(energetic music) - Okay, greetings. Happy Thursday. This is my first day of teaching, so I'm like slowly making the transition from, you know, summer to fall and public stuff to teaching stuff. I'm very glad that I can
teach a class on Ukraine. I'm very glad that you all are here to at least try out this class on Ukraine. Let me just say a word about the way the class is going to work and see if you have any
questions about that, and then I will jump into, you didn't always have a beard. I'm going to jump into a
kind of introductory lecture about what some of the major
themes of the class will be. So this is a straightforward
survey lecture class. We're going to cover a lot of, we're gonna cover a lot of time. We're gonna be focused on Ukraine, but not in the sense that
we're trying to prove that Ukraine as it
exists now had to exist, but rather we'll be
concerned with the things which made it possible, and
the other kinds of entities which were important on the
territory along the way. And more abstractly, we'll be
concerned with the question of why this nation, why nations in general, how do you get from something, how do you get from nothing to something? Why are there nations in general? Or if there have to be nations, why the ones that we have to have? Which is the ultimate thing,
which seems self-evident, like if you're produced in
the given educational culture, then the existence of
the educational system and the state that created
it seems self-evident, but it's not really. Like that's the existence of
the United States or Ukraine or Russia or any country
is highly contingent, and frankly, pretty darn unlikely. And so, the burden of proof
is really on us as historians to show how these things are possible, as opposed to taking them for granted. So, as I say, this is a
straightforward lecture class. You're expected to come to lecture. In week three, we'll have section. You're expected to come to section. You're not expected to bribe your TFs, but you are expected, oh, look at all those
heads that perked up. I was like, there are like, yeah, there are geographical lines where, you know, there are places
where that would be expected, but I'm happy to announce
that Yale University is not one of those places. I'm noting like (class laughing) - I'm noting like undergraduate wisdom, which I'm ignoring. There are things that
I don't want to know. So where was I? So lecture class. Two exams. Map quiz next week. Map quiz, take that very generally. I might ask you questions on the map quiz, very simple questions which
have to do with the readings assigned up to that point. If you do the reading
and you look at the maps, it's gonna be very straightforward. If you don't do the reading
and you don't look at the maps, you're gonna be baffled. You're not going to be able to fake it. It's gonna be a terrible experience and you'll go home crying. Okay. So it's meant to be easy, and the reason why I do a map quiz is because geography is kind of one of the great missing things from
the way that we do history, along with military history,
which has gone missing, which is a bit awkward right now that nobody does military history anymore. No, I mean, it's a serious problem, actually that we have a lot of history of like the discourse of
war and the culture of war, which is interesting and important, but we have relatively little straightforward battlefield history, which means that the journalists
writing about the war now tend to move very quickly into, "Oh, what's Putin thinking?" Or you know, like all the
things that we find comfortable, like the psychology of
people we don't know. We move very quickly into those things as opposed to how do logistics
work and why does it matter if it's a steppe rather than hills, and what is partisan warfare like, and these things that used to be known, but which we've kind of
discarded in the 21st century. Okay. That was my big
conservative move for the day. I'll go back to being myself now, but it is actually very, very important. So what we're gonna be doing
is moving through time, starting the next lecture. Well, next lecture, this is just, I'm gonna be giving a very
general introduction this time. Next lecture, we're
gonna talk theoretically about the origins of nations. Try to open up that question, go through some of the thinking about where nations come from. Our guiding thinker on this is gonna be a fellow
called Ivan Rudnytsky, who is a very important Ukrainian thinker and kind of uniquely situated
to address this question for reasons which are going
to become clear to you, I hope, over time. And then beginning, then
you'll have the map quiz, and then beginning September 13th, we are going to start moving through time, beginning with the ancient world, into the middle ages, into
the Renaissance, and so on. So it's all pretty straightforward. I don't wanna spend too
much time talking about it, but if you have a question
about the form of the class, please go ahead and ask. Yeah? It's all clear? Okay. All right. So what I'm gonna do now is
I'm going to just enter into some of the big questions that are raised by the moment that we are in now. So history is not about
how everything has to be the way that it is now. Nevertheless, it would
be naive not to notice that the way that we start
thinking about history has to do with the
predicaments and the questions that are raised by the present moment. You can't get away from
the present moment. As you might have noticed, it's very hard to get away
from the present moment, but what you can do is you
can use the present moment to reflect, right, to reflect, and then when you've reflected,
the history that you learned might make the present
moment more comprehensible. So I'm not gonna say that
the purpose of this class is to make the Russian war
against Ukraine make sense. What I am going to say
though is that the war perhaps is an occasion for us to go back and understand this history. Some of the things which
might seem mysterious, like how is a war like this possible might seem less mysterious. Some of the claims that
are made about the war might seem easier to dismiss
or easier to understand once we have the history under our belts. So let me start with where we are. Where we are right now, it is what, the 31st of
August or something like that? Where we are right now is that
the Ukrainian armed forces are undertaking a limited offensive in the the Kherson oblast of Ukraine, which is right in the
Southern part of the country. Kherson, it's an interesting name, if you think about it, it
doesn't actually, if you have, if you know anything
about Slavic languages, it doesn't sound particularly Slavic, and that's because it's not. Kherson was named after an
older ancient Greek settlement on the Crimean peninsula. It was named by Katherine the Great when she founded the city. By the way that ancient Greek city. which was also called Kherson, is now, the ruins of it are now
in a suburb of Sevastopol, which is another city name
which you might be hearing of. Things are exploding there at the moment. Sevastopol is part of the
territory in the extreme south of Ukraine and Crimea, which
was occupied by Russia in 2014. So these place names which
seem exotic and mysterious point us back to a history which is actually durable
and comprehensible. So the Greeks are the oldest documented inhabitants of Ukraine. I'm not gonna say the oldest inhabitants, because there are the Scythians and there are are all kinds of other people who left other kinds of traces, but in terms of continuous
documentation of presence, the Greeks have been
there for the longest, along with the Jews. So the Jews and the Greeks
are the longest documented inhabitants of Ukraine, which suggests that familiar
concepts of classical history, whether coming from a
Greek side or coming from a Jewish side are going
to turn out to be useful in application to Ukraine. The history of Ukraine
as we're going to see is about an axis of south to north. Okay, I realize I'm now
getting into geography and heads are spinning already. North is like, when
you're looking at a map, it's the up one. (students and professor chuckling) - I'm sorry. (students and professor chuckling) - And south is the other way. So when we think of it, people talk about Ukraine
in terms of east and west, and that, I just wanna say,
that's a very recent phenomenon. The axis on which early Ukrainian history is going to emerge, or the
history of Kyivan Rus', which is the first big
documented polity in this region is a north, it's a North-South axis. It has to do with Vikings, which is a major theme in
European history, right? The Viking age, which begins
in the eighth century. It has to do with the
encounter of the Vikings and the continuation of the Roman empire, which is known as Byzantium, which is capital in Constantinople,
which is now Istanbul. It Kyivan Rus', our history,
begins with an encounter of this major Northern development and this major Southern development, which meet in Kyiv and sets something off, which is in some way continuing. This something that is set off, we're gonna be following
for a thousand years. The state, which is founded, as I've said, is called Rus' or Kyivan Rus', I will describe, I'll talk about why it's
called Rus' later on. It's very interesting, but the territories in
question are also going to be governed by other entities like the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the biggest state in Europe
for quite a long time. Poland major, the major
power of the region for quite a long time, the Ottoman empire,
which we cannot forget, and if I get through
the middle of this class and I haven't talked
enough about the Ottomans, I want you guys to call
me on it because like there's this whole thing about Kyivan Rus' and like Putin talks about it, then Zelensky talks about it, and both Putin and Zelensky
are named after the guy who was baptized, maybe, in
order to found Kyivan Rus', who's is called Valdemar, because of course he was a Viking and not a Russian or Ukrainian, cause Russia and Ukraine
didn't exist at the time. But the Viking who got baptized, who was called Valdemar in 988, that name then becomes
Velodymyr in Ukrainian and Vladimir in Russian. Right, so that contemporary heads of state of these two countries are
named after this figure who a thousand years ago maybe
converted to Christianity. So there's this Kyivan Rus' business, and we're gonna follow Kyivan
Rus' and it's fascinating, but we have to remember
that the whole south of the territory that we're talking
about was never actually part of Kyivan Rus' right? So Putin is now making
this war in Ukraine, and part of his logic, as I'm gonna talk about
is that Russia and Ukraine have always been one
people because of a Viking maybe got baptized a thousand years ago, which I want you guys to
understand is not a persuasive historical argument, okay? If we get one thing out of this class, it's gonna be that if a dictator tells you a thousand years ago,
somebody got baptized, that doesn't mean your nation
is the same as his nation. If we can get through that,
we'll have done a good job. So at least for the first
15 minutes of class. But my point is that we cannot
forget that these Southern territories were not part
of Kyivan Rus' at all, where the fighting is
happening now was not, it was part of the ancient Greek world. It was part of the Ottoman
world for a long time, but it was not actually
part of Kyivan Rus'. Southern Ukraine has a
different history and it is brought into this larger
Ukrainian thing later on. So let's. I'm just saying that
because we have to mark the Ottoman empire and we have to mark Islam, and in general, by the way,
we have to mark Ukraine as a major center, not
just of Christian history, because when you focus on Kyiv and the conversion to Christianity, then you're in this kind of
Christian teleological arc. Somebody, maybe or maybe
didn't get dunked in water and therefore it's Christian forever, but Ukraine is actually a center of Muslim and Jewish and
Christian civilization, and this is one of the things
which makes it interesting and of note and in the ancient period, it was a center of what you
could think of as a contest between those three
monotheistic traditions to convert the pagans who lived there, which we'll get to in a later lecture. For now though, what I wanna
make sure that we get to is this issue of how you get to be a nation. Okay, so that's gonna be
one of our major themes, and I don't mean it
teleologically, just to stress, I don't mean why Ukraine had to be, because that's a terrible question. As soon as you're in the world of why a nation had to be, you've obliviated, you've
eliminated, you've erased all human agency in
the whole story, right? If I'm able to say right
now from the pulpit Ukraine had to exist, then
we're removing everything which makes history interesting, right, the human choices along the way. The way people saw the
circumstances they were in, what people thought was possible, what they thought they were doing, and what they sometimes even did. All that goes away. If I can say, "Oh, there had to be America
or there had to be Russia, or there had to be China." There didn't have to
be any of these things. We can explain how they came into being, but what we can't say, and
this is what Putin does, we can't say that it's predetermined. As soon as we say it's predetermined, this is no longer a history class, it's in some kind of, we're in some kind of
exercise in, you know, applied physics or something. Okay, but the bad, so there's a bad answer to why, you know, to
where history comes from, which is that things had
to be the way they are, and that bad answer is
closely related to this war because Putin gave that
bad answer in July of 2021, when he wrote an incredibly
long, for a politician, not long for you guys, an incredibly long essay which he called "On the historical unity
of Russia and Ukraine" and his bad answer is that
things are the way they are because they had to be
this way basically, right? Russia and Ukraine have
always been together, and if they're not together,
that's the result of alien, non-historical forces. This is really important, by the way, because when a tyrant makes an argument about how history has to be, then some of the forces that are actually resident in history, then get classified as being
ahistorical or non-historical or exotic or alien, right? So in Putin's telling you the story, all the Lithuanian stuff
and all of the Polish stuff and all of the Jewish
stuff, for that matter, all the things which aren't
about Christianity or Russia are now suddenly exotic, alien, foreign. They're not really history. They're the things that have to be removed so that history can go the
way that it's supposed to go, and that is precisely a rationale for war. In fact, it is the rationale for this war, because the argument for this war is that Ukrainians don't know who they really are because they've been polluted
by all this Polish stuff or Lithuanian stuff or Habsburg stuff, or maybe latterly European
Union stuff or American stuff. So you have to peel away
all this artificial things to get down to who they really are, and they may not know who they
really are and that's tragic and we have to apply enough violence so that they can understand
who they really are, right? And once you're in that
way of seeing things, then of course the war makes
perfect sense to you, right? And so the way that history is presented has an integral connection with
the decision to make a war, and also for the way that
a war seems to make sense while it's going on, right, while it's going on to people
who are taking part of it. So the point is though that
is not that we're gonna start with this bad history because it's the right kind of history, the point is that the bad
history or what I would prefer to call the myth or the political memory gives us an occasion to see how history might actually have been. It's a kind of, the bad
history is a kind of invitation to what might
actually be more interesting. Okay. So what's wrong with the idea, let me just open this up
to you guys very quickly. What's wrong with, this is
kind of a trick question. I'm sorry. What's wrong with
an essay which is titled "On the historical unity
of Russia and Ukraine?" Go for it. - [Student] There is no
historical unity of Russia. - Okay. That's alright.
I'll give you that. But I'm looking for yes. Okay. Why not? I mean, why not? Because you don't think so? - [Student] No, I think it's been forced, but the unity has been forced. - Okay. - [Student] Doesn't
never like substantial. - Okay. All right. I'm going for something
more fundamental. Yeah? - [Student] Russia and
Ukraine might not have existed in the way we talked about them. - Good. Okay. That's good. That's good. Russia and Ukraine as nations
definitely didn't exist in the year 988, right? The nation is a modern historical
construct characterized by the notion that you feel a
kind of solidarity with people you don't know. That's Benedict Anderson
imagined community. It's a good argument that you, somebody else is American
or Ukrainian or Chinese, and you think you have
something in common with them, even though you don't
know them personally, that's the nation. The nation also involves a certain, at least a certain notion of equality. We may not be equal in every ways, but I'm not more American
than you are, right, if you're American We're, at least in the,
at least notionally, we're equal as members of a nation, right? That does not exist in the ancient world, or it doesn't exist in the medieval world. So that's a good one. Now, can we go even deeper than that? All right, I'm gonna have to
answer my own trick question. Yeah, go for it. - [Student] This might be a long shot, but this statement itself
is inherently contradictory. Can you say the unity, but he's also recognizing
Ukraine sovereignty by saying that Russia and
Ukraine is separate entities. - That's kind of where, I mean, I'm gonna give you like
extra credit points for that, because I think you're right. And I think what I'm aiming
for is the actual language of the statement. The way that "On the historical
unity of Russia and Ukraine" plays a certain trick. The trick is that if I
begin a title with, "On" the thing that's there is
supposed to be real, right? So if the title is "On
the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine" the trick is that, well,
since it's "On" this, that thing must exist, right? If I write a book which says "On quick chess strategies
to defeat Garry Kasparov" then it's like, that
thing must exist, right, even though it doesn't exist, right? But if I say on this thing, then it exists and so that kind of language, the kind of implicit
assertion of existence is non-historical language. It's the language of legend,
the language of myth. It's tricky language
which gets you thinking in terms of categories of eternity, categories of durability,
categories which isn't changed, what things which don't change, which leads you to where Putin is, which his idea that some
things are, as he says, predetermined, right, which
is a very strong word. His idea is that because there
was a baptism in Kyiv in 988, the rest of it is predetermined and anything which doesn't go
the way it's supposed to go is somehow exotic or foreign
and has to be suppressed, and then historical unity, I mean, I'm gonna make your point
a little bit more strongly. It's not just that Russia and Ukraine, there's no such thing as
historical unity, right? History is not about unity. History is about, okay, I'm
gonna throw this one open. What's history about in two words? You can have two, you have
three if one of them's an "and." War and peace. I guess that's what I deserve
for my military history comment earlier on. (students laughing) - I mean, it's not bad. It's
not a bad answer by the way. It's a pretty good answer. Anything. Anyone else wanna go for it? Yeah. - [Student] People. - Did it in one word. That's good. It's people
who can write stuff down, actually, that's where history stops is the line between history
and archeology or anthropology. History is all about written records. So we're gonna do a lot of warmup before we get to written records, but one of the reasons
why baptism is important in the history of Eastern
Europe or Europe in general is that with baptism and
Christianity comes written language and with written language
comes the ability to make different kinds of interpretations where historians are comfortable. All right, I'm gonna
give this one more shot. What's history about? Don't you guys dream of,
isn't this like your dream you're gonna come to Yale and
a professor's gonna ask you what history's all about and
you're gonna raise your hand and say something brilliant? (class laughing) - Like isn't that what
you guys dream about? This is your moment. Yeah, Jack. - [Jack] States in society. - State in society. That's good. That's good. That's pretty good. Okay. So what I'm thinking about
is something even more basic and dumb, which is change in continuity. Okay, so you don't have
to write that down. It's a very fundamental thing that sometimes things change
and sometimes they don't and history is aware
of both of them, right, and you're in, history is aware, so the historical unity is
a non-historical concept because what it does is that it's a trick because historical
doesn't mean historical, it means unchanging, right? Historical unity in that
phrase means forever. It means eternal, right It doesn't actually mean historical, cause historical would mean it changes. Maybe there was some unity at some point, but if it's historical, then it would change because
that's what history is. History is change as well as continuity. So history is about change in continuity, which means it's about
ends and beginnings, and it's also about unpredictability. Okay, so as you might have gathered, this lecture is also because
we're doing this big question, we're handling this big subject of war, and we're trying to do this big question of where nations come from
at the very beginning. I'm trying to do just a little bit about what history actually
is, cause we're gonna need it. So one of the things which, since history is about
beginnings and endings, it's also unpredictable, right? It's about things that
you couldn't expect, and that may seem counterintuitive, because you probably think, well, okay you probably don't, cause I know you're
all very sophisticated, but someone in some other
classroom might think history is about old dusty books and we know what's gonna
happen in the old dusty books. But here's the thing, even if you read all the old
dusty books that you wanted about the year 1439 and you became the world's leading expert on 1439, you still would not know
what happened in 1440, right? That's the level you wouldn't have, and that's the level of
unpredictability of history, and it comes up to the present. You can read all, I mean
you could know everything you could possibly
humanly know about 2021, but you wouldn't know
what's gonna happen in 2022. You just wouldn't. It's only afterwards
that it all seems like it had to happen, right?
Like up until February 24th. "Of course Russia's not
gonna invade Ukraine." After February 24th. "Oh, of course Russia was
gonna invade Ukraine." That's how our minds work and
history is there to remind us that actually we're wrong
pretty much all the time, that things are not
actually predictable, right? That what people expect to happen is generally what doesn't happen, and that novelty is an authentic thing, that there are new things
which come about all the time. In our case, the new thing
that we'll be thinking about the most is nature. I
mean, sorry is the nation. Now one of the things which gets elided, and I've already mentioned
this and it's pretty important in the notion that history
is some kind of eternity or some kind of repetition. Like you may have heard the phrase, you may have heard the idea
that history repeats itself. I don't know about you guys.
I hear it all the time. Because whenever I talk about
the past, then people say, "Well, history is repeating itself" because this thing is like this thing, but if history really, oops, I'm getting out of
the camera view probably. I'm not used to doing this. If history repeats itself, that would mean that nothing
we do matters, right? If history literally repeated itself, then there would be no human agency. It's the same thing as
saying things never change. If things change according to a pattern, that also means no human agency, right, and so the notion that
history is a cycle, right, there was a time when we were great and now we have to make
ourselves great again, like the notion that there's a cycle, that there was a Golden Age
and then something went wrong and then we correct it. That's also not historical. That's also a way of
eliminating human agency, right? So history doesn't repeat. It doesn't repeat. You learn things from history which can then help you
recognize other things. You might see some certain patterns, but history doesn't repeat. Okay, so the thing which goes
missing in these accounts, which I want us to get
better at recognizing over the course of this class, and as we think about the nation, is the notion of human agency. Not volunteerism, like not the idea that you
can do whatever you want, but the notion of human agency that you, history helps us to identify
the structures as best we can, and then the better we
understand the structures, the better we see what
humans can and can't do or could imagine that they can
do within those structures. So when we do history, we're trying to, as it were objectively, understand the situation around a person, but we're also trying to
subjectively understand what that person might have
been thinking or trying to do, and we never give up on
the second part, right? So to take the example of
this baptism in 988 to, don't worry, we'll return
to it over and over again, but when Valdemar got himself baptized, we know he was not thinking
about Russia and Ukraine a thousand years later, like
that we can be sure about. We can be pretty sure
he wasn't even thinking about Christianity because we know enough about his predicament to say
what he was probably thinking about was geopolitics and
what form of conversion would be best to preserve
his own rule, right? And we'll try to explain
how that all works out, but what we're always trying to do is to understand the
situation around someone which is, so to speak, of
an objective undertaking. But then we're also trying to get inside the individual actors and their own minds and recognize that they have
a subjective appreciation of these, and you can never quite do away with that tension between
what I'm calling very simply the objective and the
subjective forms of history. Okay, so we've already
talked about many of the ways that this kind of myth
of eternity is wrong. Another way that I wanted to talk about it is in terms of diversity
or in terms of change. If I give you a myth of a Golden Age, I'm usually getting rid of diversity. I'm usually getting rid of
all the interesting stuff. If I'm talking about how,
and this is, by the way, all myths of a Golden Age are pretty much structurally the same. Interestingly, it always turns out that we were the good guys. Right, like try to think
of a myth of a Golden Age where the other guys were the good guys. If it's, funnily, it all kind
of comes down to the same thing. It's aways, we were the good guys. We were innocent, and
then the bad people came and they polluted us or
they did something very bad. It's structurally always the same, and it doesn't even matter
whether you're an empire or not. You can be the most powerful
empire in the world, the most powerful empire in
the most powerful country in the world, hint USA, and you can still come up with a story of how you were the victim
and the other people came and they polluted you, but the
structure is always the same, and so when you have a story
of which Putin's version of the baptism in Kyiv is one example. You have a story about how
everything was always static. Everything was pure, right? That's why the baptism, by
the way, is so attractive. It's not that Putin
actually goes to church or that the Russian church
really exists as such, but baptism is a notion of,
it's a cleansing, right, it's a purifying, it's a starting again, and that's why it's such an
attractive image in this story. The baptism allows us
to forget all the things that happened before and
present history or the past as this kind of clean unity where anything which was polluting came from the outside, and that is a way of
getting rid of diversity or getting rid of the things which might, as historians or as students of history, we might actually find to be interesting, where it gets rid of things
coming from other places. It gets rid of origins. It gets rid of innovation. It gets rid of all of
the interesting stuff. Like, for example, the alphabet. The alphabet might seem like
something which is eternal. I mean, when was the last time you guys thought about the alphabet? All right, that's not the
question that you were dreaming your professor was gonna ask
you the first week of Yale. "He was asking me about the alphabet, mom. I can't believe it. I studied so hard." So the alphabet is a really
interesting creation. It was actually only
invented once, like a lot of things that we take for granted and
then copied a bunch of times, the specific Cyrillic alphabet, which came to Kyiv after the baptism, was invented by a couple
of, we'll talk about this, a couple of Byzantine priests
who were trying to convert, not Kyiv, but Moravia, not then, but a couple centuries before, and they had an interesting career and it wandered and ended up in Kyiv, and then suddenly you have this alphabet. And then that Cyrillic
alphabet can seem like a kind of eternal marker of
like east and west or whatever once it's established, but
it's actually an innovation which came from the outside, right, like, for that matter Christianity itself. So when you focus on how things, or if you pretend that things are static, what you're doing is you're
excluding all the diversity, all of the innovation, and all the things which
came from the outside. What we're gonna be
trying to do in this class is make the opposite point. That what's interesting about Ukraine is that rather than being part of somebody else's myth of purity, right, is that Ukraine actually
embodies in a very intense form most of the major themes
of European history and some of the major
themes of European history, of world history. What we're gonna try to be arguing. is that as a result of
Ukraine's geography, as a result of this north-south
axis at the beginning, and then east-west axis later on, all of the themes of European history appear in Ukrainian history, just in a slightly more
interesting form, right? So the Vikings, for example, if you're interested in European history, you may be interested in the Vikings. The Vikings, let's face it,
they're interesting. Okay. So you have this mainstream
of European development where the Franks start a
state and the Vikings react to the Franks and they
start raiding the Franks and they invent these boats and they travel all over
the world. Very cool. But maybe the single most
lasting trace of the Viking Age is Kyiv, right? The Vikings founded states. They knocked over states. They founded the states all over the place. Normandy, for example. Normandy, as you might
remember, invades England and establishes England in the
form that we know it today. Vikings matter a lot,
but Norwegian democracy, it also began with Vikings, but Kyiv may be the single
most interesting legacy of the Viking Age, maybe
the most durable legacy of the Viking Age. When you look at pictures
of wartime Kyiv now, which, you know, where San
Sophia is still standing, thankfully, like that's a
legacy of Viking civilization. That's a legacy of Vikings
converting to Christianity. If you think about the history
of the Reformation, right? Oh the Reformation, we
all know the Reformation is a big theme of European history. Suddenly there are Protestants
as well as Catholics, and maybe there's a Hundred Years War and a third of the population of Germany is going to get wiped out and the printing press comes along and suddenly there can be disputations which seem to lead to a lot of violence. This whole thing about the
internet causing trouble so far is like nothing compared
to the printing press. Like we may get there, but
like the printing press came along and that was a mess. But in Ukraine you have the Reformation, but it's not Catholics and Protestants, it's the Orthodox and the Greek Catholics and the Catholic and the
Catholics and the Protestants and all kinds of Protestants. And you have a religious war in 1648, which is also a proto national
war, and an anti-colonial war and something which is
extremely interesting. So basically everything that
happens in European history happens in Ukrainian history, just slightly more intensely
and sometimes slightly earlier. And indeed one of the
themes or one of the things that I hope you'll notice as we go along is that George Orwell said this, that the hardest thing to notice is what's right in front
of your nose, right? I don't know, this is
your first week at Yale, maybe like 50 years from
now when you're an alum, you'll be like, "My professor
told me the hardest thing to notice is what's right
in front of your nose." If you take that away, I'll
also be happy, but that's true. The things which are
most intensely obvious are very often the things
that are hardest to take on and history in a way is actually like, "Oh, America's an empire." I mean, history is a way of
picking up on the obvious because it gives it to
you from a whole bunch of different angles at the same time, and then maybe the obvious will eventually come through, right? So the point is that Ukraine
is at this absolute center of a lot of things, which
we regard as central. I've given you the Viking
Age and the Reformation, which may seem a little exotic. It's absolutely at the center
of the First World War. It's absolutely at the center
of the Second World War. It's absolutely at the
center of Stalinist terror. It's absolutely at the
center of the Holocaust. It's absolutely at the center of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's at the center of major
historical developments, not just ancient and medieval,
but also very contemporary. But the fact that it's, precisely the fact that it's at the
center of the development makes it hard to see and hard to notice. It's sometimes hard to
direct your gaze at the thing which is most important sometimes, because where things are most important is also where things are darkest, right, and very often Ukraine
is going to be a kind of heart of darkness. Who wrote "Heart of Darkness" by the way? - [Student] Joseph Conrad. - Where is he from? - [Student] From Poland. - Give you one more try. - [Student] Ukraine? - You're guessing though, right? Yeah. So you're not wrong
that he was from Poland, but it's a very interesting trajectory. So "Heart of Darkness"
is a famous, famous book about the race for Africa. It's a remarkable novel. Conrad's a remarkable writer. Conrad is a Pole. How does he know about colonialism? Because he is from Ukraine, right? There's a recent Polish
history book about Ukraine, which is called "Poland's
Heart of Darkness" which of course the Poles really didn't, in general, like to hear, but it's a very valid point. During the Renaissance period, as we'll see Polish colonialism in Ukraine was incredibly intense, and that gives Conrad the background to understand the
European race for Africa, and in turn Hannah Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism"
is basically one long riff on Joseph Conrad's novel
"Heart of Darkness." And so it's not surprising that Arendt actually understands that
Ukraine is important. Just kind of closing the loop here, but a heart of darkness is
something which is hard to see, but that doesn't mean
it's unimportant, right? So things get wiped out of the history that are precisely the things
that we have to see, okay. I'm getting towards the
end of the main themes that I wanted to make sure
we got introduced here. So we've talked about what history is. We've talked about what a nation is. We've talked about the difference
between history and myth. I've mentioned this
sort of trigger question of Ukraine exists, why?
Or Ukraine exists how? Which is a lot trickier than
it seems at the beginning. So if you're living through the 21st century and I realize like this
is the only century that you guys have lived through, which I find very troubling. One of the, no like, if you're me, like think about this for a second, okay, if you're me, you
guys never get older, right? Every September I show up and
you're always the same age. That is really weird, right? It's very strange. And every year I get, every
year I get older, which is very, it's very troubling. But if you're in the 21st century, there are these moments where you say, "Oh, look, Ukraine exists." Like 2004, what Ukrainians now call the Revolution of Dignity or sorry, the Orange Revolution, 2014, the Revolution of Dignity or 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It's very easy and tempting
when Russia invades Ukraine and Ukraine resists to say,
"Oh, look, now Ukraine exists." But that wouldn't be a very
Ukrainian perspective, right? The fact that you recognize
something because someone else acts doesn't mean that they
just came into existence. On the contrary, I think the
argument probably runs better the other way. The fact that Ukrainians
were able to resist the Russian invasion
suggests that the nation or the civil society
had already consolidated to a pretty impressive degree, right, and the fact that we, and that
would be my American "we," but it was a general assumption, all thought that Ukraine
would collapse in three days might say more about our
misunderstanding of the place than it does about the place itself. And after you misunderstand
it and you say, "Well, it doesn't really exist. It's gonna collapse in three days" and then it doesn't collapse,
what's your next move? Your next move in order to
rescue your position is to say, "Oh, well Ukraine must
have just been created by the Russian invasion"
of which is something that if you've been following this war at all, you will have heard
journalists and others say. "Well, you Putin and Putin united Ukraine with this invasion" right? And of course it's true that
there's a lot of solidarity and so on that wouldn't have
happened without the war, but the idea that Putin created Ukraine by invading it is ludicrous, right? You can invade lots of places, that doesn't mean that they
start to exist as nations. That's not how history actually works. So that itself, that whole
move that journalists then made to say, "Oh, well, Ukraine
exists because Putin" is just a way to keep
talking about the thing, which people are very
comfortable talking about, which is Putin. If you're a writer in a democracy, you're very attracted to authoritarians. I don't know if you've noticed this trend, but there's a kind of seductive lure of the distant authoritarian. No, it's true. Like, the twenties and thirties, if you go back to the
twenties and thirties and you read about the way Americans wrote about not just Stalin, but also Hitler, you'll see this tendency. If you're in a democracy,
you're very kind of tempted by this idea that, "Oh,
there's somebody over there and everything is orderly
and they have a vision, and this is kind of
interesting" and so on, we fall, we go for that
again and again and again, and with Putin even now though, it's much weaker now than
it was before February. There's this idea that, "Oh, he's interesting.
It's kind of seductive. He's a strong man, and let's
talk about Putin" right? Let's talk about Putin and then saying, "Oh, Putin created Ukraine by invading" is one more way of talking about Putin rather than talking about Ukraine. In other words, it's
one more colonial move that you're making. Well, okay. They didn't
exist, but if they do exist, it's the paradoxical result of
a foreign dictator, right? Okay. So there are these
triggering moments, but what I'm trying to suggest are these triggering moments
should be triggers of our asking ourselves
what actually happened, you know, as opposed to
jumping to easy conclusions that are convenient,
with which are consistent with what we already, which
what we already think. Okay. So we've done history. We've done what history is. You guys feel like, you
know what history is now? Cause I hope so, because we only
have one lecture for this. We've talked, we've
introduced a little bit, the difference between history and myth. There's one more theme
which I wanna just introduce very quickly, and it's
a 20th century theme which I want you to have in mind. The theme is genocide. And the reason it's a 20th Century theme is that the 1948 definition
of genocide assumes that there's such a thing as a people. So Raphael Lemkin, who is
the lawyer who's educating what's now Ukraine, by the
way, Polish, Jewish lawyer, who's educated in the university, and what's now Lwow, when he
made up the word genocide, he's assuming the existence
of a people, right, because genocide is about the intentional destruction of a people. So it assumes that there is
such thing as a people, right, what we might call a nation or a society. So it's a 20th century construction. I mean genocide is the antipode
of the creation of a nation. We think of nations are
modern and any attempt to destroy a nation is also modern, right? The theme of genocide is a late theme, but I want you to keep it
in mind because of this war and because of the way that
genocide also asks questions about where nations come from. This war is a strangely genocidal war. It's strange in the
sense that it's very rare for the authors of a war to actually say at the beginning that the aim of the war is the destruction of another people. That doesn't happen very often. That might be the aim, but
for it to be announced openly, as it has been in this
war, is pretty unusual. and that's the intent part of genocide. The practical part of genocide
one can find very easily in the hundred thousand dead in Mariupol, as it appears unfortunately, in the 3 million Ukrainians deported, including a quarter million children, at least who were to
be forcibly assimilated into Russian culture in
the systematic campaign of rape and the murder of local elites in the territories that Russia controls and maybe more banally, but I
think also very importantly, in the systematic attempt to
destroy publishing houses, libraries, and archives,
which are the way, of course, that nations or societies or
people remember themselves. So there is a genocidal
aspect to this war, and I want you to keep
this in mind as a theme because this concept of genocide, though it's a modern concept, it also points us backwards
towards other questions, which we're gonna be thinking about, which have to do with colonialism and which have to do
with why people recognize or do not recognize other people. Why, what were the, if we're gonna ask the positive question, a Ukrainian nation exists how? Which I think is a really
interesting question, not just about Ukraine, a
Ukrainian nation exists. How was that possible? The converse question
is what were the things which were thrown up
along the way and why? So why was there particularly
Ukrainian famine in 1933 in the Soviet Union? Why that? Why did Hitler particularly
think that Ukraine would be a good site of Lebensraum? Why in the 1970s were
Brezhnevian assimilation policies particularly applied to Ukraine, right? What is it about this place
which has put it at the center of so much colonial
pressure over the centuries and the decades? I don't want you to
apply the word genocide to things that happened
before there's a nation. That's not my point. My point though is that I want
to introduce some concepts, which are what is
history? What is a nation? And then the kind of
pendant or counterpart to what is a nation, is what is genocide? What are the things which lead to nation? If there are things that
lead to nation destruction, what are the things which,
sorry, to nation creation, what are the things that
lead to nation destruction? What are the deeper impulses? Not just a war which is happening now or a famine which happened then, or a terror which
happened some other time, but what are some of the deeper forces which push us in that direction? So it's, Ukraine is a heart of darkness in that sense, right? It's a way to collect those
kinds of events as well. They're not the only things
we're gonna be talking about, but the concept of genocide
can help us to remember that this is an important
part of the history that we're gonna be investigating. Okay. So much for introductions. Thank you all for being here, and I hope to see you again next week. (class applauding) (upbeat transition tones)
