Timothy Snyder: The Making of Modern Ukraine. Class 18. Before and After the End of History

(dramatic music) (static hum) - Well everyone, greetings. Happy, happy Thursday. This is truly a day I would have loved to take you outside. And I feel more limited than usual by the camera, which makes me stay inside. I try not to be limited by the camera at all, but there are some things I can't do because of the camera and one of them is saying your names when I know you're in my class and you're not sitting here. Something I would be doing right now with some of you, but I can't because then, you know, 3 million people would email...

Oh, one of them just showed up. (laughs) (audience laughing) Okay, okay. Well, this is what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the weather. So if we were outside, I could do this with the trees and I could talk about how the seasons change and how the years go by and each year is a little different from the last. And some things remind us of previous years, like the changing of leaves, right? I could talk about time because the argument I want you to understand in this lecture is that

history

doesn't really end.

And if we can understand it, many of the 21st century policies we will see will make more sense than they do. In reality, the story does not end. Well, why am I starting off so grandly? I'm starting off in such a grand way because I really believe that the decline of

history

and the decline of the humanities in the last 30 years has a lot to do with the collapse of democracy and the rise of other forms of politics. I truly believe that the absence of guidance in the past means that people are easier to manipulate. Or at least, the absence of references to the past paves the way for myth makers who focus on the innocence of our group as the only thing that matters about the past.

I also think that the idea that history has come to an end is a way of flattening or brutalizing the imagination. If the story is over, then this is all you get, and there's no point in practicing your imagination and trying to figure out how, trying to work with your own mind to see how things could be different. There's, you know, you're... Don't worry, I'll talk about Ukraine in about three minutes. You can set a timer if you wish. But you've already been exposed to various types of ideas about how the story comes to an end in your life, right?

So one version of how history comes to an end is nationalism, right? So everyone is placed in their own place and we are all ethnically homogeneous, and then the story comes to an end, right? That version of history coming to an end is implicit in any notion that outsiders are the problem and only if we had less of them and it was just us, then everything would be fine, right? The story would come to an end. This hasn't really been a class on nationalism, but if you think about the beginning, there's something implicit in the idea of ​​ethnic nationalism, it's the idea, it's the assumption that, well, once we finally have our own state and it's just our people, then the story comes to an end.

All tensions will come to an end, the story will be over. Another version of history that is coming to an end is that of consumerism, right? Basically, everything is Homo economicus, there is only supply and demand. They are just wishes that can be fulfilled. The market will fulfill them. The story is over, right? We are all basically the same, it's just a matter of getting rid of the last trade barriers. The story is over. Marxism is also an idea about the end of history. Marxism says there is a way humans are supposed to be. We have a kind of human nature.

Human nature has been corrupted by a wrong form of technology. It will be corrected with the proper form of technology. Human nature became corrupted when private property came into the picture. We were alienated from ourselves. But once we develop industry, once we develop high technology, the working classes will inherit all that, we will be restored to our own nature and everything will be fine. And yes, the story will come to an end. Now, this is it, okay, maybe not in three minutes, give me three more minutes. I'm going to get to Ukraine. All of this is relevant to this broader trajectory that we're trying to follow in the 20th century of how Ukraine is treated in the Soviet Union.

Because Leninism was a very special form of Marxism. Marxism says that the working class has a special role in ending history. Marxism says that the working class, due to its special place in history, absorbs, so to speak, the suffering of everyone, has a special position, a positionality, which allows it to see, so to speak, objectively all the harms of the capitalism. And when the working class takes power, all that damage will disappear. Now, one of the problems with Marxism is that you never know exactly when the revolution is supposed to happen. If the revolution is really about the working class becoming great and powerful, then won't it just happen on its own?

If capitalism is going to produce more and more injustice, then maybe there will be more and more alienation and more and more workers, and the revolution will happen on its own. But surely the revolution will not happen by itself. There must be someone to do something. And Lenin took the view that someone has to do something. And he adopted this point of view that is called voluntarism. He took it to an interesting extreme where Lenin argued that actually what is needed is a disciplined vanguard party, basically political experts who work in the shadows, who know what they are doing, who understand reality better than the workers.

And that those people should make a revolution happen as soon as there is an opportunity. Wherever there is a weak point in the world capitalist system, we must push it forward, make a revolution. So with Leninism you get this strange mix of determinism and voluntarism. If Lenin were not there, as if Lenin had tripped over the furniture in one of those cafes in Zurich and had broken his neck, or, less demanding counterfactual, if Lenin had gotten off that train going to Petrograd in 1917, and so on, You know, I don't know, I got off the train. The train left without him, I don't know.

But make it up yourself. But if Lenin is not on the train to Petrograd, it is as if a man were not on that train at that time, there is no Bolshevik revolution and the 20th century looks very different. So in that sense, you can say that he is right. Individuals certainly matter in history. But there is this extreme volunteering, which is confirmed by experience, right? Lenin knows that he is right, that without him, Trotsky, Stalin and, you know, Kamenev, Zinoviev and some other characters, there would not have been that revolution. On the other hand, they believe that all of his willfulness, all of this obstinacy, is justified by the knowledge that history has to follow a certain path.

That there has to be feudalism, capitalism, socialism. And now that they have carried out their deliberate act, they have to balance it by pushing the Soviet Union through these stages of history. Because there is only one path the story can follow. There is only one path the story can follow. And the Soviet Union is behind, so we will have to push it forward very quickly. The consequences of this vision for Ukraine are dramatic, right? The whole idea that there has to be collectivization, that agriculture has to be collectivized, is the result of the idea that there is only one path that history can follow.

And collectivization is then the precondition for the famine and the death of around 4 million people in 1932 and 1933. You see a similar problem with the national question itself, right? In the national question itself, the same back-and-forth occurs between determinism and voluntaryism. Where, on the one hand, we are confident that we know what is going to happen and therefore, because we are confident in the 1920s, we will let Ukrainian writers write, we will let Ukrainian artists paint, We will have affirmative action for the Ukrainians to bring them into the bureaucracy and as administrators loyal to the Soviet system.

We are sure that this will be how the story will work. We are sure that capitalism will produce nationalism anyway and therefore we will do it ourselves. We will contain it, we will channel it, we will sublimate it, and it will sublimate in loyalty to the Soviet system. But then, in the 1930s, they lose confidence. And instead of being sure that history is on his side, Stalin falls back into that volunteer mode. What's wrong with collectivization? The bad thing about collectivization is that individuals do the wrong thing. Polish spies, Ukrainian nationalists, individual records, people who, for whatever malicious reason, try to block by their own voluntariness the path that history should really take, right?

So the move from determinism to voluntaryism also helps to understand how they try to understand or how they approach the national question. As we move into World War II with the national question, we see a new twist. And the new turn is possible because the very existence of the Soviet Union is in doubt. Thus, during World War II, Stalin and others adopted a much more benign view of Ukraine. Why did they do this? Because the war is largely being fought in and for Ukraine, and they need Ukrainians to remain loyal to the Soviet Union. The Germans, of course, do them a huge favor by exerting more terror in a shorter period of time than the Soviets, thus causing most of the people within the Ukrainian Soviet Republic to return to the Soviet Union, at least in the sense in which it is less bad than the Germans.

That's why, during World War II, there is a lot of nostalgia. Ukraine considers itself a great nation. Bohdan Khmelnyts'kyi is characterized as a hero of the Ukrainian past. He draws attention to the simple fact that a Ukrainian is mentioned as a kind of hero. Then, as we have seen in the immediate post-war period, there is another twist in which the way the national question is handled is not just out of nostalgia, right? Which is characteristic of nationalism. It is also managed through ethnic cleansing. It is managed by adopting right-wing nationalist solutions and turning them into Soviet policy.

And not just right-wing ones, but perfectly conventional ones, like the Ukrainian idea of ​​bribery, which in a political context means bribery means the entire territory of Ukraine within the borders of a Ukrainian state, right? A Bribe Ukraine is a Ukraine that contains all the territory that should belong to it. That is what Stalin creates by extending the borders of Ukraine, Soviet Ukraine, to the west. But there are also these far-right solutions, which we talked about in the last conference as ethnic cleansing, where not only are many people deported to Siberia, that's traditional, right? Since the 1920s, people have been deported to Siberia.

It is not just that a quarter of a million Ukrainians are deported to Siberia immediately after the war. That's notable but it's not what I'm talking about. What I am talking about is something else: the deportation of Poles and Jews to Poland. Because the deportation of Poles and Jews to Poland suggests that the system no longer believes it can assimilate everyone. So if you are deported to Siberia, there is a good chance you will die. But there is also at least the idea in principle that his body is going to be redeemed by the Soviet system, right?

You're going to be a worker while you're there, after 5 years or 7 or 15 or whatever, you'll come back and you'll have been reformed. At least that idea exists. But if you were expelled to another country across the border of the Soviet Union, the system abandoned you, right? And that is an even less trusting system, an even less internationalist system, an even more nationalist system than there was in the 1930s, as we move into the 1940s. This logic extends in some ways, and I am now recapping again, last time, but this logic extends in some ways under Zhdanov and under this logic of the two camps, where, you know, you can see this subtle shift in the second half of Soviet history, moving away from economic dynamism and towards a kind of cultural conservatism, right?

Where the economic dynamism of Stalin, of Stalinism, really ended. But of course, no one can say that, right? You can't wake up in the morning and say that. But economic dynamism has already occurred. Economic dynamism occurred, mines were dug, factories were built, large cities were built. The countryside has been collectivized. 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. And the way of justifying the State after World War II has a lot to do with the sudden Russian culture, where class war is defined.

Zhdanov defines class war as Us and Them, two sides, communists and capitalists, or as they would say, democracies and capitalists, communists and capitalists. But what are we in this? The United States in this, according to Zhdanov's reasoning, is something like the purity of Russian culture, right? The purity of Russian culture. And Russian writers are now beingpurged because they quote Charles Dickens, or are somehow too cosmopolitan to use the word of the day, right? Cosmopolitan. And that word, and this is something I wanted to mention last time but didn't, that word in the last years of Stalinism, especially from 1948 until early 1953 when he died, that word cosmopolitan is very often used as a code for the Jews. .

So Stalinist reasoning takes up a Nazi or fascist trope, namely, that Jews are responsible for the permeability of culture. It is the Jews who open the culture to perversion and influenced by outside forces. That's what they do. And this means that, especially after the founding of the State of Israel, there is a turn of Stalinism against the Jews. The last national action that was being prepared when Stalin fell ill and died was against the Jews. And one of you asked me, and it's an important question, what does all this mean for the memory of the events we refer to as the Holocaust and the Soviet Union?

The events we refer to as the Holocaust could not be referred to or defined as such in the Soviet Union. To be fair, it took decades for that term to really come into its own in the United States. I mean, well into the 1980s, Holocaust in the "New York Times" still meant nuclear holocaust, right? In fact, only recently, basically during your lifetimes and a few years beyond, did the Holocaust have the meaning it has for you today, that is, the attempt to exterminate all the Jews. So that's just, you know, just to keep perspective. But in the Soviet Union, the idea was that the murdered Jews were peaceful Soviet citizens.

And if you were Jewish and you tried to draw attention to the fact that Jews were murdered as Jews, and many more of them were murdered than other groups, then you were treated as someone who was perhaps a nationalist, or a cosmopolitan. But in any case, you were going to be punished. The same people that Stalin sent to the United States in 1943 to raise money, Soviet Jewish activist writers, he sent here, to Madison Square Garden, were on a fundraising campaign across the United States, precisely under the logic that the Jews are suffering under the Nazis. Let's raise money for the Soviet Union.

Then those people were purged and several of them were killed with the logic that they had stood out (laughs) and that they had done something they were not supposed to do. Well, this brings me to the first ending of the story that... So I already gave the game away, right? So if I don't make it to the end, you know the story never really comes to an end, right? So when I talk about these ends of history, I'm trying to give us perspective on the things that were presented as ends of history. So my first end of the story is the end of the Ukrainian story.

And what I have in mind is a kind of dialectical solution that Nikita Khrushchev is associated with. By dialectic, I mean, for all of you, you know, Anglo-Saxons who are used to thinking in straight lines, dialectic is the idea, you know, if anything, dialectic is the idea that something can persist even when transformed , TRUE? So that things do not simply advance in a straight line, but that something can find its opposite and be overcome. And when it is surpassed, it becomes a kind of higher reality, which preserves elements of what it was before, but which, however, is qualitatively different.

So, correct. So you needed to like- Okay. The drug joke was removed from the conference, right there. It never happened. There was no drug joke. Yeah, that didn't happen. It never happened. I didn't make a drug joke. That was me, not

making

a drug joke. (Audience laughs) Okay, then. Well. You needed to wake up an hour earlier. You need coffee. So the example of dialectics, which many people will be more or less familiar with, would be Marxist dialectics, right? So the idea that class conflict, capitalism, is good and bad, okay? It is both good and bad.

It is good because it builds the structures needed for socialism, but it is bad because it makes workers suffer. So, if you say that capitalism is bad, that is not entirely true because in the seeds of that suffering is the good of the revolution, right? And the revolution will maintain, when it happens, it will preserve elements of capitalism, but at a higher level, right? Turned. Well. So Khrushchev has a dialectical idea about the Ukrainian nation, which I will explain to you in a moment. But before I do that, I have to say a few words about the history of the church.

The incorporation of Volhynia and Galicia, but especially Galicia, poses a lasting challenge to Soviet Ukraine. Volhynia and Galicia are these western districts that had belonged to Poland, whose citizens were Polish citizens in the 1920s and 1930s, and which had been exposed to many repressions from the Polish side, but which had not been exposed to Soviet terror and Soviet famine. In Galicia there was still a Greek-Catholic Church. And the Greek Catholic Church, what the Greek Catholic Church is, you know, is an essentially Ukrainian institution. On Sunday I was at a fundraiser for the Ukrainian Catholic University. The Ukrainian Catholic Church is an institution founded in 1596 by the Union of Brest, which was known as the Uniate Church for a couple of hundred years later.

After the partition of Poland, the Habsburgs took this church under their protection and renamed it the Greek Catholic Church. They educated the priests, treated them as a kind of conduit for the enlightenment of a larger population. So this Greek Church, and then this Greek Catholic Church, especially under Metropolitan Andrii Sheptyts'kyi, became something of a national institution under the Habsburgs and remains so under the Poles. Sheptyts'kyi, by the way, is remembered for many very interesting things, but one of the things that he is remembered for and that we should know him for in this class is that he probably rescued more Jews during the Holocaust. than any non-diplomat.

Then there were diplomats who rescued more people, but Sheptyts'kyi rescued more than a hundred Jewish children in the St. George compound in Lviv. He died in 1944. He died just as Soviet power returned. When the Soviets recreated what had been Western, what had been Western Ukraine is now Western Ukraine again, what had been Poland, they dissolved the Greek Catholic Church in March 1946 and subordinated the Greek Catholic Church to the Russian Orthodox Church based in Moscow. . The Greek Catholic Church continues to exist hidden while it is saved in the catacombs. There continued to be sacraments, there continued to be priests until the end of the Soviet Union.

Now, one surprising thing about this little incident that I just want you to take note of, is that when the Soviet Union dissolves the Greek Catholic Church, they do it in March of 1946, I don't expect any of you to like doing the math. your head, but that is the 350th anniversary of the Brest Union. No, it's not my joke. This is on purpose because there's something about these round numbers that's starting to catch the Soviet imagination, right? Something about these kinds of negative anniversaries. I say negative because when it was 1596 and the Brest Union was created, no one said, "Hey, in 350 years there will be a Soviet Union that will undo this." It's a negative anniversary because it only makes sense to look back, right?

So in 1946, the logic was that a mistake was made 350 years ago, which we are now, yeah, it's strange, and now we're going to correct it. I just want to point out this kind of secular thinking, right? This treatment of the past, this non-historical treatment of the past as a kind of source of anniversaries in which we confirm something or undo something. This has not been a class on Marxism but that is not a Marxist way of looking at history, is it? That is not at all a Marxist way of looking at history. It's a very conservative way of looking at history.

Well, this brings me to what Khrushchev did, which is very interesting. So Nikita Khrushchev is the last leader of the Soviet Union/Russia who could be said to have actually known something about Ukraine. We talked about this he did some conferences, about this phenomenon of the Russian workers who went to the Donbass. Sorry, Russian peasants, Russian workers working in Donbas. That was Khrushchev's family. He was from, you know, as soon as I say this, you know, one of my TAs, who will remain anonymous, will Google him, but he was from a little place I think is called Kalinovka, and his family was He went to the Donbas and worked, like many Russian workers, right?

Then in the game, he was in Ukraine, Soviet Ukraine, during the Terror. He was in Soviet Ukraine during and after the war. His... ugh, I'm not sure if concubine is the word if you're a communist, but his long-time companion, later his wife, was a Ukrainian from the far, far, far west, from Vasylkiv, or Vasilkov, who now It's actually in Poland. So she was a Lemko. The Lemkos are Ruthenian speakers of a language that can be seen as a dialect of Ukrainian. Although if you speak Polish, you will find it surprisingly easy to understand the Lemko dialect of Ukrainian.

So she was a Lemko. There were the Lemkos, the Boykos, the Hutsuls, these are the Ruthenians from the western edge of what is now considered Ukraine. Also in Czechoslovakia, also in Poland. So she was a lemko from the far, far, far west of what could be considered Ukrainian territory, that she moved to Odessa and became a communist. And then she was in the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, within Poland in the interwar period. So she was someone who understood Ukrainian politics from all over the west. So why am I telling you all these details about Khrushchev?

Oh, Khrushchev was also involved in the repression of Ukrainian partisans after World War II, right? So Khrushchev knew that there was a Ukrainian question. He knew Ukraine existed and had been deeply involved with it from many angles for decades. So it's a little bit, it's a little bit like after the First World War, when the Bolsheviks realized, okay, of course we have to deal with Ukraine somehow because we just realized that the Ukrainians can deploy a army and, you know, , they lost, but they're real. After World War II, and Khrushchev comes to power after Stalin's death in 1953, he is someone who has been dealing with the Ukrainian question in one way or another, on and off, throughout his life.

So he finds a solution to the question of how Ukraine can exist and not exist. Here is the solution. It has to do with an anniversary, okay? Let's imagine that it is 1954 and Khrushchev has just come to power. 1954- Look, it's really helpful that you took this class, it goes back centuries, right? Because you immediately think of 1954, that's the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Pereiaslav, right? That's what you're thinking. You're like you're right about that. And so was Khrushchev. So the official interpretation that is given of the history of Ukraine, and this is clever and very influential and has something to do with the war that is going on now, the official interpretation that Khrushchev gives is, yes, of course, Ukraine exists. ancient history, different nation, Cossacks, all that.

But in 1654, the Ukrainians decided to forever link their own history to that of Russia, right? So they existed to not exist, or they existed to exist on a higher level, right? Ukraine existed, but it flowed into Russia and therefore exists at a higher level as part of the now Soviet Union, right? That is dialectical thinking. If you stretch your neck a little, it's easier. So this is a brilliant solution and it's related to, because it seems to solve this ideological problem that the Soviet Union continues to have. Ukraine is real, but then we are afraid of it.

What are we going to do? What is your future? Her future. Its future was chosen in 1654, exactly 300 years before. The way this was done marks a couple of trends in the communist world. I have already suggested the first one to you, which is this anniversary business, right? Nostalgia, justifying things based on hundreds of years ago. The second is consumerism. So, in 1954, to commemorate this great anniversary, that they, you know, invented. I mean, it's not like anyone was celebrating the number 100 or 200, right? Only the number 300 (laughs) was somehow important. So they produced consumer goods marked 300 years old, 200, 200,000.

I think it's Yekelchyk who writes about this in his reading, 2 million cigarette packets with 300 years written on them, which is kind of mysterious. It's like the opposite of the health warning you're getting now, right? 200 pairs of men's socks, 200,000 bras and nightgowns. And I just like to leave to your imagination the impression it makes when a bra says 300 years. (Audience laughs) But I mean, to be fair, this was the beginning of consumerism in the Soviet Union. Well, the other thing that happened in 1954, and this, again, is very loaded with meaning for what comes after, is that Khrushchev, again, issomeone who understands the Ukrainian question and knows that, unlike many, you know that, unlike Brezhnev, who will come, unlike other people, he knows that it would make sense to pretend that he is doing something for Ukraine.

Khrushchev has the idea that the Crimean Peninsula will be transferred from the Russian Federation to the Republic of Ukraine, right? When I say Russian Federation, I mean the Russian RSFSR, I mean the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Russian Republic of the Soviet Union. Trends because none of these are independent states at that time. Of course, there is a Russian Republic and a Ukrainian Republic. It will move from the Republic of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine. Why did that actually happen? Two reasons. The first is practical. As you all know from the news, Crimea is a peninsula, from Ukraine's point of view.

It is connected by ground. But it is an island, from Russia's point of view. There is no land connection to Ukraine from Russia. Hence the big bridge. And if you're going to do it, in terms of pure administration, the water and electricity connection, the grid, will obviously work much better from Ukraine than from Russia. And administratively it made a lot of sense. The second reason this was plausible is the ethnic cleansing of the Crimean Tatars. Because until 1944 the reason Crimea had a special status was not only in the Russian Federation, it was an autonomous unit of the Russian Federation, because of the Crimean Tatars.

Once the Crimean Tatars were ethnically cleansed, as they were, the reason for that status disappears. In fact, that status itself becomes a bit embarrassing. Why was it an autonomous republic? Because, you know, they're not even supposed to talk about the Crimean Tatars right now, right? All Crimean Tatars, like toponyms, like Catherine, toponyms, toponyms, are now changing their names. The heroes of the Crimean Tatar War are described as Dagestanis. Other ethnicities are being mentioned in the Soviet press, just because the idea of ​​Crimean Tatars is supposed to disappear, it is supposed to disappear. And this is another reason why the transfer of Crimea might seem plausible.

And it suggests sort of, look, it suggests two interesting things at once. That Ukraine is getting something, for that Ukraine should be grateful. Russia is giving something. But the idea that Russia is giving something suggests that it is up to Russia to give, right? And here lies the origin of this notion that Crimea was always Russian. Because how could Russia have given it to Ukraine if she hadn't reciprocated it to Russia? But maybe in some pretty deep senses, it wasn't Russia's place to give, right? Perhaps in some quite profound senses, Crimea had a diverse history all its own.

Well, so at this time in 1954 with the gift of Crimea, the gift of Crimea from Russia to Ukraine, you can see how important that is now. Because the idea that Crimea was always Russian is based on two things: the ethnic cleansing of the Crimean Tatars and then the idea that Russia could give it to Ukraine, right? That is the basis of that notion. Well then. But this, from Khrushchev's point of view, of course, is intended to be some kind of pro-Ukrainian gesture. And towards the end of the Khrushchev period, we actually entered a period of something resembling national communism in the Ukrainian Republic under a man named Petro Shelest.

Shelest. I think I'll put his name in there for you. Shelest. Shelest was Ukrainian, a native of Ukraine. Unlike Khrushchev, he had nothing to do with Stalinist crimes. He was perceived as a protector of Ukrainian culture, or at least not as someone who interfered with Ukrainian culture. The 1960s saw a small revival of Ukrainian culture led by young writers known uncreatively as the Sixtiers group. One of the figures here who will appear at a couple different points in your reading is Ivan Dziuba, who wrote an interesting text called "Internationalism or Russification?" which raises the questions that I've been talking about here like, you know, for example, well, it's about these tensions, right?

About how you handle Ukraine. And is Moscow really internationalist or is it really becoming Russified? Dziuba also in 1966, and this is in your reading, gives a short informal speech on the Baby Yar site. Baby Yar is the largest Holocaust massacre site in terms of mass shootings. In September 1941, some 34,000 Jews were murdered over the course of two days in this ravine, Baby Yar, outside kyiv. And Ukrainian Jews, survivors and other Jews had been gathering informally at this place. And in 1966, Dziuba gave this speech, which was, you know, a kind of breakthrough in relations between Ukraine and the Jews.

And all of that was part of this moment of relative freedom of Ukrainian culture. Okay, so the Ukrainian story has come to an end, right? You already understood, 1654 Ukraine merged with Russia. Its only goal was to merge with Russia. You also understand that that's not really the end of the story. Okay, so the third end of the story, as I've already suggested, is the end of the Crimean story, right? The end of the history of Crimea, which is implicit in this transfer. As you know in this class, especially from the lecture a couple of weeks ago, actually a lot of the oldest attested material that we have from this region is from the Crimea or the southern coast.

The oldest attested peoples, not the oldest peoples, but the oldest attested peoples who left a written trace are in or around the Crimea, and they are the Greeks and the Jews. We know that the Golden Horde and the Crimean Khanate had a state in the Crimea for about 600 years. And that came to an end in 1783 when New Russia, when the Russian Empire took control and New Russia was declared. At that time, the population of Crimea was approximately 100% Crimean Tatar. In 1944, it was 0% Crimean Tatar, right? After deportation. And so, as I mentioned before, this is kind of the end of the story.

Because it's not just that people are taken away, it's that their property is also given away, the names of sacred places, the names of towns, the names of everything are changed. Crimeans are not only deported, this may seem obvious, but they are not allowed to return. And although Khrushchev generally condemns Stalin's deportations of people, he does not change the rule that Crimeans are not allowed to return. And of course, in this 1954 transfer, this grand gesture between Russia and Ukraine, the Crimeans are completely absent. Nobody goes to Uzbekistan and asks the Crimeans what they think about all this, right?

And this is also a kind of end of history, the end of the history of the Crimea or the end of the history of the Crimean Tatars. And the idea that it was always Russia, which, as you know, has its intellectual origins around this 1954 transfer, is also very attractive to Soviet citizens who come to settle in the Crimean peninsula. The Crimean peninsula remains and becomes an even more important Soviet naval base. And so does that demographic. It also becomes a place where Soviet notables can retreat for the simple reason that it is hot and most of the rest of Russia is not.

And when you're a newcomer to a colonizing position, the notion that a place has always been yours (laughs) is very attractive, right? Very attractive. Look, look, you're getting better at dialectics all the time, right? So precisely because you're new, the idea that you've always been there is very attractive. Because the idea that you're just colonizing, literally taking someone else's property after it's been ethnically cleansed, isn't very appealing. So the idea that you were always there is attractive precisely because you weren't, right? So that's the end of the Crimean story. Now, the end of the story I want to do, actually there are two more, the next one is the end of the Soviet story, okay?

And the end of Soviet history, we'll talk more about this in a future lecture, but the end of Soviet history has to do with Brezhnev, Leonid Brezhnev, who supplanted Khrushchev in 1964. He really makes his debut on the world stage. in 1968, when the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies invade Czechoslovakia to put an end to a reform movement known as the Prague Spring. In 1968 he inaugurated what is called the Brezhnev Doctrine. The Brezhnev Doctrine is the idea, and this also has resonance today, that whenever a fraternal socialist state is threatened by counterrevolution, the Soviet Union can come with fraternal assistance, right?

So this metaphor of brothers is something very interesting. I mean, again, I don't want to say too much, but being someone's brother is not a very Marxist idea, (laughs), right? At least not in this sense, right? I mean, fraternité, okay, that could be a revolutionary idea. But the idea that I'm your big brother and then when something goes wrong I can come in and beat you up is not a particularly Marxist idea. And that is the idea of ​​brotherhood we are referring to here. And it also raises interesting questions. For example, if you are my little brother, who are the parents?

Where are mom and dad? Where are they in all this? Good? So, this move to family, it's actually a very conservative move, right? It's a bit mysterious, right? There are only these brothers and there are no new sisters or parents, but there are brothers. And the little brother always does wrong and the older brother always comes and helps. That idea from 1968, but even more important than the 1968 idea about the Brezhnev Doctrine, is that it's not really about ideology anymore. So Brezhnev doesn't care about Marxism. He cares much less than we do at this conference. You know, Brezhnev, when doing that dialectic thing, would also have liked to raise his eyebrows, you know, which is more effort for him than for you.

And, you know, he would have said, “Oh, what are you talking about,” right? Brezhnev was not at all interested in Marxist theory. The Brezhnev Doctrine is not really about Marxism, but about power. And the Brezhnev Doctrine defines what is, as what should be, right? So you just follow the line, whatever it is, and that's it. We will no longer justify it theoretically. That is an important breakthrough in the 1970s in the Soviet Union, and not only in it. Because what it suggests is that we are no longer moving towards a future in which these dialectics are still doing their work or towards a future in which Stalinist industrialization is still producing dynamism, economic change and social mobility, as it did during a couple of generations.

But not anymore. Social mobility is basically stopped, right? In the Soviet Union in the 1970s, if you are an engineer, most likely your father was an engineer, right? If you went to college, your parents probably did too. In the early days of the Soviet Union it wasn't like that, was it? It was not so. The nice apartments in kyiv, with all due respect, as in the late communist period, were owned by families who were elite families. Well, ownership is perhaps the wrong word. But at first that wasn't true. There was a lot of dynamism due to the economy, but also due to the Terror, right?

Also for Terror. One of the things, one of the attractions of Terror, if you're young, I don't mean to give you ideas, but one of the attractions of Terror if you're young is that- Stop nodding in the front row. , it is worrying. You're right, just a few meters from me. One of the attractions of Terror if you're young is that it clears up space upstairs, right? So the Great Terror of '37 and '38, among other things, cleared a lot of space at the top for people to rise through the ranks quickly and make careers. But both Khrushchev and Brezhnev, and this is one of the few things that Brezhnev hid from Khrushchev, said that we are not going to have mass terrorism anymore, at least that affects other communists, right?

So that was another way to stop social mobility. So what Brezhnev is doing in the 1970s is proclaiming something resembling what he calls actually existing socialism. And really existing socialism is like that. There's a Jack Nicholson movie where he says, "This is the best thing ever." I even forgot about the movie, like maybe that was the title, but he's in a dentist's office and he's looking around. It's like there's an old man sitting next to him. He says, "You know, this is the best thing ever." It's like that. This is all. This is all. There is nothing else.

We told them that there was going to be communism, there would not be communism. This is all, right? Your little apartment, you know, whatever, that's it. That's all. This is the true existing socialism. This is what we have. And we are going to defend it. And it's not going to change. We will continue like this, we will tinker with the economy, but no major reforms, and certainly no theoretical discussions. That's all. And this has basic implications for the Ukrainian question because, if everything is as it is, all you have to do is borrow from the West, and that's how the Soviet Union gets into trouble.

Talk about it next time. But money is borrowed from the West, devices are borrowed from the West, devices are stolen from the West, technology is stolen from the West as best as possible.It is possible and we try to ensure that the system, as it is, works without problems. How does it work smoothly? Suddenly, technocracy is what matters. Not revolution, technocracy. We all have to speak the same language. What language will that be? Russian. And here you have it, you're in this old imperial tension where the center says: I need everyone to speak Russian. But it's not because I don't like, you know, Bashkir.

It's not that I don't like being Belarusian or Estonian. It's because it's efficient. Whereas you, from your point of view, in Mongolia or the Baltics or whatever, you say, I actually like my own language and I think it's quite efficient. You know, I think it works very well. It's very efficient in my own life, right? And so, the tension inherent in all these projects emerges in the 1970s, with special reference to Ukraine. Then Shelest is replaced in 1972 by Brezhnev's man named Shcherbytsky. And the 1970s became a decade of a kind of administrative Russification of Ukraine. Nobody says that Ukraine does not exist, nobody says that Ukrainian high culture does not exist, but the Ukrainian language is slowly disappearing from schools, Ukrainian textbooks are printed in much smaller print runs.

By the late 1970s, it was reduced to about 25% of what it was at the beginning. Russian largely becomes the language of prestige. To give an example, you will understand, everyone will understand this example. Theoretically... Okay, I'm just going to tell you, right? Theoretically, you could take your college exams as the equivalent of your SAT, whatever, the university entrance exams in Ukraine, theoretically you could take them in both Ukrainian and Russian, because we're tolerant, right? But the difference is that if you take them in Ukrainian, you will not pass. (audience member laughing) So what do you do, right?

I mean, what do you really do, right? So no one says that Ukraine does not exist. Look, here's the entrance exam, right? Here, it's right in front of you. Do you want to take it? But if you want to advance socially, if you want to go to university, you will do it in Russian, right? That's the kind of dynamic we're talking about here. So I refer to this as the end of the story because of the idea that this is the best there is. That, you know, now it's all about the... It's about consumerism. You know, we're going to imitate the capitalist that way.

We imitated them with transformation, now we will imitate them with consumerism. And with nationalism. But this is where things get complicated. In the 1970s and 1980s across the Soviet bloc, regimes began to turn to nationalism. But how is that done in the Soviet Union? The Soviet Union is a multinational state. They do it with nostalgia for World War II, known as the Great Patriotic War. When Brezhnev takes away the future, he replaces it with the past, right? It's actually very, I mean, they make fun of it a lot, but these are very clever political techniques that many 21st century capitalists have copied, right?

Then you take away the future and slip into the past. And the past is a vision of the Great Patriotic War in which the Soviet Union is the innocent victim and the Soviet people defend the world from the horrors of fascism, led, of course, by the Russians. So there is an ambiguity here. Is it a myth about the entire Soviet Union or is it a myth about Russia? And it is in this myth that current leaders such as Lukashenko in Belarus or Putin in Russia emerged. And it's another fundamental element in trying to understand this war of 2022.

Because the idea of ​​World War II in which, you know, Stalin's alliance with Hitler is totally forgotten, the Russians are totally innocent and, you know, they won war with no one else's help, you just have to simplify a few more steps to get to the way Putin thinks about World War II. And it also helps explain, you know, why he would think that he could fight this war the way he has. You know, who is he actually? The mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, who was anti-Semitic, said, "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? If he is anyone but me. Because by definition fascists are the other side. And that's just a couple of steps away from this vision, the Soviet vision of World War II. So it's an ending to the story where you now look back. Alright, I want to finish with a few minutes about Poland. In Poland, and this is where all these funny names appear at the end, like all these names of Polish thinkers and Ukrainian thinkers. And the reason they are here is because in Poland, or rather from Polish thinkers, you get a very interesting moment of the Polish-Ukrainian conversation, which is actually about how history is not over. (laughs) 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, that many people can't stand it, right? Even from the point of view of the West, in the '70s and '80s, the idea that there was going to be something more than this was almost impossible to process, right? In the '70s and '80s, it really seemed like Brezhnev would be forever, the Soviet Union would be forever, the Eastern Bloc would be forever. Ukraine had been virtually completely forgotten, except by the institutions of the émigrés, the Canadians in Alberta, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, and the diaspora.

But with the exception of that, Ukraine had basically disappeared from the Western imagination. But there was a very interesting project within Poland or among Poles that went against this. And he acted against this notion that history was over, which was also true in Poland. Everything I talked about was in Poland. In 1968 a turning point occurred: a shift towards consumerism and nationalism. In the 1970s, the Polish state declares itself ethnically homogeneous, which is a way of saying that history is over, right? All these national things, they are all Polish now. Neither Jews, nor Russians, nor Ukrainians, nor Belarusians, nor Germans.

They are only Poles and that is the triumph of communism. It's a very interesting version of the triumph of communism, right? But the story is over. There was a group of people around a magazine called "Paris Kultura." And I need you to know this name so much that I will give you a hundred percent guarantee that it will be on the exam. (laughing) "Paris Kultura." "Paris Kultura" was formed by a group of Polish emigrants. Jerzy Giedroyc was the most important. Juliusz Mieroszewski is also very important. Józef Czapski. And what "Kultura" said about the Ukrainian question was very interesting things.

But in 1952 they printed a letter to the editor that said: "Let Lvov be Ukraine." In fact, it said: "Let the blue and yellow flag fly from Lvov." Now, if you are Ukrainian, you think: what is so radical about that? The radical thing about this is that Poland had just lost half of its territory seven years ago in conditions that could only be considered completely illegitimate, right? The Soviet Union had taken half of Poland's territory in a war in which Poland had lost millions of its own population, right? In those conditions, saying, "Oh, yeah, let's just do the same thing.

Oh, okay." You know, Poland only had four major cities. Warsaw was destroyed, Vilnius went to Lithuania, Lviv went to Ukraine, right? And then you're like, "Oh, legit." It was like saying in 1952: "Let the Ukrainians keep it," it was incredibly radical. And from there they moved on to the discussion in the '60s and '70s. Again, the crucial thing about this, guys, the crucial thing is that they were thinking about the future, right? They didn't think the story was over. They thought that at some point communism would come to an end. Even more essentially, they thought that imperialism had to come to an end.

And they weren't just referring to Russian imperialism, right? They were referring to imperialism as a whole, which meant that their own imperialism, their own Polish imperialism, had to come to an end. So his strategic argument for the existence of Ukraine was: we need Ukraine because without Ukraine, there will be Russian imperialism and there will be Polish imperialism. And both things are bad for us. Russian imperialism is bad for us, Polish imperialism is also bad for us. So there was a calculated strategic argument that they made in the '60s and '70s, totally in the desert.

Completely in the desert. Other Polish immigrants didn't necessarily share this opinion, right? In the West, the idea that communism has come to an end, Ukraine, all this, is quite marginal. But along with this, and all these names that I no longer have time to mention, unfortunately, but along with this, what "Kultura" did was to search for and publish exceptionally talented Ukrainian writers like George Shevelov, like Borys Levyts'kyi. They found Ukrainian writers, befriended them, and published them. Ukrainian writers who were executed in the 1930s or committed suicide, the term Executed Renaissance for those writers comes from Jerzy Giedroyc.

He invented that term. And he published a thousand-page book collecting the works of these Ukrainian writers, right? Nobody else did that, but "Kultura" did it. And in this and many other ways, they pushed Ukrainian culture to the center of at least Polish culture and made friends. I'm going to end now, but you get the point. At the time of Solidarity in Poland in 1980, "Kultura", considered the best Polish publication, had already started this discussion. And so, during the Solidarity period in 1980 and 1981, when there was some space for free discussion, the Ukrainian question was already discussed. And many Solidarity leaders, such as Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuroń, issued statements that were very favorable to the idea of ​​Ukrainian independence during that period of 1881.

And then, when Poland becomes an independent state in 1989, this argument already I was won. And one of the first things Poland does is start a friendly foreign policy with Ukraine. Now, the reason all of this was possible was because this milieu of intellectuals had been arguing that history was not over, that communism was going to come to an end, that imperialism does have to come to an end, and that we have to be prepared for it with arguments, right? So my Plato A here at the end is one for the history of ideas. And I'll explain more about this in future lectures, but the fact that some people recognized that history could not come to an end, and that imperialism could come to an end, actually had a big influence on how imperialism did. will end after 1989.

Well, that's it. Thank you. (soft music)