:41 What language is that gonna be? Russian. And so here you have, you're in this old imperial tension 40:46 where the center says, I need you all to speak Russian. But it's not because I don't like, you know, Bashkir.

40:53 It's not because I don't like be Belarusian or Estonian. It's because it's efficient. Whereas you, from your point of view, 40:59 in Mongolia or the Baltics or whatever, you say, actually I kinda like my own language and I think it's plenty efficient.

41:05 You know, I think it works very well. It's very efficient in my own life, right? And so that tension, which is built into all these projects 41:11 emerges in 1970s with particular reference to Ukraine. So Shelest is replaced in 1972 41:20 by Brezhnev's man who's called Shcherbytsky. And the 1970s then become a decade of a kind of administrative Russification of Ukraine.

41:29 No one says Ukraine doesn't exist, no one says Ukraine high culture doesn't exist, but Ukrainian language disappears slowly from schools, 41:38 the Ukrainian textbooks are printed in far lower print runs.

41:43 It goes down to about 25% by the end of the 1970s of what it had been at the beginning. Russian becomes very much the language of prestige.

41:51 To take an example you guys will understand, everybody will understand this example. You theoretically- 41:57 Okay, I'm just gonna put it to you, right? Theoretically, you could take your university exams like the equivalent of your SAT, whatever, 42:02 university entrance exams in Ukraine, you could theoretically take them in both Ukrainian or Russian, 42:07 because we're tolerant, right? But the difference is, if you take them in Ukrainian, you're not gonna pass.

42:14 (audience member laughing) So what do you do, right? I mean, what do you actually do, right? 42:20 So no one is saying Ukraine doesn't exist. Look, here's the entrance exam, right? Here, it's right there in front of you.

42:25 You wanna take it? But if you want social advancement, if you want to go to college, you're gonna take it in Russian, right? 42:31 So that's the kind of dynamic we're talking about here. So I'm referring to this as an end of history 42:39 because of this idea that this is as good as it gets. That, you know, everything is now just about the- 42:46 It's about the consumerism. You know, we're gonna kind of imitate the capitalist that way. We imitated them with the transformation, 42:52 now we're gonna imitate them with consumerism. And with the nationalism. But this is where things get tricky.

42:58 In the '70s and '80s all over the Soviet Bloc, regimes begin to resort to nationalism.

43:04 But how do you do that in the Soviet Union? The Soviet Union's a multinational state. The way that they do it is with nostalgia 43:12 about the Second World War, which is referred to as the Great Fatherland War.

43:17 When Brezhnev takes away the future, he substitutes in the past, right? 43:23 He's actually very, I mean, he gets mocked a lot but these are very intelligent political techniques 43:29 which plenty of capitalists in the 21st century have copied, right? So you take away the future 43:34 and you slide in the past. And the past is a view of the Great Fatherland War 43:40 in which the Soviet Union is the innocent victim, and the Soviet peoples defend the world 43:46 from the horrors of fascism, led, of course, by the Russians. So there's an ambiguity here. Is it a myth about all the Soviet Union, 43:53 or is it a myth about Russia? And it's in this myth that present-day leaders 43:58 like Lukashenko in Belarus or Putin in Russia were raised.

44:04 And it's another building block in trying to understand this war of 2022. Because the idea of the Second World War in which, you know, 44:12 Stalin's alliance with Hitler is totally forgotten, the Russians are totally innocent and, you know, 44:17 won the war with nobody else's help, you just have to simplify that a few more steps to get to the way Putin thinks about the Second World War.

44:24 And also, it helps to explain, you know, why he would think that he could fight this war the way that he has done.

44:31 You know, who is in fact- The Mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, who was an anti-Semite, he said, 44:36 you know, "Who is a Jew, I decide. I decide who is a Jew," right? Putin's notion is like, "Who is a fascist, I decide," right? 44:43 If it's anybody but me. Because by definition the fascist are the other side. And that's just a couple of steps away from this view, 44:50 the Soviet view of the Second World War. So it's an end of history in which now you're looking back to the past.

44:56 All right, where I wanna close is just with a few minutes about Poland.

45:01 In Poland, and here's where you get all these funny names that are at the end, 45:07 like all these names of like Polish thinkers and Ukrainian thinkers. And the reason why they're here is because in Poland, 45:16 or rather from Polish thinkers, you get a very interesting moment 45:22 of Polish Ukrainian conversation, which is actually about how history's not over. (chuckling) 45:27 It's about how something new is coming and we have to be ready for it. Which is so different and fresh in its time, 45:34 that many people can't deal with it, right? Even from the point of view of the West, 45:39 in the '70s and '80s, the idea that there was gonna be anything but more of this was almost impossible to process, right? 45:47 By the '70s and '80s, it really did seem like Brezhnev was forever, the Soviet Union was forever, the Eastern Bloc was forever.

45:53 Ukraine had been pretty much completely forgotten about, except by the emigre institutions, 45:58 the Canadians in Alberta, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, the diaspora.

46:03 But with the exception of that, Ukraine was basically gone from the Western imagination. But there was a very interesting project inside Poland 46:12 or among Poles which worked against this. And it operated against this notion that history was over, 46:19 which was also true in Poland too. In Poland, there was everything I talked about.

46:25 There was, 1968 as a turning point, shift to consumerism and nationalism. In the 1970s, the Polish state actually declares itself 46:32 to be ethnically homogeneous, which is a way of saying history is over, right? All these national things, 46:37 it's all Poles now. No Jews, no Russians, no Ukrainians, no Belarussians, no Germans.

46:43 It's just Poles and that's the triumph of communism. It's a very interesting version of the triumph of communism, right? 46:49 But history is over. There was a group of people around a journal called "Paris Kultura. " 46:56 And I need you guys to know this name so much that I'm going to give you a hundred percent guarantee 47:01 that it's on the exam. (chuckling) "Paris Kultura. " "Paris Kultura" was formed by a group of Polish emigres.

47:11 Jerzy Giedroyc was the most important. Juliusz Mieroszewski also very important. Jozef Czapski. And what "Kultura" said was, about the Ukrainian question, 47:21 very interesting things. But in 1952, they printed a letter to the editor which said, 47:26 "Let Lvov be Ukraine. " Actually, it said, "Let the blue and yellow flag fly from Lvov. " 47:33 Now if you're Ukrainian, you're thinking like, what's radical about that? What's radical about that is that Poland had just lost 47:38 half of its territory seven years ago under conditions which could only be seen 47:43 as completely illegitimate, right? The Soviet Union had taken half of Poland's territory in a war in which Poland had lost 47:49 millions of its own population, right? In those conditions, saying, "Oh yes, let's just like. Oh, fine. " 47:55 You know, Poland only had four major cities. Warsaw was destroyed, Vilnius went to Lithuania, 48:00 Lviv went to Ukraine, right? And so you're saying, "Oh, legit. " It was like saying in 1952, 48:05 "Let the Ukrainians have it," was incredibly radical. And they went from there to the argument 48:12 in the '60s and '70s- Again, the crucial thing about this, guys, the crucial thing is they were thinking ahead, right? 48:20 They didn't think history was over. They thought at some point communism was gonna come to an end.

48:26 Even more essentially, they thought that imperialism had to come to an end. And they didn't just mean Russian imperialism, right? 48:34 They meant imperialism as a whole, which meant their own imperialism, 48:39 their own Polish imperialism had to come to an end. So their strategic argument 48:45 for the existence of Ukraine was, we need Ukraine because without Ukraine, 48:50 there will be Russian imperialism and there will be Polish imperialism. And both of those things are bad for us.

48:57 Russian imperialism bad for us, Polish imperialism also bad for us. So there was a calculated strategic argument 49:04 which they made in the '60s and '70s, totally in the wilderness. Totally in the wilderness.

49:09 Other Polish immigrants did not necessarily go along with this view, right? In the West, the idea that communism have come to an end, 49:17 Ukraine, all this, pretty marginal. But along with this, and all these names that I don't have time 49:23 to mention anymore, unfortunately, but along with this, what "Kultura" did was seek out and publish 49:29 exceptionally talented Ukrainian writers like George Shevelov, 49:35 like Borys Levyts'kyi. They found the Ukrainian writers and they befriended them and they published them.

49:43 The Ukrainian writers who were executed in the '30s or committed suicide, the term Executed Renaissance for those writers 49:51 comes from Jerzy Giedroyc. He made that term up. And he published a thousand-page book 49:57 collecting the works of these Ukrainian writers, right? No one else did that, but "Kultura" did that.

50:02 And in this and many other ways, they pushed Ukrainian culture towards the center 50:08 of at least of Polish culture and they made friendships. I'm gonna finish now, but you get the point.

50:15 By the time of Solidarity in Poland in 1980, the "Kultura," which was regarded 50:20 as the best Polish publication, had already started this argument. And so during the Solidarity period in '80, '81 50:26 where there was some space for free discussion, the Ukrainian question was already discussed. And many leaders of Solidarity, 50:32 such as Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuroń issued statements which were very friendly to the idea of Ukrainian 50:37 independence during that period of 1881. And then when Poland becomes an independent state in 1989, 50:43 this argument has already been won. And one of the first things that Poland does is that it begins a foreign policy 50:49 which is friendly to Ukraine. Now the reason why any of this was possible was because this milieu of intellectuals 50:56 had been making this argument that history was not over, that communism was gonna come to an end, 51:02 that imperialism does have to come to an end, and we have to be ready for it with arguments, right? 51:07 So, my Plato A here at the end is one for the history of ideas.

51:12 And I'll explain more about this in lectures to come, but the fact that some people recognized that history couldn't come to an end, 51:18 and that imperialism might come to an end, actually had a great deal of influence on how imperialism did come to an end after 1989.

51:27 Okay, that's it. Thanks.

51:36 (gentle music)

back to TOC


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Lecture 19 Oligarchies in Russia and Ukraine

0:00(majestic music) 0:12 - Okay, greetings. We're getting towards the end of this class, so I wanted to remind you that there is a second exam.

0:19 You know that. And I also want to remind you that there is a brief written assignment 0:24 for this class as well. It's not meant to be complicated. You don't really need to do any additional research for it.

0:30 It's essentially about looking at the reading that you've got and finding some kind of a theme 0:36 that you think is interesting in Ukrainian history. Ideally, not a theme which is identical to one of the lectures.

0:41 Ideally a theme where you've connected some of the dots yourself. It doesn't have to be an incredible brainstorm, 0:49 just a theme, Just an idea that unites other ideas.

0:55 And talk to your TFs about it, that's what they're there for. So this is not meant to be tricky. It's just meant to be for a way 1:01 to try to rethink the class diagonally, make some connections that maybe I didn't make 1:08 or the reading didn't make. Try to connect different parts of the reading with one another in a way which maybe I didn't do.

1:15 Talk about it amongst yourselves, not right now, but talk about it amongst yourselves. That's a good way to think of ideas, is to brainstorm 1:23 what some of these things could be. Might even be fun, meet your classmates.

1:28 Invite that person you always wanna invite for tea. Here's your chance. (student chuckling) 1:34 Who knows what will happen? (student chuckling) 1:40 speaking of who knows what will happen, it appears that a couple of Russian missiles 1:45 just fell on Polish territory, which leads us nicely into our theme today.

1:53 What I'd like to do today is I actually wanna take a step back and talk at greater length 2:00 about the Polish factor, just as I did a couple of lectures ago about the German factor.

2:06 I wanna do properly what I meant to do last time, which is to give you a sense of how Polish policy 2:13 after 1989 helped Ukraine to become the state that Ukraine has become.

2:19 I would use that to lead into the main subject, which is the 1980s, the 1990s, and the formation of a Ukrainian state.

2:28 So from today's point of view, November 15th or so, 2022, 2:33 where Poland is Ukrainian staunchest supporter, or one of Ukrainian staunchest supporters.

2:39 Where there have been millions of Ukrainian refugees in Poland in the last nine months.

2:45 It's very difficult to remember that in fact, Ukrainian national identity when it formed, 2:52 was formed against Poland. Against Poland. And so the Cossack legend, 3:01 the struggling peasantry, the battle for land, all of that is chiefly about, not Russia, but Poland.

3:09 It's about Poland. And then the Polish Ukraine encounter over the centuries has also created a lot of the concepts, 3:17 a lot of the underlying political notions that are taken for granted in Ukraine today 3:22 and has been creative in lots of other ways. So I just wanna start by reminding you of that. I know that you know it, 3:28 'cause one of the basic themes of this class has been that nations don't come from nowhere.

3:35 Humans evolved once in Africa. None of us is truly autochthonous, 3:40 groups come into contact with one another. The alphabet was only invented once. I can do this all day, 3:48 So when we look at a nation, the gut instinct of a state is very often to say 3:53 there was ethnogenesis and a people formed a thousand years ago, and maybe there was a baptism or like some magical event 4:00 where we all started, cherry tree was cut down, whatever, constitution, you name it. Like some moment where everything is like, 4:06 you get a clean, fresh start. But that's not the way history actually works. Nations are par excellence, 4:14 international events. And so in order to explain Ukraine or any other country, 4:20 you have to get all the international factors into the picture. This is something that Roman Szporluk 4:25 who was and is a great Ukrainian historian, always insisted on. And it's true for everybody. It's true for Russia, it's true for China, 4:32 It's true for America. If it weren't for the particular configuration of British-French relations 4:37 having to do with the Seven Years War, no America or some completely different version of America. All right, so I wanna just remind you 4:44 how important the Polish factor has been for Ukraine. You know that it was Lithuania, 4:51 which very quickly thereafter formed a personal union with Poland, which swept up most of the territories of old Rus, 4:59 including Kyiv. You know that it was Lithuania, which very quickly merged with Poland in a personal union, 5:05 which perpetuated much of the cultural attainments of Kyiv, including the language of law.

5:12 And much of the law. You know that because of the Polish-Lithuanian state 5:17 or the Lithuanian-Polish state, Kyiv becomes a major center of European trends 5:26 such as renaissance, reformation, counter reformation. Kyiv along with Chernihiv, 5:31 a couple of other places, if this were a class in Belarusian history, we'd be talking about some other characters like Skaryna.

5:39 But Kyiv is one of the places where an orthodox world, an eastern Christian world, is bouncing up against these Western trends.

5:47 And that's because of the Polish connection or the Lithuanian connection. The idea of a republic, 5:53 which is very important, Res publica, Rzeczpospolita, Rich Pospolyta 6:00 The idea of a republic comes from Poland. It's not coming directly from Rome of course, 6:06 it's coming from Poland. The idea of political rights in a republic 6:12 which may not be held by everybody. And of course the dispute between the Cossacks and the Polish nobility back in the 16th century, 6:19 17th century is largely about who belongs to the republic. Who actually has rights? 6:25 If the republic means the common matter, who is the public? Who has access to rights.

6:31 Both at the micro level and at the macro level, the Cossacks rebellion of 1648 is largely about that.

6:38 If Bohdan Khmelnyts'kyi had had better access to justice by way of courts, if he'd been seen as a noble, 6:44 then probably no rebellion, at least not at that time. The Cossacks themselves, 6:50 this particular formation of Cossacks anyway around Zaporizhzhia is a result of Polish power...

6:57 Encounter of Polish power with the Crimean Tatars. They're living in the zone between Polish power and the Crimean Tatars 7:03 and they're learning from both, adapting to both. So Poland-Lithuania loses the Left-Bank.

7:13 I've gotten all kinds of directions from email about what I should do with my hands when I talk about Left-Bank and Right-Bank.

7:18 They say, when you talk about the Right-Bank, move your left hand and then the students will understand. But I'm just assuming 7:24 you guys don't actually don't even know your left from right. So it doesn't matter what I do. I'm assuming you're like my kids.

7:30 They're like, if I say left, they go right, They go da, da, da, da. So I'm just gonna do whatever I want with my hands when I talk about...

7:35 But the eastern part of Ukraine, Poland loses, the Left-Bank is lost in the 1660s, 1670s.

7:41 The Right-Bank is lost about a century later when Poland is partitioned 1770s, 1790s.

7:50 There are four or 500 years here that one has to account for where the Polish factor is very, very direct.

7:56 And even after Poland no longer exists, as we've talked about, it's still the Polish aristocracy that owns much of the land 8:04 Right-Bank, Ukraine, all the way up to the Bolshevik Revolution. So there too, there's an important idea 8:11 of property rights and the desire of Ukrainian peasants to have to have property.

8:18 Then there's also this minor current, which becomes major later on, which is Galicia Volhynia.

8:24 Halychyna (indiscernible) Galicia. Which is part of Poland known as Czerwona RuÅ› 8:33 Red Ruthenia. It's part of Poland from the 1340s onward, and then is part of the Habsburg monarchy, 8:39 and then is part of Poland again. And then that region Halychyna Galicia becomes part of the Soviet Union 8:46 after the Second World War. And then is much of what we now call Western Ukraine.

8:54 So I'm just reminding you, I don't want you to forget any of this when we enter into the modern period.

9:00 'Cause there's this temptation in the 20th century, this kind of unhealthy temptation to say, 9:05 well something has just happened and now everything else is gone. Like the First World War, the 'war to end all wars,' 9:11 And the Second World War was thought to reset everything. And then the Cold War came to an end 9:16 and history itself supposedly then also came to an end. All these mental resets.

9:22 But there's no way to understand Ukraine without this long trajectory.

9:27 Which of course can be interpreted in various ways. But it's uncontroversial, and I think incontrovertible to say, 9:33 without the Polish factor in the long run, there wouldn't be a Ukraine of the kind that we now have.

9:40 So what I wanna explain now is the thing that I was very hasty about the last time, which is how Polish foreign policy 9:46 and Polish thinking about Ukraine had a decisive and I would even venture to say world historical effect in the 80's and in 1990s.

9:55 And to do this, I need to draw your attention to a certain... I'm gonna have to make a certain anti-imperial point, 10:01 which is this. When people talk about the period '89 to '91, 10:07 now they talk about Moscow and Washington, which is already problematic, 10:14 because what happened in '89 to '91 had a lot to do with Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, 10:21 Vilnius, a lot of other places. But more than that, people talk about Moscow and Washington 10:28 as though they knew what they were doing. Especially with respect to Washington.

10:33 There's this very strange view which holds that...

10:38 The Soviet Union broke up in 1991 because the Americans, and they were all powerful and they machinated... is that a word? 10:46 It was all (indiscernible) like they were behind everything and somehow there was a plot and they wanted to break the Soviet Union up.

10:53 And that's just not so. That's just not so. American policy at the time 10:58 was to hold the Soviet Union together. And the period '89 to '91 was a series of one unexpected event after the other, 11:06 which people reacted to sometimes very skillfully. The Bush Administration reacted very skillfully 11:12 to an unexpected situation, especially with respect to the unification of Germany. There were some good diplomats at work, no denying that, 11:18 but basically nobody expected the East European revolutions of '89. And even after the East European revolutions of '89, 11:25 very, very few people expected the Soviet Union to fall apart in 1991.

11:30 And the American political class was working with great determination in the opposite direction 11:36 to try to keep Gorbachev in power and to try to keep the Soviet Union together.

11:43 I mention all that because this is not a class about the Cold War, although Arne Westad teaches great classes about this.

11:49 This is a class about Ukraine. But it's very important to see that these countries, which where people lose focus, 11:59 what people remember about '89 to '91. I mean, what's one image from '89 to '91? 12:06 - [Student 2] The fall of the Berlin Wall. - Yes, David Hasselhoff. Sorry that joke did not work.

12:11 That joke was totally out... You know who David Hasselhoff is? So you know that he played on the Berlin Wall.

12:17 Yeah, so David Hasselhoff here is like KITT and Knight Rider. That was Knight Rider, yeah.

12:23 Because in Germany he's a rock star. And in Austria he's a rock star. And so when the Berlin wall fell, David Hasselhoff went and played...

12:31 You don't need David Hasselhoff, but the image is the Berlin Wall falling. Which A, it didn't fall.

12:36 It's a very dramatic image, The people... And then it fell. It didn't actually fall.

12:41 They opened the gates and they opened the gates, because an Italian journalist asked a question and the East German official gave an ambiguous answer 12:48 and people went to the gates and the border guards opened them and then they charged into... But that's not how communism really came to an end.

12:56 The reason why we like Berlin Wall is because it's very dramatic, right? And because it's Germany 13:01 and Germany's a big important country. But the real action at the end of the Cold War 13:06 was not actually in Germany. The real action at the very end of the Cold War was much more in Poland than anywhere else.

13:11 And when it comes to the end of the Soviet Union, we can't understand that part without Ukraine. I'm sure you all get that.

13:18 So the point that I wanna make now is that there was an interior development inside Poland, 13:26 or among Poles that was running against the main current of communism and also against the main current 13:34 of nationalism. And if that sounds contradictory, keep in mind that one of the ways that communism was trying to stay in power 13:41 by the 70s and 80s was as a kind of boring, homogenizing version of nationalism.

13:47 A nationalism which looked back to uncontroversial symbols that wouldn't defend the people in Moscow.

13:54 A communism that took credit in the Polish case for making the country nationally homogeneous 14:00 I. e. without Germans, without Ukrainians, and without Jews.

14:05 A communism which seemed like it could go on forever. And indeed that is what the 70s and 80s felt like.

14:13 So in order to... (foot bumping desk) Sorry. In order to understand the mood shift of '89, 14:20 one has to grasp that it really did seem like that version of communism could go on forever.

14:26 It really did seem like that they were winning, as they put it, the correlation of forces was in their favor.

14:32 That they were winning in the third world, that they would keep winning in the third world. That their economy was big 14:38 comparable to the American economy. The CIA thought that the Soviet economy was, in 1975, was 57% of the size of the US economy, 14:45 which it almost certainly wasn't. The East German economy was thought of as being... I forget, but it's like the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, 14:51 one of the biggest economies in the world, or at least per capita. Those things were really not true, 14:57 but that's really how it seemed. The version of communism 15:04 which was going on in Poland, offers a kind of exception.

15:09 And that exception was Solidarity. And I have to mention Solidarity.

15:15 I realize this is a class about Ukraine, not about Poland, but the Solidarity movement in Poland.

15:21 Which one of your TAs, whose name I won't mention since I've learned I shouldn't mention anybody's name, 'cause then they get like millions of emails.

15:29 But one of your TAs who shall now remain nameless, works on this subject. I'll be very happy to talk to you about it.

15:35 And you can guess which one. So Solidarity is very special, 15:41 because what Solidarity does is that it opens a window 15:47 where discussions of difficult questions having to do with communism and nationalism are possible.

15:53 Solidarity is possible, because the Polish workers above all, 15:59 who gets left outta the story of the revolution? The workers. There was only one working class revolution ever, and it was in Poland.

16:05 And who gets left out of the story? Poland and the workers.

16:10 '89 it's all about the clever guys in the suits. No, it's fundamentally about a working class revolution, 16:16 which began in Poland, which made it seem possible that communism could come to an end. So what was special about Poland was this, 16:23 in the 70s, the Polish regime was operating basically the way that other communist regimes 16:29 in Eastern Europe were operating and the way Brezhnev wanted them to operate. Namely, no discussions of ideology, 16:36 marxism is dead, no serious attempts to reform the system. Reform is dangerous, 16:42 if you try to reform, we can invade you as in Czechoslovakia in 1968. That's the Brezhnev doctrine.

16:49 The country seems to be getting a little bit out of line than fraternal assistance. So the Polish government, 16:55 which was led by a man called Edward Gierek took this to its logical extreme and said, 17:03 this is all about consumerism and nationalism. Then what we're gonna do 17:08 is we're gonna borrow... And you can see how this is just the next logical step. We're gonna borrow a lot of money from the West, 17:16 we're gonna let people travel a little bit more, we're gonna work on refrigerators and cars and consumer goods, try to provide them.

17:24 And for about five years, this seemed like it was going very well. We're talking about the 1970s now.

17:34 After about five years of this you get oil crisis, you get Poland not being able to pay back 17:41 its hard currency debts. So hard currency debt may sound like a technical term. And up until the moment when you don't have hard currency.

17:48 So if you borrow money in dollars or German marks as they were at the time, you have to be able to pay it back in dollars 17:54 or German marks, which means that you have to be able to sell something which will give you dollars or German marks, 18:00 which the Poles were not really in a position to be able to do. They over-invested in heavy industry.

18:06 They didn't invest in things that they could actually sell like textiles and agriculture. So they found the economy by 1979 18:12 went into the red GDP in 1979 in Poland, was negative.

18:18 Solidarity begins as an economic protest against price increases.

18:23 But it morphs very quickly into a political movement which demands the right to form a free 18:32 and independent labor union. That's what Solidarity is, it's a labor union.

18:38 But also other political rights like the release of political prisoners and freedom of speech.

18:44 Solidarity exists in Poland for about 16 months from August of 1980 18:52 until Marshal Law's declared in December of 1981. And during the 16 month period, there is a free discussion in the press, 18:59 in public among people of many difficult questions, including the Ukrainian question.

19:07 And Solidarity itself does some very interesting things with respect to Ukraine. Like for example, express its solidarity 19:13 with the nations of the Soviet Union. I'm sure that sounds incredibly... Like an incredibly bland formulation now.

19:20 But in 1981, that was an extraordinary thing to say, to recognize the nations of the Soviet Union.

19:27 And I'll talk more about this in a moment, but in Solidarity newspapers and even in public discussions, 19:33 many of the difficult questions of Polish-Ukrainian relations, which we've talked about, like the ethnic cleansing in Volhynia, Operation Vistula, 19:41 The interwar Poland and its oppressive policies towards Ukrainians. Many of these things were discussed, 19:47 Many of the things were worked out. People in Solidarity had the sense correctly that the Ukrainian question was being used against them.

19:56 That the Ukrainian question was being used to keep Poles in their place.

20:03 How did they know to do this? And this is the part that I did in 45 seconds last time. And I wanna spend a few more moments on it.

20:10 This is the part about where I was trying to make the point that history doesn't come to an end. And so you should plan for the future, 20:17 Which is, I'm sure that's what your mom and dad tell you all the time anyway. Sorry, I'm not gonna do an in imitation 20:22 of all of your parents, I have limited time. I only know some of your parents.

20:28 This is being filmed.

20:33 The point though and it's a very serious point, is that if you think history is coming to an end or if there's only one destination for history, 20:40 then political imagination just disappears. Just disappears. And if you're in a complaining mood, 20:47 you might say, oh, this is the story of my lifetime. Because in the United States, everyone said history came to an end in 1989 20:53 and then everyone stopped thinking about the future and here we are.

20:58 That may give you an intuitive sense of what I'm talking about. But what happened in the Polish case 21:05 is that a group of... A very small group of Polish thinkers centered around this journal called Kultura, 21:13 rethought the issue of Poland and its Eastern neighbors. And in particular they rethought 21:20 the issue of Poland and Ukraine. And the men and women who did this were coming out of a liberal status milieu 21:29 in Interwar Poland. They didn't come from nowhere. These were the same people who in Interwar Poland, 21:34 thought there should be autonomy for Galicia. We have to take the Ukrainian questions seriously.

21:40 Some of them were active in the attempt to create autonomy in Volhynia.

21:47 Some of them were thinking about how we might break the Soviet Union apart. This group survives... Most of them, 21:54 survives a second World War. They end up abroad 22:00 in a suburb of Paris called Maisons-Laffitte which is chiefly known for its horse races.

22:08 In case you go there, that's something you could do. The food's also nice. So they went to Maisons-Laffitte 22:13 'cause they couldn't afford the rent in Paris. And how did they get to Paris? Here's how they got to Paris. First you serve in the Polish army.

22:21 Second Germany invades, third, you retreat to the East, fourth Soviet Union invades, 22:28 fifth, you get deported to the Gulag, sixth after you deport to the Gulag, Germany invades the Soviet Union.

22:35 Seventh, Stalin decides that he needs you to fight after all on his side. Eighth, you're allowed to form an army, 22:41 but not one that's gonna fight on the eastern front, only on the western front. What number am I on? 22:47 - [Students In Unison] Nine. - Ninth you form up... You're released from the Gulag.

22:54 You probably leave your wives and children behind. You're released from the Gulag.

23:02 Men. You probably leave your wives and children behind the Gulag, 23:08 You form up... That part of the story always gets left out. But if you think about it for just a minute, you realize, well wait a minute, 23:15 where were the women and children? Oh, they were still in the Gulag. So you form up...

23:20 That's what heroism looks like. You form up in an army, 23:25 in a base in southern Russia. You make your way through Iran, Iraq, Palestine, 23:32 Northern Africa, you fight on the western front in Italy, take terrible casualties, 23:38 especially at the famous battle called Monte Cassino. That's the standard trajectory. And then after having done all of that, 23:45 of course the Soviets win the war on the Eastern Front, Poland goes communist, you can't go home. So simple little story.

23:52 That's the basic trajectory of a lot of these folks. They're variations, but that's the basic idea.

23:58 So these are people who are very often Russian speakers Jerzy Giedroyc's the most important of them, 24:05 born in Minsk. Russian, probably his preferred language of reading.

24:10 Had a Russian wife for a while. Jozef Czapski, probably the second most important of them.

24:16 Born in what's now Belarus. Very extremely cosmopolitan origins, 24:21 chooses Polish identity. These are people who knew Russian, who knew Eastern Europe, 24:27 who had a sense that Poland... Their sensibility about Poland was everything opposite. Everything contrary to the notion 24:33 that it was some kind of small Central European ethnically homogeneous entity.

24:38 But their achievement, their achievement was to think about the future 24:44 and to imagine what it would be like to be 24:49 an independent Poland in Eastern Europe. In other words, they went beyond the obvious grievance position.

24:56 I mean, it is totally obvious. Poland lost half its territory, It lost millions of people during the war.

25:01 It was an ally... The whole second World War was fought because of Poland. And even though it was an ally, 25:08 it still ends up under Soviet rule. The entirety of Warsaw is destroyed at the end of the war.

25:14 So there are things to have grievances about, but they, if you want, quite calmly or even coldly, 25:21 moved beyond the grievance. Oh, and the point is, a lot of these grievances could be directed against Ukrainians. Ukrainians got Western Ukraine.

25:27 That's not what they called it. Ukrainians got the districts of Małopolska wschodnia 25:33 they got Wołyń, the Ukrainians got this territory from us. So a lot of these grievances could be directed against Ukrainians.

25:38 What Kultura did was they moved beyond the grievance position into what they portrayed as a geopolitical position, 25:44 which is interesting. They said, okay, if there's gonna be an independent Poland, how is that gonna be possible? 25:51 How is it gonna be possible? It's gonna be possible with an independent Lithuania, independent Belarus and especially independent Ukraine.

26:02 And the reason why this is so important, this is their argument, is imperialism, 26:08 imperialism. Russian imperialism will only be blocked 26:13 by an independent Ukraine. Polish imperialism will only be blocked by an independent Ukraine.

26:21 There's a very important degree of self-understanding and self-knowledge in this. When I went to visit Jerzy Giedroyc in Paris 26:29 in Maisons Laffitte in 1994, for the first time.

26:35 He had no idea who I was. He didn't have a perfectly high opinion of Americans and I was just some kid.

26:41 But I told him what I was working on. At the time I was working on Polish... Contemporary Polish diplomatic relations 26:47 with Ukraine and Lithuania. And he said, he gave me this little speech in which he said, 26:52 ProszÄ™ Pana You've probably heard a great deal about the romantic Polish legacy in the East 26:58 and all of the terrible suffering of the Poles in the East. And he said, This is all nonsense.

27:06 Which is a very strong thing, to deny the entire frontier rhetoric of your own country.

27:14 Very strong position. To take Polish romanticism and say, 27:19 just gonna push that aside. Very strong position, very strong position.

27:25 And so they start with the geopolitical logic and the whole time, what they say is, 27:30 this is all... Okay, this is all just cold hard geopolitical reasoning. That's what they say.

27:36 But in order to carry this out, in order to make Ukraine real, 27:42 they engage with Ukraine. And again, for a lot of them, they've been already doing this for decades.

27:47 So Giedroyc took a class in Ukrainian history in I think 1924 in Warsaw.

27:53 Okay, so classes in Ukrainian history, they're important. He took a class in Ukrainian history as a law student in Warsaw.

27:59 He was engaged with a Galician question in interwar Poland. It wasn't the first time they thought about Ukraine, 28:04 but they engaged with Ukraine in the sense that they publish, I mentioned this last time, 28:10 they published Ukrainian writers, They published George Shevelov, who is a brilliant Ukrainian philologist.

28:16 They published Borys Levyts'kyi, he was a otherwise unknown, but very talented sovietologists 28:22 or contemporary historian in the Soviet Union. They publish a thousand pages of what Giedroyc calls the 'Executed Renaissance,' 28:29 which is the murdered or some of them committed suicide. But the murdered or exiled Soviet Ukrainian writers 28:37 of the 20s, the 20s and early 30s. In 1952, they publish a letter.

28:43 I mentioned this last time. They publish a letter saying, let the blue yellow flag fly over Lwów 28:51 which is an extraordinary... At the time, an extraordinary thing to say. And then they back that up over the course of the 60s and 70s 28:58 with a long series of geopolitical articles. But the entire time they're doing this, they're also publishing.

29:05 And here comes the slightly... The part which is slightly impalpable, but they also befriend Ukrainian writers.

29:13 They befriend Ukrainian writers. Ukrainian writers become part of their milieu over the course of the decades, 29:20 these friendships build up and Ukraine becomes real for them. So the entire time they're saying this is just like a 29:26 cold-hearted, you know, we're just cold-hearted geo politicians, we're just doing this in the interest of the Polish state.

29:31 And that's some of the truth, maybe even most of the truth. But that calculation, I mean, you might even say that geopolitics 29:39 was only possible with the help of the personal dimension. They couldn't have done it themselves. They needed to do it with the Ukrainians, 29:46 And so a lot of Ukrainians found their voice. Oh and I almost forgot to say, 29:51 the person, he only published one article in Kultura to my knowledge. But the person who was often guiding Giedroyc 29:59 about who to publish on the pages of Kultura was this fellow Ivan Rudnyts'kyi who I mentioned towards the beginning of the course.

30:06 Ivan Rudnyts'kyi who comes from this Ukrainian family, 30:12 Jewish origin. His mother was Milena Rudnyts'ka, powerful orator, parliamentarian interwar Poland.

30:19 It was Ivan Rudnyts'kyi who in the 60s and 70s in particularly 30:24 was winning the debate in the diaspora about what kind of nation Ukraine was.

30:29 He was also advising Giedroyc about who to publish in Ukraine. Rudnyts'kyi, you know who Rudnyts'kyi is, 30:35 because you're doing the reading, right? I don't have to tell you who... You're doing the reading. Yes, I like the smiles when I say that.

30:41 I'm not gonna think too hard about what those smiles mean, but I like them. So, Rudnyts'kyi who's the most influential voice 30:49 on behalf of the argument that Ukraine is a political nation and not an ethnic one, is involved with Giedroyc, 30:55 who has a very similar idea. A very similar idea about nationhood, which is its fundamentally a political commitment, 31:02 fundamentally about political action. So why am I dwelling on this so much? 31:08 I'm doing this so much because you've seen in this class how Ukraine is a result of, 31:15 and sometimes the victim of various imperial powers. You can't make sense of Ukraine without the Ottomans, 31:23 the Crimean Tatars. You can't make sense of Ukraine even without the Swedes, if only briefly.

31:28 The Austrians certainly matter quite a lot. And the Germans matter, definitely, 31:34 especially in the 20th century. The most important imperial powers would be the Russians and the Poles.

31:41 If you look at the situation as the Soviet Union is coming to an end in the late 1980s, you're down to only two possible imperial power...

31:48 Well, let's be nice to everybody else.

31:53 Only two possible imperial powers. The Poles and the Russians. And the Poles take themselves out of the picture.

32:01 The Poles take themselves out of the picture. The Poles in fall of 1990, 32:06 before Ukraine is an independent state, before the Soviet Union has ceased to exist, 32:13 they make up this thing of a treaty with a country that doesn't exist. Diplomacy can be more interesting than you think.

32:22 They make up this instrument, which is a kind of treaty with Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which says we each recognize each other's borders.

32:31 It could seem trivial, right? But it's not at all trivial. What they're doing is they're putting the border question 32:37 off the table preemptively. And when they do this, 32:42 I should mention Solidarity again, they're following the debate, which has been happening in Solidarity in the 1980s.

32:50 So the Solidarity debate all moved in that direction. So when comintern came to an end in Poland, 32:55 it wasn't like in other countries where suddenly all the historical questions rushed out at once and were very hard to handle.

33:02 That was true for the Soviet Union by the way. In Poland it was a bit different. The historical questions, many of them 33:08 had already been set up like the Ukrainian question. And so then when there was suddenly 33:14 a sovereign independent Poland, they could make policy based upon a previous discussion which had already happened.

33:20 So by the time that Ukraine does become independent in December of '91, there is no Polish question, 33:27 there is no Polish question. The Poles have already declared that they are in favor of an independent Ukraine, 33:32 which means that from December, 1991, to the present day, the only potential imperial power 33:39 and of course now real imperial power. But the only potential imperial power is Russia.

33:45 So you see where I'm going with this. The part of the making of modern Ukraine is the encounter with Poland.

33:51 Part of the making of the Ukrainian state as we know it now, has to do with Polish-Ukrainian relations, which since 1991 have certainly had their ups and downs.

33:58 But the recognition of Ukraine as an independent state and Ukrainians as a separate people 34:03 has always been a constant. So in Ukraine itself, 34:09 I wanna mention three influences on political thought in the 70s.

34:15 So as you've noticed, I think the 70s are very important for where we are now, because the 70s were when a certain generation, 34:23 which is still in power in Russia, and Belarus was formed. And what's crucial in Ukraine, I think, 34:29 is that that generation is no longer in charge in Ukraine. The people who run Ukraine now 34:34 are in their upper 30s and and lower 40s. They're from a different generation. This generation, which in the Soviet Union 34:40 was called stagnation or in Czechoslovakia normalization, this generation of the 70s, 34:46 this generation where... This time when ideas were thought not to matter. When history, as I talked about last time 34:53 was thought to be over when ideologies were all thought to be discredited and where cynicism was the dominant mood 35:02 that people had to try hard to come up with some way to think outta the box.

35:08 So at a time when East Europeans are being invited to just say all that really matters is your personal...

35:16 We know, we agree with you. There's gonna be no glorious communist future. We agree, we know, we admit it.

35:22 This is really existing socialism and this is good as it gets. But look, cars, maybe some foreign travel, 35:29 refrigerators, television, television was very important to this. Television programs.

35:36 We'll give you that and it's just gonna go on forever. There aren't any alternatives, that's the deal. How do you think your way out of that? 35:42 And so this idea of normality. In Poland, this is important, 35:48 to be abnormal in the 70s and 80s politically, was to be Jewish or Ukrainian.

35:54 Not really to be Jewish or Ukrainian. I mean some of them were Jewish. But it meant... So normal was like, you're with the crowd.

36:01 You belong to the majority nation. You're not causing trouble, you're with us. And the dissidents were all categorized 36:08 Jewish, Ukrainian, Jewish, Jewish, Jewish, Ukrainian, Jewish, Jewish, Jewish, Ukrainian. 'Cause that's what the secret police really liked.

36:13 They like to have them on the outside. So you're supposed to be normal. You're not supposed to raise your head, 36:19 you're not supposed to raise your hand, you're not supposed to raise your eyes, you're not supposed to have ideas. You're just supposed to go along with this kind of consensus 36:26 that we're day after day we're gonna have the same thing. Human rights was an answer to that. Directly an answer to that.

36:32 Directly, directly. Because Brezhnev in 1975 36:38 wanted recognition of the status-quo. So Brezhnev in 1975, 36:45 along with the Americans, the Canadians, the Europeans held a conference in Helsinki.

36:50 Very important conference, things are still named after it today. People still find it very motivating.

36:57 What Brezhnev wanted was more the same forever. So what he wanted was 37:02 for the Western powers to acknowledge the Soviet borders and the borders of the East European states.

37:08 So those borders were never recognized by anybody. There was never a peace treaty after the second World War in Europe.

37:14 So what he wanted was effectively a late peace treaty that would legalize, codify the status quo.

37:22 The ironic outcome of all of this is something else. He gets that, he gets that.

37:28 But in exchange, there are a few... If you read it, it's an interesting document. If you read the Helsinki Final Act, 37:34 there are a few paragraphs in there kind of buried, about human rights. And what the East Europeans did 37:41 was they said, oh, we're gonna take this extremely seriously. The East Europeans said, 37:46 well that's now the law of the land. And of course they knew that they weren't in rule of law states and they knew that their leaders didn't really mean it.

37:52 But nevertheless the idea of human rights became very fruitful. Because with human rights, you can always find a gap 37:59 between what the state says it's doing and what it should be doing. With human rights you always have an argument 38:04 coming from the person outwards or from human dignity outwards about the way things should be.

38:10 It gives you a different kind of language of evaluation. So all across Eastern Europe, the Russians did this.

38:16 the Russian dissidents had already been publishing since the late 60s, something called the Chronicle of Current Events, 38:21 which was using human rights language. The Czechs did this, Charter 77 launches the distinct career Vaclav Havel 38:28 who eventually becomes president. The Poles did this, they had a committee, something called the Committee to Defend the Workers.

38:34 Ukrainians did this. In 1976, they formed something called the Ukrainian Helsinki Committee.

38:41 And Ukrainian Helsinki Committee. I'm sorry, I have to be so hasty about all this. We're doing a thousand years 38:46 and these are fascinating figures, but Ukrainian Helsinki Committee makes the interesting argument 38:53 that the nationality is part of human rights. So it's not that the nation is an ethnic group, 39:01 but the fact that I wanna speak my language or that I wanna be able to sing my songs 39:08 or I wanna be able to wear my shirt. These things are part of my life as an individual.

39:14 And so that national rights are actually individual rights, human rights.

39:19 They said lots of other things that were much more universalistic and conventional. But this is a point that they made.

39:24 It's a very telling point that the nation doesn't have to be a collectivity, the nation could be something which resides in people.

39:31 And you can violate their rights by not letting them speak their language.

39:37 So taking my school books away, which is what happened in the 70s in Soviet Ukraine. The de facto not letting me go to university 39:44 in my own language. Not hiring me, because I'm known to be somebody 39:50 who speaks Ukraine in public. That these are violations of human rights. And so the Brezhnevian language is all technical efficiency.

39:59 History's over, it's all about how, it's all about efficiency. So why don't we all just speak Russian.

40:05 'Cause that would just be easier. How do you answer that language? You can only answer that language 40:10 with some kind of why, with some kind of normative position. And human rights gave people that language.

40:16 So one source of the political thinking, which is gonna inform Ukraine later on are the dissidents.

40:21 And the dissidents... This is predictable. The dissidents end up in the Gulag.

40:27 The Gulag is much smaller by the 70s and 80s, but it still exists. There are two major camps 40:32 that Ukrainian dissidents are sent to. And in these camps, they encounter Ukrainian nationalists, 40:38 because those people were sentenced to 25 year terms. Sometimes repeatedly.

40:44 And so Ukrainian nationalists who were sentenced in the 40s, 50s, were fairly regularly still in the Gulag 40:52 in the 70s and 80s and there were conversations in the Gulag about what kind of future Ukrainian nation there would be.

41:00 And again, I wish I could go into more detail with this 'cause it's fascinating. But the basic drift is that the political nation argument wins out.

41:08 That the ethnic national argument is seen for what it is. And certainly the dissidents in general 41:13 have respect for the nationalists for having taken risks, which they certainly did and having resisted Soviet power which they certainly did.

41:20 But the argue, the general drift is towards the political characterization of the nation.

41:26 The third place that this is happening is in the diaspora 41:31 in Canada, in the United States especially where it's the same...

41:38 Interestingly it's the same two sides. Where many of the people, 41:43 and this remains true, many of the people who are very active in the Canadian-American diaspora come from West Ukrainian families who are associated with 41:51 nationalist politics. But over the decades, the argument becomes more about the Ukrainian state 41:58 and about how this thing, which is Ukrainian-Soviet socialist republic and its present boundaries 42:03 will become an independent state and what the politics of that will be like.

42:10 And although this is not easy for people, the reality of Soviet Ukraine is that many people speak Russian.

42:15 It's a multinational country, making an independent state with just the idea 42:20 of ethnic Ukrainians is gonna be pretty tricky. And so the argument that Ukraine is basically political, 42:26 and this is not trivial. Also interesting... You don't have to tell me that you love the reading.

42:32 You don't have to tell me you love the reading. But at the time at least, the adventures that Ivan Rudnyts'kyi was making 42:38 in intellectual political history, they were interesting. I know I sound so defensive 42:44 for assigning you this stuff. But it wasn't just... You'll notice he's not just writing about 42:50 how there were Ukrainian people and look at their songs and it lasted forever. That was my parody of Hrushevsky.

42:56 It's about interesting combinations and individuals and surprising currents that meet each other.

43:02 And it's also about contact between Ukrainians and others. It's international history.

43:08 So political nation means interesting history. It means you're working for an interesting account 43:14 of where you came from and maybe where you're going. And so again, I'm abbreviating these decades of debates.

43:19 But again, it's the political notion of what Ukraine is gonna be like that wins out. And wins out before '91.

43:26 Wins out before '91, which is very, very important, because the Ukrainian territory which is inherited in '91, 43:34 is indeed a complicated and messy business. I have to be very brief about this, unfortunately.

43:43 So how did Ukraine become an independent state? Ukraine becomes an independent state, 43:48 because Gorbachev messes up his attempt to reform the Soviet Union.

43:54 Understandably. Gorbachev has the idea that communism can be reformed.

44:01 As he tries to reform communism, he realizes he has to consolidate his own position, 44:06 because the Communist Party is full of defacto reactionary lobbies that will drag their feet and defend their interests.

44:13 So he tries to build up a Soviet state. This is from '85 to '91. He tries to build up a Soviet state 44:19 where he's going to shift being basically the president. He's gonna be the head of state and that's gonna matter.

44:24 As he does this, the question is raised about the federal structure of the Soviet Union.

44:29 So as you know, going back back to 1922, essentially the Ukrainian question 44:35 means that the Soviet Union has to be or has to look like a federal state with these national units.

44:41 By summer of 1991 as a new state treaty is being discussed, 44:47 this question of how centralized or decentralized the Soviet Union is going to be is the thing which pushes Soviet Conservatives 44:54 against Gorbachev and brings about a coup where people try to bring down his rule in August of 1991.

45:02 As a result of that, Gorbachev is pushed into the background. So the hero then... His name's not even on here, but you know.

45:09 The hero then of that little episode is a Russian communist called Boris Yeltsin.

45:16 And what Yeltsin does is he sees this occasion, he leads the resistance to the coup.

45:23 Gorbachev is in his dacha. That's where you are during a coup. If you were read your lines, 45:29 it's coup, okay go to dacha, read book, wait for the knock on the door, stay in dacha, that's how it goes.

45:35 So Gorbachev is in his dacha, Yeltsin gets on top of a tank, famously at that age, 45:40 he could still get on top of tanks. And the Russian military... The Soviet military hesitates 45:46 and the coup plotters lose. Yeltsin takes advantage of this to pull Russia out of the Soviet Union, 45:53 which leaves Yeltsin in charge. That's the way the Soviet Union comes to an end. Russia pulls itself out.

45:58 The second most important actor in all of this is Ukraine. The Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian leaders 46:07 of the Russian, Ukrainian Belarusian parties meet in a forest in Belarus.

46:13 They meet because they're the heads of the three republics of 1922, 46:19 which still exist in 1991. So the constituent republics of the Soviet Union 46:24 that still exist meet to dissolve the Soviet Union. Now the Ukraine...

46:30 So the man who does that is Leonid Kravchuk and Kravchuk is a party Apparatchik.

46:39 He had been responsible for ideology born in interwar Poland actually in the 30s, 1934 thereabouts 46:48 in Volhynia which was then in Poland. Kravchuk represents the most important current 46:56 in the beginning of independent Ukraine, which are the slightly national communists.

47:03 Because you see by... Ukraine from 1972...

47:09 Soviet Ukraine from 1972 to 1989 had been ruled by the first Secretary Volodymyr Shcherbyts'kyi 47:16 who was a conservative and a russifier. Ukraine had been one of the least reformed republics 47:24 during the Gorbachev period. Shcherbyts'kyi was against Perestroika, He was against Gorbachev's reforms.

47:31 When the Chernobyl nuclear reactor blew up in 1986 in Ukraine, this made it seem like Gorbachev's reforms were meaningless.

47:38 One of his reforms are called Glasnost which means transparency. But the reactor blew up and nevertheless, 47:44 they went out for the mayday parades and irradiated themselves in Ukraine, because Gorbachev didn't want anyone to know 47:50 that there had been this terrible accident. So Gorbachev's reforms both in appearance and in reality 47:56 were much slower in Ukraine than elsewhere. So there was a very brief interval before the Soviet Union came to an end 48:03 for Ukraine to get its politics in order. The result is that the way that Ukraine comes to an end 48:09 is that the Communist Party is still the main force 48:15 and there are people shifting at the top of the Communist Party. This fellow Kravchuk gets in charge. He sees his opportunity after the coup.

48:21 He has a referendum on Ukrainian independence. I guess this is important today. There's a referendum on Ukrainian independence, 48:28 which a majority votes for in every region of Ukraine, including Crimea by the way. More than 90%...

48:33 This is 1991. More than 90% in the country as a whole. And they also have presidential elections.

48:39 And Kravchuk turns out to be president, wonderful. So he works this out very well. But what he represents is 48:45 the most important current in Ukrainian politics at the beginning. Which are the communists who are able to ride this wave 48:52 and reestablish themselves in positions of authority inside Ukraine.

48:58 So I didn't quite get to Paul Manafort. You guys can remind me. Make sure we get to Paul Manafort.

49:04 Paul Manafort will probably appear in the next lecture, which Professor Shore is giving about my Maidan.

49:09 She'll also be getting the bad news that she has to do 15 years before Maidan. 'Cause I only got as far as I got.

49:16 Please make sure to read that her book, I think it's the only assigned reading this week. Please make sure to do the reading before the lecture.

49:22 Thank you very much. (papers rustling) 49:29 (mystical music)

back to TOC


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Lecture 20 Maidan and Self-Understanding

0:00(tense music) 0:12 - Greetings everyone. Thanksgiving is coming, less students are coming.

0:17 Today, we have a wonderful opportunity to... To close the historical part 0:24 of History of Ukraine course, with guest lecturer, Professor Marci Shore.

0:31 She is Assistant Professor... Associate Professor of history already 0:38 here at Yale. Professor Marci Shore teaches European cultural and intellectual history.

0:45 She graduated with a bachelor's and PhD from Stanford, 0:50 and holding master's degree from University of Toronto. She wrote it extensively on 0:56 intellectual history of Eastern Central Europe. And recently, she published book 1:02 on history of Euromaidan (indistinct) was submitted to read, 1:08 "The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution" And today, we'll be particularly talking 1:15 about the years coming to Euromaidan, and revolution itself, and its consequences.

1:24 Marci, the floor is yours. - Oh, thank you. Thank you, it's nice to see you. The Fall of Communism 1:30 I'm recognizing some of you, so I think some of you have listened to me talk before, or taken my classes, 1:36 so hopefully this won't be too repetitive.

1:42 Let me start... Let me start just briefly with... With the fall of communism in 1989, 1:50 'cause this was also reminding me of when I was younger. One of the things Maidan did was bring me back 1:58 to that moment when I first became enchanted with this whole part of the world, with Eastern Europe.

2:05 And in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, it was one of those things that felt 2:12 inconceivable and impossible until the moment that it happened. And then, in retrospect, 2:17 it seemed inevitable, which I think is a lesson for historians in general, that the thing that seems 2:22 impossible and inconceivable will seem that way until the moment that it happens, 2:28 and then it will retrospectively seem to be inevitable. The Soviet Union seemed like 2:34 it would go on forever. The one thing that struck me when I first started going to Eastern Europe in the early 1990s was 2:41 how many people said to me, "I never thought I would see it end in my lifetime. " 2:47 People who were dissidents, people who sat in prison, people who did everything they could to protest, people who did nothing, 2:52 people who were content, people who went along with it; Everybody said, "We never thought "we would see it end in our lifetime. " 2:59 And I know that you've all, by now, sat through this whole course on Ukraine, so you know a lot by now about 3:04 the Soviet experience. So I'll just say, as a reminder, 3:09 in some sense to myself as well, that the Soviet project was arguably 3:18 the largest, deepest, most far reaching experiment in social engineering 3:25 that has ever been performed on mankind. And in some sense, we are still grappling with 3:31 the sheer scope of the experiment, and the sheer magnitude of the failure, 3:37 of the catastrophe. It was not just an attempt 3:43 to remake a government, and it wasn't even just an attempt to remake a society. It was an attempt to remake human beings.

3:49 It was an attempt to create a new kind of human being.

3:54 And I was... I was the last generation to grow up during the Cold War.

4:00 The war was... the world was divided into two camps. There was an Iron Curtain, not literal, 4:06 although in the case of the Berlin Wall, there was actually physical wall. The world was divided into those two sides 4:12 and you were never gonna see what was on the other side. Sorry, I'm trying to avoid moving around too much, which is my usual practice 4:17 because I see that there's a camera there, so I'm gonna try to be disciplined and stay right here. The Paradigm 4:24 And then, one day, it was over and the wall fell, and the world opened.

4:31 And soon enough afterwards, the Soviet Union seemed to dissolve.

4:36 Kind of, just dissolve into pieces. Ukraine, as you probably heard, 4:42 got its independence, to a certain extent, by default, but also with some agitation, 4:49 and with some desire on the part of the population. And in the West, we were celebrating.

4:55 "The wicked witch is dead "and now we all live happily ever after," that was the paradigm. I always think of the Wizard of Oz, 5:01 and "Ding Dong, the witch is dead. " You've all seen the Wizard of Oz, yes? "Ding dong, the witch is dead. " There was a sense that the wicked witch is dead, 5:08 and now we were all gonna live happily ever after. Ironically, or perhaps paradoxically, 5:13 the Hegelian narrative that had been underlying communism all these years gave way 5:21 to what was also a Hegelian narrative about a liberal teleology of progress, 5:27 that now that communism had failed and now we knew that, in fact, 5:33 the locomotive of history was leading towards liberal democracy. And there was a sense that liberalism, democracy, 5:41 free market neoliberalism, they were all part of, what Adam Michnik has called, 5:46 the "utopian capitalist package. " They were going together as part of a harmonious whole, 5:52 and now, we were all going to move on that train and live happily ever after.

5:59 There had been wonderful existentialist metaphysics among dissidents and philosophers 6:04 in the 80s and 90s... Or 70s and 80s, especially after 1968.

6:10 That kind of disappeared in the 90s because everybody was celebrating the end of history, 6:15 as Francis Fukuyama called it, and the triumph of neoliberalism. There was something kind of smug about that.

6:22 Our smug Western triumphalism that, yes, we were right, now everybody lives happily ever after.

6:29 Now, in some sense, that was a narrative that, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, 6:35 was very deeply felt. But something we perhaps didn't appreciate so much, 6:40 being on the former capitalist side, or the still capitalist side, of the Iron Curtain was just 6:47 how brutal the 1990s were for the societies that were coming out of communism.

6:55 Nobody really knew how you go and undo the communist experiment, 7:01 and try to get back on that locomotive. Nobody really knew how you made those transitions.

7:07 There were lots of theories. There was shock therapy in Poland. There was a faith that even if it were...

7:13 However rough it might be, there were gonna be some bumps in the road, but now we knew where the road was going. The 1990s 7:23 And the 1990s, I mean, not only in the former Soviet space, perhaps more dramatically in 7:28 the former Soviet space than in the rest of Eastern Europe, which was also quite rough.

7:34 One of my graduate students now, who's from Albania, said, there's an expression Albanian, 7:39 that's "it's not the 1990s," that references that you're continually referencing 7:44 the trauma of the 1990s. It took us a long time, I think, in the West to understand that 7:49 the 1990s were traumatic. There was a kind of wildness to it, a sense that the old rules no longer obtained 7:57 and nobody knew what the new rules were. The coming of capitalism came as a kind of what, 8:05 in American history we've called "robber baron capitalism. " Capitalism as a wild free-for-all 8:11 with no rules. It left open the possibility of former communist apparatchiks 8:18 very quickly transitioning into gangster-style neoliberals 8:24 who managed to monopolize and steal a lot of the state resources.

8:30 The transition was not particularly gentle, and not necessarily particularly fair at all.

8:36 So Ukraine was languishing under these conditions, as were other places.

8:43 It was called... The Ukraine of the 1990s was called by the American political scientist, Keith Darden, 8:49 "The blackmail state," which was a term that got taken up.

8:55 Was mired in corruption scandals, you probably heard a bit from Professor Snyder 9:00 already about Leonid Kravchuk, who came through the Communist Party. And then, his successor, Leonid Kuchma, 9:07 who was entering politics around 1990, and just mired in corruption scandals.

9:13 This omnipresence of corruption, of this lawlessness that is accompanying 9:20 the transition to capitalism. I mean, I still remember the transition to capitalism even in so-called 9:26 "gentle places," like Prague, where you just got in a cab and they could charge you any amount of money.

9:33 There was no in there being any kind of limitation, or any kind of commitment to rates 9:38 that were pro... That were posted. I mean, you just felt constantly vulnerable because there were no rules.

9:46 In the year... In September 2000, this era is probably personified, 9:51 or symbolized, by a brutal murder, an assassination of a Georgian-Ukrainian journalist...

9:59 Young Georgian-Ukrainian journalist, Georgiy Gongadze, who had been reporting on corruption, 10:07 who was assassinated during Kuchma's reign. There wasn't widespread violence en masse 10:15 against the population, but if you were a dissident journalist or if you were making trouble in particular, 10:22 then you were clearly very vulnerable. And Ukraine languished this way 10:28 until the elections of 2004, which is really where I wanna pick up for today.

10:35 And the elections of 2004, the presidential elections, were the elections between two Viktors.

10:42 My kids are always complaining that all of these people we know in various Slavic speaking countries, their names repeat too much.

10:48 There are many Agnieszkas in Poland and Romania. There are many Viktors, there are many Sashas.

10:54 So this is an election between two Viktors; Viktor Yanukovych and Viktor Yushchenko. Victor Yushchenko 11:01 And Viktor Yanukovych was your post-Soviet gangster type.

11:06 I mean, not really "type," I mean, he was a gangster. I mean, and not... My friend, Ivan Krastev, 11:13 the Bulgarian political scientist, said to me once, "Marci, it's not just that "he's a gangster, "he's a petty gangster. " 11:20 To which Radek Sikorski answered, "the sums of money involved were "really not so petty. " 11:27 Post-Soviet gangster type, close to the Kremlin, representing continuity with 11:33 what had come before. The presidency would clearly enrich himself and his circle of friends.

11:40 And then, there was Viktor Yushchenko, who seemed to be the person who was Westward-looking, 11:45 who was looking towards Europe, who was going to take Ukraine, 11:50 or had visions of taking Ukraine, on a path towards eventual European Union integration.

11:57 And the short version of this particular story is that Yanukovych's team tries 12:05 to poison Viktor Yushchenko with dioxin. Not only tries, 12:10 they do poison use Yushchenko with dioxin. The doctors save him, 12:16 but his face is grotesquely disfigured. And in some ways, that disfigured face, 12:23 the images of Yushchenko as a victim of this dioxin poisoning, becomes the face of those elections, 12:31 and a symbol of the brutality and the corruption. Not only do they poison Yushchenko, 12:38 but then they cheat in the elections. In a way, not so dissimilar 12:44 from the way that Lukashenko, in Belarus, cheated in the elections two years ago.

12:49 It was quite obvious to people that they had forged the election results. And at that point, 12:54 Ukrainians come out onto the streets. And in particular, they come out to the main square Maidan 13:01 in the center of Kyiv. And the main square in the center of Kyiv is called the Maidan.

13:08 I just wanna say about the Maidan, it's an unusually large city square, 13:14 and it's an unusually complex geographical space.

13:19 So for those of you who are interested in what is visual, who are interested in what is architectural, it's multi-leveled, 13:26 which is not so typical for a city square. And there's a underground part, 13:32 with a subway and with some underground shopping. So it's large and complex, 13:38 and architecturally offers possibilities for things to happen on this square.

13:43 So for those of you who haven't been there, that physical space is significant to the rest of the story 13:49 that I'm going to tell. And hopefully, you all go some day. Hopefully, after the victory when 13:55 (speaking foreign language). As they say Ukrainian, "We can all go back and do fun things on the Maidan. " 14:02 Ukrainians go to the Maidan, to the central square in Kyiv, 14:07 and they protest in November 2004.

14:12 They protest forged elections. And Kyiv is very... It gets very cold in the winter.

14:18 It's fairly far north, not as far north as Petersburg, but quite far north. For three weeks, people stand there 14:24 and they freeze and they shout. It's completely nonviolent, but they insist on free elections.

14:32 And somewhat miraculously, it works, Under pressure to some extent 14:39 from other European countries, but the elections are done over.

14:44 This time, Yushchenko is declared the winner. And people are happy and they go home.

14:51 And as you can probably guess, this is not going to be happily ever after.

14:56 We're still waiting for that moment in history when happily ever after comes, it's never come, 15:01 so we don't want to anticipate too much. People go home, 15:07 and there's a sense of, "Now, we are on the right path. " But the short version of this story is 15:12 that Yushchenko turns out to be a disappointment. And hopefully, you'll have some time to talk in your discussion sections 15:19 in more detail about why he turns out to be a disappointment. Was he never quite the same 15:24 after the dioxin poisoning? Was he never actually the Messiah figure that he was projected to be? 15:30 Was it because of infighting on his team? Did it have to do with the falling out with the Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko? 15:36 Was he always a little bit self-interested? Did he always have certain nationalist leanings? 15:41 For overdetermined reasons that will... We will never be able to know, 15:46 with certainty, exactly what was causal. It doesn't work out well.

15:52 And again, I hope you'll have some time to talk about this in your discussion sessions 'cause it was an interesting moment.

15:57 And in the meantime, Yanukovych, it had seemed absolutely impossible that this man could ever come back.

16:03 I mean, first of all, he was hardly very inspiring to begin with. He was...

16:08 He had a past that was a past as a gangster, he was involved in robbery, he was involved in assault, 16:13 stealing state resources, being his usual gangster self. There's nothing particularly appealing about him.

16:19 I realize I'm being very biased here. And it was publicly exposed 16:26 that he poisoned his opponent with dioxin and cheats in the election, so you think, really, he's out of there.

16:32 But somehow, he's still lurking around in the background, and he doesn't give up. Public Relations Consultant 16:40 And he finds out that in Washington, there are some Americans who have 16:46 a little boutique industry going for gangsters with presidential ambitions.

16:53 I mean, really, American capitalism, you can find anything. And so, he decides he's going to hire 16:59 one of these public relations consultants who specializes in gangsters with presidential ambitions.

17:06 And so, this guy, whose name was Paul Manafort, you may have heard of him, 17:12 comes over to Ukraine from Washington. He doesn't know Ukrainian, 17:18 he doesn't know Russian, but he knows how to play golf. He has opinions about suits, 17:24 he has opinions about haircuts, he has opinions about facial expressions on television, 17:31 and they hang out and he grooms... Manafort grooms Yanukovych 17:38 and gives him a makeover. Now, again, I realize I'm not a very objective source of information here because I find Yanukovych somewhat repulsive.

17:46 I didn't really see the transformation. Nothing seemed to be particularly enchanting about him 17:52 after Manafort worked on him. But somehow, he comes back 17:58 and in 2010, genuinely wins the election. And this time, nobody disputes the election results.

18:07 And as a thank you gift, he presents Paul Manafort with a $30,000 jar of black caviar.

18:15 I don't even know what one does with a $30,000 jar of black caviar but again, I'm speaking as somebody 18:20 who doesn't like caviar. So again, for overdetermined reasons, I'm not impressed by this. Neutral Observer 18:26 In any case... You can tell I'm not really a neutral observer to this story.

18:33 I'm not Ukrainian, but I'm also not a neutral observer. It's hard to maintain your stance as a neutral observer for a very long time.

18:41 In any case, Yanukovych is the president, he's being his usual gangster-like self, 18:46 not particularly inspiring. He's not offering anyone some kind of grand narrative.

18:52 I mean, he's not one of these dictators with "I am going to restore you to greatness. " There's no eschatology, 18:59 there's no teleology. It's just like "the next gangster could be worse, "so you better kind of shut up 19:04 "and go along with me. " He's not using widespread violence against the population, 19:09 unless you really get in his way, and then people could be eliminated here and there.

19:16 And he's dangling out the carrot of eventually, slowly perhaps, one day, 19:25 putting Ukraine on a path towards European Union integration.

19:31 And this, for the people, especially the people who are exactly your age, 19:37 was... Meant everything. Whether or not, if you were... If you were 15, or 18, or 22, or 25, 19:46 whether or not Europe was going to be open to you meant everything 19:51 about what kind of future you could have. Would you be able to learn foreign languages? Would you be able to study abroad? 19:57 Would you be eligible for Erasmus exchanges? Would you be eligible to do internships in Brussels? 20:03 Would you be able to travel, and go to conferences, and meet with other young people without spending months waiting in long lines, 20:10 and humiliating yourself, and paying lots of money and pleading for a visa that you might or might not get? 20:15 So this, whether or not the doors of Europe would be open, was enormously important, 20:20 especially to young people, and especially to students, especially to people who were looking at their future, 20:26 who were upwardly mobile, who wanted to learn languages, who wanted to see the world.

20:32 In November 2013, Yanukovych was due to sign this 20:38 very long anticipated association agreement with the European Union.

20:43 Now, it was not a fantastic agreement, and I think that the TFs can tell you 20:48 more about the details of this agreement. It would have involved Ukraine undertaking 20:54 costly reforms to get in line with European Union regulations. It almost definitely would have provoked retaliation 21:03 from the Kremlin, who did not want Ukraine associating more closely with the European Union.

21:09 And at the end of the day, it didn't make any promises about European Union membership.

21:15 This was an association agreement, it wasn't a membership agreement. But it was a foot in the door. Foot in the Door 21:22 It was symbolically of enormous significance. It was a sign that Ukraine had intentions 21:29 of getting in line with European standards for integration. And it was a sign that, potentially, 21:36 even if contingently, if everything went well, Europe was open to the possibility 21:42 of accepting Ukraine. And so, for an agreement that, on the face of it and in the details, 21:49 didn't seem so spectacular, it was of enormous symbolic and existential significance, 21:55 especially to a certain demographic. At the 11th hour, when the ceremony had...

22:01 There was a signing ceremony. It was set up in Vilnius. Everything was all arranged for the end of November.

22:07 And at the very last minute on November 21st, Yanukovych suddenly said, "No, I'm not gonna sign. " Shock Devastation 22:15 And then there was a feeling of sudden shock and devastation.

22:20 Again, not equally throughout the population. And I keep emphasizing that because it's very different from the war 22:27 that's going to come later. The people who were... The part of Ukraine that was truly devastated 22:32 by the association agreement was a more distinct demographic than 22:37 the part of Ukraine devastated by the war, which is a whole country. Likes Dont Count 22:43 At that point, still, nothing might have happened. It's one of the lessons about historical contingency.

22:49 People were very depressed, people were very upset, people were angry. Had not a 32 year old Afghan-Ukrainian journalist, 22:58 named Mustafa Nayyem, not posted on Facebook, in Russian, 23:04 a little note on November 21st, saying, "Hey, let's be serious.

23:10 "If you're really upset, "come out to the Maidan by midnight tonight. " 23:16 And he said, "likes do not count. " Interestingly, that "likes do not count" 23:23 initially often got mistranslated to English, which I found odd because it's one of the rare, serendipitous moments 23:30 when the Slavic translates perfectly into English. It was literally "likes do not count. " 23:37 And as a historian, that really captured me because I thought, "Wow, "that's a sentence that would have made 23:43 "no sense before Facebook. " Like, student... I mean, literally, it would've been devoid of any semantic meaning before Facebook.

23:50 And now, "Likes do not count" is going to become a revolutionary slogan for the 21st century.

23:56 People come out to the Maidan that night. Mostly, although not exclusively, 24:02 young people, students, people exactly your age, quite similar to yourselves, they go out to the square.

24:09 It's November, it's cold, not as cold as it's going to get in January, but cold.

24:15 They hold hands, they sing, they play music, they're completely peaceful.

24:21 They're not interested in ethnic politics, they're not interested in language politics, 24:28 they're not interested in opposition political parties, they're not talking about elections.

24:34 Their slogan is "Ukraine is Europe. " That's it. "Ukraine is Europe. " 24:40 And they call themselves "Euromaidan. " They want Europe to be open to them.

24:47 And there are, at any given time, anywhere from several hundred 24:52 to a couple thousand of them on this square. They stay there for about nine days.

24:58 Again, completely peacefully, hanging out, dancing, 25:05 declaring that "Ukraine is Europe. " And then, at four in the morning The Riot 25:12 on November 30th, Yanukovych suddenly, or not so suddenly, 25:18 we don't really know, I have no privileged epistemological access to what was going on inside his head, 25:23 perhaps under pressure from Putin, he decides to send out his riot police, called Berkut, 25:29 to brutally beat up the students. And this was a shock. The Shock 25:36 It was a shock because there had been a tacit social contract that however much corruption there had been, 25:43 however weak the rule of law had been, however much that people's livelihoods 25:51 and resources had been stolen from them, however a journalist may have been assassinated 25:57 here or there if they were too critical, since 1991, in independent Ukraine, the regime had not used mass violence 26:04 against its own population. And there was a sense that that was a line that was impermissible to cross.

26:13 Nobody was killed, although that was initially unclear, but the beatings were really quite brutal 26:19 and a lot of people were seriously injured. It seems that Yanukovych was counting 26:26 on the fact that if you shock people this way, not enough to kill people 26:32 but enough to terrify them, the parents will freak out and they will pull their kids off the streets.

26:39 And one of the people I talked to about this afterwards was a great Ukrainian novelist 26:46 who writes in the genre of magical realism, Taras Prokhasko, you should all read him, if you haven't, 26:51 there's quite a bit that's been translated into English. His son, Markian, who was a young journalism student, 26:58 was on the Maidan in Kyiv at the time. And Taras was in Ivano-Frankivsk, 27:05 so he was not there. He was an overnight train ride away. But his son, who was a student, was there.

27:12 And Markian had been there for several days. And just coincidentally, at like two in the morning 27:18 before Berkut came onto the square, he went to a friend's apartment and fell asleep.

27:25 And he had been on the square day and night for the past couple days. He turned off his phone and went to sleep.

27:31 And there's this sudden outbreak of brutality. People call...

27:36 Phone calls are being made. Taras gets a phone call, a message from a girl who knows his son, 27:44 and he's trying to get ahold of his son and he can't. He's calling, and calling, and calling, and Markian is not answering the phone.

27:51 And he's getting more and more distraught. I know you guys are too young to have children, 27:57 but it's like... As soon as you do, you are like... I already had children by the time that Maidan came, and you can feel it under your skin, 28:04 this terror about like not being able to find your children at such a moment. He's calling hospitals, he's calling police stations, 28:10 he's calling everybody he knows in Kyiv, and Markian is not answering the phone, nobody else can find him.

28:16 Finally, Markian wakes up, turns on the phone, finds out...

28:21 Finds hundreds of messages, sees that... Finds out what's happened. Calls his girlfriend, now his wife, 28:28 she posted a message on Facebook that says he's alive. He talks to his mother, talks to his father, 28:33 the things you're supposed to do, like a good child, when your parents have been hysterically worried about you. Keep that in mind if you're ever 28:39 in such a situation. And Taras immediately gets in his car 28:44 and starts driving... Driving to Kyiv. And as I said, 28:50 it seems that Yanukovych is counting on the fact that you do something violent, 28:55 and shocking, and you terrify parents, like Taras. And of course, he was not the only parent who was terrified.

29:02 I'm just telling you his story because I happened to talk to him. And he thought they would then pull 29:08 their kids off the streets. They're not gonna expose their children to this, And so, Taras is one of the parents 29:14 who runs to find their children. And when he finds Markian, 29:19 he doesn't pull him off the street, he joins him there.

29:25 And that's the moment when everything turns because that is en masse what the parents do.

29:33 So you go from having had several hundred to a couple thousand people 29:38 on the streets of Kyiv, to, a day and a half later, you have hundreds of thousands of people 29:46 on the streets of Kyiv. Nobody has ever seen that many people on the streets of Kyiv.

29:52 And now, they're not just shouting, "Ukraine is Europe. " Now, they're shouting, 29:57 "We will not permit you to beat our children. " And interestingly, I heard this also 30:04 from people who didn't have children there per se, but they all became our children. "We will not permit you to beat our children. " 30:11 And that was the moment that when I talked to the...

30:17 Vasily Cherepanin, who is one of the leading leftist intellectuals, who was probably in his early 30s at the time, 30:24 he said "That was the moment when Euromaidan became Maidan," with no prefix.

30:31 And it was no longer just about the European Union. It was now a revolt against...

30:40 Against something that, in Russian, is called (speaking foreign language). This is a word we don't have in English, 30:45 but during the Trump Administration, I was suggesting that we needed to introduce it in English because it was missing, 30:53 which is this idea of arbitrariness tinged with tyranny. The sense of helplessness 30:59 in the face of power. The feeling that the powers that be can do whatever they want to you, 31:06 and you are helpless. That you are being treated as a play thing, as a thing and not as a human being, 31:12 as an object and not as a subject. And the maidan became a revolt 31:17 against (speaking foreign language). It became an insistence on being treated as a person and not as a thing, 31:23 as a subject and not as an object, and they began to call themselves, 31:29 "On the Maidan, the Revolution of Dignity. " And "dignity" here... I really...

31:35 You're gonna... I'm now exposing myself as the intellectual historian who teaches a lot of philosophy. "Dignity" here in the Kantian sense.

31:42 So for those of you who haven't been subjected to reading Kant with me, and if my husband hasn't told you enough about Kant, 31:49 Kant has a famous definition of a human being. Kant says that "Whatever can be exchanged 31:56 "for something of equivalent value has a price. "Whatever is beyond all price 32:03 "and bears of no equivalent has dignity. "Human beings are distinguished 32:09 "in that we possess dignity. "We do not have a price, we possess dignity. " 32:15 And from this comes Kant's categorical imperative, which is the basis of his moral philosophy, 32:22 which is you always treat a human being as an ends and never as a means, always as a subject and not as an object.

32:31 In this sense, the Maidan was a very Kantian revolution. I realized most of the political commentators were 32:36 not talking about Kant but I said, I'm intellectual historian, so I feel compelled to talk about Kant. It was a Kantian revolution.

32:43 We wanna be treated as human beings and we are going to insist on being treated with dignity.

32:50 It was a remarkable moment for me as a historian because so many revolutions have been emplotted 32:58 as oedipal rebellions. You can emplot, in fact, the whole history of communism 33:03 as a series of oedipal rebellions, where each generation rises up and turned against the fathers.

33:10 So the fact that suddenly you have parents joining their children on the streets, 33:16 and that is the moment that creates the revolution, was just an extraordinary thing to witness 33:23 in real time. And then, when I was working on the book, I became very interested in interviewing people 33:30 in the same family of multiple generations who went to the Maidan, because people then started going to the Maidan with their children, 33:36 with their parents, sometimes with their parents and their grandparents. You would have multiple generations going.

33:43 And one of the... One of the people I interviewed, together with his father, 33:49 was this young kid. I mean, literally a kid. He was 16, he wasn't even at university, 33:54 he was still in secondary school, named Roman Ratushnyi, who was on the Maidan from the beginning.

34:00 His shoulder was battered in on November 30th from Berkut. But he was determined to go back.

34:07 He kept going back. And I was talking at this cafe in Kyiv, 34:13 and it must have been December 2014, to Roman, to his father, Taras.

34:19 And Roman was living with his mother at the time. And I said, "Your m... " I mean, he seemed so young to me, 34:25 and I said, "Your mother must have been very upset, "but she let you go back. " 34:33 And he said, "My mother? "My mother was making Molotov cocktails "on her (indistinct). " 34:42 Yes. One of the horrific pieces of news I got in the spring early in this war was 34:48 that Roman, before his 25th birthday, was killed in June, 34:54 fighting in the East. After that, within a couple days, Parallelpolis 35:01 the Maidan became a whole parallel polis. Parallel polis was a concept that was developed 35:08 by the Czech dissident philosopher, Vaclav Benda, in the late 1970s. And it was the idea that to oppose the regime, 35:18 to oppose tyranny, was not just, or should not be primarily, "we're going to have a political protest. " 35:24 It was to create an alternative space, an alternative society, with your own institutions, 35:31 in which you live according to the values as you wish to see them instituted 35:36 in the society as you wish to imagine it. The Maidan became a parallel polis.

35:42 Within 48, 72 hours, there were elaborate kitchens running, 35:49 there was a whole infrastructure. People were cooking soup in cauldrons, they were making tea, 35:54 they were making coffee, there was clothing distribution points, a piano, a stage, a library, 36:00 an open university, medical clinics. There was a whole world going on in the Maidan.

36:07 People were living on the Maidan. People were coming every day to the Maidan. Some of them were coming in shifts 36:13 to the Maidan, walking around the Maidan. It was getting colder and colder, so you couldn't stand still, Civil Society 36:18 you had to keep walking. There were cleanup crews. One of the other young students 36:26 who was on the Maidan, who now is fighting in the East, and who I worry about every day, Misha Martynenko, 36:32 said "the Maidan was so clean "you could eat off the pavement. " Everybody was taking care of this space.

36:38 This was their space. People were suddenly not drinking alcohol, which was extremely unusual, 36:45 like in Kyiv in the winter. There were performances, there were lectures, 36:51 there were discussion groups, there was a whole world that took place there.

36:56 It was a masterpiece of self-organization.

37:02 And interestingly, there was a sense of an explosion of civil society, 37:07 of self-organization, in a way that hadn't been anticipated. But I found when I pushed, 37:15 that you could find the origins in these much smaller instances, or more modest instances of civil society, 37:24 that had been percolating beneath the surface. At one point, my friend, Katya Mischenko, 37:30 who was shuttling back and forth at the time between Vienna, where she had a fellowship, and Kyiv, 37:35 who was... Among other things, she was guarding patients at hospitals from being kidnapped by Yanukovych's people, 37:42 which was something he liked to do. Protestors would be injured by Berkut, 37:47 and then while they were vulnerable in the hospital, they would be kidnapped and taken away. And Katya was...

37:54 Came back to Vienna one day, and all of us were jumping on her and say, "Okay, tell us what's going on.

37:59 "Tell us what's going on. " And she was talking about guarding people at the hospital, and how they had organized teams, 38:05 and there was an SOS hotline and if you saw somebody taken away, you could call this number.

38:10 And there were these people with cars, and they were on this program. And I said, "Katya, how'd you guys get "an SOS hotline overnight, 38:17 "in a couple hours? "How did you get it so fast?" And she said, "Oh, well, there was an LGBT group 38:23 "that had a confidential hotline. " It was small, it was under the radar. You could call and discuss personal issues, but...

38:31 And so, they just turned it over to the Maidan. And I found that an interesting detail because it suggests that 38:37 even if something is kind of... Is in a very nascent, modest stage, 38:42 any little bit of infrastructure, once it's there, then becomes a jumping off point.

38:49 You've already got a hotline set up. Maybe it's a small hotline, maybe it doesn't get many calls, but it's there. And once these little pockets of things were there, 38:56 it turned out that there was a springboard that was unanticipated. It was an extraordinary thing to watch.

39:04 There was also this sense of what Europe meant changed.

39:11 I think Europe was no longer, first and foremost, the highly imperfect, 39:19 contingent empirical manifestation that was the European Union. Europe was Europe, 39:25 in the kind of platonic essence of Europe-ness. Europe represented human dignity, 39:30 it represented human rights, it represented the rule of law. It represented western civilization 39:37 in the sense that Gandhi meant when he was one... Gandhi was once famously asked 39:43 what he thought about Western civilization, and he gives this answer, which some of you may have heard, 39:48 "I think it would be a very good thing. " I mean that Europe, that would be a very good thing, 39:54 was the Europe that was at stake on the Maidan. The essence of what it would be to live under a regime of human rights 40:01 and the rule of law. The other thing I wanna talk about 40:07 that was so remarkable to me, and goes back to the idea of the overcoming of a generational divide, 40:15 is this overcoming of boundaries. And I should say, my perspective on this was influenced Overcoming Boundaries 40:21 by the fact that I was... I was an American in Vienna, watching this livestreamed.

40:26 And the people in the Maidan set up cameras to live stream themselves, so the Maidan was live streamed 24 hours a day 40:33 on the internet, which is also an uncanny, trippy thing. People turned the cameras on themselves.

40:40 You were kind... It was a self-violation of one's own privacy in an effort to assert one's own narrative.

40:48 And so, I was an American, watching this livestream from Vienna, but in some ways, I was watching it, 40:53 above all, through Polish eyes. I mean, I was following the press in different languages, 40:58 including in English and German. But the coverage I was somehow clinging to most was 41:03 the coverage coming from Poland. And in particular, what my friends in Poland, 41:09 who had been veterans of Solidarity in the 70s and 80s, 41:14 and who had sat in prison under communism, were writing. And maybe, I'll just take a little brief detour here 41:21 to say something about that. So there's... There are two remarkable Polish films, which you should all watch, 41:28 by the great director, Andrzej Wajda. They're in a series starring Krystyna Janda, "Man of Marble" and "Man of Iron. " 41:36 And in the second one, "Man of Iron," it... Early in the film, 41:41 we are in 1968 in Poland. In 1968 in Poland, the students lead protest 41:47 against communist government censorship, and many of them end up in prison, 41:54 including many of those people who were still... Who were watching the Maidan, and who I was in close touch with watching this.

42:01 And in the film, one... Which is fictional, but based on real events. A young man, a student, 42:07 goes to his father, who is a shipyard worker, in 1968, as the communist secret police are coming 42:12 and battering the students, and asks his father to bring out the workers in solidarity with the students.

42:19 And the father refuses, and he locks the son in his room, and he says, "Someday, when the time is right, 42:28 "we'll march together. " And the son is livid. And he says, "No, I will never forgive you.

42:34 "We will never march together. " And two years later, in Poland, it's the shipyard workers who demonstrate 42:43 against the regime. And in the film, in Wajda's film, "Man of Iron," 42:48 the father then comes to his son and ask him to bring him and his friends out in solidarity with the workers.

42:54 And at that time, the son basically says, "Hey, you let us down two years ago, "now you go to hell. " 43:01 And what Solidarity was in Poland, both in its proto form, 43:07 as the Committee for the Defense of the Workers, which was spearheaded by Adam Michnik and others in 1976, 43:14 and then the form it evolves into through 1980 and 1981, 43:20 was this remarkable moment of the coming together of the fathers and the sons, 43:25 and the workers and the intellectuals, and the Catholics and the Marxist, 43:31 and the Jews and the Poles, and all of these hitherto existing boundaries.

43:37 And that was what happened on the Maidan. You had people who never in their lives would have encountered one another, 43:44 who wouldn't have necessarily been on the same side, who wouldn't have shared a common way 43:49 of understanding the world, suddenly encounter one another with this kind of openness 43:56 that people would not have expected. And it was watching...

44:03 I think part of my captivation was seeing how people like Konsta Gebert, 44:09 and Adam Michnik, and Aleksander Smolar, and these veterans of Solidarity were watching the Maidan 44:16 because they knew better than anybody else that that Solidarity, 44:22 that Solidarność in Poland represented it, that it lasted 20 seconds after communism fell.

44:28 But they also knew that it was this extraordinarily precious thing 44:34 that most people never experience, and they never counted on living 44:40 to see a second time in their lifetimes. And they appreciated it, they knew what it meant.

44:45 They knew that it was that miracle that most people never experience.

44:51 And that that was what the Poles understood about the Maidan. I think that's why the coverage was so different.

44:58 In the German press, people were talking about the kids in Kyiv, supportively, but in a slightly condescending way.

45:07 In the Polish press, they were talking about powstanie. powstanie, which is insurrectionary.

45:12 It's like this romantic, lofty, noble word in Poland, to talk about powstanie.

45:18 "Those who fight for our freedom and yours. " Okay, I see I'm... Okay, I see I'm running out of time, 45:23 so let me... People stay on the Maidan.

45:29 They stay all winter. They stay and freeze, and the stakes get higher and higher, Winter 45:36 and the government violence becomes more and more severe.

45:41 Peoples disappear. Sometimes their bodies are found, 45:47 having been tortured and frozen in the woods.

45:53 Activists are frozen and battered with fire hoses.

46:04 There are... There's a sense that the violence is only increasing.

46:09 And again, it seems to be that Yanukovych is saying, "If you keep raising the stakes, 46:15 "it's going to stop. " But it has the opposite effect because at a certain point, 46:21 you can push people to the other side of fear. You can push them to the point 46:28 where they feel that "no one will ever be safe "as long as this man is in power.

46:34 "The only way any of us are going "to be able to breathe again is "if he's overthrown. " The stakes become all or nothing.

46:44 Remarkably... I mean, even watching from a distance, even watching this livestream, 46:49 you could feel a kind of existential transformation. When those students went out 46:54 to the Maidan in November, nobody was thinking, "We're gonna die here," 46:59 or "We're ready to die here. " And by the second half of January, you could feel, almost palpably, 47:07 and even from a distance that something had turned, and a critical mass of people was ready 47:13 to die there if need be. And then, you were kind of... You were just waiting for the end game.

47:19 You knew that more violence was going to come, and you knew that those people were not gonna leave.

47:25 And there was this sense of voyeuristic terror that I was watching this with, 47:31 and many people were watching this with. This happened in the second half of February 2014, 47:42 where Yanukovych's regime unleashes a sniper massacre, 47:47 and there are snipers on buildings firing down.

47:57 And this is all being live streamed, so you are watching people being killed 48:02 in real time. You're watching these battles in real time.

48:07 More and more reinforcements start coming to Kyiv. In Lviv, there's a former real estate agent...

48:15 Or she's still a real estate agent now, but she turned herself into a committee to organize buses.

48:21 They were just putting people on buses and sending people to Kyiv. And people wanted to go.

48:27 More people wanted to go than they could produce buses.

48:34 Radek Sikorski, who was the Polish Prime Minister at the time during this massacre, 48:40 flies over to Kyiv to try to negotiate a ceasefire. He goes to the presidential palace 48:46 to talk to Yanukovych. The presidential palace is very close to the Maidan.

48:52 I mean, Radek gets there and you can smell the smoke. I mean, things are burning, 48:57 buildings are burning, people are burning. You can smell the smoke in the presidential palace. He goes in to talk to Yanukovych.

49:05 I found this... I found this kind of extraordinary because I thought...

49:10 When I talked to him afterwards, I thought, "Radek, you're sitting there, "talking to this man. "You know that with every "additional five minutes that takes, 49:17 "more people are being killed. "And you know you're talking to someone "for whom other people's lives 49:22 "just don't have any value. "I mean, was he at all concerned about "these people who were being killed 49:28 "as you were talking to him?" And Radek is like, "Marci, he doesn't have much of an emotional imagination.

49:33 "He's not that bright. "No, he didn't seem concerned at all. " But finally, they managed to negotiate a ceasefire, 49:41 and a call for early elections. Yanukovych agrees to early elections. Not immediately, but several months from then.

49:49 People in the Maidan do not wanna sign it. They don't trust the president. They've just seen their people die.

49:55 Radek takes a very hard line stance and says, "Hey, listen, "I grew up in Poland under Solidarity.

50:00 "We underestimated the strength of the regime, "and we got martial law and mass detention.

50:06 "So you accept this now. "Later, you push for more. "Otherwise, you're gonna get the army, "you're gonna get martial law, "you're all gonna be dead. " 50:14 And they sign. But it's clear that people are just furious. I mean, they're carrying corpses in caskets 50:22 through the Maidan, and Yanukovych flees. He flees across the border to Russia.

50:30 And Paul Manafort is out of a job. We all know what he does next.

50:37 Little green men in unmarked camouflage appear 50:42 on the Crimean Peninsula, sent by the Kremlin. While no one has had a chance to catch their breath, 50:49 one president has fled, he's been deposed. There's an interim government, 50:55 but they haven't had elections yet and nobody really knows what's going on. And Putin capitalizes on, particularly, 51:03 that moment to try to take Crimea... To take Crimea, and to instigate separatist rebellions 51:12 throughout eastern and southeastern Ukraine. So-called "Russian tourist" come across the border.

51:20 They have been told various stories, one of which is that the Maidan was a CIA-sponsored conspiracy, 51:28 and that Ukrainian Nazis are now heading east to kill all the Russian speakers.

51:35 I don't have time to go into, unfortunately, the rest of that story, but I'm sure after the break, 51:41 you will be caught up as to what happens after the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the war in the Donbas.

51:50 Let me just... Maybe if I can say something philosophical and existential at the end.

51:55 So I'm not really a political historian per se. One of the things that struck me most Time 52:01 about the accounts people were giving on the Maidan was how everybody started talking about how they lost track of time.

52:08 Something happens to time during a revolution. It changes its form. You can't remember what happened an hour ago, 52:14 what happened the day before, what happened a week before. I mean, one of the principles of revolution is that the state of affairs 52:21 that obtained five minutes ago could become completely irrelevant five minutes later. That anything can change at any moment.

52:28 That suddenly, there was an effacing of the boundary between night and day. You could call anyone at any time.

52:34 (That) That was true if you were 15 or if you were 75, that the experience of time changed.

52:41 And I became very interested in thinking about time. Time and revolution. And one of the things I learned 52:47 from the Maidan, or learned from the accounts of the Maidan that I was getting from my friends, and colleagues, and other people 52:53 who were there, was an appreciation of Sartre's idea of time, 52:58 of the present. The present is a border. The present is a border between...

53:03 Between what Sartre calls "the inward self. " Facticity, what has already happened, 53:08 who you have been up to this moment, what cannot be changed, and "the forward self. " 53:14 What is coming in the future, what is not yet determined, what is the possibility for transcendence, 53:20 to go beyond what has been and who you have been up to this moment.

53:25 And that border is with us, every moment of our lives. The present is the moment of that crossing of the border 53:31 from what has already been and who we have been to the possibility of going beyond, but we normally don't feel it, 53:37 we normally don't turn our attention to it. And revolution is that moment when you suddenly shine a glaring light 53:44 on that border, and you are shaken into understanding the present as the moment of the possibility of going beyond.

53:52 Thank you. (audience applauding) 54:01 (calm music)

back to TOC


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Lecture 21 Comparative Russian Imperialism

0:00(electronic music) 0:13 - Good afternoon, everybody. Happy Tuesday. Today's one of those days in which our biweekly lecture 0:19 is going to be delivered by a guest. And our guest lecturer is Professor Arne Westad.

0:25 Arne Westad studied history, philosophy, and modern languages at the University of Oslo 0:31 before doing a graduate degree in U. S. and international history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

0:38 Before joining the faculty at Yale, where he is the Elihu Professor of History, he held positions at the London School of Economics 0:45 and Harvard University. Professor Westad has published 16 books, most of which deal with 20th century 0:52 Asian and global history. He is one of the world's leading historians of the Cold War, 0:57 which he worked on for a significant part of his career, writing important work about the Soviet Bloc 1:02 and the People's Republic of China. He now specializes in the histories of empire and imperialism, 1:08 as well as China's place in the international order. Today, in one of our very last meetings of this course, 1:14 he will deliver a lecture about comparative Russian imperialism. Arne, the floor is yours. - Thank you.

1:21 (students applauding) 1:26 Thank you, Wiktor, for that generous introduction. I can see the Russian empire up here flicking off and on, 1:35 and that's a little bit like what the Russian Empire has been over a long period of time.

1:40 So maybe that's illustrative of what we are going to talk about today. So I think the reason why I've been asked to do this lecture 1:47 is that I teach a class this semester here at Yale on comparative empires and imperialisms.

1:54 So where we look at the transformations of empires going back to the mid-19th century 2:01 and all the way up to the U. S. empire today. It's an undergraduate seminar, 2:08 and I hope the undergraduates enjoy it half as much as what I do. So the purpose of the lecture is trying to understand better 2:18 how Russian imperialism versus Ukraine today fits into a bigger context.

2:25 So both of Russia's own past as an empire, but also that of the other empires.

2:32 And I think one of the problems that we've had conceptually and interpretatively 2:39 with regard to Russia's war of aggression this year is that it hasn't been understood enough 2:47 in terms of those contexts. And I hope this class overall have helped the people 2:53 who are here or those who are watching understand that aspect of the conflict better, because it is, to me, crucial, 3:00 not just in terms of the conduct of the war, but also how the war is going to end.

3:06 Without understanding that deeper background, it's really hard to get to understand that.

3:11 So I'm gonna be looking, as I said, at Russia's own past, but also gonna be looking, although briefly, at China, 3:18 at France, at Britain, and to some extent, to United States, 3:24 which also I think in terms of its past certainly best should be understood as an empire.

3:29 And I'm gonna start with the drivers of Russian imperialism 3:34 coming out of the 19th century that stayed with us for a very long time.

3:40 And you will hear resonances of these today.

3:45 I'm going to talk about the competition between the Russian Empire and other empires in Europe 3:51 and outside of Europe. I'm going to talk in particular about the Qing Empire in China, 3:57 the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and Eastern Europe and Britain.

4:03 Just to get a sense of how this element of competition 4:09 came to frame much of the thinking both back in the early 20th century, 4:15 but also today about Russia's place in the world.

4:20 Then I'm going to do in the substantial part more of a direct comparison between Russia 4:28 and its relationship to Ukraine and Britain, really meaning England, in its relationship to Ireland, 4:37 and France in its relationship to Algeria. And I picked these up not because they're identical, 4:44 they're not identical, but they have a lot in common in terms of how long the involvement has lasted.

4:51 But also crucially, to me, that this is a matter of decolonization. Even though these areas, 4:58 these countries are close to the Imperial Centers, Ireland and Algeria, 5:03 their evolution has been an evolution driven in the 20th century by decolonization.

5:09 And what I'm indicating here, of course, is that the relationship between Russia and Ukraine 5:14 is in many ways similar in character, not in every context of those relationships.

5:21 And then I'm gonna finish before we hopefully have time for just a couple of questions 5:28 about talking about what drives Russian imperialism today, especially, but not exclusively, with regard to Ukraine.

5:35 So that's the overall framework for this lecture.

5:42 And some of this of course you will have touched upon before, but probably not in the context that we're trying to draw up today.

5:50 So let me start then with the drivers of Russian imperialism.

5:56 Is there anyone who can stop that map from flicking on and off? - [Speaker] Press Escape button on the keyboard.

6:01 No, no, no, keyboard ESC. - Press the Escape button. - [Speaker] Yeah.

6:06 - That seems to be a good idea. So we're gonna start by thinking 6:12 about the drivers of Russian imperialism, the way that it came out of the 19th century.

6:18 Some of these drivers, in my view, as you will hear later on in the lecture, have stayed relatively intact and others have changed.

6:26 The argument I'm putting forward here is not an argument about absolute continuity.

6:32 It is about the need to understand the starting point for many of these forms of thinking.

6:37 Without which, I think we are lost in our attempt at understanding what is the situation today. (telephone ringing) 6:49 It's this one. It's not me. (students laughing) (telephone ringing) (students laughing) 7:03 Probably. It should have been a red phone, right? Uniqueness of Exceptionalism 7:08 So the first of these drivers is also the most complex one.

7:15 It's a sense on the Russian side within the Russian elite or elites of uniqueness, 7:21 of exceptionalism, of standing apart as an empire from other empires.

7:27 Now, Russia, you underline this, Russia is not the only empire that thinks of itself in that way.

7:34 You are sitting here within an empire that thinks of itself very much in that way, right? 7:39 What is a little bit special with Russia is how comprehensively some of these ideas developed 7:48 from fairly early on about religion, 7:54 about authenticity, which is a term that is often used, for Russian speakers here, "samoefikasnost" 8:03 which can be translated in many different ways, but self being, very often, and I think most correctly, 8:10 certainly in the context of the 19th century, translated as at authenticity, 8:16 being close to the people, having a certain almost mystical connection between elites.

8:24 Then of course being imperial elites, and the vast majority of people who were included in the empire, 8:31 not just Russians, it should be said, but everyone that was included within the empire.

8:38 A genuine understanding of people's wishes that other empires, according to these texts, 8:45 did not possess. A search for a genuine order 8:52 that could represent those wishes of the people. Of course leading to the idea 8:58 or the ideal of benign authoritarian rule. And you will hear much of this being reflected 9:05 in some of the discourses later on as well. And speaking of this, by the way, I'm reminded of the great British historian, 9:14 Sir Lewis Namier. I don't know if Namier's name has come up earlier in this series of lectures.

9:21 He was one of the people, though most of his work was on British constitutional history, who gave voice to this idea about a particular link 9:30 between Russia, Russian empire, and authenticity. So Namier was born in Warsaw in the late 19th century 9:39 under the name of Bernstein. He then moved with his family to Ternopil, where he grew up.

9:46 Polefied, is that the word? Polefying his name to Niemirowski, which then became Namier 9:54 when he came to Britain as a student. Authenticity was the term that he often used.

10:01 He hated the Polish Republic. He hated Germany even more. He was ambivalent on Ukraine, 10:07 but he was big on Russia because it was authentic, right? In a way that other empires, including the British Empire, 10:13 which he served for most of his life, were not. So this is the first driver: 10:18 uniqueness, exceptionalism, authenticity. The second one, it seems to me, 10:25 is the emphasis within the official discourse of expansion as being defensive.

10:33 Now, again, other empires do this as well. There is always a border that needs to be pacified.

10:38 We're gonna talk about the Qing Empire later on, always a border to be pacified, the British Empire stumbled into its empire, et cetera.

10:50 But it's never emphasized as deeply and for as long, in my view, as the expansion of the Russian Empire.

10:59 And much of it was then rubbed off in a somewhat different form to the Soviet Union, 11:04 when that was reconstituted later on within what had been the Russian Empire.

11:11 Now, some of this is easy to understand, the emphasis on defense. Part of the reason is that Russia, of course, 11:17 confronted empires east and west, that for most of its existence, 11:22 were much stronger than Russia itself. In Europe, for sure, but also the Ottomans, 11:29 and certainly the Qing in East Asia, as the Russian empire discovered fairly early 11:36 in its expansion East, you didn't mess with the Qing. That was not a good idea. It was probably in terms of sheer military capability 11:43 combined with a ideology of aggression, the one that you really didn't want to come up against.

11:49 So this idea of expansion as being defensive in order to meet challenges that other empires are stronger, 11:58 very significant in the 19th century. Then thirdly, expansion as opportunistic.

12:06 And this is the one that is most problematic in a way to deal with, because it isn't 100% true.

12:12 I mean, it's not arguing that there weren't plans for expansion within the Russian Empire in the 19th century.

12:20 There certainly were such plans, but in a way, I would argue that were much less carried through on 12:27 in the Russian Empire than in any other empire that I know, including the ones that I mentioned so far.

12:33 Part of the explanation for that is, of course, the relative weakness that I have already referred to.

12:39 But then of course, making use from the mid-19th century on 12:45 of a unique moment when the Eastern, 12:50 and here I would include Britain, meaning British India, the eastern empires that Russia confronted got into trouble, 12:57 all three of them, the Qing, the British, and the Ottomans, roughly at the same time.

13:03 The Qing, mainly for domestic reasons, I would argue, and then followed by what confrontations 13:09 with Western imperialism, the Ottomans because of the beginning of nationalist 13:15 organizations in part of the Ottoman Empire, especially in the European part, and the British, because of the rebellion in India in the 1850s.

13:23 So instead of pushing outwards, these empires start to step aside, opening up for a remarkable period 13:32 of Russian imperial expansion. Now, that's opportunistic. It's opportunistic for a reason.

13:38 That reason is the weakness of others. But it also tells you something about the ability to act.

13:45 And that is what happened in the late 19th century. And the result you see up here, Russian Empire 13:52 in terms of this is the Russian Empire, and on 1914 or thereabouts. If you look at the red line, 13:58 which is the one that we are really broke upon massive expansion of territory.

14:05 Then fourthly, a driver of Russian imperialism coming out of the 19th century is the emphasis on hierarchy, 14:15 bureaucracy incorporation of elites. Also, meaning, it was non-Russian elites.

14:23 So again, these are characteristics you would find in any empire, but particularly, the emphasis on the incorporation 14:30 is something that the Russian Empire took very far. Most of the people, I think Putin will be profoundly shocked 14:37 if he reflects on this, but most of the people who constituted the expansionist elite 14:43 in the Russian empire were not Russian. They came out of other, mainly European, 14:49 not exclusively, peoples that were part of the Russian empire in the 19th century.

14:55 They staffed and mandated, and they were the bureaucrats that came to serve it, 15:00 which was part in a way of the promise 15:05 that the empire presented to them in terms of how working for and with the Russian Empire 15:13 could serve a lot of people who were not necessarily Russian, or perhaps even more crucially, 15:19 had not been born in a dominion of the Tsar.

15:25 That worked. And it worked for a very, very long time. It wasn't uncontroversial.

15:31 Certainly not in the areas that had been colonized. Neither was it uncontroversial within Russia itself, 15:38 but it was a powerful aspect of how the Russian empire worked.

15:44 People who were born, grew up in Ukraine, for instance, 15:49 in many cases, went to serve the Russian Empire in far away places, Poles, Germans, Belarusians, 16:02 you have it. I won't go through all the different groups that served in these kinds of worlds.

16:08 So hierarchy, bureaucracy, incorporation. Of course, a driver of Russian expansionism 16:16 was also the exploitation of resources. So for those who were already thinking, 16:22 "Aha, here's Professor Westad arguing a completely idealistic understanding 16:29 of Russian imperialism. " Not so. I mean, there were motives that were driven 16:34 by the wish for exploitation of resources outside what had been the established borders of the empire.

16:41 What is remarkable though about the Russian Empire for a very, very long time was that it was relatively ineffective 16:48 in exploiting those resources. So this was not for a lack of trying, but if you look at this map, 16:55 and you will have heard this many times, I'm sure, in this class, distance sometimes defeated Exploitation 17:00 the best purpose of exploitation, right? You could grab the resources, as all imperialists do, 17:06 that you want and that you need, but could you easily bring them to market, which here would be mainly in the West? 17:12 Did you even necessarily want to bring them to market when you could use them to strengthen the state 17:17 much more locally? Those are questions that need to be asked about the Russian empire.

17:24 So saying that this is not about the exploitation of resources as almost all imperial ventures are, 17:32 would be wrong, but it's also important to remember her relatively ineffective, inefficient for a very long time 17:40 the Russian Empire's exploitation of these resources were.

17:47 And then the final driver that I'm going to mention, there are many, but it has to stop somewhat.

17:54 It's about settlement. So again, if you look at the map, Settlement 18:01 we should have had a map that indicated where people from various parts of Russia settled during the empire, 18:07 but especially after emancipation, from the 1860s, you have a massive expansion of settlement 18:14 in various parts of Russia, far from where people were born. So not just saying that it was (indistinct) who settled.

18:21 They were fairly large number, but there were also other kinds of peoples. The empire, in a way, opened up for settlement.

18:29 For those of you who are here primarily because of your interest in Ukrainian history, 18:35 you should look at where Ukrainians have ended up all over the Russian empire.

18:41 Maybe especially look at the far east and what is today the Maritime provinces, which has a very large number 18:47 of people from Ukraine settling. This is important, because not all empires settle, right? 18:58 There are some, Russia is among them, where settlement, trend settlement, whatever you want to call it, 19:06 is an important part of the drivers. We're gonna come back to this a little bit later on. And there are others that are too much less of it.

19:12 And then of course there other hybrid ones, like the British Empire that would settle in some areas, 19:19 which is part why fairly large number of you are here today.

19:26 North America would settle, Australia would settle parts of Africa, 19:32 and carrying out at least episodic acts of genocide as they did so. Comparative Imperial History 19:38 But then in other parts of the British Empire, settlement was not on the agenda. There was very little British settlement in India, 19:45 for instance. And we can, if you are interested in comparative imperial history, we could move further into why that was so.

19:53 I often use the example of Korea. So Korea was in some kind of union in a very broad sense, 20:01 being linked to Chinese empires for a very, very long time. But there were no Chinese attempts 20:06 at settling Chinese people in Korea during that time period. From the early 20th century, 20:12 Korea became gradually a part of the Japanese empire, and the Japanese settled in very large numbers.

20:18 So it's important, particularly for those of you who have an interest in concepts linked to certain colonialism, 20:23 it's important to understand what this is really about, and what the forces are, the drivers of it 20:29 why it consult the way it is. So these are the drivers of Russian imperialism at the higher level the way I see them. Competition 20:39 So let's then turn to the issue of competition 20:44 that I mentioned originally. And I do think that this is important in order to understand 20:52 why we ended up with a Russian empire that control all of this enormous land mass 21:00 that we are looking at here.

21:07 And you will know this, and I'm not gonna dwell on it, Russian expansion towards the east and towards the south 21:14 and into other parts of Europe started quite early. We're talking about the 17th century, 21:20 in the early 17th century. But of course, during that time period, as I already said, 21:27 the Russian Empire had to be very careful not to come up against stronger empires, 21:32 which would basically whack them if they tried to get into the areas that were contested.

21:38 So most of that expansion went northward and eastward 21:45 into areas in which the anti-imperial resistance 21:50 were much weaker. That was the story for a very, very long time. The 19th Century 21:56 And it's really the 19th century that changes this.

22:03 As I already indicated, it's important sometimes to recognize this in history.

22:09 The Russian Empire, in many ways, got lucky. It got lucky with the Qing.

22:14 It got lucky with the Ottomans. It got lucky with the British for no reason connected to the Russian Empire itself, right? 22:22 There was the opportunity to expand into enormous areas, 22:28 because of that weakness of Russia's opponents. So you see that here along the borders of the Russian Empire 22:40 going into the (indistinct), going into Central Asia, Southern parts of Central Asia, 22:46 which had been an absolute no-no, because if you went in there, you got in trouble with the Qing.

22:52 And then of course, ultimately, in the far east, what became the Maritime provinces were taken directly 23:00 from the Qing Empire when the Qing got into real trouble in the late 19th century. Empires and Competition 23:07 I think we can learn a lot about how empires behave if we think about them in terms of competition, right? 23:15 Not just each empire for itself, which generally has been the approach, 23:20 but also how empires learn from each other, how they see each other.

23:27 My Princeton colleague Jeremy Adelman has written really well on this. I mean, how empires take over characteristics, 23:35 take over imperial technologies from others. And in many ways, this is what Russia 23:41 then proceeded to do in the 19th century. Of course, not just in the areas that were taken over, 23:50 but in other parts of the Russian Empire as well. This sudden explosion in expansion also gave rise 23:59 to much of this restlessness that took place in other parts of Russia, 24:04 which even truly would lead up to the fatal engagement in the war in 1914, and then to the collapse 24:13 of the Russian Empire in the revolution. A collapse that quite a number of historians will explain, 24:18 at least in part, by overstretch, that they were trying to do too many things 24:24 at the same time and therefore failed. There's a lot to be said for that.

24:29 Yale colleague Paul Kennedy's term "imperial overstretch" I think is incredibly well applied 24:36 to Russia in the late 19th century. So comparison is not just a issue by issue comparison, 24:46 at least to me. Comparison can also tell us a great deal when you think about it in a broader context, 24:53 when you think about it in a societal context, an economic context, and maybe first and foremost, in a state context.

25:00 Not just about political systems, but about how one create or tries to create 25:06 capable states that respond to these kinds of imperialist opportunities as they come out.

25:17 Now, I thought at this point, that it could be quite helpful for us to explore 25:23 some of the categories that most of which we have already touched upon 25:28 in terms of drawing a more immediate comparison, as I said, to begin with, 25:35 between Russia, Britain, and France. I'm not picking these three because they are the only three 25:41 that you could possibly compare. I mentioned the Qing. I mentioned the United States, 25:48 but there is something in particular about the start of expansion with these empires, Russia, Britain, France, 25:56 that I think can be quite illustrative. And many people now lost decade or so 26:02 who want to work on comparative empires and imperialisms, have started looking at these factors.

26:10 With Ukraine being a significant part of it in terms of its relationship to Russia.

26:16 And the parallels then, as I said, to begin with, is the English in Ireland and the French in Algeria, 26:24 both early attempts at colonization 26:31 that lasted for a very long time and ultimately failed.

26:36 They failed because the people who lived in these regions took on identities, accepted identities, 26:43 worked through identities that were not commensurate with imperial project that had been put on them 26:51 from the outside, even though significant elements, think language remained, 26:59 or after that imperial period was over.

27:04 Anti-colonial revolutionaries in Algeria mainly wrote in French.

27:12 The activist of the Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army used almost exclusively English.

27:18 So there are things that do remain. But let's look at this in terms of 27:25 some more specific comparisons.

27:31 One, and here we get to go back to that term again is of course about settlement.

27:37 This is difficult because settlement happen in slightly different forms in these three countries.

27:44 So in Algeria, in Ireland, and in Ukraine.

27:50 So in Ireland settlement, English settlement, happened more or less all over the country.

27:58 But then increasingly, and here we see a parallel to Ukraine, increasingly, as industrialism started to take hold 28:05 in the most resource rich, energy rich parts of the country, meaning the north, right? 28:11 And the parallel here, of course, is Donbas in the eastern parts of Ukraine in particular.

28:17 There's also a parallel to France in Algeria, where it was the most productive, 28:26 but mainly in agricultural terms, areas along the coast that were colonized 28:32 by French-speaking people, not necessarily people who came from France, but people whose main language was French 28:39 and moved into these areas under the auspices of the French Empire. Selffulfilling Prophecy 28:48 In all three of these countries, in terms of settlement activities, 28:56 the native population were mainly excluded. Not fully excluded, but mainly excluded.

29:03 The arguments that were being used for this were of different kinds.

29:10 One had to do with education and skills, which of course, the empire that was in control deliberately deprived 29:17 the people they were ruling over of. If you ever heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy, 29:23 you can see that that one is there. But also, of course, loyalty to the imperial project, 29:29 which was very, very significant 29:34 probably as we already touched upon, in all three of these cases, particularly in the late 19th century, 29:41 settlement was a part of expanding one's own population overseas. And in these cases, of course, 29:48 in areas that were pretty close to the imperial model country, 29:53 which is important in this context. Incorporation 29:59 But the comparisons here are not just about settlement. They're also about incorporation.

30:05 And this is when things I think get really interesting. The idea at the Imperial Center of these countries, 30:15 which had, for most of the countries, had a separate existence 30:20 being an integral part of the imperial homeland, not just the imperial state.

30:27 Imperial states are vast, over to the peripheries. And no would, or very few people, 30:34 especially if you're not French, would make an argument that these faraway places actually are a part of France or part of whatever, right? 30:42 But if you happen to be next door, it is more problematic in many ways.

30:48 So you get this argument in the late 19th century, which has resonated all the way down to very close to today, 30:58 that Ireland really belongs to Britain. It is part of the British Isles, right? 31:05 It should be incorporated. More incorporation is what is necessary, not less incorporation.

31:11 Until, of course, the British hit at one of the weaker moments in history, 31:16 an armed rebellion that they couldn't overcome, that established an Irish state.

31:22 But in the process of that, this is where incorporation really resonates.

31:27 The British kept hold of the north, of the northern parts of Ireland, which had been the part that had been mostly settled 31:34 by English people, Scottish people, other people from the empire who had come in 31:39 to work at the factories and work in the areas, in the north.

31:47 In the Franco-Algerian situation, things were even worse in terms of finding a solution, 31:54 because as many of you will know, in the late 1940s and 1950s, 32:00 the position that the French state took was that Algeria was an integral part of France.

32:08 Even considering any form of autonomy, nevermind independence for Algeria 32:14 was tantamount to devaluing the whole significance and position of the French state, 32:21 which is why that War of Independence became so incredibly vicious, right? 32:27 Because it had to do with identity, and identity both within the former colonized area 32:33 and within the imperial center. Empire 32:40 Exploitation is an important part of this, and various kinds of exploitation of near areas 32:49 in terms of empire. I think there are some parallels here 32:54 as well with regard to these three.

32:59 When I say exploitation, I'm not always thinking about it in sort of purely material terms, though that is a significant part of it, 33:06 as I have already described. But it goes further than that.

33:12 It's also making use of the manpower, for instance, for wars, for further wars of expansion.

33:18 If you look at the number of Algerians that served 33:24 in France's wars during the 20th century, especially, 33:30 it's a very, very large number. The number of Irish people who served 33:36 in various British armies, sometimes as the front troops for this, are also very, very high, right? 33:43 So it's not just about economic exploitation, it's also exploitation of the manpower 33:51 that is actually there. It's also other forms of exploitation. Sexual exploitation is one part of this in a gendered sense, 33:59 which I think is really important to emphasize.

34:04 Its exploitation in terms of when you have more development 34:11 as you did during the mid-20th century. Exploitation of resources in terms of 34:18 everything from currency to fuel.

34:24 When you think about imperialist exploitation in these near contexts, 34:29 you sort of have to take the smash and grab version, right? Of exploitation that most of us think of 34:37 in imperialist terms and magnify it, look at it through a slightly different lens, 34:43 in part because the cases that I'm talking about here were not cases of resources 34:51 having to be brought in from afar. They were pretty close and easily accessible.

35:02 So settlement, incorporation, exploitation. And then finally, cultural hegemony.

35:12 I'm gonna dwell on this a little bit because I think it is hugely important for all three of these cases.

35:21 So I talked about language to begin with in this part, 35:27 and how language had been used in order to incorporate 35:33 certainly elites, but after a while, to further a field as well into the imperial project.

35:42 Ukraine is of course the best example that I know of this, right? But Ireland and Algeria would not be far behind.

35:53 Prioritizing the culture of the colonizer is, as Edward Said and others have told us, 36:01 a really important aspect of continuing the imperial tradition, sort of driving on the kind of issues 36:08 that come from the earliest period of empire and of imperialism. Culture 36:16 It's also a way in which imperial powers almost always create divisions within the countries 36:25 that they are in control of. And culture here is probably more important 36:30 than straightforward politics. It brings us back to what we talked about 36:36 at the beginning of this lecture in terms of identities, 36:42 in terms of discouraging dissent among the colonized, 36:48 because the cultural power of the colonizer is so much greater.

36:55 For instance, we are international, we are global, we are great power, we are super power, 37:01 while you are not, right? You are local. So culture works in that way, I think, 37:09 with regard to imperial projects, and probably is the last thing to go, right? 37:16 I think it's pretty clear in the case of Ukraine, and eminently visible in the case of Algeria and Ireland.

37:25 This is certainly so, and it is an issue. It's an issue that of course, 37:30 only colonized people after decolonization can deal with themselves successfully. But it is an important issue. Questions 37:40 So I wanted to make sure that we have a little bit of time at the end for questions.

37:45 So I'm just gonna make some final remarks first about Russian imperialism today versus Ukraine.

37:54 But then I think more importantly in terms of what I know something about 38:02 how the effects of this war are going to resonate 38:07 on the Russian side in terms of dealing with the past including the deeper past.

38:15 So I have absolutely no doubt, as you might have guessed, in terms of how I framed this lecture, 38:21 that Russian imperialism today versus Ukraine will end in the same way as England and Ireland 38:30 and France in Algeria in decolonization, 38:37 in spite of neo-colonial wars. So I mean, the Russians in Ukraine in 2022 38:43 are not the first ones who engage in neo-colonial wars. I mean, Algeria, and in my view Ireland, 38:49 are also good examples of it. You find it in almost all parts of the world. This idea that if a formal association 38:58 in terms of empire is gone, that that's the end of the story. Almost in all imperial context, not so.

39:08 This continues to be problematic for a very long time after that.

39:13 And part of the reason for that, I argue, is that these positions are so closely 39:20 bound up in identities, in core identities, for many of the people who are involved, 39:26 not just on the side of the colonized, but perhaps even more powerfully on the side of the colonizers.

39:34 And this is what we sometimes do not understand well enough, maybe especially in the Russian case, 39:40 because this has been including the collapse of the Soviet Union, such a long and outdrawn affair. Russian Identity 39:48 This is in many ways about Russian identity.

39:55 And it is, in my view, first and foremost, identity in Russia in the sense of an inability 40:03 to deal meaningfully with the past. I spent a lot of time in Moscow in the early 1990s.

40:13 As Wiktor said, I worked on the history of the Cold War. There was no better opportunity for a historian 40:20 of the Cold War than to be in Moscow in the early 1990s when the archives started to open up and you could get access.

40:25 I also then was witness to how people almost overnight 40:33 went from belonging to one of the two superpowers, which gave immense pride to a lot of people in Russia 40:39 over onto being next to nothing. People starving, people in Moscow, elderly people starving to death in 1993.

40:50 So that sense of collapse, being déclassé, 40:56 everything taken away, is a very important reason I think why Putin has been able to develop Russia 41:04 or not develop Russia in the direction that he has. Course also manipulates very effectively, 41:10 at least up to the war in Ukraine began, the image globally of the Soviet era 41:17 as a kind of anti-empire, while in reality, of course the Soviet Union kept some, not all, 41:24 but some of those visions of empire relatively intact.

41:30 So what Russia needs, in my view, probably more than anything else except regime change, 41:35 is a reckoning with the past. Just like there is a need to discuss slavery 41:41 and settler colonialism in Europe and in the Americas and elsewhere, 41:46 there is also a deep need for Russians to discuss the effect the empire has had on those at the receiving end, 41:54 but also, and maybe more fundamentally on Russians themselves, 42:00 because it's very difficult, as this country, United States is slowly realizing 42:08 to be an empire and a republic. To be an empire, nevermind a democracy, 42:16 but even a functioning republic at the same time.

42:21 So these forms of what I call hybrid exceptionalism that Vladimir Putin has been using 42:29 in his war of aggression against Ukraine, when Foreign Minister Lavrov at the beginning 42:37 of the conflict spoke about Ukraine as being a Russian sphere of privileged interest, right? 42:45 You can see how that resonates with some of these drivers of Russian imperialism 42:50 that I've been talking about today. So on the Russian side, it is as important to deal with this 42:56 in terms of empire as it is to deal with it in terms of war. So that's what I had to say.

43:01 And we have time, I think. Exactly five minutes for questions, 43:07 if there were people who wanted to ask.

43:17 Please. - Was there any conflict between this Russian sense of authenticity as an imperial motivation 43:24 and the fact that many of the servants of imperialism were themselves not Russian? Links 43:31 - I think there are some links. I mean, one I think is that it is the imperial 43:38 institution in itself that is unique in a way. You sort of project it upwards.

43:44 You can see some tendencies to that during the Soviet era and the post-Soviet era as well, 43:50 this idea of inclusive representation, right? 43:56 People have written whole books about this comparing the late imperial era in Russia and the Soviet Union, right? 44:03 This idea of representing something that is much bigger than Russia, 44:09 much bigger than the Soviet peoples themselves that is immensely attractive to others.

44:14 Now, for most of the time, it should be said, with regard to the Russian empire, that wasn't so, with some bulk exceptions.

44:21 People were incorporated into the empire by force and not by choice, right? 44:28 But you can still see how it could work, right? This idea that you represent some bigger idea 44:36 that is not even necessarily Russian in nature, but has the Russian state, 44:41 the Russian imperial state in this case at its center.

44:50 Other questions? Yeah. - [Student] You hinted that what you think Russia needs is regime change and reckoning with the past.

44:58 Do you think that when regime change does come, they will bring this reckoning with the past or no? Track Record 45:05 - I certainly hope so. The track record is not particularly good with regard to this.

45:12 Look, there's been, over the last 20 years in Russia, 45:18 I'm sure all of you're aware of that, a very specific set of attempts of moving away 45:25 from dealing with the past in any meaningful sense. I mean, to some extent, that is what the Putin regime has been about, right? 45:36 A kind of denial of everything that has happened before. Not always in a specific sense.

45:41 It's very interesting, right? So as an archival historian, 45:47 I found it fascinating that in the very last two, three years before the invasion of Ukraine, 45:54 Putin, we know that it was Putin himself, acted to open up many archives from the Soviet era.

46:02 And we don't know the reason why that was so. I have a strong suspicion that the real reason was to compare his own regime 46:11 favorably with what had been the failure of the Soviets. I mean, Putin, as you will know, 46:18 his constituent elements is that he's an anti-communist. He believes that the communist era, 46:25 in spite of the little parenthesis around the great patriotic war, 46:31 that communism was bad for Russia, bad for Russians. It might have been good for other peoples in the empire, but it was bad for Russians.

46:38 So I think you have to have a pretty significant change, not just in terms of the regime itself, 46:46 which can go in any direction. I'm not in any way foreseeing that what comes off 46:51 for Russians necessarily is better than Putin. But in terms of thinking about the past, 47:00 I think it's more significant in terms of society than it is significant in terms of the state.

47:06 Of course, the state must not resist it or disallow it, 47:12 but my greatest shock with regard to the 2014 invasions 47:19 and the 2022 invasions was how many ordinary Russians who were, at least the step of the way, carried along.

47:27 Boy, this pack of lies and half truths that Putin presented as the justification for colonial wars.

47:35 And that tells me that there is a lot of work among Russians themselves to do, to understand how they are held back 47:43 by this imperial mindset. Because as I said in the case of the other examples, this always ends badly 47:50 when you are gotten to the early part of the 21st century. One final question, if there is one.

48:06 If not, let me make one very brief point at the end. So in this lecture, 48:12 I've tried to look at sort of the long delay, 48:17 the kind of trajectories that come out of the past, even the deeper past. I've not done so trying to tell you 48:25 that history explains everything. It doesn't. There are new directions, new trajectories 48:30 that are not necessarily connected to the past. But if you wanna try to understand terms, terminologies, 48:38 parts of language, ideas and identities, then history can be a great guide, 48:45 because history brings something to the table in terms of understanding the present, 48:52 which can explain things that otherwise would be really, really hard to explain.

48:57 So that's, in a way, my message in this lecture. Doesn't explain everything. But it's hard to make do without it 49:03 because of the things that it can help you to understand. All right, thank you very much. (students applauding) 49:14 (soft gentle music)

back to TOC


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Lecture 22 Ukrainian Ideas in the 21st Century

0:00(somber music) 0:11 - All right, we're getting close to the end. There's this lecture, which is gonna be about culture very broadly understood.

0:19 And then the next lecture, which is gonna be a kind of review of the ideas of empire and Europe.

0:26 You can think of both of these lectures as helping you think through some of the main issues of the class 0:33 as you prepare for the exam. 'Cause I understand that as Yale students, 0:38 you would prefer actually not to be in class, but to be studying for the exam, and I'm here to tell you, you can do both at the same time, right? 0:45 Especially the essay questions in the exam give you a lot of room to think through and make arguments, right? 0:51 Think through and make arguments. And so in these last couple of lectures, we'll mostly be doing interpretation.

0:58 So this lecture is about culture. I'm not gonna try to define what a culture is.

1:04 We've got the whole anthropology department for that, but what I have in mind here is the very broad notion of, 1:12 let's say, a set of self, a set of mutually reinforcing notions 1:18 of what a people might be. So by Ukrainian culture here, I'm not gonna have time to get into, 1:26 with some exceptions, the details of Ukrainian literature and Ukrainian poetry. What I'm mainly concerned with is the notion of people. Ukrainian Literature 1:35 So I'm going all the way back, if you remember, all the way back to September in the first couple of lectures 1:41 when I tried to specify that the modern legal notion of genocide rests on the equally modern notion 1:49 of a people or a nation, and that these two things are in a kind Genocide Convention 1:55 of uncomfortable relationship, one with the other. And as we complete this course during a war, 2:04 which certainly has genocidal aspects to it, it's worth thinking about that relationship.

2:10 So the Genocide Convention in 1948 assumes that there is such a thing as a people, right? 2:17 It assumes that there is a society which has a top and a bottom, which has some way, which has some kind of a border 2:24 where people are in or people are out. So the convention acknowledges of people in law 2:31 by presuming that they exist. You can think of the act of genocide as a different kind of acknowledgement, right? 2:38 You don't destroy something if it doesn't exist. You don't seek to destroy something if it doesn't exist.

2:44 But the slightly tricky part about this is that very often, the act of destroying to people begins 2:50 with the explicit verbal negation of its existence, right? Ukrainian Cultures 2:56 And so, one of the larger points I want to try to make in this lecture, maybe the large point, 3:02 is that Ukrainian culture, the notion of what Ukraine is, where it begins and where it stops, 3:08 can't really be done outside of this larger notion of an encounter. It can't really be done outside of the notion 3:15 of an encounter with the Russian Empire, with the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia. Encounters 3:22 Now, as I try to make this argument, I wanna be clear about something very specific 3:27 about this encounter, something which makes it a little bit different from the other encounters we've talked about in this class, 3:33 which is that this is an encounter which denies that it is taking place.

3:38 Okay. This is, like, I'm sure you've all had moments like that in your lives, right? 3:43 Perhaps on a Saturday night, encounters where, okay, that was like a really low, 3:48 going really low, really fast, (students laughing) really early on a really important point.

3:55 All right. But there's a certain strangeness to an encounter, 4:00 or there's this, let me put this, there's a specific character to an encounter where one side denies 4:06 then an encounter is actually taking place. A third party looking in will say, "Well, yes, the encounter is happening," 4:12 but there's nevertheless something specific about this. So as a way to start, I want you to just remember that moment 4:18 in the third quarter of the 19th century in the Russian Empire where the existence 4:24 of the Ukrainian language is being denied. It's a very specific thing to do, right? To go out of your way to deny something exists 4:32 is a very specific form of action. The Valuev decree of 1863 includes the famous passage 4:39 that I'm quoting now, "The Ukrainian language never existed, does not exist, and shall never exist," right? 4:47 So, or as we say, in Ukrainian, [Ukrainian words] 4:56 Right? So I don't know. That was kind of a joke. Omniscience 5:02 But there's a very specific, there's a very specific thing going on here when an encounter is being denied, right? 5:07 So if it never existed, why would you refer to it, right? If it doesn't exist now, why are you banning it? 5:17 But maybe the most interesting thing is the claim that it never will exist.

5:23 It never will exist. There's this very specific kind of omniscience going on 5:29 when I make the claim that something will not happen, right? I'm denying the basic unpredictability, 5:35 or at least, the contingency of everything which is going to happen after I issue this decree.

5:42 In other words, this decree is doing a very specific kind of work.

5:50 The relationship between the emerging Russian imperial culture and the Ukrainian culture, 5:57 which exists at the time, is taking on a very specific form. Because of course, it's not as logically contradictory Existence 6:06 or silly as maybe I'm suggesting, the idea that the Ukrainian culture or language doesn't exist means 6:12 that it's existence can only be described as part of Russian culture, right? 6:19 So it's not that there are no, it's not that there's nothing there, it's rather that it can only be described as existing 6:27 as part of something else, right? And so when I say that you don't exist, 6:34 what I'm really doing is that I'm saying that I do exist, right? So there's a fancy term for this, 6:40 which is like Constitutive Other, which you're welcome to note down and use to impress your friends. But the idea that you don't exist is how I show 6:49 that I do exist. What you are doing has no character of its own. It is a version of what I am doing, right? 6:58 And so there's a very specific thing which is going on here, whereby Russian culture as it emerges, 7:05 is being defined not exactly against Ukrainian culture, but somehow riding along on top of Ukrainian culture.

7:14 Anything that seems to be Ukrainian is actually Russian, and anyone who denies this is moved out of history.

7:22 So this is where the categorical part of never will exists comes in. So this class has been all about encounters, 7:31 a basic argument about the nation in this class has been that no nation comes from nowhere, right? 7:37 That's why all the founding stories are so implausible, like the one with the lady and the snake, and the one with the guy.

7:43 The founding stories are all really implausible, right? They're fun, they're silly, they don't make any sense.

7:48 All the stories of ethnogenesis, including the ones involving the aliens, they're all implausible, right? 7:55 There's always some encounter. And the whole argument of this class about how something specific emerged on the terrain 8:00 that's now Ukraine involves, it involves the Khazars and the Vikings and the Byzantines 8:09 and the Slavs and the Lithuanians and the Poles. And of course, it also very much involves the Russians 8:14 and the Soviet Union. But there's something very specific going on from the 19th to 21st centuries 8:21 where this encounter has an ideological quality to it 8:27 that the others don't. Or in the case of the Polish one, I would say, no longer have, no longer has, 8:35 but in Russia, it clearly does. So in order to get ourselves to see this 8:41 and maybe get ourselves out of it, we have to kind of look at some trajectories 8:47 in the Russian encounter with Ukraine, not from the point of view of how a Russian national ideology would see them, 8:54 but just to note what this encounter looks like, right? So this very special thing, 9:00 this is the overall special thing. There have been lots of European empires, right? European Empires 9:09 But they all have the feature, and write this down 'cause it's important, of starting in Europe except for one.

9:18 You see, what's very different about the Russian Empire is that it becomes an empire by going into Europe, right? 9:27 By going into Europe. The Russian Empire becomes the Russian Empire in 1721, 9:34 having moved from Asia into Europe as a result of the cataclysm of 1648 onwards.

9:42 Remember that, and then there was that whole lecture about the 18th century and the collapse of Poland-Lithuania, 9:48 the collapse of the Cossack states, the collapse of the Crimean Tatar state, all those things happening in the 18th century, 9:55 leaving Russia in Europe. But it's not a European empire that went outwards, right? 10:00 It is a state which was centered at the edge of Europe in this relatively new city called Moscow, which first went south and east, 10:07 and then its final stage of development went into Europe. And the ambivalence of the relationship with Kyiv 10:14 is built into that. Because on the one hand, on the one hand, you become European by claiming Kyiv, right? 10:23 'Cause Kyiv has all those European things that you might want. It has the old baptism, it has North European history, 10:31 it has the Renaissance, it has the Baroque, it has all the European references.

10:36 It's just older than you are. And by a lot, I mean by five centuries, right? Kyiv is four or five centuries old than Moscow.

10:44 It is a millennium older than St. Petersburg, right? That's a lot.

10:49 So the ambiguity is you become European by going to Kyiv.

10:55 But since you are the empire, you can't acknowledge that the periphery is better than you.

11:02 So this tension is built in from the very, very beginning. On the one hand, we are European because Kyiv, 11:09 but on the other hand, the people who are around Kyiv have to be the periphery and are therefore inferior.

11:15 That tension is built in from the moment that Kyiv, Chernihiv, 11:20 these places come into the Russian Empire, and it's still very much present today, right? 11:28 So the Russian Empire vis-a-vis Ukraine is simultaneously inferior and superior 11:35 at the same time, right? It's superior because it's big and powerful and it's the empire, but it's also inferior 11:43 because this is the place that actually allows us to become the Europeans, right? 11:49 This is the place that allows us to become the Europeans, but we can never say that. That can never be said out loud, right? 11:56 So there's this deep tension which is built in to all of this. Religion 12:01 Okay. So one part of this is the timing, right? 12:08 Another part of this has to do with an encounter in religion.

12:14 There probably hasn't been enough religious history in this class, and it's an important element of the history of Ukraine, 12:21 in particular, distinctiveness between Ukraine and Russia, not just because there's a Greek Catholic church in Ukraine 12:29 and not in Russia, not just because church participation is much higher in Ukraine than it is in Russia, 12:34 but maybe mainly because in Ukraine, there is not a clear relationship between church and state the way that there is in Moscow, 12:42 both at present and historically. For many centuries, the relationship between the church and the state, 12:49 and including the last 30 years in the lands of Ukraine, has been rocky and uneven.

12:54 The church has been repressed by the state. It's been a part from the state, but it's never been seamlessly woven together 13:02 with the state, and that's an important difference. But from the point of view of Moscow, The Russian Orthodox Church 13:07 this curious things happens, which I mentioned in the 17th century, but it's very, it's an important example of this dialectic.

13:13 The Russian Orthodox Church, such as it is, and now, I'm leaning very heavily on a dissertation 13:18 by the wonderful Yale PhD graduate, Ievgeniia Sakal, the Russian Orthodox Church, such as it is, 13:26 takes on its form and its own narration of what it is in an encounter with Ukraine.

13:32 So if you remember back to the 18th century when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth collapses, 13:37 there are all of these educated churchmen in places like Kyiv and Chernihiv and they've been having these debates with each other, 13:43 and they've been having debates with the Catholics and the Protestants. They've been besieged by the Counter-Reformation. They've been dealing with the Jesuits for decades.

13:49 These are very erudite men, and suddenly, they're confronted with this new situation 13:55 in which there's no longer the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to deal with, no longer the reformation, Counter-Reformation, all that's gone, 14:01 but there are these fellows in Moscow, and they're suddenly subordinate to them.

14:06 So what is the story that you tell? There's a political story, I'll return to that, but there's also a religious dispute which takes place.

14:13 And then this religious dispute, authorities in Moscow and authorities in Ukraine have different ideas.

14:18 And the authorities in Moscow have the power. The authorities in Ukraine have the arguments. But what happens over time, 14:24 and this is all verges on being a general truth, the people with the power will eventually figure out the arguments 14:30 and they will eventually use them. So within the space of a generation, the church authorities in Moscow 14:37 are also using the same sources and the same kinds of arguments that the church authorities in Ukraine are using.

14:43 In other words, the church authorities in Moscow, by way of Ukraine, start reading the French and the Latin, and they start borrowing the arguments 14:49 from the Western theologians, and they start disputing and doing all the things that the Ukrainians are doing, and what they come up with is this interesting claim.

14:57 They claim, well, the reason that we are different, and we are right about theological matters, is that we, the Russian Orthodox Church, 15:03 are basically the unbroken, continuation of the Byzantine church 15:09 that nothing has really happened. It's just all a placid pool of non-events.

15:14 "We are pure. " Right? And this is, if you know anything about Western Orthodoxy, this is the account to this day, right? 15:21 That it's a non, basically a non-historical institution, but this argument that they're a non-historical institution 15:28 emerges as a result of historical encounter with Ukraine, very much like the political point, 15:34 which I made in the lectures a couple of weeks ago. The idea that Kyiv and Moscow are somehow connected, 15:43 organically connected, that Moscow fulfills itself in Kyiv and vice versa and all of this, 15:48 That is also an argument which was made by Ukrainian churchmen in the late 17th century facing a new position of power, 15:57 right? And you'll remember, it's a pretty clever argument, at least in this short term.

16:03 If you are in Kyiv, and suddenly you're being ruled by Moscow, you make the argument, "Hey, you and Moscow, everything actually came from us in Kyiv.

16:10 "Therefore, we're very important. " But given a generation or two, that argument will be turned around against you, 16:16 and it will become something much more like Kyiv fulfills itself in Moscow.

16:25 It all began in Kyiv, but everything fulfills itself in Moscow. And so now, the role of Kyiv is to be subordinate to Moscow. The role of Kiev 16:32 But the point is that that whole argument never emerges without Ukraine, right? 16:38 So all of these important steps in the history of what's going to become Russian culture are deeply, 16:44 organically connected with Ukraine. Take a literature, right? Take a literature. Okay. Who's the first important Russian writer 16:54 besides Pushkin? - [Student] Gogol? - Yes, Gogol. Who is from? 16:59 - [Student] Ukraine. - As everyone knows, from Ukraine, right? And his first stories are about Ukraine, and his family is Ukrainian. The turning point 17:09 Gogol is the turning point where the bilinguality stops being Ukrainian-Polish 17:17 and moves towards being Ukrainian-Russian, right? From the point of view of the 20th or the 21st century, you might think, "Well, the Ukrainians and the Russians, 17:22 they've always been together, blah. " No. It was Ukrainian-Polish was the normal bilingual character situation for a long time.

17:29 In the 19th century, Ukrainian-Russians starts to become the normal one, and you have these Ukrainians who write in Russian.

17:35 If you don't know Gogol, by the way, after exams, I know, but you might wanna start reading some of his short stories.

17:42 If you like the grotesque, if you have a taste for things like Edgar Allen Poe or Kafka, 17:47 it's truly extraordinary, wonderful stuff. But the cliche is that we all come out 17:54 from under Gogol's overcoat, which is a play on words because like an overcoat, but also, "The overcoat" is one of Gogol's most important, 18:00 one of his funniest and most important stories. But Russian literature comes from this Ukrainian story, right? 18:07 So in all of these levels, we have the same problem.

18:13 Another is with educated elites. So again, by the 20th century, there are very impressive Soviet educational institutions.

18:21 And by the 19th century, early 20th century, Russian imperial ones as well. But when these two societies merge, 18:28 the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and Kyiv is far more important than any educational institution in the Russian Empire.

18:34 And so during the 18th century, graduates to the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy are flooding Petersburg, which is the capital after 1721, 18:41 with the educated elites who help govern the empire, right? So in all of these ways, the Ukraine is what's needed 18:51 to make a Russian self-assertion, but that Russian self-assertion has to negate its own sources, right? 18:59 It has to negate its own sources, or else, it will seem incomplete. Something related happens at the level of history Russian Story 19:09 where the Russian story, as I've just described it, 19:16 it has to be a story about political legitimacy, right? 19:22 And again, you can see an extreme version of this in Putin today where Russia exists and has the right to rule 19:28 because of baptism in Kyiv in 988. Nothing that's happened between then and now really matters.

19:34 What you have is an unbroken right to rule as a result of a kind of metaphysical event a long time ago.

19:40 It's a version of, I mean, it is actually very much like and is a version of these medieval or early modern stories 19:48 where a family says, "By the way, we're descended from wolves, and not just any wolves, but the ones who founded Rome," 19:55 or whatever, right? I'm sort of, that's kind of a Habsburg joke. But when families, in families, you have families, 20:02 you may know this. Families have these kind of, probably from your family tells you this story, 20:07 like you had this great uncle, he actually invented the airplane. If you let families go on like that, they eventually just, 20:13 everybody comes, has descended from some king or whatever. I'm making a serious point or trying to, Family History 20:18 which is that history begins with a genealogy that legitimizes eternal power, right? 20:25 So if you're a family, you have trouble getting at keeping power, 20:30 getting power, not so hard, blood and treasure. It's keeping power which is hard, and that requires some kind of legitimating ideology 20:36 and the idea that you're gonna keep power forever into the future makes more sense if you can explain why you've had power 20:41 or should have had power forever into the past, and so there's some kind of story about how, what, where you came from, right? 20:47 So a lineage of power, and that's where political history comes from, okay.

20:53 So now, if you're in the 19th century and it's Ukraine, the move that you make is you counter political history 21:00 with social history, and that's Hrushevsky, right? That's Mykhailo Hrushevsky.

21:05 You then say, "No. History isn't just about some kind of legitimating story that makes sense to the people 21:11 who are in power. It's about actual continuities in culture. " Right? 21:16 That history is about the people, okay. Then you get into this conversation, 21:23 which continues to this day where if I say, "History is not about the power, it's about the people. " 21:31 Okay. At first glance, that might seem very much a matter of justice. But the obvious question is, 21:37 okay, who's the people then? Are the Jews the people? Are the Poles the people? 21:43 Is everybody who's on the terrain the people? Or is it just the people who know, if history is about the songs and the stories 21:50 and the language, what about the people who don't know the songs and the stories and the language, but live on the same territory, right? 21:55 So this is where there begins in Ukraine, but not just in Ukraine. It's just Ukraine's a very interesting 22:00 and clear case of this. And Ukraine begins this, forgive me, like this dialectic where neither of these positions is, 22:07 it can be exactly right, right? The idea that history is about the people is attractive, right? 22:13 But if you push it to an extreme that makes history just about the ethnicity and it becomes ethnic nationalism, 22:19 then there's a counter argument which says, "No, the people are defined by action.

22:25 The nation is a daily plebiscite. " And so it doesn't matter whether they're Jews or Germans 22:30 or Poles or whatever, it's about participation, and cooperation, and things like this. That's the political nation. Politics 22:36 But if you push that all the way to this extreme, then everything is politics. Why can't I make compromises with some other nation? 22:43 Maybe I can just take money from this guy over here. What's wrong with that? It's all part of me being political. And this is the political nation, right? 22:49 And so neither these positions can quite be correct, at least take into an extreme. They're in some kind of communication 22:57 with one another the entire time, and that discussion is going on today. It has to do partly with the Jews, 23:04 the Jews in Ukrainian history, which is an example of culture which we have to spend at least a moment on.

23:13 The Jews of Ukraine are there because of currents in Polish history.

23:19 The Jews of Ukraine become Russian imperial subjects after Ukraine ceases to become part of Poland. Modern Yiddish Literature 23:28 The Jews of Ukraine, see over the course of the 19th century, their traditional way of life essentially broken down 23:34 as a result of the military draft and other things. And the Jews of Ukraine, or some of them in the late 19th century build up a kind 23:43 of a modern Yiddish literature. The most important example of this, which you will have heard of, if you come from these traditions is all of Sholem Aleichem.

23:51 Sholem Aleichem is basically, and now, I'm stealing idea from my colleague, Amelia Glaser.

23:57 but what Sholem Aleichem is basically doing is he's taking Gogol and his portraits 24:02 to the Ukrainian countryside and making them gentler, and bringing the Jews into the center of the conversation, 24:11 whereas Gogol at the beginning of the 19th century was very much about taking mystical pre-enlightenment 24:20 beliefs and working them into modern literature. What Sholem Aleichem was doing was taking Yiddish language.

24:26 That's important. He's writing Yiddish. Yiddish language literature and using it. Yiddish, which is an old language and only newly a literary language, 24:32 taking Yiddish and using it to write about the problems of modernity. And what are the problems of modernity? The problems of modernity are socialism, 24:43 romantic love, right. So the position in Tevye the Dairyman is that he has these daughters, 24:48 and you guys know this, "Fiddler on the Roof," right? "Fiddler on the Roof," right. So it's the problems in modernity from the point of view of a Jewish dad, basically, right? 24:56 And the girls, all the daughters all have some, they all do something unexpected thing, but each one of the things they do represents modernity, 25:03 like the socialist, the rejecting the church, but even romantic love itself is a modern idea here.

25:11 Okay. So this is, so the Jews are, if there's going to be a talk of culture in Ukraine, 25:17 the Jews and Jewish history have to be part of it, and that includes the broad destruction of Jewish culture 25:25 at the beginning, not of the second, but the First World War when the Jews of Western Russia were deported, 25:31 which was one of the causes of the pogroms, which happened most intensively in Ukraine during the war.

25:40 We have to also talk about the assimilation of Jews in Ukraine to the Russian language before, 25:46 but especially after the Bolshevik Revolution. And then in Ukraine in particular, 25:52 and I'm just very briefly referring to material that you've read and we've talked about, but the mass murder of most Jews in Ukraine 25:58 during the Holocaust. And then after that, the return of Jew, 26:04 not, return is the wrong word, but the immigration or the movement of Jews from elsewhere in the Soviet Union to what is now Ukraine.

26:10 So Ukraine is now one of the most important Jewish countries in the world, numerically speaking.

26:15 It's one of the few, you can count them on one hand, countries that have a Jewish president. It is the only country in the world that will ever, 26:21 now, I'm gonna make a prediction, that will ever have a Jewish president elected by 70% or more of the vote.

26:26 I don't think that's ever gonna happen, because it won't happen in Israel because there're always two candidates, right? So it's hard to, see, I'm cheating. I'm using math.

26:33 But this Jewish Ukrainian culture is a post-war, 26:42 second, third, fourth generation Ukrainian culture, but it's clearly part of what one could think of 26:49 as a political nation, right? So the greatest, again, 26:54 so now, we're in a situation where the greatest Ukrainian warlord in history is a Jew, 26:59 which proves that God is Jewish and has a sense of humor. (students laughing) 27:07 In the Soviet Union, there's a version, and we've talked about this, 27:13 of how Ukraine becomes the Constitutive Other. The Soviet Union needs things from Ukraine. The Soviet Union Needs Ukraine 27:21 The Soviet Union needs for Ukraine to be a nation, 27:26 but then not to be a nation, right? So it needs for Ukraine. So, Ukraine, Stalin, Lenin, 27:34 they know that Ukraine is a nation. They need Ukraine. They want as much of Europe as they can, 27:40 but they have to settle for Ukraine. They need Ukraine to be a nation, but they also need it not to be a threat, 27:46 and so that's the dialectic of the 1920s and 1930s where the Ukrainian nation, Ukrainian literature, 27:53 Ukrainian people are educated. Literature is supported for a while, and then it breaks in the early 1930s. Ukraine is a Bread Basket 28:01 In a similar way, the Ukrainian economy has to exist and not exist.

28:08 The Soviet Union needs the Ukrainian economy because of, and this is a theme which literally goes back, 28:14 I mean, a lot of things, people say, "Go back to the ancient Greeks," but mostly, we're just having fun. In this case, it really goes back to the ancient Greeks.

28:21 Ukraine is a bread basket, right? Athens depends on grain from what is now Ukraine, 28:28 just as the Soviet Union depended upon grain from what is now Ukraine. It's a bread basket.

28:34 So they need the economy, but they don't want it to be the Ukrainian economy.

28:40 It has to be part of a larger project, right? 28:46 If they had let the Ukrainian peasants just grow the grain, they would've had bigger yields 28:52 than they did under collected by as agriculture. But collective by as agriculture meant that it was all under control, 28:58 and it would be the Soviet Union, which would be in charge of the distribution and the exports, right? So the Ukrainian economy has to exist 29:05 and has to not exist, which is a very brief way of referring to something that we have talked about before, 29:10 which is the death of about 4 million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine during the 1930s. Ukrainian Culture After WWII 29:18 Something similar can be said about Ukrainian culture after the Second World War.

29:24 And again, now I'm reviewing a theme. So we need it, but we don't need it.

29:31 And this is, during the Second World War, we need, we is now the Politburo, right? We is Stalin.

29:37 We need Ukraine because the war is being fought in Ukraine. And so, we'll talk up the Ukrainian nation.

29:42 We'll even talk about Bohdan Khmelnytsky as being a hero while the war is going on.

29:48 When the war is over, this is all gonna change. Under Zhdanov, this is all going to change. Ukraine is gonna be suspicious.

29:53 The Western Soviet Union is going to be suspicious. And then Khrushchev is going to find this brilliant solution.

29:59 And I mean, I don't mean that ironically, and as politically, it has been very powerful.

30:04 If you need the Ukrainian nation, you need Ukrainian culture, but you also don't need it.

30:11 What do you do? You say it's real, but it's reality is expressed in its merging 30:16 with Russia into something bigger, right? And so the brilliance of this move in 1954, 30:24 you remember 1954, it's when they gave out the cigarette, like millions of cigarette packs with the words, 300 years, on them.

30:30 Also, nightgowns, socks too, I think. The brilliance of that is that you're acknowledging 30:36 that Ukraine is real, but you're just saying Ukraine's history went in a certain direction.

30:41 In 1654, Ukrainians made this choice and it binds on them forever.

30:47 It's been done, right? So let's just remember that. And the Soviet Union is a version of this choice, which was made 300 years ago.

30:52 So Ukraine is real. It's just that Ukraine's existence is now meaningful 30:58 as part of a larger unit with Russia, and that is the version of how to think about Ukraine, 31:04 which works extremely well in Soviet Russia and in Soviet Ukraine 31:09 for a lot of Soviet Ukrainians for a very long time. Something like that, some version of that from 1954. Russian History 31:19 And this is an expression, again, these things aren't just made up.

31:25 These things are expressions of the actual politics of the actual Soviet Union.

31:31 So this might come as a surprise, but there haven't actually been that many Russian leaders 31:37 of Russia in the narrow sense of Russia, right? So if Russia claims the ancient dynasty from Kyiv, 31:45 I mean, they were Scandinavians. And then the Romanovs, at least after Catherine, 31:52 I mean, the only Romanov we can be sure of after Catherine was Catherine because you always know who the mother is, right? 32:02 I really have to stop because I don't have enough time to talk about Catherine the way that I'd like to talk about Catherine.

32:09 But in the case of the Romanovs, the only Romanov, I mean, this is dead serious now about the succession.

32:14 The only Romanov you can be sure of after Catherine is Catherine herself, and Catherine was a German.

32:19 So that's not a Russian origin story, right? And then the Bolsheviks, 32:24 okay, Lenin is maybe the most famous Russian of the 20th century, but how many Russian grandparents did he have? 32:32 That was like a high level question. I'm looking at the TAs. One, one.

32:39 Stalin's a Georgian. Khrushchev is from Russia, just barely but he grew up in Ukraine.

32:46 Brezhnev, as Jenny has taught me, was born in Ukraine and had Ukrainian nationality 32:53 as his passport nationality, and changed it to Russian, changed it to Russia. So you have to get, 32:59 oh, and Gorbachev, half Ukrainian family from southern Russia, and I am old enough to remember people in Moscow making fun 33:07 of his accent and saying that, "He's actually from Ukraine, this guy. " So you have to basically get to Yeltsin or Putin 33:17 before you're talking about Russians in an unambiguous sense running Russia, right? And so the story of how we need them, right? 33:25 We need them, but we can't say we need them, actually reflects the history of the Soviet Union in all of these ways. Soviet Industrialization 33:30 It also reflects that the history of Soviet industrialization, 33:36 where much of what is important is in Ukraine, the coal and the steel, and then later, the rockets.

33:43 A lot of what is important is in Ukraine, and so we need Ukraine. We need Ukraine. We need it more than we say we can need it.

33:49 And so that's why what we need has to be incorporated into this story about how what we need doesn't really exist on its own, exists with us. The Point of Ukrainian Culture 33:56 And in case I forget to say this, the point of all of this is that one can't talk about Ukrainian culture 34:05 without all the encounters, but this is a specific kind of encounter, right? This is a specific kind of encounter.

34:12 It's a little tiny bit like US history where, with the attitude of whites towards Blacks where, 34:20 "We are us because of you. You're what makes us different, but we can't acknowledge you for that reason, you see. " 34:28 The different, see, that's like, it's that same kind of pattern. The difference is the Europe part, right? That the Europe part plays out differently, 34:34 but it's that kind of move, right? It's that kind of move. So just in case I forget to say that that's the argument, 34:39 that it's an encounter, but it's not like other encounters. It's not like other encounters. But the point of culture is also, and now, we're gonna get, 34:52 now, we're gonna talk a little bit more in depth for the next 15 minutes about the late Soviet period in the contemporary period.

34:57 The the point of culture though, would be that even though all these things, 35:04 all these contingencies I'm insisting on are true, that if you're creating culture, you're trying just to create, like you're trying to create, right? 35:10 You're trying to create. And much of the protests that happen from the sixties onward are kind of in that spirit 35:18 where the notion of Ukrainian culture is not that we're trying to defend Ukrainian national culture, we're just trying to defend culture.

35:25 We're just trying to be ourselves. And the move that Ukrainian dissidents make, 35:30 especially in the 70s, is they say, "Look, it's not about Ukrainian culture, 35:36 Russian culture writ large. It's not even really primarily about Russian culture 35:42 and its hegemony, although that's a problem. What it's really about is the individual. " This is the move they make in the 70s, right? 35:48 They say human rights includes the right to be from the culture that you're from, 35:54 and that's something inside you as a person, right? And so that has to do, so that is your normality. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors 36:04 So I'm gonna mention a couple of crucial examples of this, and there's only really time for a couple, but one is 1965 when, 36:13 this is early Brezhnev, Ukrainians are being persecuted, 36:20 and at the same time, a film comes out, which I urge you to see, called "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" 36:28 which is by a Georgian Armenian, Sergei Parajanov, 36:33 but it's based on a story by a Ukrainian writer called Kotsiubynsky, 36:38 and it's set in the extreme West Carpathians, extreme west of Ukrainian. It's not only in Ukrainian, 36:44 it's in Carpathian dialect of Ukrainian. It's not socialist realism. It's magical realism.

36:51 And it's quite weird. It's quite weird and beautiful, and it's one of the very best Soviet films, 36:59 if that's even the word. Apropos of this film, there were protests about the oppression of Ukrainians.

37:06 One of the people who took part in these protests was a poet called Vasyl Stus, who loses his job as a result.

37:15 I'm gonna read to you one of his poems to make this point that sometimes culture is just trying 37:24 to be culture, right? And that a lot of the defensive culture in the late Soviet period was on that basis, 37:31 that all these things that I've been explaining to you, people understood. That was there. That was sorted out. But then, somehow it's all meaningless 37:38 unless there's a, there, there, right? Unless the culture itself is there. So Stus goes to the Gulag twice.

37:45 He ends up dying after a hunger strike in 1985. But this is the kind of poetry he wrote.

37:52 This one is called "A Stranger Lives My Life and Wears My Body. " 37:57 "It seems to me that it is not I who live, but another someone lives for me 38:03 in the world taking my shape, no eyes, nor ears, nor hands, nor feet, nor mouth, 38:09 estrange to my own body. And a chunk of pain and closing myself, 38:15 suspended in the abyss. And you, though born, just burned and never grew into the body. You never entered the flesh.

38:21 Just a passerby between the worlds, having sunk to the bottom of before in existence.

38:26 A hundred nights ahead, and a hundred nights behind, and between them, a mute doll, burned white from self-inflicted pain like a speck of hell.

38:34 The laconic cry of the universe, a tiny ray of the sun trapped and estranged in the body.

38:39 You are awaiting another birth for yourself, but death entered into you long ago. " 38:45 That's my translation from yesterday. It's much prettier in Ukrainian.

38:50 I'm gonna resist the temptation. It's really nice in Ukrainian. [Ukrainian words].

39:00 It's very nice in Ukrainian. Learn Ukrainian. Read it in Ukrainian. Ukrainian Helsinki Group 39:06 So Stus goes, is sent, is imprisoned. He's released.

39:12 By the time he comes out, there's a human rights movement, the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, he defends it and then joins it, 39:18 is sent to the Gulag. Again, he's sent to Perm. The Gulag in the 70s is much smaller, but it still exists.

39:26 Perm is where I think four members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group die. He is one of them after a hunger strike. The Lord Has Started Being Born 39:35 I'm gonna read you another one of his poems. We're just gonna do him as a poet today. This is not my translation.

39:41 This is Alan Zhukovski translation, which was just published a few months ago. This one is called "The Lord Has Started Being Born 39:47 Within Me. " "The Lord has started being born within me, and half-recalled and half-forgotten, 39:53 waits till I depart from life. It looks as if he is outside me, at the edge of death where living people should not dare to enter.

40:00 My grandchild and my ancestor, God waits. Together on my own, that's how we live, 40:05 how we exist when nobody is near. Misfortune thunders like a cannonade. He is salvation, so, white-lipped, I say, 40:13 'Please save me for a second, Lord, and then, recovered, I will save myself alone without assistance. ' 40:21 But he wants to leave my borders and desires to finalize my demolition by salvation, seeking to force me from myself 40:26 amid the gusts of chilling winds, a saber from its scabbard. He bides his time and wants to get outside 40:31 to make the candle of my pain go out so that the darkness of obedience would save me by the touch of Otherness, 40:37 another form of life, another name no longer mine, along with countless people inside the kingdom of the frenzied God 40:42 who wishes to be born from deep within me, but I'll preserve that healing flame for longer, 40:47 to not get caught too early by the darkness. My pain's black candle fills my road with light 40:54 and represents my stealthy victory. " So culture carries a shadow with it, right? Culture carries a Shadow 41:01 Culture stands for itself. These poems are, they're not about politics, but culture stands for itself, 41:08 but there's a shadow alongside it. The shadow from the 1860s from the Valuev Decree, 41:13 the shadow from the 1930s from famine and terror, the shadow of the 1970s of the assimilation 41:20 and the forced integration from the top, which means that when Ukraine emerges Integration from the Top 41:27 as an independent state in the 1990s, culture is pursued very, very gently.

41:36 There is no strong Ukrainization policy in the beginning. Kyiv and Ukraine are characterized by bilinguality, 41:45 by code-switching, by surzhyk, which is the mixing of the two languages. oligarchical pluralism 41:52 The Europe is portrayed in the beginning.

41:57 Oh, there's another thing which is very important about Ukrainian culture, which is, especially at the beginning, 42:03 oligarchical pluralism, oligarchical pluralism by which I mean when you have several different oligarchs 42:10 with several different foundations and several different TV stations and several different this and that, 42:15 that's a different situation from when you have one. It may not be the ideal situation, but it does mean that different views emerge 42:23 about art and history and other things with different patrons. That was very characteristic of Ukraine in the 1990s, right? 42:29 And remain, it's coming less so, but it's still, it's a feature, it's a feature of Ukraine. Okay. early attitudes towards Europe 42:34 So the early attitude towards Europe, I mentioned one novel, which is again, for fun, 42:43 Yuri Andrukhovych, "Perversion. " In this novel, Europe figures as this kind of postmodern, 42:52 very distant, beautiful thing, which we never might, which we probably never get to, or if we get to, it'll be a result of all kinds 42:57 of improbable drunken adventures. postmodern carnival 43:03 That's like the postmodern carnival version of where we are. We are this outskirt. We are this province.

43:09 We reach Europe with our spectacular literature basically. This changes, I would say, around the time of the Maidan 43:18 about what you've read a book and had a lecture where Europe starts to become much more practical.

43:23 where Europe is not, because the politics of wanting to join Europe follows the culture of wanting to join Europe, right? 43:29 And the culture of wanting to join Europe has to do with younger people who see Europe as a future.

43:34 And so Europe becomes, somewhere around the 2010, it's ceasing to become a kind of strange thing 43:42 which is desired, a strange object of desire and more kind of practical place where we might go. key figure 43:48 And a key figure here would be Serhyi Zhadan, Serhyi Zhadan, 43:55 who in Kharkiv, in 2014 had his skull broken for, 44:00 this is, I mean, it could not be more symbolic of the themes of this lecture, had his skull broken after he refused to bow down to Russians Ska band 44:09 in a quite literal sense. Zhadan is a great novelist and also a great poet.

44:16 He also has a ska band, which is a rare threefer, I have to say.

44:22 And when he does win the Nobel Prize for literature, I want that ska band right in the middle of what they, 44:29 all right. Okay. So Zhadan would be an example of something else, 44:39 which is very important, which is the eastern re-anchoring of Ukrainian culture, 44:46 right? So I've made this point, which is slightly awkward if you're from Ivano-Frankivsk or Lviv 44:51 which is that the historical function of Galicia was basically 1870s to 1970, 1980s, maybe 1990s.

45:01 Right. There was a very special wolf for Galicia in that time, and it remains a kind of repository, 45:06 a safe place to go, so to speak, in Ukrainian culture, but Zhadan is from a Russian speaking environment, 45:13 and he chooses to write only in Ukrainian and express himself in Ukrainian 45:19 absent emergency situations. So Zhadan was doing that the entire time.

45:26 Zhadan, by the way, is also someone very much worth reading, remarkable short stories if you don't wanna invest 45:31 in a whole literature. Tremendous, what is the title, Jen? 45:36 Like the last, "The last," or is it "The First Gay Club?" Do you remember? (student speaking away from mic) 45:43 Okay. He has like, among of the things, he has really good stories about, 45:49 he has really good stories about things which approach being political without quite being political, right? 45:55 So his story about the gay club is a good example of that. Anyway, this eastern anchor point is very important Turning Point 2014 46:03 because some people were doing it all along, but then 2014, in Maidan was a turning point where major figures in Ukrainian culture realized 46:10 that they weren't really welcome in Russia anymore and made a kind of turn.

46:15 One of them was someone called Svyatoslav "Slava" Vakarchuk, who is the lead singer of Okean Elzy, 46:22 which is the biggest rock band. Traditionally, a very big following in Belarus and Russia. After 2014, this became awkward.

46:30 Another was the comedian and writer, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who up until 2014, had a very big following, 46:37 a very big career in Russia, and appears in Russian television until I think early 2000, maybe late 2013, early 2014, 46:43 but then he realizes something has changed, right? So this is a turning point for a lot of people. Turning Point 2022 46:48 And then in 2022, we've reached a more dramatic turning point, 46:54 extremely dramatic turning point and where things are happening so quickly and so violently that it's hard to characterize what's happening, 47:01 but a dramatic example of this is, is the writer, Volodymyr Rafeienko, who was here at Yale a couple of weeks ago.

47:08 Volodymyr Rafeienko who wrote only in Russia, who didn't even know Ukrainian, which is unusual, 47:14 and who ceased communicating in Russian entirely 47:19 with this war and is now a Ukrainian language writer, which is not an easy thing to do, not an easy thing to do.

47:26 It's kind of a remarkable thing for him to be doing. He said something very interesting when he was at Yale. He said, "We don't choose language. Language chooses us. " 47:35 And it's a strange kind of freedom, which like, there's profundity, there's profundity in that.

47:41 What's that? - [Student] You don't master language. - Yeah, you don't, right. Yeah. "You don't master language, language masters you. " Right. "You don't master language, language masters you. " 47:50 Yeah. [Ukrainian words] 47:55 So another example of this would be another writer who was just at Yale, Stanislav Aseyev, 48:03 also from an entirely Russian speaking background, a writer now in Ukrainian, and a Ukrainian writer 48:11 whose most recent book is about torture, and it's actually one of the best bits of prison writing that's been produced, 48:16 I think in Eastern Europe or maybe anywhere else. So the final point that I wanna make about culture 48:26 is that we're looking, okay, two more points, indulge me.

48:32 We're looking at a new centrality of Kyiv, a Kyiv is something that hasn't been before.

48:38 It's a Kyiv which is asserting itself as a European capital, 48:44 and that is something new. Kyiv has been many things but a European capital among other European capitals 48:50 in a modern sense is new, and a proud Kyiv is something new.

48:56 And I'm gonna read a poem from Stus, which is about Soviet Kyiv, 49:02 and you'll see why I'm doing this. It's "Thousand Year Old Kyiv," 49:09 and this is from, translated by Bohdan Tokarskyi and Uilleam Blacker. "One-thousand-year-old Kyiv, fancied, feeling young again.

49:15 Suddenly, Kyiv was aware of hotels, trolleybuses, trams and trains, the Paton Bridge, the ungainly buildings on Khreshchatyk.

49:21 Kyiv licked the rough asphalt with its pagan tongue, the slopes of the Green Theatre became overrun by martens, squirrels, aurochs, 49:27 and the god Yarylo's roaring heathen laughter drove the Dnipro's waves. Kyiv coughed asthmatically.

49:32 Through the metro's drafts, the electric trains fearfully rattled, as a dozen layers of ground, white from human bones, horses' skulls, 49:38 and gray ash of funeral pyres, rippled like the skull of an angry bull's neck.

49:44 Kyiv strained but then gave up, just how the devil to lift this whole assemblage of new-builds, avenues, motorways, 49:49 and the stately birthless bellies of the inhabitants? May sacred forces strike you down, heathen Kyiv hurled a curse.

49:55 But then it saw a pack of pioneers, and, ashamed, it bowed its head. It hid itself away without a peep. " Pioneers, you have to know.

50:01 Pioneers means communist youth group, right? So Kyiv finally submits. That Kyiv of is now gone, right? 50:09 The people who are now in charge of the government in Kyiv, the people are now in charge of culture in Kyiv are of a different generation 50:15 that isn't just post-Soviet or anti-soviet, it's just something else. And the very last point that I wanted to make is that, 50:22 although it's too soon to evaluate what this war means for culture, one of the very striking things 50:27 about this war is the production of culture within it. So other people have noted 50:32 that this is the most recorded war of all time, which is true. I would note that that act of recording 50:38 by a journalist is also an act of culture, which requires corporeal risk-taking as well as intellect, 50:45 but just the culture itself is going on. Not to sound too romantic or pathetic about it, 50:51 but right down to and including in the trenches, right? I have colleagues who are still giving their lectures 50:56 from where they are right in the trenches, and the production of poetry and other forms of culture goes on.

51:02 So I'm just going to read you one more poem. Please indulge me. This is from Yuliya Musakovska, 51:09 who's a mom who works in IT. She wrote this in late March, 2022 for her collection, 51:14 which is published under the title "Iron. " Her poem goes like this, this is March.

51:20 "Such problematic, such frightful poems, full of anger, so politically incorrect.

51:25 No beauty in these poems, no aesthetic at all. The metaphors withered and fell to pieces 51:33 before they could bloom. The metaphors buried in children's playgrounds 51:39 under hastily raised crosses, dead in unnatural poses by the gates of houses covered in dust.

51:48 They prepared meals over an open fire. They did try to survive. It was a dehydration that they perished under the rubble.

51:58 Shot in a car under a white flag made from a sheet 52:03 with colorful backpacks over their shoulder. They lie on the asphalt face down next to the cats and dogs.

52:12 I'm sorry to say so, but such verses are all we have for you today. Dear ladies and gentlemen, spectators of the theater of war.

52:25 (somber music)

back to TOC


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Lecture 23 the Colonial, the Post-Colonial, the Global

0:00(intriguing music) 0:12 - All right, everyone. Greetings. This is the last lecture of this class.

0:19 You have an exam in a couple days. You have a thematic assignment due a week after that.

0:25 The thematic assignment's meant to be very straightforward. I don't want you to do extra research. I want you to pull out some little theme 0:30 that is in the reading that maybe I've referred to or haven't referred to at all and write something simple and straightforward about it.

0:37 Don't overthink it. Don't overdo it. Don't make us work too hard.

0:46 It's 1500 words. Pick a theme, it's not gonna be hard.

0:52 Can anybody sing? Do you think, can you sing? 1:00 Do you know how... what's it called? Do you know how the "Carol of the Bells" goes? 1:05 - [Student] No. - Okay. (students vocalizes) That's it. (students laughing) That's the one. That's the one.

1:12 That's the one. Very good. (students chuckling) And you didn't raise your hand when I asked. - [Male Student] I know. The second question usually is not great after the first.

1:19 (Timothy and students laughing) - All right.

1:25 - So we had eight tones of Christmas music there to start us out with, which I'm gonna get back to, if I manage. Is Empire in Europe 1:32 What we're talking about today is empire in Europe. And like the last lecture, this lecture 1:38 is meant to bring some threads together to help you think about the essays 1:43 and help you think about the class as a whole. We're obviously talking about this in the context 1:50 of an imperial war that is going on right now, the Russian War against Ukraine, which began in 2014, 1:59 and which was accelerated this February with a full scale invasion.

2:04 I think this is a fairly straightforward imperial war in its rhetoric and in its goals.

2:09 I'll talk more about that as we go. What I want to talk about, though, in this lecture, 2:15 is what this imperial war tells us about Europe and the European imperial past 2:24 and what we can say about the European and American reaction to this war 2:30 on the basis of the history of empire. So a larger theme of this class, 2:36 as you've all gathered, is what is history good for? What is it and what is it good for? 2:43 One of the things that history is good for is reflection upon the other stories 2:48 about the past that you are being told. So there's an obvious criticism, of course, in this class 2:55 of the imperialist narrative that Ukraine doesn't exist, but perhaps more subtly, 3:04 there's also a criticism of a European narrative, which says that European integration 3:10 was born out of the higher European wisdom that war is bad and that peace is good.

3:18 So if any of you are from European Union member states, you'll be familiar with this, because you've been bombarded with it since childhood.

3:26 The notion that the Europeans are different and better than the Americans, because they experienced a Second World war 3:32 and they saw that it was bad, and therefore, they have now had economic cooperation and since then, things have been good. Problems with European Integration 3:41 There are a couple of problems with this. One of them is that what happened is not that Europeans 3:49 learned from the Second World War that war is bad. That never happened. They kept fighting wars after the Second World War.

3:56 They kept fighting wars until they lost them. That's a critical part of the story, which goes missing.

4:04 The Dutch and Indonesia, the French in Algeria and Southeast Asia. The Portuguese and the Spanish can't hold out in Africa.

4:12 It's basically the same story everywhere. They keep fighting until they lose and the wars they lose are imperial wars.

4:21 The story of European integration, as it's told, allows that imperial history to be pushed aside, 4:27 to be occluded, to be not seen at all and because that history is not seen at all, 4:32 this leads to misanalysis and misunderstandings of contemporary political situations.

4:39 The other tricky thing about that story is that it suggests that once you've learned this lesson that war is bad, 4:46 all you have to do is trade with people and everything will be good. To emphasize, the problem with that 4:53 is that the European integration story with all the trade, which certainly happens, Treaty of Rome and all of that, 5:00 it all happens after the defeat in the imperial war. And so trade may be very well, be a good thing.

5:07 But in the actual European history, this trade project follows upon defeat in imperial war.

5:14 And when you take the defeat in imperial war out of the story, you're removing something which is going to disable 5:20 your analysis of the rest of contemporary events.

5:25 So just very briefly now, I'm gonna remind you of some of the high points of the history of European Empire.

5:31 We've already had a couple of lectures on this already. It's in the background of the reading in Road to Unfreedom, Black Earth to some extent, 5:39 but I wanna try to make sense of where we are now on the basis of this trajectory of empire.

5:45 So from the point of view of European Empire, 1776, the great proud American independent story, 5:53 that's when the Northern Hemisphere basically falls out. I mean, there will be six... the Spanish will be around for a while, the Portuguese, too, The Race for Africa 6:00 but 1776 is, basically, you can call a turning point where the Western hemisphere, where the Americas fall out, 6:06 begin to fall out of the calculation, empire is going to mean, essentially, Asia and Africa.

6:14 The 19th century is then a competition for the territory that's still left. Most famously or notoriously, the race for Africa 6:22 at the end of the 19th century. At the end of the 19th century or at the beginning of the 20th, we have a First World War, which is a world war, 6:30 even before the Americans arrive, because of empire. It's a world war because it's fought with colonial soldiers from all over the world.

6:38 It's not a war of Europeans against Europeans. It's Europeans and their colonial subjects against other Europeans and their colonial subjects, 6:45 which is fought in Europe. In the end of the First World War, what we have is a curious situation 6:52 where the land empires all managed to lose and the sea empires, the maritime empires managed to win.

7:00 The British and the French managed to win, the Ottomans, the Germans, the Russians, in a complicated way, by way of revolution, 7:07 the Hapsburgs, all manage to lose. And as we've seen, in this war, Ukraine is a major prize.

7:14 Ukraine is the territory that the Germans think they can use to win the war on the Western front. They turn out to be wrong, but that is what they think.

7:23 At the end of this war, we have the rise of the doctrine of self-determination, 7:29 which means, in effect, that the maritime empires, I'm now counting the US among them, 7:36 have the idea that some of the former territories in the land empires in Europe 7:44 should become independent states. So national self-determination does not apply to all the world.

7:49 That's a truism. It was not about American colonies or British colonies or French colonies, far from it.

7:55 It was about the former terrains of defeated land empires, but not all of them.

8:01 Not not Ukraine. Not Ukraine. Ukraine instead passes through 8:06 this incredibly complicated period that we have studied of, in which you have white Russians, 8:13 that is, Russian restorationists of empire who are fighting for Ukraine. We have Poles who, in some way, are fighting for Ukraine.

8:19 We have the Leninist idea of self-determination, which basically means we say that you can have self-determination, 8:26 but so long as it doesn't contradict the interests of the center of the revolution. So a kind of declarative self-determination.

8:33 And while this is all going on, this is why I asked if anybody could sing. While this is all going on, musicians from Ukraine 8:42 are on tour across Europe and North America, playing, for example, in Carnegie Hall.

8:48 The song which drew the most attention is the melody which was just sung, 8:54 which was composed by a Ukrainian composer called Mykola Leontovych, which really caught the attention of the Americans, The Second World War 9:01 so much so that it was adapted with new English words 9:06 to become what's now the Carol of the Bells, which is the most striking, I think, 9:11 American Christmas carol and I'm gonna return at the end to why that is. Leontovych, himself, is murdered in 1921 9:19 by the Bolshevik secret police.

9:24 So then what is the Second World War? Again, from the perspective of Ukraine or from our perspective, 9:30 the Second World War is another imperial war. But this time the German aspiration 9:35 for Ukraine is the absolute center. It's at the absolute center of Hitler's plans. It's at the absolute center of the war itself.

9:44 And the theory behind this war, 9:49 and you've read all of this in Black Earth, but the theory behind this war is that the stronger nation should be colonizing 9:55 and starving the weaker nation, that's what always happens. Or the stronger people, the stronger race should be dominating, colonizing, starving out the weaker.

10:03 Why does this not always happen? According to Hitler, it doesn't always happen, because of the Jews.

10:09 That is Hitler's version of antisemitism. The Jews have ideas like Christianity, capitalism, 10:14 communism, rule of law, contracts, you name it. And these ideas get into people's minds 10:19 and prevent them from becoming the ruthless racial warriors that nature meant them to be.

10:26 So in Hitler's view, the Jews are both softening the minds of Germans, and this is important, 10:33 they're ruling Ukrainians, because the Soviet Union, according to Hitler, is a Jewish state. So the Ukrainians, in his analysis, are colonial people.

10:41 They're being ruled by one colonist, the Jews and if you kill the Jews or get them out of the way somehow, the Ukrainians will be happy 10:48 to be ruled by another colonial master. That's the theory. In the planning for the war, 10:55 the Germans intends to starve tens of millions of Soviet citizens, Holodomor 11:01 tens of millions of Soviet citizens, in order to colonize the Western Soviet Union and especially, Ukraine.

11:08 Tens of millions of Soviet citizens.

11:15 The reasons why they think this is possible is because, at the time, everyone knew 11:20 that there was this thing, which only recently, people have started to call Holodomor, which is the famine in 1932-1933.

11:26 The German analysis is that the collective farms in the Soviet Union can be used to divert food in any direction.

11:34 So if they can be used to divert food to feed the Russians, they can also be used to divert food to feed the Ukrainians. We can use them as instruments of starvation.

11:41 In fact, they're never able to starve tens of millions of people. Most of the starvation takes place in prisoner of war camps, 11:46 where about 3 million Soviet prisoners of war are starved. Ukraine, as you know from the reading, 11:53 is also a major site, oh, and by the way, Ukrainian soldiers who are starving 11:58 in the German prisoner of war camps in 1941 refer to their experience of hunger 12:04 in the Soviet Union in 1933. There're even songs which refer to both of these events.

12:10 Ukrainian, as you know from the reading, is also a major site of the Holocaust. Two of the major shooting sites, Kamianets-Podilskyi 12:17 and Babi Yar just outside Kyiv are, of course, in Ukraine. And the war is largely fought in and for Ukraine.

12:24 And so it's very important for present politics and for present conversations about imperialism 12:31 that we know that this war was an imperial war. This is not just some point that I'm trying to make on the margin.

12:37 It's very important to keep in mind that there was an imperial motive, an imperial geography to this war 12:43 and that they were peoples who were subject to an imperial policy.

12:49 At the end of the Second World War, once again, the maritime empires managed to win.

12:54 The British and the French managed to win, again, with the help of the Americans. Germany, which is aspiring to be a much larger land empire, Imperial Wars 13:02 loses and loses very decisively. And in losing decisively their imperial war for Ukraine, 13:11 the Germans begin the trend of other European empires losing imperial wars.

13:19 That thing which I've just said is the thing which is silenced. It's silenced that Germany's war was an imperial war 13:26 and it's silenced that Europeans then began to lose a series of imperial wars. And how is that silence achieved? 13:32 It's achieved by the otherwise very attractive story of European integration.

13:37 The story about how Europeans are very wise, and they understand that war is bad, because they're smarter than the Americans who keep fighting wars, et cetera, et cetera.

13:46 And so in this story, it's the empire that goes missing and it's most crucially, the story 13:52 of the German empire which goes missing. So Ukraine goes missing just as Indonesia 13:58 and Algeria and Morocco and Mozambique and all the rest go missing from this story.

14:04 But as I say, this is most important for the Germans. This lecture is about empire and you think I'm only gonna be talking about Russia, 14:10 but I'm gonna be spending a lot of time talking about Germany. Russian imperialism is, right now, very open.

14:16 It's not very complicated, we'll talk more about it, but crucial to where we are in the 21st century 14:22 is the misanalysis, the misapprehension and forgetfulness about German colonialism and German empire.

14:30 And as I say, one of the things history is good for, maybe the major thing, is to create reflection about the things that one got wrong 14:37 or the things that one missed. So in Germany, from 1945 and 1989, 14:44 the main story is the division of the country. Germany loses its Eastern territories.

14:49 What remains of Germany is divided into a West Germany and to an East Germany.

14:55 One Democratic, one communist. From the point of view of West Germany, The Holocaust 15:00 the major story is of one's own victimhood, one's own victimhood.

15:07 We were bombed at the end of the war. So many of our men died.

15:12 We lost all of this territory. Our country was divided. So the major story in the 50s, 60s, 15:20 into the 70s is one's own victimhood. So this business of Germany taking responsibility 15:26 for the Second World War is a relatively recent development and quite partial.

15:32 The discussion of German responsibility for the war begins as a discussion of the Holocaust, which is very important.

15:38 It allows other discussions and it's tremendously important in and of itself.

15:43 The problem with the discussion of the Holocaust, which takes place in Germany in the 70s and 80s, 15:49 is that it's missing a lot of important things. It's missing any discussion of East European territories.

15:56 It's missing any discussion of territory at all. And it's missing, perhaps most critically, 16:03 the German imperialism, which got Germany out into Eastern Europe in the first place, which is a crucial part of the history of the Holocaust, 16:09 because that is where the Jews lived. So without the German imperial ambition to get to Ukraine, 16:14 there couldn't have been a Holocaust, because those territories are where the Jews or most of the Jews actually lived.

16:21 So in this discussion of the Holocaust, one of the things which is missing is the German imperial ambition.

16:27 So you get self-criticism about the Holocaust, but it's limited, it doesn't have territory.

16:33 And the Jews who are most important in this discussion are the German Jews. And of course, that is a very important history.

16:39 But German Jews are only about 3% of the victims of the Holocaust, only about 3%.

16:45 And so that story can't be a representative one and it can't be one which is going to get Germans 16:50 to think about the broader geographical scope of the war. And then, indeed, it tends to be one...

16:57 Whereas, the history of the Holocaust tends to move you to a place where you can talk about other crimes. So for example, Jews in Eastern Europe Reconciliation 17:04 are some of our witnesses to the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war. In Jewish testimonial material, 17:09 there is evidence of the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war. If you focus on Germany, 17:15 all you have are the Germans and the Jews, which is a very different sort of story and you're not being forced to think about the other crimes, 17:22 let alone the other peoples further east.

17:29 In the 1970s, West German social democratic governments begin a process of reconciliation with the Soviet Union.

17:38 And this is a Soviet Union, which you know from the reading from the class, this is the Soviet Union of Brezhnev.

17:45 And so what we have underneath this reconciliation is the meeting of two stories about what actually happened 17:52 in the Second World War. And by this time, by the 1970s, there's a Soviet story and the Soviet story is a cult of the war 18:02 in which we were the victims as well as the victors, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Soviet Alliance 18:08 with Nazi Germany, completely taboo. The documents are hidden away. No one's remembering that.

18:17 It's a Russified cult of the war. It's a Russified cult of the war.

18:24 This meets a German story in which Germans are increasingly willing to take responsibility for the Second World War 18:31 and the way that Germans move in this direction is to direct the apologetic energy 18:36 towards the Moscow Center. And so in Germany as in the Soviet Union, 18:42 the idea that the Second World War was about tens of millions of dead Russians becomes normal.

18:48 Now, the Second World War did involve millions of dead Russians, but the scale of suffering was actually greater in Ukraine 18:56 and in Belarus than it was in Russia. And the story in which Russia monopolizes Quiet Russian Imperialism 19:02 both the victory and the victimhood also starts to become natural in Germany.

19:07 And so then, in this weird way, what is actually meeting is a Russian quiet imperialism, 19:15 the administrative Russification of the 1970s with a German or with the remnants of a German imperialism, 19:22 or German implicit imperialism, or at the very least, the total absence of a reckoning with German imperialism, 19:30 which means that it's totally natural that in this situation, no one talks about Ukraine, at all.

19:35 No one talks about Ukraine, at all. The Germans have no reason to talk about Ukraine, because there's been no historical reckoning.

19:42 And so Russia's silences about Ukraine or control about Ukraine seems completely natural.

19:52 After 1989, we reach a moment where we have, 19:57 as you've seen already in this class, After 1989, we're in a moment of tremendous change 20:02 of rapid geopolitical realignment, where, from the German point of view, 20:08 and we're now under Christian democratic governments headed by Helmut Kohl, from the German point of view, 20:14 what we have is historical justice. We have a unification. East Germany and West Germany are brought together.

20:20 The most interesting anti-imperial move that's made at this time was made, as we've seen again in the lectures and the reading, 20:27 was made by the Poles, actually. When the Poles recognize the Ukrainian border 20:32 before Ukraine is even independent, they're making an anti-imperial move vis-a-vis themselves, 20:38 which makes it much easier for the Germans to make the same move vis-a-vis Poland.

20:44 Because all the way up until 1990, Germany had not recognized its border with Poland.

20:49 The fact that the Poles put any national quarrels with Ukrainians out of the question made it somewhat more likely that the same outcome 20:56 would prevail on the German-Polish border. And the lack of national conflict or border conflict Germanys Legacy 21:02 is one of the reasons why the European Union can enlarge as it will to embrace many 21:07 of the former communist states in 2004, 2007, 2013.

21:13 During this time, Germany is the most important democracy 21:18 in Europe, unified Germany. It's the biggest economy. It's a very functional democracy.

21:23 It may already be the most important democracy in the world, but you can't tell the Germans that.

21:30 And as we enter the 21st century, the Germans have a reputation 21:36 for having dealt with the past, which is only partially justified.

21:43 One has to be very careful here, because the Germans are, of course, pioneers in identifying a particular historical evil, 21:50 which is the Holocaust, and beginning a story of addressing it. And that has been good for their democracy.

21:55 And I suggest, in general, that those kinds of things are good for democracy. The problem with this reflection 22:02 is that it was thought to have been completed. The idea was that by the time we got 22:07 to the end of the Cold War, we, the Germans, have already gone through this process and now, we're in a position to be a model for other people.

22:15 Whereas in fact, the end of the Cold War created, I would've said, an opportunity to think about eastern Europe more broadly 22:22 and about the German war in the East more broadly, which is the thing that doesn't happen.

22:31 So the form the criticism very often takes is that other people in Eastern Europe, 22:36 in Poland, for example, or in Ukraine, don't understand how important peace is.

22:43 So peace is the crucial category. What the Germans will say again and again, 22:48 and here I say the Germans with some confidence, because this is a consensus which goes, which spans most of the political spectrum, 22:54 is that peace is the important thing. But peace is not what happened to Germany.

23:00 Defeat is what happened to Germany. But you won't find Germans arguing 23:05 that imperial powers have to be defeated. What you find them arguing is that peace is a good thing.

23:14 So there's no reflection on empire. There's no imperial analysis in this framework.

23:21 There is room for criticism of decline of democracy in a minor key, 23:27 but here, the Germans, and again, this is a broad consensus, generally miss the most important and obvious case, 23:34 the decline of democracy, which is Russia in 1999 to 2000, or maybe Russia, 1993 to 2000.

23:40 But in any event, the rise of Putin in 1999 to 2000 is a hugely important turning point, 23:46 because it's here that Russia fails to have competitive elections where one Russian president, 23:52 Yeltsin, anoints the next one, Putin, Putin stages a war.

23:58 And so you avoid that thing, which is so crucial for the success of a democratic system, in which somebody coming from somewhere else unexpectedly 24:05 is a candidate and wins, and wins. Here you have instead the person at the center of the system 24:11 picking the next person who's the center of the system. This is the moment where Russian democracy fails.

24:17 Likewise, there was very little recognition in Germany, I think it's fair to say, of the significance 24:23 of the reverse happening in 2004, 2005 in Ukraine. In 2004, there was similarly attempt in Ukraine 24:28 for a president to anoint his successor and then elections were faked to see that that successor would win 24:34 and this was held off by civil society protest. And in this way, Ukrainians were able to arrange 24:41 for an actual democratic succession where the person that the incumbent wanted 24:47 to come into power to succeed him did not actually come to power and someone else did.

24:55 So 2004, at this time... . There's something I have to go on the record now. It's at this time when Gerhard Schroeder, 25:02 who's the social democratic, now, prime minister of Germany, 25:07 it's at this time, November 2004, that Schroeder says Putin is a flawless Democrat.

25:12 And that kind of rhetoric from Schroeder is going to continue, essentially, almost to the present day.

25:22 In the 21st century, under Schroeder and then under his successor, Angela Merkel, 25:30 the key that the Germans tend to apply in their foreign policy towards Russia is economics.

25:39 And I wanna stress this point again, although I'm sure it's clear, this arises from a certain misanalysis 25:44 of how the European Union and how European integration arose. The theory of European integration 25:50 was war is bad, trade is good. I mean, one doesn't wanna dispute those two premises, 25:56 but the missing part in the story is, we, the Germans, decisively lost a war and admit that we lost it. (chuckles) 26:03 We gave up on imperial solutions, because we had to 'cause we were defeated and then we moved on to something else 26:10 and that that was true of most of the other Europeans as well. And so the economics becomes a magic 26:18 where the notion is, then, if we cooperate economically with Russia, for example, if we buy Russian natural gas, 26:25 that must have a positive effect on Russia, because that's the theory. So Gerhard Schroeder, who's the leading figure 26:31 in all of this, negotiates a gas pipeline with the Russians 26:36 a few weeks after he leaves office in 2005. In what not only the Germans 26:41 might find to be unseemly haste, he then joins the board of the gas company in question 26:46 and is employed, in one way or another, by the Russian hydrocarbon industry with accumulating titles and salaries 26:52 for the next many years. This policy, though, in fairness, one has to say, 27:00 is a consensus policy, which is then continued by the Christian Democrats. And when I say the Germans over and over again, 27:06 I'm basically meaning the two Volkspartei and the two big parties.

27:13 Now, the irony of all of this, especially given that Schroeder is from the Social Democrats, which, historically, is an antifascist party, 27:19 the irony of all of this is that this is a time when an astute observer, at least, 27:27 might have noticed that certain important parts of the Russian elite, including the president of the Russian Federation, 27:32 are beginning to talk in openly fascist terms. And that the president of the Russian Federation 27:37 is quoting Russian fascists in his most important political addresses.

27:42 There is no notice of this in Germany. No notice at all.

27:49 I think the logic of insulating Germany from all of this is something like 27:56 we are the antifascists and therefore, if we're negotiating with them, they can't be fascists.

28:02 And this logic prevails deep into the 2020s and probably until the beginning of the war.

28:12 So the Maidan of 2013-2014 can be seen in this light as well.

28:19 Actually, the Maidan of 2013-2014, which you've read about, which you've heard about in a separate lecture, 28:24 confirms this post-imperial analysis of the EU, because that's how everybody sees it.

28:30 Everybody who matters anyway. The Ukrainians wanna join the European Union, because they understand that the European Union 28:37 is there to rescue slightly problematic post-imperial states, such as their own.

28:43 The Russians wanna stop Ukraine from joining the European Union, because they recognize the same thing.

28:48 They understand that should Ukraine join the European Union, it is much more likely that Ukraine will become a successful rule-of-law state 28:55 and prosper and become a model for Russians, which, from the point of view of the Putin regime, would be a very bad thing. Imperial Rhetoric 29:02 Everyone outside the European Union sees the logic that I'm trying to share. It's only inside the European Union that it becomes unclear.

29:09 When Russia invades Ukraine in 2014, we see the implicit imperialism 29:18 of Russian-German cooperation become explicit in the language which the Russians use 29:24 and which the Germans, then, pick up. The Russian invasion of Ukrainian in 2014 29:29 is muddled and made unclear and a great success for Russian foreign policy. And the muddling and the un-clarity 29:36 is a result of certain kinds of tropes about Ukrainians, which are imperial tropes. That Ukraine was never really a real state, 29:43 that Ukrainians aren't really a people, and if they are a people, they are corrupt 29:48 and their state is gonna fail because they're corrupt. And by the way, they're all Nazis. Oh, and they're gay, that fit in there, too.

29:56 And they were you know... (students laughing) 30:01 No, you know how this works. It's social media targeted audiences, that's how it works. If you don't like gay people, 30:07 they tell you the Ukrainians are all gay. If you don't like Nazis, they tell you they're all Nazis. If you do like Nazis, they tell you that they're all Jews.

30:13 That also happened. (students chuckling) Social media, it's your life, you understand this.

30:19 But this imperial rhetoric, and here's the point, is largely accepted, at least in 2013-2014, 30:28 in the German media. At least as the central points of discussion, are they all Nazis? Which is just a way of asking are they all barbarians? 30:35 Are they all Nazis? Is it a failed state? Did the Ukrainians somehow bring this upon themselves? 30:41 All of this language, which speaks to the German imperial tradition about Ukraine.

30:50 And of course, the Russians 30:55 are consciously manipulating this. They're consciously playing on what they understand to be German sensibilities. Imperial War 31:03 Now, I said this was a consensus and it is, when after Russia invades Ukraine, 31:08 the Christian Democratic government under Angela Merkel then brings into existence Nord Stream 2, 31:14 which is interpreted at the time by a broad swath of Europeans, not just Ukrainians and Poles, 31:20 but many of Germany's West European allies, as nothing more than a reward for Russia invading Ukraine.

31:25 Because what Nord Stream 2 does is it allows the Russians to very easily bring their gas to Europe 31:33 without having it to pass through Ukrainian territory. So there is a consensus of implicit imperialism here, 31:41 which has to do with, on the Russian side, an aggressive retelling of history, which I'm gonna say more about now.

31:47 But on the German side, a lack of historical reflection combined with a certainty that the historical reflection 31:54 has already taken place, which is not only a German problem, you can find that elsewhere, too.

32:03 So when we get to the war of 2022, this is an imperial war, I think, fairly obviously.

32:10 It's an imperial war in that it's based on a story of history in which some people exist and some people don't.

32:16 Putin's account of the history of Russian Ukraine, which he gives in July of 2021, tells you that what happens today is predetermined 32:22 by things that happened a thousand years ago. That things that happened a thousand years ago give him the right to say who's actually a people 32:28 and who's actually not a people. It's imperial in the classic sense of denying that the people you encounter are a people, 32:34 instead they're a tribe or a clan or they're corrupt or whatever. And it's imperial in the classic sense of denying 32:40 that the state you encounter is a state, they're not subject to law, law doesn't really apply, what is law anyway? 32:45 The more interesting thing which is happening, continuing the Russia-German theme here, is that the Russian invasion of Ukraine 32:52 very, very closely follows the model of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which the Russians themselves tip off at the very beginning. The German Model 33:02 They tip this off at the very beginning by saying that this is all a war about de-Nazification 33:07 and all you have to do is remove the de. Just takes a little bit of Freudian analysis here. Just a tiny, tiny bit of Freud 33:13 to get what they're really after. What they're really after is they're fighting a war on the German model, on the German model.

33:21 And with the de-Nazification, they're doing their typical thing of rolling something in front of the western media, especially the German media and saying, 33:27 "Hey, why don't you talk about this. Let's change the subject to how many Nazis there might be in Ukraine, as opposed 33:33 to we're invading the country right now. " But the de-Nazification thing, I think, is actually deeply a clue to what's happening.

33:40 'Cause the similarities are actually really striking. The notion that Ukraine only exists because of conspiracies.

33:53 The idea that Russia is not the aggressor, but it is the victim of conspiracies 33:58 and therefore, it must attack Ukraine. The ideological assumption that the state you're attacking doesn't really exist.

34:06 It's just propped up by said conspiracies. So the moment you hit it, it will fall apart, which is literally what Hitler said about the Soviet Union.

34:13 Putin says the same thing about Ukraine. There is also, it's obviously not nearly as important, but there's also an antisemitic element 34:20 in which the thing which is artificial is the presidency of Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself, 34:26 because he's Jewish. And that element has grown larger with time 34:31 as the Russian media now presents Zelenskyy routinely as the devil or as the anti-Christ.

34:38 Also, the idea which is practically plagiarized that the Ukrainians are a colonial people, they have one master now, 34:44 but they would be happier with a different master. Now they have the Americans, the Jews, the gay international conspiracy, whatever, 34:50 they have some master, but we would be a better master. But the Ukrainians are colonial people and they'll be happy when we replace the previous master.

34:58 All of these ideas are not just uncomfortably close, they're practically copies of the German motivations 35:05 or the German's stated ideologies in the invasion in 1941.

35:11 There's even the haunting fact that the Russians were planning one kind of genocide, 35:16 which was the extermination of the Ukrainian elite, and they have since moved on to other forms of genocide when that one didn't work out.

35:22 Which again, in a minor key, is very similar to what happened to the Germans who were planning a mass starvation campaign, 35:28 which they were not able to carry out, but then moved on to other forms of genocide when the war actually continued.

35:34 So the actual policies of Russian Ukraine include things like the deportation of a 10th of the Ukrainian population, including children, 35:42 the execution of elites, rape as politics, the bombing of evacuation routes and so on.

35:47 And currently, the deprivation of water and energy. And this moment we're in now, 35:53 as we move into the winter of 2022, is, if you're a German, at least, should be uncomfortably close to the winter of 1941, 36:00 where the idea is you're killing people by depriving them of access to things.

36:05 The Soviet prisoners of war died in the millions, not because they were shot, although many of them were shot, especially the Jewish ones, 36:11 but they died in the preponderance, because they were denied access to other things, 36:16 which is of course what Russia is now trying to carry out on the scale of Ukraine itself. This is not a reference which Germans themselves make.

36:23 And I would say that's because the Germans generally don't think of the Second World War in terms of the things which happened in the east.

36:30 So of course, the war in 2022, to be fair, does change people's views.

36:37 The general consensus, which is not just a German idea, it's also an American idea, that Ukraine is a weak state, 36:44 is challenged by the events of February, March, April, and the rest of 2022. The idea that Ukraine was gonna fall apart 36:50 within three days was not just, and this is important, it wasn't just a Russian idea, that was also basically believed in Washington and in Berlin 36:58 and I would suggest that the reasons why we all believe that have to do with our own imperial past.

37:04 It's not just Russian propaganda, it's our vulnerability to certain kinds of arguments about how other people are corrupt 37:10 and they haven't ever really had a state and maybe they're all radicals and can they really have elected a president? 37:20 Things have changed, things are changing. The German parliament just voted a few days ago 37:26 to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide, which is interesting and of itself, but it's a short step from there, I would like to think, 37:33 for Germans to think about how their own hunger plan in 1941-1942 was related to the Holodomor, 37:41 not just in the experience of people, but also in its planning. The Ukrainians who survived both certainly linked both.

37:48 So it's an interesting moment to see what's going to happen in the winter of 2022.

37:53 But when we speak about empire, 37:59 it's important to recall that empire is about the denial of the subjectivity of others.

38:05 It's about monopolizing agency. We exist and they don't really exist. And so the story of Russian imperialism in Ukraine 38:12 is also the story, or more importantly, the story of the Ukrainian reaction. So Ukrainian subjectivity and all this matters 38:20 and not just as an answer or as the answer to a negation of, it matters on its own.

38:26 And here we can also see a way that history can help us. The historical references that Ukrainians make on the battlefield at this point in the class 38:33 should be clear to all of you. When they refer not just to Cossacks but to Vikings, that will no longer seem like a curiosity, 38:39 that will seem like something which is not very surprising. When they claim the Second World War as their own war against the Russians, 38:45 this is also, probably, now understandable. But the most interesting things in the history, frankly, 38:51 may have to do with the history of the last 30 years. A lot of what the Ukrainians are doing in their communications has to do 38:57 with a particular understanding of both Russia and the West and the United States, which I think is specific to a certain generation or two of Ukrainians. Generational Changes 39:06 And the generational part itself is very important. The elites who govern Russia 39:12 are the same elites as 20 years ago. Which, in Ukraine, is not the case.

39:17 The people who are running Ukraine now tend to be younger than me. I'm not as old as you think, I mean.

39:26 They're closer to my age than your age, let's put it that way, but they're young still. (students laughing) They're still young, they're still young.

39:31 They're still learning, they're still growing. The people who are running Ukraine now are in their late 30's and early 40's, just to be clear.

39:38 And so there's been a generational turnover, which is, itself, very important.

39:44 And this is also the generation which experienced Maidan, participated in it or saw the consequences of it 39:50 and that has a lot to do with the sheer subjectivity of the Ukrainian battlefield response, 39:55 which is based, not just on a state, which turns out to be far more functional than people thought, but largely on the basis 40:01 of what we call civil society, of people in horizontal organizations filling in the gaps and doing the things that the state can't do 40:08 or in a way that the state can't do them. It's also reflected in the pluralism of the army itself 40:14 and the army's ability to take local decisions, but also the various kinds of formations, which appear in the Ukrainian armed forces.

40:21 Which include, by the way, as probably everybody knows, but it's roughly one in six female and includes gay soldiers who actually 40:29 mark themselves very often as such. Prominent cases, but not the only cases of the variety, 40:37 which is possible in a pluralist army. But the war itself is largely about this subjectivity.

40:45 The word that Ukrainians use, as I have found, others might correct me, most often to say what it's about is freedom.

40:52 Freedom in the positive sense, not just of being free of Russians, but freedom in the sense of what is going to come next. Resistance 41:01 And the resistance, and this is the point that I meant to get to last time and didn't get to, the resistance is also carried out by the people 41:07 who would ordinarily be creating the culture.

41:12 It was two lectures ago that a historian, a colleague of mine, a guy called Vadym Stetsiuk, 41:19 was killed in combat and this death in combat 41:24 was reported in turn by a journalist, a very courageous, intelligent journalist called Vakhtang Kipiani, 41:30 who's a Ukrainian of Georgian origin. That name, which I very much hope I have on the sheet, 41:37 that name, Kipiani, he wrote the book about Vasyl Stus, 41:42 who was the poet I cited at length last time, the most important of the Ukrainian-Soviet era 41:48 dissident poets and in that book, just follow me here, in that book, he devotes a chapter 41:55 to a man called Viktor Medvedchuk, because this guy, Medvedchuk, was Stus' lawyer 42:00 in 1980 when Stus was on trial. And at that time, your lawyer was not somebody who represented you, he was someone who stood up 42:07 and said, "Yeah, he's guilty, he actually did it and he probably should go to a camp. " And Stus, then, did go to a camp and went on a hunger strike and died five years later.

42:16 This fellow, Medvedchuk, you're gonna see why I'm mentioning this, this fellow, Medvedchuk, is Putin's personal friend 42:21 and he was one of the candidates in February to be the person that the Russians were gonna drop in to run Ukraine.

42:29 So there are continuities in this, not just a personal, literal example, that go back to the 70s.

42:35 And one way to think about the moment we're in now, not just in Russian-Ukraine, but for the whole world, 42:41 is whether we can ever actually get out of the 1970s. Whether we get out of the 1970s into something else.

42:50 Because the 1970s, and this is a bit of a pivot, but just work with me here.

42:55 The 1970s are also the origin of all of the literary theory, which is behind Russian propaganda. Responsibility 43:03 And one way to understand this conflict in Ukraine is one version of the 70s against another version of the 70s 43:09 where the other version of the 70s is the dissidents, the human rights idea.

43:15 The notion that you're bearing responsibility. So there are many ways to criticize 43:21 the Russian media about Ukraine. You can talk about how it's genocidal and say genocide and all of that's true, 43:26 whole long list of critiques. But maybe the most interesting thing about it is the total shunning of responsibility.

43:35 The idea that the war itself is just a performance. That we ourselves are not involved.

43:42 We're not really involved personally. It's a performance, it's a spectacle in which Ukrainians should die because that...

43:49 it's like when our soccer team scores a goal or something. They should die because that's the way that the world works.

43:54 That's the way we are entertained. And in this, of course, the people who are urging all of this, 44:02 I mean, to make the obvious point, but it's important, they're not themselves ever going to go to the front.

44:08 They're not themselves ever going to go to the front. It's a spectacle. It's a spectacle.

44:16 Signifier is separated from signified. What is actually true? 44:21 Everything that really matters is the medium itself. That version of the 1970s versus the other version of 1970s, 44:27 which is the dissident version, which says you're always bearing some responsibility all the time, 44:32 even when the situation is unfair. Even when you're in a show trial or even when you're at war, 44:39 you take some responsibility anyway, even when the conditions are against you. And this is, by the way, one of the things that, 44:44 when I did talk to Zelenskyy back in September, we spent a lot of time talking about.

44:50 So on the other side, of course, it's the case and I put some of the names on the list, 44:55 because I can't mention all of them and even that list would be very incomplete. But on the other side, Ukrainian cultural figure Cultural Figures 45:03 after Ukrainian cultural figure is killed in this war, some in bombing and shelling but many of them in combat.

45:08 Many of them in combat, from famous movie actors to multiple ballet dancers, to athletes, 45:15 and of course, journalists, humanists, scientists. Most recently, the conductor of the Kherson Orchestra 45:26 was executed for refusing to conduct a concert for the Russians, which of course, recalls Leontovych, 45:34 the Ukrainian composer I mentioned earlier, who was executed because he represented Ukrainian music.

45:46 I could mention a Russian cultural figure who was killed in Ukraine.

45:54 There is one person I can think of and no doubt there are more, but the one who I can think of, 46:00 and people will no doubt help me in the sea of emails I'll get about this, but the one who I can think of is Oksana Baulina.

46:09 She was a Russian reporter who was killed by Russian shelling in the Podil district of Kyiv 46:15 and the way she was killed is by what's called a double tap. A double tap is when you fire an artillery shell and then you wait for the rescue workers to come 46:21 and then you fire on them, that's a double tap. It's a way that journalists often die, that's how she died.

46:27 And so she died in Podil. She was a Russian, she did die in this war. She is a known cultural figure, she died. Of course, someone who opposed the war.

46:35 There are no Russian cultural figures who are in favor of the war, who are fighting this war in Ukraine. None. There are no such people.

46:44 She dies in Podil and what is Podil? What is Kyiv, what is Podil? Podil was a port area of the city.

46:50 I'm asking you a way back now to the 8th century, 9th century, beginning of the class. It was the port area of the Khazars 46:57 before the Vikings even showed up. The Vikings controlled in 900, which is a sign that they and not the Khazars Podil 47:03 are the ones who are in charge of Kyiv. If you walk down to Podil from the center of Kyiv, 47:08 there's a beautiful route downwards, there's a 14th century Lithuanian castle on the way, 47:14 which marks the period of Lithuanian control of Kyiv and much of Ukraine. In the 19th century, Podil was the site of markets, 47:22 which were dominated by Jews and Poles. Was it made Russian by shelling it? 47:32 Was it made Russian by the death of a Russian journalist? So Podil was there before any of this.

47:42 Podil was there a long time ago and it's been a theme of this class 47:47 that nations are real political entities in the 20th century, the 21st century, the 19th century.

47:54 They're formed by all kinds of contact along the way. But there are some things which are actually, 47:59 authentically old. I ended the class last time 48:06 by reading Julia Moskovski's poem about the problematic politically incorrect verses.

48:15 But, of course, the thing about that poem is that it's not actually the poem that's problematic.

48:20 It's we who are problematic. And the poem is perfectly elegant. It's the we, we who are problematic.

48:29 This thought that this is leading me to is the way the poem answers itself.

48:35 Because the premise of the poem is that this is all we have to offer, these awkward words, but that's not true at all.

48:41 The example of Ukrainians resisting this war offers much more than that and it offers much more than that even in poetry.

48:50 When Julia answered me on, I can't even tell you what platform, 'cause I don't know, 48:56 but maybe it was Instagram, maybe it was Telegram, I don't know. But what she said was, "I thank all of the Ukrainians Generous and Bountiful 49:02 who are continuing to create in times of war," which is an acknowledgement of an important point. That it's not just that the war is going on, 49:10 the culture is going on the entire time, 49:15 which leads me to where I began and where I'm gonna end, I promise, very soon.

49:22 On Sunday, I was at a concert in Carnegie Hall, which is not something I do all the time. You have to make me, but I have kids.

49:32 You can imagine, it was three hours long. But I really wanted to be there, it was very interesting. Among other things, the performers 49:38 were the Ukrainian's Children's Choir, which is called Shchedryk. And Shchedryk is named after a song called, "Shchedryk," 49:44 but Shchedryk is an interesting word, because Shchedryk involves an adjective 49:50 which can mean both generous and bountiful.

49:56 A person is generous, but a situation is bountiful. And that it's generous that gives me a cue, 50:02 which I need to use to thank all of the Ukrainian historians and also the Ukrainian listeners.

50:07 This class has turned out to have been listened to a lot of people in Ukraine. So I'm very glad that you've done so 50:12 and that you've indulged my interpretations. But the blurriness between generosity 50:18 and bountiful is interesting, because it points us back to a pre-Christian era where in a pagan world where the deities 50:25 are present in the world, there isn't really a line between generous and bountiful.

50:30 The world is gonna be bountiful, because the deities are generous. And that's why you perform certain rituals 50:36 and that's why you celebrate the season. So that song, the (vocalizes "Carol of the Bells") 50:41 that song, which we have as an American Christmas Carol, is, of course, you know where I'm going with this.

50:48 It's a Ukrainian song and the reason why it's so different from all the American Christmas carols is because it arises from Ukrainian polyphonic singing.

50:57 From multi-part harmony, Ukrainian singing. And the song itself, the song that Mykola Leontovych Winter and Spring 51:04 took almost 20 years to adapt is ancient. It's ancient. And it's not about winter actually, 51:10 it's actually about spring. Because if you're a pagan, I mean, if you're a sensible person actually living in the world, when does the year actually begin? 51:17 It begins when things start growing out of the ground. And it begins when the swallows come and sing. It begins when the first lambs are born, 51:24 which is February or March, which is what the song is actually about. It's about those things. So this song, which was adapted and played 51:32 in Carnegie Hall a century ago and then played again on Sunday, is ancient. It's pre-Christian, it goes back before 988.

51:41 It's actually about spring. It's about fertility, it's about prosperity, 51:48 it's about love, it's about how things are going to get better. That part in the American version 51:53 where they say at the end, "Merry, merry, merry, merry Christmas," in that part of the song, in the Ukrainian version, 51:59 it's actually about how your wife is beautiful. (Timothy and students chuckling) Things are going really well for you. You're gonna make lots of money this year.

52:05 The farm's going really well and by the way, your wife is beautiful. (students chuckling) And what it literally says is that 52:12 she's dark-browed, which is beautiful. That's a beautiful woman in Ukraine.

52:19 It's a woman who has dark eyebrows. It's a song about spring.

52:25 It's a song which we think of as about winter, which is about spring, which I close on, 52:31 because I just wanna suggest that sometimes that things that seem like an end can actually be a beginning.

52:38 Thanks. (students applauding) 52:59 (gentle music)

back to TOC


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Putin and the Presidents: Timothy Snyder (interview) | FRONTLINE

0:00 I just want to start at the moment right before the invasion of Ukraine, the end of 2021, Joe Biden's being briefed. 0:08 His intelligence is saying that Vladimir Putin is intending to go into Ukraine, that this is serious.

0:14 Can you help us understand what the stakes are at that moment? What's on the line for Joe Biden, for Putin, for democracy, for the world?

0:24 Well, in late 2021, the Biden administration was faced with this challenge they didn't expect; 0:30 namely, a major power is going to invade its neighbor---not just any major power, the Russian Federation, 0:36 and not just any neighbor, Ukraine, which is on the border of NATO and the European Union. 0:42 What was at stake is the idea that countries shouldn't destroy other countries for no reason in a war. 0:48 What was at stake is the international legal framework which had been trying to keep going since the Second World War. 0:53 And what was at stake more broadly, from the Biden administration's point of view, is whether there can be a coherent American foreign policy which makes any difference. 1:02 And I think they've had a pretty good run at that, first by trying to persuade other people that the Russians 1:08 were going to invade, which the Americans were right about; secondly, by being part of a coalition which has helped the Ukrainians with arms and in other ways; 1:17 and third, by talking about what the war is all about, which is that if you let a country invade another country 1:23 with the goal of exterminating its population, that's not just a horror in and of itself, it's a remaking of the world, 1:29 which is going to continue in directions that you don't want indefinitely. So this is really a profound moment for the Biden administration, The war in Ukraine 1:36 one that's going to define who they are and really define his presidency. I think in 100 years, historians will be writing about the war in Ukraine. 1:45 I'm not sure there's going to be any other event in the Biden administration about which that is true. A lot of the things that seem very important to us right now, like gas prices one summer 1:54 or whether we're wearing masks or not, that's going to disappear into the mists of time. Whether Ukraine wins or loses, which is very much up to the United States, 2:03 very much up to the Biden administration, is something that historians are going to be writing about in 100 years. Putins false understanding of Ukraine 2:08 There's this tremendous effort to try to dissuade Vladimir Putin. There's a video call; there's statements that Biden makes; there's diplomatic missions going to Moscow, 2:18 trying to convince them. There are warnings; there are threats.

Why does it not dissuade Vladimir Putin from invading?

2:26 I believe that Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine on the basis of a 2:32 systematically false understanding of what Russia is and what Ukraine is. 2:39 Putin helps us understand him by publishing a 7,000-word essay about his own views about history, 2:46 and in that essay he makes it clear that he doesn't really believe that Ukraine has any kind of independent existence; there isn't really a Ukrainian state; there isn't really a Ukrainian nation. 2:54 If you're planning your war on that basis, you think it's going to be all over before anybody else's response really matters. 3:02 The Russians were planning for a three-day war. They were planning for a political war. They were thinking that there aren't really that many Ukrainians in the sense of people 3:09 who'd be willing to risk their lives for their country. And in this they were entirely wrong. I think what Putin was imagining is that this is all going to be over so quickly that anybody else's reactions, 3:19 be they sanctions, be they anything else, are going to look silly and aren't really going to matter. When he announces what he calls a 'œspecial military operation' but which is the war in Ukraine, The Empire of Lies 3:28 if you go back and you look at that speech, one of the things that's interesting about it, you know, the line that comes out of it is the 'œempire of lies,' and a lot of the speech is about the United States. 3:37 It's about Ukraine, but a lot of it is about the United States in particular.

What do you make when you see him deliver that speech?

3:44 Well, Putin is and he isn't talking about America. This is not a man who really spends a lot of time in the rest of the world. 3:53 Unlike all the foreign leaders with which he deals, he doesn't know foreign languages. 3:58 He doesn't know a thing about Ukraine, which is interesting. He thinks he knows everything; he doesn't know anything. 4:04 And his understanding of Ukraine is based on the notion that it isn't really a place, and if it seems to be a place, 4:10 this is because of foreign conspiracies. And in a historical reasoning, those conspiracies have been, in the past, 4:16 the Austrians, the Germans, the Poles, the Jews. Today it's the European Union and the Americans. 4:23 So Putin's worldview, which I think he really believes, is that Moscow and Kyiv 4:28 are somehow organically together and always should be, and it's only because of the outsiders that this isn't true. 4:34 And so what he's talking about is not America as it is; he's talking about a fantasy of America, a fantasy of America that wants to do these insidious things like take Ukraine away from Russia. 4:44 But that just shows, in my view anyway, a misunderstanding not only of America and Ukraine, but also of his own country. Americans and Russians 4:51 Before Ukraine, many Americans didn't see themselves in a cold war with Russia, 4:56 didn't see Russia necessarily as a major enemy, but here he's describing America as a major enemy.

How important is it to understand the different worldviews of Americans and of Russians 5:04 about what's happening and how different they are?

Well, one thing that one has to understand is that the Russians 5:11 are systematically wrong about how much attention Americans pay to Russia. 5:16 The Russians think about America all the time. Americans only think about Russia when they have to. 5:23 And that is not a reality which Russian leaders can afford to recognize or talk about because their power 5:30 or their ideology of power rests on the idea that there are great powers in the world: Russia, America, China. 5:37 Russia's one of these great powers. And so the basic reality that Americans actually don't really like to think about Russia, 5:44 they don't think about Russia that much, would be something which is absolutely unacceptable. But that's a fundamental difference in worldview. 5:50 Russian leaders are thinking nothing about domestic politics, are thinking about foreign policy all the time, and foreign policy as a kind of duel of great powers. 5:57 American presidents, American public opinion, the American columnists, they're not thinking that way. 6:03 We only react to Russia when we absolutely have to. I mean, we reacted very, very late and very, very weak to the Russian intervention in the American election in 2016. 6:12 When Mitt Romney said, when he was campaigning against Barack Obama, that Russia was a serious threat, 6:17 everyone laughed at him except the Russians, who kind of liked to think that they were a serious threat. 6:24 When Obama says that Russia doesn't matter because it's only a regional economy and so on, he's saying something which to the Russians is absolutely incomprehensible; 6:31 they think of themselves as a great power, and they want to prove that they're a great power. So the biggest difference is that Russians really like to think about America because American enmity, 6:39 the idea that America's trying to hurt Russia gives Russia a sense of meaning, 6:44 whereas Americans absolutely do not need Russia for their sense of themselves. That's the basic difference. Democracy 6:51 The last question on the end of the Cold War is these statements that you would hear--- George H. W. Bush says, 'œIt's a victory for the moral force of our values'--- 7:00 that there's a feeling at the end of the Cold War that it wasn't just a collapse of the Soviet Union; 7:05 that it represented something bigger, that democracy had triumphed.

When you look back at that and the contrasting views between Biden and between Americans, 7:13 was that a dangerous view that Americans adopted, that it was a sense of inevitability about what had happened?

7:21 I think it's better to say that democracy is a better system than it is to say that it's inevitable, 7:26 because once you say that it's inevitable, you're forgetting all the things that you have to do or struggle for in order for democracy to come into being. 7:33 And that applies not just to us---and our own democracy I think, arguably, is in a worse situation than it was in the late 1980s---it applies to everybody. 7:42 The Russians, nobody in Eastern European was going to get democracy inevitably, and nobody was going to get it just because there was capitalism, 7:49 which I think was our big, tremendous, stupid mistake at the time, relying on these larger structural forces, not paying attention to culture, not paying attention to ethics, 7:59 and imagining that the economic transformation in the form of privatization was automatically going to bring about political changes. 8:05 That's what we were thinking, and we were wrong about that. And Russians were also wrong about that. 8:11 The Russians who were in charge, it was convenient for them to think that because the people around Yeltsin were making huge amounts of money at the time. 8:17 But that was a big mistake, which we should recognize, that democracy is going to be inevitable 8:23 because there are no alternatives, as people said; it's going to be inevitable because capitalism's going to bring it. These were all mistakes, and we can learn from these mistakes. 8:31 Russia, I think, is one consequence of believing in those mistakes. If you seriously believe that just privatizing things is going to lead to a good political system, 8:39 then Russia should be a good political system, because they did privatize things. But in fact---this is a lesson for everybody---if too few people own too much of the stuff, 8:49 and if too few people dominate the media, you're not going to end up with a democracy, whether you're America, whether you're Russia, whether you're anybody else. 8:56 And I imagine that the former KGB agent who you describe, the cynical Vladimir Putin, could see in American hubris 9:04 about democracy some way that he can operate that we may not pay attention to until it's almost too late. 9:10 Yeah. The idea that we have, that capitalism is eventually going to bring everybody around to some kind of 9:17 reasonable form of politics, the idea that there's no alternative, opens a huge window of opportunity 9:24 for people who do represent alternatives, especially in capitalist countries, which Russia and China, by the way, are. 9:30 We were very slow to pick up on the particular nature of the Putinist threat largely for this reason, 9:37 because we thought well, because it's capitalist, it will be OK, or we just measure its economic growth and we say it's not very important. 9:44 But meanwhile, Putin can represent an alternative. He can come up with an ideology which draws people not only in Russia but in America. 9:51 He can come up with a counter story about globalization. He can claim that he's the one who embodies values because we're not talking about values; 9:56 we're just talking about how this stuff is inevitable, which is not very attractive. He can make all those claims. 10:02 And we're very, very slow to pick up on it because we're in this story about how history is on our side. Who is Putin 10:09

What do you make of that that famous meeting with George W. Bush, where he says he looks into Putin's eyes and he sees his soul?

10:15 Back then, did it matter?

Did we not understand---who Vladimir Putin was?

Or was it not clear at that point who Vladimir Putin was?

10:22 I think that Vladimir Putin at that time is not the same person we're dealing with now, but there is a constant thread which is in a way representative of Russia. 10:32 The eyes-seeing-the-soul thing I don't understand at all; I've never had that experience. But Putin did consistently say Ukraine is not a real country, and that has consistently been his view. 10:43 And that's a typical Russian view, that Ukraine is not really a country. And the idea that Ukraine is not really a country only becomes threatening when Ukraine in some ways 10:52 starts to become a better country than Russia, according to measures which some Russians at least some of the time themselves accept, like Ukrainians can vote, or Ukrainians have had 11:03 a peaceful change of president with an actual election, where the votes counted, which Russians have never had. 11:11 Ukrainians are closer to Europe. Ukrainians are going to be able to travel in Europe. Those kinds of things suddenly turn Ukraine from being not a real place, a joke, 11:20 which is Putin's first idea, to being not a real place, therefore some kind of a concocted threat by the West. 11:27 But the common idea, which is not just Putin's, that this is not a real country, that was actually there to hear way back when. Putin and the West 11:34 And what's going on in that timePutin, it seems like, is trying to win over Bush, but by the time you get to the famous speech in Munich, he's describing America as a threat. 11:44

What is it that turns him?

Is it that rhetoric of the freedom agenda of Bush?

Is it Iraq?

11:49 Is it what's going on in the 'œnear abroad'?

What's the progression in those seven years?

Give me the chronology again. 11:56 Putin comes in in 2000. And by the time you get to 2007, he gives a speech at the Munich Security Conference 12:04 where he says the West is a threat. And we've talked to people who were there, and they said it was striking to see Putin describe, 12:13 in rhetoric that's very similar to what he was saying in 2022 about the West. 12:19

What is his progression of coming to see America as a threat?

I guess it's very important for us as Americans to recognize that the most important things that are happening 12:30 in Russia are actually happening in Russia and that the things that Putin says about us are very rarely, 12:37 and if so only distantly, connected to actual things that we do and say in our own country. 12:43 The way to understand Putin, I think, is to follow the failure of his domestic policy. 12:49 Putin comes to power with the basic idea that Russia can be rigged up into some kind of rule-of-law state. 12:55 'œDictatorship of the law' is the phrase that he uses. He quickly realizes that that's not the case, or at least that he's not the person to do it, 13:04 and shifts gears to a different program of rule, which involves not getting rid of oligarchy, 13:10 but being the top oligarch, which is a very fundamental difference. It might look the same because you're rounding up people, putting them in jail, but becoming the top oligarch, 13:19 becoming the boss of bosses, turning the state into the most important mafia clan, is very different than cleaning out the stables. 13:27 Once Putin makes that turn, that's the important turn, because it means that there's never going to be effective domestic policy. 13:34 Russians are not going to get the things you're going to get out of the rule of law, like social mobility, freedom; they're not going to get that. 13:40 What they're going to have to get instead is a foreign policy of spectacle. So we, the West, are the enemy of choice for Putin. 13:50 And the reason why we're the enemy of choice is that defining the West as the enemy feeds in to a very long tradition 13:57 in Russia, a, and b, it's also very safe because we're not actually going to do anything aggressive with respect to Russia. 14:05 So the way to understand Putin's turn against the United States is not to feel guilty about American policy; 14:11 it's not to imagine that we're responsibility for everything, because we're not; it's not to deny him or Russians agency, because they have agency. 14:18 It's to understand the failure of Putin's domestic policy and his recognition that what he needs is a kind of permanent 14:24 spectacle which comes out of foreign policy and that the Europeans and the Americans are always going to provide that. 14:29 Now, when I say that, I'm not saying that American foreign policy has been good. The Iraq War was an absolute disaster, and I said so at the time. 14:37 And the Iraq War has played a later, indirect role in the Ukraine war, which maybe we can talk about. 14:44 But what I am trying to say is that it's very important as Americans not to think that everything that Putin does 14:49 is because of some little thing that we did. The most likely explanation is that what Putin is doing in foreign policy has to do with his needs in domestic policy.

Putin and democracy 15:05 or Victoria Nuland or Michael McFaul or whoever it is, that they are interfering, what is he doing there?

15:13 Is that something he believes?

Is that for show?

What does Vladimir Putin see when he sees Americans coming to Russia, talking about democracy, talking to activists?

15:22 I think he sees a threat. I mean, the Putin system is based upon turning democracy into a ritual 15:28 using what Russians call the administer of resource. Because there's no alternative ideology to democracy, 15:35 Putin only survives with the repeated legitimation that democratic theater acts, democratic performances provide him. 15:43 So every so often, every six years, we're going to have an election, and Putin's going to win that election. And he has to win it by a lot, not because people actually believe in the results---they don't--- 15:52 but because the election proves that he's the one who's in charge, because he's the one who's running the election. That's how it works. 15:58 The idea that elections could be real, whether it's Pompeo who's saying it or Clinton who's saying it, 16:04 the idea that elections could be real is a threat. Putin needs Russians to believe that elections are always a circus, a farce and a fake, 16:11 because if Russians believed that British elections and German elections and American elections are also fake, 16:16 they're not going to mind that their own elections are fake. So when Americans come to Russia and talk about votes being counted, I think he authentically regards that a threat, 16:25 and the way he expresses that sense of threat is to say, 'œOur democracy is real. Their democracy is fake. 16:32 We care about ourselves. They only care about meddling in our politics,' and so on and so forth. 16:37 But I think the concern is that people in Russia might actually believe that there are places in the world where votes are counted. Biden and democracy 16:44 Joe Biden goes there in March of 2011 and speaks to students and talks about democracy. 16:50 Do you think that Biden or any of the Americans who go understand that--- it's so common in America to talk about democracy and talk about values. 16:58

Do you think they understand how it's seen by Putin or that it's going to lead to that reaction from him?

17:04 I think that American policy, as I understand it, was based upon the assumption, which I think is sound, 17:11 that we would be living in a more secure world, not just a freer world, if there were more democracies in it. 17:18 Putin's reaction is not to the Americans talking about democracy; Putin's reaction is to the idea that 17:24 there might be democracy in Russia, an idea which, by the way, is much more threatening when it comes from 17:30 nearer neighbors like Ukraine, where Russians could actually see, 'œAha, the system is actually working. ' 17:36 I think in general, Americans are aware that Putin isn't going to like them talking about democracy; 17:41 I don't think there's any kind of surprise there. What I would caution against is the idea that Putin is reacting to the Americans. 17:47 He's not reacting to the Americans; he's reacting to the threat of the idea that there might actually be democratic elections in Russia. 17:54 It's very convenient for him to frame this as great-power politics: 17:59 The Americans are not talking about democracy; they're talking about their own geopolitics, and they're pretending to talk about democracy. 18:05 That's what he's going to say. That's very comfortable; that works very well. But he would be saying that regardless of what we were talking about, I think. Obama and Russia 18:14

By the time we get into the Obama administration, we talked a little bit about that, how seriously do you take Russia?

18:20 And there's that famous moment, of course, that you mentioned between Romney and Barack Obama. 18:26

Do you think that Barack Obama and the administration took Vladimir Putin and Russia seriously enough?

18:32 I think they didn't understand the Russian state in the correct way. 18:37 The Russian state is not about a creative project. If the Russian state were about a creative project, then in some sense, 18:44 President Obama would have been right when he said, 'œNo, no, it's just a regional power,' because it's correct. Russia doesn't have big economy; it doesn't really set an example for anyone else. 18:52 So in that narrow sense, where you think economics and ideas that are familiar to us are all that matter, 19:00 then maybe Russia doesn't matter so much. But that's imposing our own criteria on the Putin regime. 19:06 The Putin regime was never about creating things. The Putin regime is about removing alternatives. 19:11 It's about making the normality that is Russia---the corruption, the inequality, the spectacle, the constantly lying---seem normal. 19:19 And the way you make it seem normal is by making it be normal, not just in your own country, but in other places. 19:24 So what the Russians became very effective at doing by way of their international propaganda and then later 19:30 by interfering in elections, is messing things up, taking the worst of other societies and bringing the worst tendencies 19:36 to the fore, finding, by digital means and otherwise, our weaknesses and making those weaknesses greater and greater. 19:43 So the Obama administration was totally blindsided when the Russians decided to try to alter our electoral outcomes, 19:50 but it was totally consistent with the way Russia sees the rest of the world. Russia's not trying to make America like Russia; Russia's just trying to turn America into a total mess. 19:59 That's what they're going for. And that's a kind of power. And it's consistent, by the way, with a lot of Soviet history, 20:05 that it's not so much about necessarily making everybody believe your ideas. It's more a matter of making sure that nobody else can mount a serious challenge to you, 20:14 undermining everything else, making everything else a shambles. And then you may be shambolic, but provided that you're no more shambolic than anybody else, 20:21 you're going to be OK. Biden actually gives the speech about the 'œreset,' and Hillary Clinton gives them the button. The reset 20:27

Was that ever going to work, or has Vladimir Putin always needed the U. S. as an enemy, as somebody who's interfering, as somebody who's causing trouble?

20:34 And was it by that point---was the reset ever going to work?

Were things ever going to be put back as they were hoping early in the administration?

20:41 I think that we generally just don't take Russian domestic politics seriously enough, and therefore we don't take Putin's position seriously enough. 20:51 Of course the reset wasn't going to work because there's nothing that America did which was actually that important inside Russia. I mean, I'm sorry if I'm undermining the whole premise of your program, 20:58 but there's literally nothing that we do which is that important inside Russia. 21:03 American foreign policy does not matter that much in Russia. What matters in Russia is what happens in Russia. 21:12 They have chosen to have us as their foreign policy enemy because that is convenient for them, 21:17 and it works very well in domestic politics. There is nothing we can do to change that. We could all wear the Russian flag as t-shirts every day. 21:26 We could get up in the morning and we could all sing the Russian national anthem. It wouldn't change that. There's nothing, the reset, nothing else that could have changed this 21:34 because it's a need which comes out of domestic politics, to have a convenient enemy of choice. 21:40 So no, I don't think the reset ever could have worked, and I think it's kind of one more expression of American vanity because the idea is that, well, we did something wrong, and so long as we have some kind of course correction 21:49 and they have some kind of course correction, it's all going to be OK. But the problem was just much deeper than that. Yeah. I mean you're not undermining the premise of what we're trying to figure out because the question is, Did Obama understand Putin 21:58 did we understand---on the American side; then I'll ask you more about on the Russian side, too---

did we understand who we were dealing with and what their actual worldview was, or were we projecting?

22:09 In that case of the reset, I guess that's the question. It was, did the Obama administration really understand Vladimir Putin, really understand Russia 22:16 as they were trying to deal with them?

I think the answer to that is fundamentally no. The Obama administration, I think, misunderstood Russia 22:23 and also misunderstood what it would take to reorient American foreign policy. 22:29 The Obama administration thought that we can repair relations with China, and Russia will just somehow follow along one way or the other. 22:37 I don't think you can treat it that way. I think Russia's an independent issue, and you have to take Russia seriously, along with the Europeans, 22:44 which is where the Obama administration also went wrong. We needed to be with the Europeans vis-à-vis Russia rather than imagining that we could 22:51 go off and solve something with China, which we pretty much completely failed to do. What we didn't---fundamentally didn't understand is that for the Russians, 23:00 it's not that there's a foreign policy problem and they want to solve it. They don't want to solve the foreign policy problem; 23:05 they want to have the foreign policy problem in a form that they can handle. So for the Russians, the real foreign policy threat is not us; they're not really afraid of us. 23:14 They're really afraid of China. But that fear is so deep and that geopolitical problem is so real that they prefer not to talk about it at all. 23:29 in domestic politics, and it's not really risky because we're not ever really going to do anything, is the basic idea. 23:34 So we can be more friendly or less friendly. We can turn the dial this way or that way, but it's not going to change that basic reality. Was Obama right to talk about democracy 23:42 In this period, too, is the Arab Spring, is Obama who comes in a little bit skeptical 23:47 of the Freedom Agenda of the Bush administration and spreading democracy. 23:53 By the time you get to the Arab Spring, the rhetoric at least is 'œDemocracy is coming. ' It looks like maybe Russia is part of it; maybe other countries as well. 24:03

From the Obama administration, was there hubris about what was happening, about whether they had to do anything or they could just support it rhetorically?

24:11 How do you see the Obama administration at that point in the rhetoric of democracy, especially in regards to Russia, but in that era after the Arab Spring?

24:18 I think the Obama administration was right to talk about democracy. I can't imagine a coherent American foreign policy, honestly, which doesn't talk about democracy. 24:29 I think if we think our system is better, we should be advocating our system as being better. The criticism I would have is that the hubris is more a matter of thinking that history is on your side, 24:41 and history is never on your side. And as soon as you think that history is on your side, you've got to reevaluate your assumptions, because there's no such thing as history which can be on your side. 24:47 And I think the whole arc of history bending towards justice, it's a nice thing; one likes to believe things like that are true. 24:55 But there's no arc of history; it's not bending in any particular direction. You can make democracies happen, but to make democracies happen, 25:01 you have to first set a really good example yourself and, second, understand the countries that you're dealing with. 25:07 And in the case of the Obama administration, I think we dismissed Russia as weak 25:14 rather than realizing that the people who run the Russian state are very intelligent, that they have no desire to have democracy at all, that they're not just going to wait and let it happen to them, 25:22 but instead, they're going to go on the offensive and try to undermine it in other places. This isn't to say, though, that everything is our fault. 25:29 When Putin looks at the Arab Spring, or when Putin looks at Qaddafi, it's absolutely right that he thinks: 25:34 they're dictators, I'm a dictator; they're tyrants, I'm a tyrant; they end up in a cage, I could end up in a cage. 25:41 He certainly thinks that because that is the logic of being a tyrant. As we know from Plato to Shakespeare, the logic of being a tyrant is that you're going to be afraid of ending that way. 25:51 In fairness to the Obama administration and everyone else, there is nothing that we could have done to stop that. When you are the boss of bosses, when you are the tyrant, you're going to be afraid of ending up in a cage. 26:02 What you're going to want is to die peacefully in your bed, and that is a logic which is true and irresistible, 26:08 regardless of what American foreign policy is going to be. So he was going to look at the Arab Spring the way he looked at it, 26:14 regardless of how we talked about it or what we did. By the end of the administration, the Maidan, seizing Crimea, eventually there will be the war in the east. What was the message Putin was sending 26:24

What was the message that Putin was sending in that, or what was the message we should have been receiving at that moment?

26:31 Well, the message Putin had been sending since 2008 in Georgia was that he was willing to intervene militarily in his neighbors if he could get away with it. 26:39 And the 'œif he could get away with it' is really important, because what America thought or Americans thought 26:46 or our administration at that time thought is that we are winning the war of ideas. We are winning the war of words. 26:52 History, culture, all that stuff is on our side. But that was wrong. What Russia was able to prove was that, no, as a matter of fact, we can invade a country, 27:02 and we can make you think that it didn't actually happen. Russia invaded Ukraine and basically persuaded us that it didn't actually happen. 27:10 While Russia was invading Ukraine, the most important thing that was happening in the minds of the West, not just Americans, were discussions about whether there'd been a coup in Ukraine 27:19 or whether the Ukrainians are all Nazis, or maybe they're all gay, or maybe they're all Jews, depending on what social media you were following, right?

27:26 The Russians totally had our minds in a trap at that time, and we were totally unprepared for that, 27:33 not just the Obama administration but American public life in general. They outsmarted us, they ran circles around us, and they did it by appealing 27:41 to what they already knew about us because they were paying attention to us, at least in the negative sense of knowing what our vulnerabilities were on social media. 27:50 So when they invaded Ukraine, which they did in 2014, we were unable to talk about it that way. We couldn't say 'œwar'; we couldn't say 'œinvasion. ' 27:57 The basic realities of life we couldn't talk about because we got ourselves all tied up in these discussions which the Russians invented for us. 28:04 So what we were not prepared for was the possibility that actually the ideas and the culture and the digital technology were not working for us. 28:13 They were actually working for somebody else. We were totally unprepared for that. And I think to this day, we haven't quite figured out how we got that wrong. 28:20 And if anything, it's the Ukrainians in 2022, with their own social media and the way they're approaching it, which are kind of teaching us how you might deal with a situation like that. What lesson did we take from 2014 28:29 We might have been unprepared before, but Vladimir Putin straight out lies to Barack Obama, 28:34 says, No, I don't know anything about the little green men in Crimea. What lesson---at that point, if we weren't prepared for what was happening in the moment, as the dust cleared 28:44 and it became very clear what had happened and then by then what's going on in the east, what lesson did we take?

28:51 What lesson should we have taken back then?

Yeah. I think---I just really wouldn't want to underestimate how important Russian propaganda was at that time 29:01 because it's hard to take a lesson from something when you haven't really understood that that something is happening. 29:06 And in the American mind---if you go back and read the press from those weeks and months, this is very clear---it just wasn't clear that an invasion of Ukraine was happening. 29:14 I mean, if there had been a single-column story in the New York Times one day, which had just said 'œRussia Invades Ukraine,' that would have been so much more useful than the 29:22 endless discussions we had about a whole bunch of things which either were irrelevant or weren't happening. But we couldn't get ourselves to the moment where we just had a single-column story saying 'œRussia Invades Ukraine. ' 29:31 We can't learn a lesson if we don't know the thing is actually happening. The lesson that we should have learned in domestic politics is that the Russians have found techniques 29:40 using social media to structure and frame what's going on. They did that in 2014 when they invaded Ukraine, and then they did it in 2016, to great effect, 29:50 when they intervened in our presidential elections using the same people, the same institutions and the same techniques. 29:56 So once we had been had in Ukraine in 2014, we should have been better prepared for being had in 2016. 30:03 I made that connection at the time, and I tried to persuade other people that this was what was happening, but---so I remember this very vividly---nobody was going along with that. 30:11 Nobody thought there was anything we needed to learn from 2014 because we hadn't realized how much we'd been fooled in 2014. Was there a lesson we didnt learn from 2014 30:18 Let me ask you a different way, which is by the time you're getting to the debate inside the administration, which is about do you send Javelins, do you send weapons to Ukraine, 30:26 by that point, it is clear who is involved and what has happened.

30:31 Was there a lesson by that point that wasn't learned?

It sounds like a lot of people inside the administration were advocating for it, 30:38 and the president was really the one making the decision in that case. What do you think of that decision and whether they were really understanding what was going on?

30:46 Well, I think we were caught up in a world where fundamentally it was going to be ideas and economics, and they were fundamentally on our side. 30:56 So therefore we make some public relations announcements and we have some sanctions, 31:01 and our job is done, which was basically our policy. I don't think we were in a world where we were thinking the Ukrainians are real people 31:08 and they might want to defend themselves. I think that's fundamentally the problem, that Russia's not an important country, 31:16 and the countries next to it are even less important, and what are we really going to do here?

What's---you're asking me to kind of decode what the president himself thought, 31:25 and I don't know; I can only talk about the kind of---the factors which were around it. But I think the thing that we basically didn't understand is that Ukraine could have defended itself. 31:35 If we had done in 2014 more like what we've done in 2022, we never would have gotten to 2022. 31:41 I think all the dancing around about whether we send Javelins or not was just bizarre and kind of a weird example of American vanity because ---you're not a party to war because you give weapons. 31:51 If that were true, then every country in the world would be a party to every war which is going on because we're constantly giving weapons and selling weapons. 31:57 We went on for years with this debate about whether we should arm Ukrainians. It's obvious that we should have armed Ukrainians. If we'd armed Ukrainians earlier and better, I think we'd be in a better world now.

32:05 Does Putin take a lesson from that?

Putin takes a lesson from Syria when we say there's a red line and there's not a red line. Does Putin take a lesson from Ukraine 32:13 And Putin takes a lesson from Ukraine when he's able to invade a country which is in seized territory, 32:20 which is a fundamental violation of everything that we say is the basis of our legal order. 32:27 The whole thing, the idea that one country does not invade another country, and annex territory, 32:32 is the entire foundation of the United Nations and the Security Council of which Russia and America are members.

And our reaction is minimal, right?

32:40 And so of course he takes a lesson from that. The lesson that he takes from that is that this kind of thing can work if we gin it up properly. 32:49 And that's not the message that we really wanted to be sending at the time. But I think the other lesson he took from that, totally understandably, 32:55 is that if you can just get the Americans to talk about themselves, you can get away with a lot of stuff. 33:03 We can't separate out the propaganda from the war itself because the Russians won a propaganda war 33:12 in a way which a propaganda war has rarely been won in this century, in the past century, in any other century. 33:18 It is very rare that a country, Country A invades Country B, and Country C talks about other subjects entirely. 33:26 So one of the lessons he learned is that you can mess with the American political mind, which he then applies in 2016. 33:32 If anything, in 2022, he thinks we're too much of a pushover and he doesn't work hard enough on the propaganda side 33:40 because he just thinks we're just complete idiots, but, you know, which we turn out fortunately not to be.

Did the US take Ukraine seriously enough 33:45 Is the conflict in Ukraine about democracy and about authoritarianism at that point?

33:50 We talked about how we had this rhetoric about democracy and about the Arab Spring, and was that on the line then?

33:56 Did the president realize that?

Did we recognize it in those terms?

We didn't take the Maidan and Ukraine seriously enough. 34:06 So Russia invades Ukraine because it looks like Ukraine could become a functioning rule-of-law state 34:13 which would join the European Union. It doesn't have a whole lot to do with America. 34:19 What it has to do with is the possibility that a post-Soviet country, next to Russia, where lots of people speak Russian, which is in some ways not so different from Russia, 34:26 that that country could actually become a rule-of-law state, a democracy, and join the European Union. 34:32 That is what Russia needed to prevent in 2013, and that's what Russia needed to prevent in 2014 when it invaded. 34:39 That's what was really going on. It was really about democracy. It wasn't about American presidents talking about democracy---different subject. 34:46 It was about actual democracy in Russia's actual neighborhood, which is an actual threat to Putin. 34:52 The European Union is also an actual threat to Putin, although they don't like to see themselves that way, because the European Union shows that you can take flawed post-communist states and with 35:01 a little bit of encouragement, a little bit of aid and some norms, you can make them into prosperous countries. 35:06 That would be very bad for Putin if his people actually believed that. So from Russia's point of view, it was all about showing that Ukraine is actually a joke; it's never going to join Europe. 35:17 I don't think we got any of that because we were taking neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians seriously enough. 35:23 But that was a story about how Ukrainians had understood that for their country to have the rule of law and defeat--- 35:30 the protesters on the Maidan, the million people who came out of the Maidan, when they were polled, the thing they said was most important to them was the rule of law, 35:38 not language or all the other things that we were obsessing about in the U. S. What they wanted was the rule of law. 35:44 They wanted their country to be a normal country which could join Europe, and that's what Russia needed to stop. That's what it was all about. And we---the Obama administration said very little, and what it said it said very late about the Maidan. 35:55 It's not something that we took very seriously, unfortunately. As we get to the election interference, does Vladimir Putin'“ I mean, we talked about this idea Does Putin understand the weakness of American democracy 36:03 that we thought democracy had triumphed in the post-Cold War and that it was going to go forward on its own.

36:08 Does Vladimir Putin understand something about the weakness of America, of American democracy, that Americans don't or didn't understand at that time?

36:17 They always have the advantage of believing in the worst parts of human nature, 36:22 and we are not better than anybody else. We may have better or worse institutions, but we're not better than anyone else. 36:30 And the KGB instinct, the Soviet instinct, that every psychology has a weakness and the way that you 36:39 perform your work and you perform your life is to find that weakness and expand it and exploit it, that can work on us. 36:45 That can work on American democracy. So I'm not sure that they understand us, in the normal sense of the word 'œunderstand. ' 36:52 I think they have a protocol that they follow, that they use in interrogations, and that protocol they 36:58 follow in interrogations, where they seek out weaknesses, also works on social media, because remember, 37:05 the way they tried to throw the election doesn't have to do with people in touch with people, not really. It has to do with the mechanical collection of data which reveals weaknesses.

37:14 So, do Russians understand American racism?

No. But do they understand that people reveal their racism on Facebook?

37:22 Yes. And so then they can appeal to racists on Facebook. Do they understand what it's like to be an African American in the U. S. ?

37:29 Obviously not. Do they understand that African Americans might be sensitive to claims that Hillary Clinton is a racist?

37:35 Yes, they get that. And so what they're doing is they're following a protocol which says, look for the psychological weakness; 37:43 expand it; exploit it; hit it; make everything about that. And they're taking the data which social media provides 37:50 to generate a coherent approach to try and affect an American election. I don't think they understand us; I don't think they have to in order to follow this protocol 37:58 any more than a KGB interrogator really had to understand a dissident in order to try to hurt that person, 38:04 exploit that person or turn that person. When suddenly you have a president who's very different than all of the other presidents we've talked about, What is Putin thinking about Trump 38:11 who talk about democracy and freedom, and going back to H. W, Bush and even to Reagan, 38:17 somebody from a completely different tradition, what is the view, if not personally from Vladimir Putin, 38:23 from the Kremlin, from Russia as they're watching this new president come in?

So, I hesitate to answer the question of what Putin is thinking about Trump 38:30 just because I think they're thinking all kinds of things that we don't know. 38:35 I mean, I think they have their views about how this person is going to destabilize America, which are probably informed by data that we just don't have, the things that--- 38:44 because they've obviously been paying attention to this man for a long time. So just how they see him I think is something we can't quite get to the end of it. 38:53 It's clear that Putin wanted Trump to win. He said as much. It's clear that he applauded Trump's idea that the European Union isn't really a thing, 39:05 That's all clear because Putin has said so. That's all absolutely clear. 39:11 In general, what Trump does for Putin is he normalizes the Russian way of doing politics. 39:18 So Putin's view that democracy is a joke, you can lie all the time, politics is fundamentally about some rich guy becoming richer, corruption is normal, right , that---Trump normalizes that for the whole world. 39:33 So it's a huge gift for Putin because the United States, although it doesn't matter as much as it thinks it does, it does matter a lot. 39:39 And so what Trump did was he took Putin and he made Putin normal. 39:44 He put Putin at the middle. Putin was now no longer something exceptional. Putin was now normal thanks to Donald Trump, and that had a tremendously negative effect on politics around the world, I think.

39:57 Was this something they were hoping to get from Trump?

You talk about---is it destabilizing America?

What were Putins hopes for Trump 40:03 Is it destabilizing the Western alliance?

What are their hopes for that Trump presidency?

Look, it was a bonanza for them, the way it actually turned out. 40:11 So before we talk about what they were hoping, the Trump administration was just a feast for the Kremlin every day. 40:20 Because what the Trump administration delivered every day in its outrageous rhetoric, in its disrespect 40:26 for American institutions, and in the countless scandals was what Russian propaganda outlets dreamed of. 40:34 They dream of this kind of raw material which proves that democracy is a joke. 40:39 Trump is there to tell you that democracy is a joke. That's what he's there to tell you. He's there to tell you that the rules don't apply to everyone equally; they don't apply to him. 40:48 He's there to tell you that might makes right. He's there to tell you that you can lie every day, not just in Russia but in America, which---that's what he did. 40:55 He lied every day, all the time, just like Putin. So, They had other hopes, but Trump gave them the basic thing that they wanted, which was 41:04 an American administration which was an embarrassment for everyone who cared about democracy, an American administration which showed that Russia was more normal, right, which---that's what they crave. 41:16 They crave the rest of the world, the democratic world to say, 'œActually, Russia's normal; 41:21 the way things happen in Russia is the way things happen everywhere else. ' Because if that's what people believe, then there's no threat to Putin and his regime. 41:28 So Trump did Putin a huge favor just by his existence and his everyday behavior. I think they wanted an America which would pull out of NATO, 41:36 which they'll likely get in a second Trump administration, if there is one, or at least an attempt in that direction. 41:42 I think they wanted an America which would separate from the European Union, which they got to a considerable extent and which the Biden administration has had to work very hard to repair. 41:53 And again, if there's another Trump administration, I think we can probably say goodbye for quite a while to American-European cooperation. 42:01 And one thing which they wanted, which they got and which they celebrated was a coup attempt. 42:07 They loved Jan. 6. Nobody loved Jan. 6 more than the Russians did. Jan. 6 showed that all this stuff about peaceful transitions of power and consensus 42:17 and the American Constitution, they just loved it. They lapped it up. They reproduce it all the time. 42:23 They talk about it all the time. That was---I mean, Trump gave them four years, which was one big gift, but Jan. 6 was like the wrapping, the beautiful wrapping, the package which they'll just never forget. 42:36 If he's elected again---if he becomes president again, I should say, I'm sure he'll come up with new things, 42:41 but Jan. 6 was an extraordinary gift to Russia. For Vladimir Putin, however he experienced it at the time, now talks about the collapse of the Soviet Union The collapse of the Soviet Union 42:49 and what he saw in Germany as being such a searing time, to see something like that 42:54 happening on the steps of the Capitol after watching the West celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall 43:00 and here are images that are sort of reminiscent in America,---

how must he have taken that?

Well, I think he understands all of this in terms of vulnerability. 43:10 So he doesn't know why the Soviet Union fell apart. Putin has no idea why the Soviet Union fell apart. 43:16 His whole story of why the Soviet Union fell apart is utter nonsense. The story that they tell is that the Americans wanted it to happen and therefore it happened, 43:25 which a, we're not that powerful, and b---and I was there at the time--- our policy in 1991 was to keep the Soviet Union together; it wasn't to make it fall apart. 43:34 But with the way he sees the world, it's all just about power. It couldn't have mattered that people in Lithuania or Ukraine had ideas about the Soviet Union. 43:44 It couldn't have mattered that there were legitimate disagreements inside Moscow. None of that matters. It's just about power, and the Americans showed their power. 43:51 And so now he was showing his power. Now it looks like the Russians are powerful: 'œLook what we can do. 43:57 We can make a mess inside American politics, which ends with bloodshed on the steps of the Capitol.

44:03 And since we've shown that we're powerful, what are we going to do next?

We're going to invade Ukraine, because obviously this crew of people who can just barely get Biden into office, 44:13 this crew of people is not going to do anything about that. ' So Jan. 6, apart from anything else, leads directly to the war in Ukraine, 44:20 because it looks like America is not just morally discredited; it looks like America is weak. Trumps approach to Ukraine 44:26 Let's just go back and pick up one thing about Ukraine, which is we were talking about Ukraine as, or you were talking about Ukraine as an example of this important conflict here 44:34 between democracy and authoritarianism, and being an actual conflict, and not just rhetorical. And Trump's approach to Ukraine, which we know he described as sort of a corrupt country; 44:44 there's obviously the famous phone call---

what does Trump's approach to Ukraine tell us?

44:49 What does it tell us about democracy and authoritarianism and what would happen?

Well, Trump's world is like Putin's world. 44:55 There are big guys; there are little guys; it's all about force. You respect the person who can humble you; therefore he respects Putin, but he doesn't respect other people. 45:04 He respects Putin because he knows Putin helped him get to power. He thinks that Russia is a great power, and in this sense, as in so many others, 45:11 his view of the world and Putin's view of the world overlap. It's very comfortable: Russia's a great power; the countries around Russia are not real places. 45:20 And of course, Trump doesn't care at all about democracy. He doesn't care about American democracy; he doesn't care about anybody's democracy. 45:27 He's a gift not to just Putin but to all dictators around the world, especially the ones who came out of 45:32 a quasi-democratic background, because he seems to show you can start from democracy and end up in tyranny. 45:38 That's what Trump seems to show. That's why he's so beloved among a certain class of dictator. So what Trump does with Russia and Ukraine is he personalizes all of it. 45:47 It's all about Putin. A lot of Americans have this problem: We just talk about Putin, Putin, Putin, Putin. 45:53 But Trump really personalizes it. It's all about Putin. Putin's the one who really has power.

45:58 The Ukrainians and Zelenskyy, who are those people?

They don't really matter. They're just secondary. 46:04 So might makes right. Naturally the Russians are going to do what they're going to do. And when it comes to the interaction between President Trump and President Zelenskyy, 46:15 we see that the only thing which matters to Trump is staying in power personally, because of course he needs to 46:21 avoid prosecution, and he needs to avoid challenges to his wealth, so he needs to stay in power. And in order to stay in power, he's willing to try to blackmail Ukraine and its newly elected president by saying, 46:34 'œWe're going to take weapons away from you unless you pursue this basically insane investigation,' which 46:39 by the way, all the Ukrainian investigative journalists know is bogus, 'œthis insane investigation of the son of my rival. ' 46:46 So he's not taking Ukraine or Zelenskyy seriously as a country. They're just there to help him in his reelection campaign; that's it. 46:53 And those statements, that Ukraine is just a corrupt country. Obviously there is corruption in Ukraine, but that it's just a corrupt country, how did that play into that perception, Corruption in Ukraine 47:02 that conflict between democracy and authoritarianism?

It's really important. So, all countries have problems, right?

47:08 So America has a problem with racism. Are we just a racist country?

It's pretty fundamental, but we're not just a racist country; other things are going on. 47:16 All democracies have these issues. Is France a post-imperial country?

Yes, it is, but there are other things going on in France that make France not a completely lost republic. 47:26 Does Poland have a problem with its judiciary?

Certainly it does. And so on and so forth. Ukraine has a problem with corruption. 47:31 Absolutely Ukraine has a problem with a corruption, but that became a sort of trope where, 47:36 thanks in part to Russian propaganda, it was pushed to a degree where people would say, 47:42 'œWell, it's not really a state; it's a failed state,' which is something that Russians said over and over again. So what happens is that people use various things that are in some way or another 47:51 kind of true about Ukraine in order to turn '“ in order to turn Ukraine into a place that doesn't really exist. 47:57 So the language question is another issue. People in Ukraine speak two languages. What's wrong with that?

I think it's kind of nice. 48:03 I wish more of my students spoke two languages. But somehow speaking two languages becomes bad; it means you don't really know who you are; it means they're not really a people, and so on. 48:10 So these things which are kind of true in one way or another, like the corruption or like the languages, become an argument for saying Ukraine's not really a place. 48:18 And we are not really paying attention; we're not really experts. The Russians are taking these themes, and they're driving them home as seriously as they can, 48:26 which leads us to this almost impossibly implausible situation of Donald Trump, 48:32 who is like the walking embodiment of corruption, talking about how other people in other countries might be corrupt. Bidens approach 48:38 What was Joe Biden's approach?

Was it different from other presidents'?

Well, I'm going to judge the Biden administration from how it reacted to a crisis, 48:48 and the way they reacted to a crisis was to recognize that the crisis was real, and that I think does them credit. 48:57 They were right that Russia was going to invade Ukraine. They were right to try to persuade other people that Russia was going to invade Ukraine. 49:05 And where I think they stand out, both from not just other Democratic but all the previous administrations since 1989, 49:12 is they were right to believe that they couldn't handle the problem on their own, you know, that they weren't going to be able to just say, 'œThere's a red line,' 49:20 or they weren't going to be able to just conjure up a coalition because they said so; that they were actually going to have to do the hard work of getting the coalition together. 49:27 So I think that the Biden administration recognized that something terrible was going to happen, and they scratched their way towards coming to some kind of coherent response to it. 49:37 I think that's all in their favor. And I think the Biden administration reacted---they reacted quickly also in terms of the concepts that they were using. 49:49 It was no longer about how Russia was a failed democratic project or Putin was someone we could do business with. 49:57 It was more about just actually taking the data as it was on the ground and trying to respond to it. I think they did that pretty well. Putins perspective 50:04 When you look at it from a Western perspective, almost from everybody except for Russia, or at least Vladimir Putin's perspective, it seems so illogical, the war. 50:13 It seems so hard to understand why they would isolate, why the threats against them wouldn't work, 50:19 why he would risk so much, maybe even his life, on this invasion. 50:25 And had Putin changed?

Did we just never understand him, and it had always been there?

50:31 How do you explain that?

I think it's all the above. First of all, Ukraine changed. 50:37 Ukraine between 2014 and 2022 saw a generational change in leadership where a lot of talented and interesting people actually came to power. 50:46 Ukraine changed in the sense that 2014, the Maidan, the first war, opened up a period of cooperation 50:53 in civil society and human networks which were going to prove to be very important in the 2022 war. 50:58 I think that we and the Russians were alike in the sense that we didn't really understand how much Ukraine had changed and how much Ukraine would be an agent in this story of a war, 51:08 how much this was not going to be a story of Russia humiliating America by invading Ukraine, 51:13 how this was going to be a story of Russia humiliating itself because Ukrainians were going to fight back and win. 51:18 Number two, I think we always misunderstood Putin. And we always misunderstood him in the sense 51:25 that we misunderstood Russia as a kind of failed transition to democracy. Russia wasn't that. 51:31 Russia was an alternative to democracy which pretended to be a democracy and which functioned in its foreign policy by trying to destroy the democracies which were more real than it was. 51:39 But that said, Putin also changed over time. The cynicism gave way also to a certain mysticism, 51:47 a certain idea about Russia's mission and his personal mission and how he would be remembered after he died. 51:53 That did change. And if one follows his rhetoric in this last 10 years, it's clear that he's reaching a point 52:00 where he actually believes that Russia and Ukraine are one country and that this means that Ukraine will collapse 52:07 when he invades, but it also means that this is his opportunity to somehow make history right again, which is 52:13 the kind of thinking which it's understandable that democratically elected leaders are not going to really understand. Does Putin understand Joe Biden 52:19 Does Vladimir Putin understand Joe Biden?

Does he understand what the American response will be?

52:26 Does he also have an inability to understand what will happen if he invades Ukraine?

I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding on the Russian side, on Putin's side, 52:37 of people who are used to living in democracies, because in some ways he's right: We are slow; we're complicated; the various forces inside our countries end up canceling each other out. 52:49 But that doesn't mean that there aren't points where a fundamental sense of decency is involved, 52:56 and I think in, not just in American public opinion but in European public opinion, invading Ukraine crossed that line. 53:04 It crossed that line for a lot of people. And here you can take President Biden as a person, like other Americans, 53:11 or like others who just thought, totally invading a country with the aim of wiping it out of existence is--- 53:19 crosses a line which is not a political line but was some kind of line of human decency. And I think it is a misunderstanding that Putin has about us, that we are just as cynical as he. 53:29 I think that is a misunderstanding. I think it's a fundamental misunderstanding. When he said he's a 'œmurderous dictator,' 'œhe's a war criminal,' he should be gone, is this a real breaking point How profound is Bidens statement 53:39 or a real turning point in---certainly in these presidents we've seen from George W. Bush, even before, up till now?

53:47 How profound is that a break when Biden says that?

I think it's kind of refreshing for us, honestly, to be using this language which is more straightforward. 53:57 I think it's important for Americans to be using a language which is more general and which is not of our own making, because in our language, there was '89 and '91 54:08 and democracy and it was inevitable, and then maybe some people were going astray. But to flat out say that what's happening in Ukraine is genocide, which it is, is to get out of our story of what's been 54:19 happening in the last 30 years and to bring in some more fundamental concepts, which I think Biden has been doing. 54:25 And I think that what that involves fundamentally is recognizing our own mistakes, 54:30 that maybe more dramatic things have been happening that we have not quite been able to look at. And when we use the more dramatic language like war criminal, for example, we are recognizing our own mistakes. 54:41 It doesn't really matter for Russia the way that people think it matters for Russia because the Putin regime is always saying that we say things like this. 54:50 So when we actually do, it actually---they don't actually cover it. So we assumed that when, for example, when Biden said that Putin had to go, 54:57 that that would have huge ripples in the Russian media, and I'm here to tell you that it didn't. I was following the Russian media after that. 55:02 If anything, they tried to just kind of tuck it away on the side because it was a bit embarrassing. It's much better for them to be in control of the story than it is for an American president 55:11 to actually come out and say these things.

How dangerous is this moment? How dangerous is it for Putin?  How dangerous is this moment 55:16 How dangerous is he?

Well, I think he's trapped in the conventional war that he's fighting. 55:24 So I think the chief danger of this war, we should remember, is for the Ukrainians who are under Russian occupation. 55:30 The civilian deaths of Ukraine I think are the worst thing about this war and will likely remain the worst thing about this war. 55:37 I think he's in a conventional war which he is going to lose, and I think the conventional war that he's going to lose will likely have political ripples, already is having---has had for some time, political ripples inside the Russian Federation. 55:48 And it may lead to his losing power. I think it's pretty important for us not to get too emotionally involved, as we have in the past, with individual Russian leaders. 55:57 We wanted Gorbachev to stay; we wanted Yeltsin to stay. We don't like Putin, but even so, we're discomfited by the idea that Putin won't be in power. 56:05 They always fall from power. Dictators always fall from power. It always happens. And when it happens, it's not something we should feel guilty or ashamed about. 56:12 We should just be ready for it and be preparing our policy for the next person. 56:17 So obviously, the situation is very dangerous for Putin, and poetically, he's created the situation which could bring him down, which didn't have to happen. 56:25 By mobilizing a million Russian soldiers to go fight a war which was utterly pointless in which many of them are going to die, he's created the situation where he could fall. 56:34 He's gone back to a place like 1917 where a Russian government 56:39 is fighting a war it probably shouldn't have been fighting. He's going back to the 1560s and Ivan the Terrible, 56:46 fighting a war he shouldn't have fought and creating domestic consequences which he may not be able to deal with. 56:53 That's all on him, and I think it's very important for the United States to recognize that these things have their own logic. 57:02 And we should really do our very best to try to deter nuclear weapon use. We should do our very best to try to make this war in Ukraine end as quickly as possible, 57:10 which means, to be clear, Ukrainians winning it as quickly as possible because that's the only way it can end. 57:15 And how things turn out in Russia, we shouldn't be talking about who we want to rule Russia; that's not our business. We shouldn't be talking about whether Russia should fall apart; that's not our business. 57:23 If the Russians start a war and they lose a war, let them figure out what happens next. Don't talk too much about it. 57:29 Just make sure that the right country wins the war, and then the rest is up to the Russians themselves.

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