Timothy Snyder: The Making of Modern Ukraine. Class 23. the Colonial, the Post-Colonial, the Global

(intriguing music) - Alright, everyone. Greetings. This is the last lecture of this class. You have an exam in a couple of days. You have a thematic task pending a week later. The thematic task should be very simple. I don't want you to investigate further. I want you to bring up some small topic that is in the reading that I may have referred to or not referred to at all and write something simple and direct about it. Don't think about it too much. Don't overdo it. Don't make us work too much. It's 1500 words. Choose a topic, it won't be difficult.

Can anyone sing? Do you think you can sing? Do you know what... what's his name? Do you know how the "Carol of the Bells" goes? - Not well. (students vocalize) That's it. (students laughing) That's the one. That is. That is. Very good. (students laughing) And you didn't raise your hand when I asked you. - I know. The second question is usually not a good one after the first. (Timothy and the students laugh) - Very good. - So we had eight tunes of Christmas music to start with, and I'll play them again if I can make it.

What we are talking about today is the empire in Europe. And like the last lecture, this one aims to pull together some threads that will help you think about essays and think about the class as a whole. We're obviously talking about this in the context of an imperial war that's going on right now, the Russian war against Ukraine, which began in 2014 and accelerated in February of this year with a full-scale invasion. I think this is a fairly simple imperial war in its rhetoric and its objectives. I'll talk more about that as we go. However, what I want to talk about in this lecture is what this imperial war tells us about Europe and the European imperial past and what we can say about the European and American reaction to this war based on the history of the empire. .

So a broader issue of this kind, as you've all already deduced, is what is history for? What is it and what is it for? One of the things that history is used for is to reflect on the other stories about the past that you are told. So there is an obvious criticism, of course, in this kind of imperialist narrative that Ukraine does not exist, but perhaps more subtly, there is also a criticism of a European narrative, which says that European integration was born of superior European wisdom. that war is bad and that peace is good. So, if any of you are from a member state of the European Union, he will be familiar with this, because he has been bombarded with it since childhood.

The notion that Europeans are different and better than Americans, because they lived through a Second World War and saw that it was bad, and therefore, now they have had economic cooperation and since then, things have been good. There are a couple of problems with this. One of them is that what happened is not that Europeans learned from World War II that war is bad. That never happened. They continued to fight wars after World War II. They continued fighting wars until they lost them. That is a critical part of the story, which is lost. The Dutch and Indonesia, the French in Algeria and Southeast Asia.

The Portuguese and the Spanish cannot resist in Africa. It's basically the same story everywhere. They keep fighting until they lose and the wars they lose are imperial wars. The story of European integration, as told, allows imperial history to be pushed aside, occluded, not seen at all, and because that story is not seen at all, this leads to erroneous analyzes and misunderstandings of political situations. contemporary. The other tricky thing about that story is that it suggests that once you've learned the lesson that war is bad, all you have to do is trade with people and everything will be fine.

To emphasize, the problem with this is that the history of European integration with all the trade, which certainly happens, the Treaty of Rome and all that, all happens after the defeat in the imperial war. And then trade can be very good, a good thing. But in current European history, this commercial project follows defeat in the imperial war. And when you eliminate the defeat in the imperial war from history, you are eliminating something that will disable your analysis of the rest of contemporary events. Now, very briefly, I will remind you of some of the high points in the history of the European Empire.

We've already had a couple of conferences about this. It's in the background of reading Road to Unfreedom, Black Earth to a certain extent, but I want to try to make sense of where we are now based on this trajectory of empire. So from the point of view of the European Empire, 1776, the great, proud American independent history, that's when the northern hemisphere basically falls apart. I mean, there will be six... the Spanish will be around for a while, the Portuguese too, but 1776 is basically a turning point where the Western Hemisphere, where the Americas are falling apart, starts to fall.

Outside of calculation, empire will mean, essentially, Asia and Africa. The 19th century is then a competition for the territory that still remains. The most famous or notorious was the race through Africa at the end of the 19th century. In the late 19th century or early 20th century, we have World War I, which is a world war, even before the Americans come, because of the empire. It is a world war because it is fought with

colonial

soldiers from all over the world. It is not a war of Europeans against Europeans. It is Europeans and their

colonial

subjects against other Europeans and their colonial subjects that are fought in Europe.

At the end of World War I, what we have is a curious situation in which all the land empires managed to lose and the sea empires managed to win. The British and the French managed to win, the Ottomans, the Germans, the Russians, in a complicated way, through revolution, the Habsburgs, they all managed to lose. And as we have seen, in this war Ukraine is an important prize. Ukraine is the territory that the Germans believe they can use to win the war on the Western Front. They turn out to be wrong, but that's what they think. At the end of this war, the doctrine of self-determination arose, which means, in effect, that the maritime empires, among which I now count the United States, have the idea that some of the former territories in Europe's land empires They should become independent states.

So national self-determination does not apply to everyone. That's a truism. These were not American, British or French colonies, far from it. These were the ancient grounds of the defeated Earth empires, but not all of them. Ukraine no. Ukraine no. Ukraine, on the other hand, is going through this incredibly complicated period that we have studied, in which there are White Russians, that is, Russian restorers of the empire fighting for Ukraine. We have Poles who, in some way, fight for Ukraine. We have the Leninist idea of ​​self-determination, which basically means that we say that you can have self-determination, but as long as it does not contradict the interests of the center of the revolution.

So a kind of declarative self-determination. And while all this is happening, that's why I asked if anyone could sing. Meanwhile, Ukrainian musicians are touring Europe and North America, playing, for example, at Carnegie Hall. The song that caught the most attention is the melody that was just sung, which was composed by a Ukrainian composer named Mykola Leontovych, which caught the attention of Americans, so much so that it was adapted with new words in English to become what is now. the Christmas Carol of the Bells, which I think is the most amazing American Christmas carol and at the end I will explain again why that is so.

Leontovych himself was assassinated in 1921 by the Bolshevik secret police. So what is World War II? Again, from Ukraine's perspective or from our perspective, World War II is another imperial war. But this time the German aspiration over Ukraine is the absolute center. It is at the absolute center of Hitler's plans. It is at the absolute center of the war itself. And the theory behind this war, and you've read all this in Black Earth, but the theory behind this war is that the stronger nation should colonize and starve the weaker nation, that's what always happens. Or the strongest people, the strongest race should dominate, colonize and starve the weakest.

Why doesn't this always happen? According to Hitler, this does not always happen because of the Jews. That is Hitler's version of anti-Semitism. Jews have ideas like Christianity, capitalism, communism, rule of law, contracts, you name it. And these ideas enter people's minds and prevent them from becoming the ruthless racial warriors that nature intended them to be. So, in Hitler's opinion, the Jews are softening the minds of the Germans, and this is important, they are ruling the Ukrainians, because the Soviet Union, according to Hitler, is a Jewish state. So the Ukrainians, in his analysis, are a colonial people.

They are being ruled by a colonist, the Jews, and if they kill the Jews or get them out of the way somehow, the Ukrainians will be happy to be ruled by another colonial master. That's the theory. In planning the war, the Germans intend to starve tens of millions of Soviet citizens, tens of millions of Soviet citizens, to colonize the Western Soviet Union and, especially, Ukraine. Tens of millions of Soviet citizens. The reasons they think this is possible is because, at the time, everyone knew that there was something that people recently started calling Holodomor, which is the famine of 1932-1933.

The German analysis is that the collective farms of the Soviet Union can be used to divert food in any direction. 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 to kill hunger. In fact, they will never be able to starve tens of millions of people. Most of the famine takes place in prisoner of war camps, where some 3 million Soviet prisoners of war starve. Ukraine, as you know from reading, is also an important place. Oh, and by the way, the Ukrainian soldiers starving in German POW camps in 1941 refer to their experience of starvation in the Soviet Union in 1933.

There are even songs that reference both events. Ukraine, as you know from reading, is also a major Holocaust site. Two of the main shooting sites, Kamianets-Podilskyi and Babi Yar, outside kyiv, are, of course, in Ukraine. And the war is largely fought in and for Ukraine. That's why it's very important for current politics and for current conversations about imperialism that we know that this war was an imperial war. This is not just a point I'm trying to make on the side. It is very important to keep in mind that there was an imperial motive, an imperial geography for this war and that they were people subject to an imperial policy.

At the end of World War II, once again, the maritime empires managed to win. The British and French managed to win, again, with the help of the Americans. Germany, which aspires to be a much larger territorial empire, loses and loses very decisively. And by decisively losing their imperial war over Ukraine, the Germans begin the trend of other European empires losing imperial wars. What I just said is what is silenced. It is silenced that Germany's war was an imperial war and it is silenced that the Europeans began to lose a series of imperial wars. And how is that silence achieved?

It is achieved thanks to the otherwise very attractive history of European integration. The story of how Europeans are very wise and understand that war is bad, because they are smarter than Americans who keep fighting wars, etcetera, etcetera. And so, in this story, it is the empire that disappears and, most importantly, it is the history of the German empire that disappears. So Ukraine disappears, just like Indonesia, Algeria, Morocco, Mozambique and everyone else disappears from this story. But as I say, this is the most important thing for the Germans. This lecture is about empire and you think I'm only going to talk about Russia, but I'm going to spend a lot of time talking about Germany.

Russian imperialism is, at this moment, wide open. It is not very complicated, we will talk more about it, but what is crucial to knowing where we are in the 21st century is the misanalysis, misinterpretation and forgetting about German colonialism and the German empire. And as I say, one of the things that history is useful for, perhaps the most important, is to create a reflection on the things in which one was wrong or the things that one missed. Thus, in Germany, between 1945 and 1989, the main story is the division of the country. Germany loses its eastern territories. What remains of Germany is divided into West Germany and East Germany.

A democrat, a communist. From the West German point of view, the main story is one of victimhood itself, victimhood itself. We were bombed at the end of the war. Manyof our men died. We lost all this territory. Our country was divided. So the main story in the 50s, 60s and 70s is victimhood itself. So the issue of Germany taking responsibility for World War II is a relatively recent and rather one-sided development. The discussion about German responsibility in the war begins as a discussion about the Holocaust, which is very important. It allows for other discussions and is tremendously important in itself.

The problem with the Holocaust debate, taking place in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, is that many important things are missing. Any discussion on Eastern European territories is missing. There is no discussion of territory at all. And missing, perhaps most critically, is German imperialism, which brought Germany to Eastern Europe in the first place, which is a crucial part of the Holocaust story, because that's where the Jews lived. So without the German imperial ambition to reach Ukraine, there could not have been a Holocaust, because those territories are where Jews or most Jews actually lived. So, in this Holocaust debate, one of the things missing is German imperial ambition.

So there is self-criticism about the Holocaust, but it is limited, it has no territory. And the Jews who are most important in this discussion are the German Jews. And of course, that's a very important story. But German Jews are only about 3% of the victims of the Holocaust, only about 3%. And so that story cannot be representative and cannot make Germans think about the broader geographical scope of the war. And then, in fact, it tends to be one... Whereas the Holocaust story tends to take you to a place where you can talk about other crimes. So, for example, the Jews of Eastern Europe are some of our witnesses to the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war.

In Jewish testimonial material there is evidence of the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war. If you focus on Germany, all you have are the Germans and the Jews, which is a very different story and doesn't force you to think about the other crimes, much less the other peoples further east. In the 1970s, the social democratic governments of West Germany began a process of reconciliation with the Soviet Union. And this is a Soviet Union, which you know from reading in class, this is Brezhnev's Soviet Union. So what we have behind this reconciliation is the meeting of two stories about what really happened in World War II.

And at this time, in the 1970s, there is a Soviet history and Soviet history is a cult of the war in which we were victims and victors, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet alliance with Nazi Germany, completely taboo. The documents are hidden. Nobody remembers that. It is a Russified war cult. It is a Russified war cult. This coincides with a German history in which the Germans are increasingly willing to take responsibility for World War II and the way the Germans are moving in this direction is by directing apologetic energy towards the Moscow Center. And so, in Germany, as in the Soviet Union, the idea that World War II was a matter of tens of millions of dead Russians becomes normal.

Now, in World War II there were millions of Russians killed, but the magnitude of suffering was actually greater in Ukraine and Belarus than in Russia. And the story in which Russia monopolizes both victory and victimhood is also beginning to become natural in Germany. And so, in this strange way, what is actually being found is a silent Russian imperialism, the administrative Russification of the 1970s, with a German or with the remains of a German imperialism, or an implicit German imperialism, or at least , the complete absence of a reckoning with German imperialism, which means that it is completely natural that in this situation no one talks about Ukraine at all.

Nobody talks about Ukraine at all. The Germans have no reason to talk about Ukraine, because there has been no historic reckoning. And that is why Russia's silences on Ukraine or control over Ukraine seem completely natural. After 1989, we reached a moment where, as you have already seen in this class, we are in a moment of tremendous change of rapid geopolitical realignment, where, from the German point of view, and Now that we are under Christian Democratic governments led by Helmut Kohl, from the German point of view, what we have is historical justice. We have a unification. East Germany and West Germany unite.

The most interesting anti-imperial move that has been made at this time, as we have seen again in the lectures and readings, was made by the Poles, actually. When the Poles recognize the Ukrainian border before Ukraine is even independent, they are taking an anti-imperial step against themselves, which makes it much easier for the Germans to take the same step against Poland. Because until 1990 Germany had not recognized its border with Poland. The fact that the Poles excluded any national dispute with the Ukrainians made it somewhat more likely that the same outcome would prevail on the German-Polish border. And the lack of national conflicts or border conflicts is one of the reasons why the European Union was able to expand as it wishes to encompass many of the former communist states in 2004, 2007 and 2013.

During this time, Germany is the largest democracy. important in Europe. , unified Germany. It is the largest economy. It is a very functional democracy. It may already be the largest democracy in the world, but you can't tell that to the Germans. And as we enter the 21st century, Germans have a reputation for having dealt with the past, which is only partially justified. You have to be very careful here, because the Germans are, of course, pioneers in identifying a particular historical evil, which is the Holocaust, and in starting a history to address it. And that has been good for their democracy.

And I suggest, in general, that those kinds of things are good for democracy. The problem with this reflection is that it was believed to be finished. The idea was that by the time we reached the end of the Cold War, we Germans would have already gone through this process and are now in a position to be a model for other people. Whereas in fact the end of the Cold War created, I would have said, an opportunity to think about Eastern Europe more broadly and the German war in the East more broadly, which is not happening. So the form that criticism very often takes is that other people in Eastern Europe, in Poland, for example, or in Ukraine, do not understand how important peace is.

So peace is the crucial category. What the Germans will say again and again, and I say this here with some confidence, because this is a consensus that covers most of the political spectrum, is that peace is what matters. But peace is not what happened to Germany. Defeat is what happened to Germany. But you won't find Germans arguing that the imperial powers must be defeated. What one finds them arguing is that peace is a good thing. So there is no reflection on the empire. There is no imperial analysis in this framework. There is room to criticize the decline of democracy in a minor tone, but here the Germans, and again there is a broad consensus, generally overlook the most important and obvious case: the decline of democracy, which was that of Russia in 1999 -2000. , or perhaps Russia, 1993 to 2000.

But in any case, the rise of Putin in 1999 to 2000 is a hugely important turning point, because it is here that Russia fails to hold competitive elections in which a Russian president, Yeltsin, anoint the next. , Putin, Putin organizes a war. And this avoids that, which is so crucial for the success of a democratic system, in which someone who comes from another place unexpectedly is a candidate and wins, and wins. Here, instead, the person at the center of the system chooses the next person who will be the center of the system. This is the moment when Russian democracy fails.

Likewise, I think it is fair to say that there was very little recognition in Germany of the importance of the opposite that occurred in 2004 and 2005 in Ukraine. In 2004, there was a similar attempt in Ukraine to have a president anoint his successor and then mock elections were held to see which successor would win, which was stopped by civil society protests. And in this way, the Ukrainians were able to organize a real democratic succession in which the person who the incumbent wanted to come to power to succeed him did not actually come to power and someone else did.

So, 2004, right now... There's something I have to put on record now. It is at this moment that Gerhard Schroeder, who is the social democrat and now prime minister of Germany, it is at this moment, November 2004, that Schroeder says that Putin is an impeccable democrat. And that kind of rhetoric from Schroeder will continue, essentially, almost to this day. In the 21st century, under Schroeder and then under his successor, Angela Merkel, the key that Germans tend to apply in their foreign policy towards Russia is economics. And I want to emphasize this point again, although I'm sure it's clear, this arises from a certain erroneous analysis of how the European Union came about and how European integration came about.

The theory of European integration was that war is bad, trade is good. I mean, you don't want to argue those two premises, but the missing part of the story is that we Germans decisively lost a war and admit that we lost it. (laughs) We gave up on imperial solutions, because we had to because we were defeated and then we moved on to something else and that also applied to most other Europeans. And then the economy becomes magical where the notion is, so if we cooperate economically with Russia, for example, if we buy Russian natural gas, that must have a positive effect on Russia, because that is the theory.

So Gerhard Schroeder, who is the main figure in all this, negotiates a gas pipeline with the Russians a few weeks after leaving office in 2005. In what not only the Germans might consider unseemly haste, he then joins the board of directors of the gas company in question and is employed, in one way or another, in the Russian hydrocarbon industry with titles and salaries accumulated over the next few years. But, to be fair, it must be said that this policy is a consensus policy, which the Christian Democrats then continue. And when I say the Germans again and again, I basically mean the two Volkspartei and the two big parties.

Now the irony of all this, especially given that Schroeder belongs to the Social Democrats, which, historically, is an anti-fascist party, the irony of all this is that we are in a moment where an astute observer, at least, I might have noticed that some important sectors of the Russian elite, including the president of the Russian Federation, are beginning to speak in openly fascist terms. And that the president of the Russian Federation quotes Russian fascists in his most important political speeches. In Germany there is no news about it. No notice at all. I think the logic of isolating Germany from all this is something like we are anti-fascists and therefore if we are negotiating with them, they cannot be fascists.

And this logic prevails well into the 2020s and probably until the start of the war. So the Maidan of 2013-2014 can also be seen from this perspective. In fact, the Maidan of 2013-2014, which you have read about, which you have heard about at another conference, confirms this

post

-imperial analysis of the EU, because that is how everyone sees it. All that matter anyway. Ukrainians want to join the European Union because they understand that the European Union is there to rescue slightly problematic

post

-imperial states, like theirs. The Russians want to prevent Ukraine from joining the European Union because they recognize the same thing.

They understand that if Ukraine joins the European Union, it is much more likely that Ukraine will become a successful rule of law, prosper and become a model for the Russians, which, from the point of view of the Putin regime, would be something very bad. Everyone outside the European Union sees the logic I am trying to share. Only within the European Union is it confusing. When Russia invades Ukraine in 2014, we see the implicit imperialism of Russian-German cooperation become explicit in the language used by the Russians and then adopted by the Germans. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 is confusing and unclear and constitutes a great success for Russian foreign policy.

And the confusion and lack of clarity are a result of certain types of tropes about Ukrainians, which are imperial tropes. That Ukraine was never really a real state, that Ukrainians are not really a people, and if they are a people, they are corrupt and their state is going to fail because they are corrupt. And by the way, they are all Nazis. Oh, and they're gay, that fits in there too. And they were, you know... (students laughing) No, you know how this works. They are targeted audiences on social media, that's how it works. If you don't like homosexuals, they will tell you that all Ukrainians are homosexuals.

If you don't like Nazis, they tell you that everyone is a Nazi. If you like Nazis, they will tell you thatThey are all Jews. That happened too. (students laughing) Social media is your life, you understand. But this imperial rhetoric, and here is the point, is widely accepted, at least in 2013-2014, in the German media. At least as central points of discussion, are they all Nazis? Which is just one way to ask if everyone is barbarian? Are they all Nazis? Is it a failed state? Have the Ukrainians asked for this in some way? All this language, which speaks of the German imperial tradition about Ukraine.

And of course the Russians are consciously manipulating this. They are consciously playing with what they understand to be German sensibilities. Now, I said it was a consensus and it is, when after Russia invades Ukraine, Angela Merkel's Christian Democrat government creates Nord Stream 2, which is interpreted at that time by a wide swath of Europeans, not just Ukrainians. and Poles, but many of Germany's allies in Western Europe, as nothing more than a reward for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Because what Nord Stream 2 does is allow the Russians to very easily bring their gas to Europe without having to pass through Ukrainian territory.

So there is a consensus of implicit imperialism here, which has to do, on the Russian side, with an aggressive retelling of history, which I will say more about now. But on the German side, the lack of historical reflection combined with the certainty that historical reflection has already taken place, which is not only a German problem, but can also be found elsewhere. So when we get to the 2022 war, I think this will be an imperial war, quite obviously. It is an imperial war in the sense that it is based on a story in which some people exist and others do not.

Putin's account of the history of Russian Ukraine, which he offers in July 2021, says that what happens today is predetermined by things that happened a thousand years ago. That things that happened a thousand years ago give you the right to say who is really a people and who is not really a people. It's imperial in the classic sense of denying that the people you meet are a people, but rather that they are a tribe or a clan or corrupt or whatever. And it is imperial in the classic sense of denying that the State you encounter is a State, it is not subject to the law, the law does not really apply, what is the law anyway?

The most interesting thing that is happening, continuing with the Russia-Germany theme, is that the Russian invasion of Ukraine follows very, very closely the model of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, of which the Russians themselves already gave notice from the principle. They warn from the beginning saying that all this is a war for denazification and that all that needs to be done is to eliminate denazification. Here it is enough to do a little Freudian analysis. Just a little bit, a little bit of Freud to get what you're really looking for. What they really seek is to wage a war according to the German model, according to the German model.

And with denazification, they're doing the typical thing of putting something in front of the Western media, especially the German media, and saying, "Hey, why don't you talk about this? Let's change the subject to how many Nazis could there be in Ukraine, in instead of us invading the country right now. But I think the denazification thing is actually a deep clue to what's happening. Because the similarities are truly striking. The idea that Ukraine only exists thanks to conspiracies. The idea that Russia is not the aggressor, but the victim of conspiracies and therefore must attack Ukraine. The ideological assumption that the state you are attacking does not really exist.

It is simply 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. Putin says the same thing about Ukraine. There is also, obviously it is not so important, but there is also an anti-Semitic element in which the artificial thing is the presidency of Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself, because he is Jewish. And that element has grown larger over time as the Russian media now routinely portrays Zelenskyy as the devil or the antichrist. Also, the practically plagiarized idea that Ukrainians are a colonial people, who now have one master, but would be happier with another master.

Now they have the Americans, the Jews, the international gay conspiracy, whatever, they have some master, but we would be a better master. But the Ukrainians are a colonial people and they will be happy when we replace the previous master. All of these ideas are not only uncomfortably close, but are practically copies of German motivations or the ideologies declared by the Germans in the invasion of 1941. There is even the disturbing fact that the Russians were planning a type of genocide, which was the extermination of the Ukrainian elite, and have since moved on to other forms of genocide when this did not work.

Which again, in a minor key, is very similar to what happened to the Germans who were planning a campaign of mass starvation, which they were unable to carry out, but then moved on to other forms of genocide when the war actually continued. So the real policies of Russian Ukraine include things like deporting a tenth of the Ukrainian population, including children, executing elites, rape as policy, bombing evacuation routes, etc. And currently, the deprivation of water and energy. And the moment we find ourselves in now, as we approach the winter of 2022, should be, at least if you're German, uncomfortably close to the winter of 1941, where the idea is that you're killing people by depriving them of access to things. .

Soviet prisoners of war died in their millions, not because they were shot, although many of them were shot, especially the Jews, but they died in preponderance, because they were denied access to other things, which is of course what Russia is trying to do. carried out now on the level of Ukraine itself. This is not a reference made by the Germans themselves. And I would say that's because Germans generally don't think about World War II in terms of things that happened in the East. So of course the 2022 war, to be fair, changes people's opinions. The general consensus, which is not only a German idea, but also an American idea, that Ukraine is a weak state, is challenged by the events of February, March, April and the rest of 2022.

The idea that Ukraine was going to fall apart in three days was not fair, and this is important, it was not just a Russian idea, which was also basically believed in Washington and in Berlin and I would suggest that the reasons why we all believe that have to do with our own imperial past. It's not just Russian propaganda, it's our vulnerability to certain types of arguments about how other people are corrupt and have never really had a state and maybe they're all radicals and can they really have elected a president? Things have changed, things are changing.

The German parliament just voted a few days ago to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide, which is interesting in itself, but I'd like to think it's a small step from there to Germans thinking about how they planned their own famine in 1941. -1942 was related to the Holodomor, not only in people's experience, but also in its planning. Ukrainians who survived both certainly linked the two. So it's an interesting time to see what will happen in the winter of 2022. But when we talk about empire, it's important to remember that empire is about the denial of the subjectivity of others.

It's about monopolizing the agency. We exist and they really do not exist. And so the history of Russian imperialism in Ukraine is also the history, or more importantly, the history of the Ukrainian reaction. So Ukrainian subjectivity and all of this matters and not just as a response or as a response to a denial, it matters on its own. 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 should be clear to all of you. When they refer not only to the Cossacks but to the Vikings, that will no longer seem like a curiosity, it will seem like something that is not very surprising.

When they claim that World War II is their own war against the Russians, this is probably understandable now as well. But frankly, the most interesting things in history may have to do with the history of the last 30 years. A lot of what Ukrainians are doing in their communications has to do 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. And the generational part itself is very important. The elites that govern Russia are the same as they were 20 years ago.

Which is not the case in Ukraine. The people who now run Ukraine tend to be younger than me. I'm not as old as you think, I mean. They're closer to my age than yours, let's put it that way, but they're still young. (students laughing) They're still young, they're still young. They are still learning, they are still growing. To be clear, the people running Ukraine now are in their 30s and 40s. And so there has been a generational change, which is, in itself, very important. And this is also the generation that experienced the Maidan, participated in it or saw its consequences and that has a lot to do with the sheer subjectivity of the Ukrainian response on the battlefield, which is based, not only on a State, which is It may be much more functional than people thought, but largely based on what we call civil society, of people in horizontal organizations that fill in the gaps and do things that the state cannot do or in a way that The state cannot do it.

It is also reflected in the pluralism of the army itself and its ability to make local decisions, but also in the various types of formations that appear in the Ukrainian armed forces. Which includes, by the way, as everyone probably knows, but it's about one in six women and it includes gay soldiers who actually very often mark themselves as such. Outstanding cases, but not the only ones, of the variety that is possible in a pluralistic army. But war itself has largely to do with this subjectivity. The word Ukrainians use, I have discovered, others might correct me, most of the time to say it is about freedom.

Freedom in the positive sense, not just freedom from the Russians, but freedom in the sense of what will come next. And the resistance, and this is the point I wanted to get to last time and didn't get to, the resistance is also carried out by the people who would normally be creating the culture. Two conferences ago a historian, a colleague of mine, a guy named Vadym Stetsiuk, died in combat and this death in combat was in turn reported by a journalist, a very brave and intelligent journalist named Vakhtang Kipiani, who is Ukrainian. of Georgian origin. That name, which I hope to have on the page, that name, Kipiani, wrote the book about Vasyl Stus, who was the poet that I quoted at length last time, the most important of the dissident poets of the Ukrainian-Soviet era and In that book , follow me here, in that book he dedicates a chapter to a man named Viktor Medvedchuk, because this guy, Medvedchuk, was Stus' lawyer in 1980, when Stus was on trial.

And at that point, his lawyer wasn't someone who represented him, he was someone who stood up and said, "Yes, he's guilty, he actually did it and he should probably go to camp." And Stus then went to a field and went on a hunger strike and died five years later. This guy, Medvedchuk, you'll see why I mention this, this guy, Medvedchuk, is a personal friend of Putin and was one of the candidates in February to be the person that the Russians were going to send to govern Ukraine. So there are continuities in this, not just a personal, literal example, going back to the '70s.

And a way of thinking about the moment we're in now, not just in Russia and Ukraine, but around the world. , is whether we can ever get out of the 1970s. If we get out of the 1970s and head somewhere else. Because the 1970s, and this is a bit of a pivot, but work with me here. The 70s are also the origin of all the literary theory behind Russian propaganda. And one way to understand this conflict in Ukraine is one version of the 70s versus another version of the 70s, where the other version of the 70s is the dissidents, the idea of ​​human rights.

The notion that you are responsible. So there are many ways to criticize the Russian media about Ukraine. You can talk about it being genocidal and say genocide and all that is true, a long list of criticisms. But perhaps most interesting is the total rejection of responsibility. The idea that war itself is just an act. That we ourselves are not involved. We're not really involved personally. It's a performance, it's a show that Ukrainians should die in because that... it's like when our soccer team scores a goal or something like that. They should die because that's how the world works.

This is how we entertain ourselves. And in this, of course, the people who are urging all of this, I mean, to make the point clear, but it's important, themselvesThey will never go to the front. They themselves will never go to the front. It's a show. It's a show. The signifier is separated from the signified. What is really true? What really matters is the medium itself. That version from the 1970s versus the other version from the 1970s, which is the dissident version, which says that you always have some responsibility all the time, even when the situation is unfair.

Even when you're in a show trial or even when you're at war, you take on some responsibility anyway, even when the conditions are against you. And this is, by the way, one of the things that, when I talked to Zelenskyy in September, we spent a lot of time talking about. So on the other hand, of course, that is the case and I put some of the names on the list, because I can't mention them all and even that list would be very incomplete. But on the other hand, one Ukrainian cultural figure after another dies in this war, some in bombings and bombings, but many of them in combat.

Many of them in combat, from famous film actors to multiple ballet dancers, through athletes and of course, journalists, humanists, scientists. More recently, the conductor of the Kherson Orchestra was executed for refusing to conduct a concert for the Russians, which of course is reminiscent of Leontovych, the Ukrainian composer I mentioned earlier, who was executed because he represented Ukrainian music. I could mention a Russian cultural figure who was murdered in Ukraine. There is one person I can think of, and there are certainly more, but I can think of, and people will certainly help me in the sea of ​​emails I will receive about this, but I can think of.

Her name is Oksana Baulina. She was a Russian reporter who was killed by a Russian bombing in the Podil district of Kiev. And the way she was killed is by what is called a double tap. A double tap is when you fire an artillery shell and then wait for rescuers to arrive and then shoot them, that's a double tap. It's a way journalists usually die, that's how she died. And so she died in Podil. She was Russian and died in this war. She is a well-known cultural figure, she died. Of course, someone who opposed the war.

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. She dies in Podil and what is Podil? What is Kyiv, what is Podil? Podil was a port area of ​​the city. I'm asking you a way back to the 8th century, 9th century, beginning of the class. It was the port area of ​​the Khazars even before the Vikings appeared. The Vikings were in control in the year 900, which is a sign that they and not the Khazars are the ones in charge of kyiv.

If you walk to Podil from the center of kyiv, there is a beautiful route down, there is a 14th century Lithuanian castle on the way, which marks the period of Lithuanian control of kyiv and much of Ukraine. In the 19th century, Podil was home to markets, dominated by Jews and Poles. Did he become Russian by bombing it? Did you become Russian because of the death of a Russian journalist? So Podil was there before all this. Podil was there a long time ago and it's been a theme of this kind that nations are real political entities in the 20th century, the 21st century and the 19th century.

They are formed by all kinds of contacts along the way. But there are some things that are truly ancient. Last time I finished class by reading Julia Moskovski's poem about problematic politically incorrect verses. But of course the thing about that poem is that it's not really the poem that's problematic. We are the problematic ones. And the poem is perfectly elegant. It's us, we, who are problematic. This thought this leads me to is the way the poem responds to itself. Because the premise of the poem is that this is all we have to offer, these uncomfortable words, but that's not true at all.

The example of Ukrainians resisting this war offers much more than that and offers much more than that even in poetry. When Julia responded to me, I can't even tell you what platform, because I don't know, but maybe it was Instagram, maybe it was Telegram, I don't know. But what she said was, "I thank all Ukrainians who continue to create in times of war," which is an acknowledgment of an important point. That it's not just that the war continues, the culture continues all the time, which takes me back to where I started and where I will end, I promise, very soon.

On Sunday I was at a concert at Carnegie Hall, something I don't do all the time. You have to force me, but I have children. As you can imagine, it lasted three hours. But I really wanted to be there, it was very interesting. Among others, the Ukrainian children's choir called Shchedryk performed. And Shchedryk is named after a song called "Shchedryk," but Shchedryk is an interesting word, because Shchedryk implies an adjective that can mean both generous and abundant. A person is generous, but a situation is generous. And that he is generous, that gives me a signal, which I need to take advantage of to thank all Ukrainian historians and also Ukrainian listeners.

This class turned out to be heard by many people in Ukraine. So I'm very glad that he did it and that he accepted my interpretations. But the confusion between generosity and generosity is interesting, because it takes us back to a pre-Christian era where, in a pagan world where deities are present in the world, there isn't really a line between generous and generous. The world will be abundant because the deities are generous. And that's why you perform certain rituals and that's why you celebrate the season. So that song, (vocals "Carol of the Bells"), that song, which we have like an American Christmas story, is, of course, you know where I'm going with this.

It is a Ukrainian song and the reason it is so different from all American Christmas carols is because it comes from Ukrainian polyphonic singing. From the harmony of several voices, Ukrainian singing. And the song itself, the song that took Mykola Leontovych almost 20 years to adapt, is old. It's old. And it's not really winter, but spring. Because if you're a pagan, I mean, if you're a sensible person who really lives in the world, when does the year really start? It begins when things begin to grow from the ground. And it begins when the swallows come and sing.

It starts when the first lambs are born, which is February or March, which is what the song is really about. It's about those things. So this song, which was adapted and played at Carnegie Hall a century ago and then played again on Sunday, is old. It is pre-Christian, dating back to before 988. Actually, it is about spring. It's about fertility, prosperity, love, how things are going to get better. That part in the American version where they say at the end, "Merry, Merry, Merry, Merry Christmas," in that part of the song, in the Ukrainian version, it's actually about how beautiful your wife is. (Timothy and the students laugh) Things are going very well for you.

You are going to make a lot of money this year. The farm is doing very well and, by the way, your wife is beautiful. (students laughing) And what she literally says is that she has dark eyebrows, which is beautiful. She that is a beautiful woman in Ukraine. She is a woman who has dark eyebrows. It's a song about spring. It's a song that we consider about winter, which is about spring, and I close it, because I just want to suggest that sometimes things that seem like an end can actually be a beginning. Thank you. (students clapping) (soft music)