(intriguing music) - All right, everyone. Greetings. This is the last lecture of this class. You have an exam in a couple days. You have a thematic assignment
due a week after that. The thematic assignment's meant
to be very straightforward. I don't want you to do extra research. I want you to pull out some little theme that is in the reading
that maybe I've referred to or haven't referred to at all and write something simple
and straightforward about it. Don't overthink it. Don't overdo it. Don't make us work too hard. It's 1500 words. Pick a theme, it's not gonna be hard. Can anybody sing? Do you think, can you sing? Do you know how... what's it called? Do you know how the
"Carol of the Bells" goes? - [Student] No.
- Okay. (students vocalizes) That's it.
(students laughing) That's the one. That's the one. That's the one. Very good.
(students chuckling) And you didn't raise
your hand when I asked. - [Male Student] I know. The second question usually
is not great after the first. (Timothy and students laughing) - All right. - So we had eight tones
of Christmas music there to start us out with, which I'm gonna get back to, if I manage. What we're talking about
today is empire in Europe. And like the last lecture, this lecture is meant to bring some threads together to help you think about the essays and help you think about
the class as a whole. We're obviously talking
about this in the context of an imperial war that
is going on right now, the Russian War against
Ukraine, which began in 2014, and which was accelerated this February with a full scale invasion. I think this is a fairly
straightforward imperial war in its rhetoric and in its goals. I'll talk more about that as we go. What I want to talk about,
though, 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 on the basis of the history of empire. So a larger theme of this class, as you've all gathered, is
what is history good for? What is it and what is it good for? One of the things that history is good for is reflection upon the other stories about the past that you are being told. So there's an obvious criticism,
of course, in this class of the imperialist narrative that Ukraine doesn't exist,
but perhaps more subtly, there's also a criticism
of a European narrative, which says that European integration was born out of the higher European wisdom that war is bad and that peace is good. So if any of you are from
European Union member states, you'll be familiar with this, because you've been bombarded
with it since childhood. The notion that the
Europeans are different and better than the Americans, because they experienced
a Second World war and they saw that it
was bad, and therefore, they have now 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 the Second
World War that war is bad. That never happened. They kept fighting wars
after the Second World War. They kept fighting wars
until they lost them. That's a critical part of the
story, which goes missing. The Dutch and Indonesia, the French in Algeria and Southeast Asia. The Portuguese and the Spanish
can't hold out 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 it's told, allows that imperial
history to be pushed aside, to be occluded, to be not seen at all and because that history
is not seen at all, this leads to misanalysis
and misunderstandings of contemporary political situations. The other tricky thing about that story is that it suggests
that once you've learned this lesson that war is bad, all you have to do is trade with people and everything will be good. To emphasize, the problem with that is that the European integration story with all the trade,
which certainly happens, Treaty of Rome and all of that, it all happens after the
defeat in the imperial war. And so trade may be very
well, be a good thing. But in the actual European history, this trade project follows
upon defeat in imperial war. And when you take the defeat in imperial war out of the story, you're removing something
which is going to disable your analysis of the rest
of contemporary events. So just very briefly now,
I'm gonna remind you of some of the high points of the
history of European Empire. We've already had a couple
of lectures on this already. It's in the background of the reading in Road to Unfreedom,
Black Earth to some extent, but I wanna try to make
sense of where we are now on the basis of this trajectory of empire. So from the point of
view of European Empire, 1776, the great proud
American independent story, that's when the Northern
Hemisphere basically falls out. I mean, there will be six... the Spanish will be around for a
while, the Portuguese, too, but 1776 is, basically, you
can call a turning point where the Western hemisphere,
where the Americas fall out, begin to fall out of the calculation, empire is going to mean,
essentially, Asia and Africa. The 19th century is then a competition for the territory that's still left. Most famously or notoriously,
the race for Africa at the end of the 19th century. At the end of the 19th century or at the beginning of the 20th, we have a First World
War, which is a world war, even before the Americans
arrive, because of empire. It's a world war because it's fought with colonial soldiers
from all over the world. It's not a war of Europeans
against Europeans. It's Europeans and their colonial subjects against other Europeans and
their colonial subjects, which is fought in Europe. In the end of the First World War, what we have is a curious situation where the land empires all managed to lose and the sea empires, the
maritime empires managed to win. The British and the French managed to win, the Ottomans, the Germans, the Russians, in a complicated way,
by way of revolution, the Hapsburgs, all manage to lose. And as we've seen, in this
war, Ukraine is a major prize. Ukraine is the territory
that the Germans think they can use to win the
war on the Western front. They turn out to be wrong,
but that is what they think. At the end of this war, we have the rise of the doctrine of self-determination, which means, in effect,
that the maritime empires, I'm now counting the US among them, have the idea that some
of the former territories in the land empires in Europe should become independent states. So national self-determination does not apply to all the world. That's a truism. It was not about American colonies or British colonies or
French colonies, far from it. It was about the former terrains of defeated land empires,
but not all of them. Not not Ukraine. Not Ukraine. Ukraine instead passes through this incredibly complicated
period that we have studied of, in which you have white Russians, that is, Russian restorationists of empire who are fighting for Ukraine. We have Poles who, in some
way, are fighting for Ukraine. We have the Leninist idea
of self-determination, which basically means we say that you can have self-determination, but so long as it doesn't contradict the interests of the
center of the revolution. So a kind of declarative
self-determination. And while this is all going on, this is why I asked if anybody could sing. While this is all going
on, musicians from Ukraine are on tour across
Europe and North America, playing, for example, in Carnegie Hall. The song which drew the most attention is the melody which was just sung, which was composed by a Ukrainian composer called Mykola Leontovych,
which really caught the attention of the Americans, so much so that it was
adapted with new English words to become what's now
the Carol of the Bells, which is the most striking, I think, American Christmas carol and I'm gonna return at
the end to why that is. Leontovych, himself, is murdered in 1921 by the Bolshevik secret police. So then what is the Second World War? Again, from the perspective of Ukraine or from our perspective, the Second World War is
another imperial war. But this time the German aspiration for Ukraine is the absolute center. It's at the absolute
center of Hitler's plans. It's at the absolute
center of the war itself. And the theory behind this war, and you've read all of
this in Black Earth, but the theory behind this war is that the stronger
nation should be colonizing and starving the weaker nation,
that's what always happens. Or the stronger people, the stronger race should be dominating, colonizing,
starving out the weaker. Why does this not always happen? According to Hitler, it
doesn't always happen, because of the Jews. That is Hitler's version of antisemitism. The Jews have ideas like
Christianity, capitalism, communism, rule of law,
contracts, you name it. And these ideas get into people's minds and prevent them from
becoming the ruthless racial warriors that
nature meant them to be. So in Hitler's view, the
Jews are both softening the minds of Germans,
and this is important, they're ruling Ukrainians,
because the Soviet Union, according to Hitler, is a Jewish state. So the Ukrainians, in his
analysis, are colonial people. They're being ruled by
one colonist, the Jews and if you kill the Jews or get them out of the way somehow, the
Ukrainians will be happy to be ruled by another colonial master. That's the theory. In the planning for the war, the Germans intends to starve tens of millions of Soviet citizens, tens of millions of Soviet citizens, in order to colonize
the Western Soviet Union and especially, Ukraine. Tens of millions of Soviet citizens. The reasons why they
think this is possible is because, at the time, everyone knew that there was this thing,
which only recently, people have started to call Holodomor, which is the famine in 1932-1933. The German analysis is
that the collective farms in 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 of starvation. In fact, they're never able to starve tens of millions of people. Most of the starvation takes
place in prisoner of war camps, where about 3 million Soviet
prisoners of war are starved. Ukraine, as you know from the reading, is also a major site, oh, and by the way, Ukrainian soldiers who are starving in the German prisoner
of war camps in 1941 refer to their experience of hunger in the Soviet Union in 1933. There're even songs which
refer to both of these events. Ukrainian, as you know from the reading, is also a major site of the Holocaust. Two of the major shooting
sites, Kamianets-Podilskyi and Babi Yar just outside Kyiv
are, of course, in Ukraine. And the war is largely
fought in and for Ukraine. And so it's very important
for present politics and for present conversations
about imperialism that we know that this
war was an imperial war. This is not just some point that I'm trying to make on the margin. It's very important to keep in mind that there was an imperial motive, an imperial geography to this war and that they were
peoples who were subject to an imperial policy. At the end of the Second
World War, once again, the maritime empires managed to win. The British and the French managed to win, again, with the help of the Americans. Germany, which is aspiring to
be a much larger land empire, loses and loses very decisively. And in losing decisively their
imperial war for Ukraine, the Germans begin the trend of other European empires
losing imperial wars. That thing which I've just said is the thing which is silenced. It's silenced that Germany's
war was an imperial war and it's silenced that Europeans then began to lose a
series of imperial wars. And how is that silence achieved? It's achieved by the otherwise very attractive story
of European integration. The story about how
Europeans are very wise, and they understand that war is bad, because they're smarter than the Americans who keep fighting wars,
et cetera, et cetera. And so in this story, it's
the empire that goes missing and it's most crucially, the story of the German empire which goes missing. So Ukraine goes missing just as Indonesia and Algeria and Morocco and Mozambique and all the rest go
missing from this story. But as I say, this is most
important for the Germans. This lecture is about empire and you think I'm only gonna
be talking about Russia, but I'm gonna be spending a lot of time talking about Germany. Russian imperialism is,
right now, very open. It's not very complicated,
we'll talk more about it, but crucial to where we
are in the 21st century is the misanalysis, the
misapprehension and forgetfulness about German colonialism
and German empire. And as I say, one of the
things history is good for, maybe the major thing,
is to create reflection about the things that one got wrong or the things that one missed. So in Germany, from 1945 and 1989, the main story is the
division of the country. Germany loses its Eastern territories. What remains of Germany is divided into a West Germany
and to an East Germany. One Democratic, one communist. From the point of view of West Germany, the major story is of
one's own victimhood, one's own victimhood. We were bombed at the end of the war. So many of our men died. We lost all of this territory. Our country was divided. So the major story in the 50s, 60s, into the 70s is one's own victimhood. So this business of Germany
taking responsibility for the Second World War is a relatively recent development and quite partial. The discussion of German
responsibility for the war begins as a discussion of the Holocaust, which is very important. It allows other discussions and it's tremendously
important in and of itself. The problem with the
discussion of the Holocaust, which takes place in
Germany in the 70s and 80s, is that it's missing a
lot of important things. It's missing any discussion
of East European territories. It's missing any discussion
of territory at all. And it's missing, perhaps most critically, the German imperialism,
which got Germany out into Eastern Europe in the first place, which is a crucial part of
the history of the Holocaust, because that is where the Jews lived. So without the German imperial
ambition to get to Ukraine, there couldn't have been a Holocaust, because those territories
are where the Jews or most of the Jews actually lived. So in this discussion of the Holocaust, one of the things which is missing is the German imperial ambition. So you get self-criticism
about the Holocaust, but it's limited, it
doesn't have territory. And the Jews who are most important in this discussion are the German Jews. And of course, that is a
very important history. But German Jews are only about 3% of the victims of the
Holocaust, only about 3%. And so that story can't
be a representative one and it can't be one which
is going to get Germans to think about the broader
geographical scope of the war. And then, indeed, it tends to be one... Whereas, the history of the
Holocaust tends to move you to a place where you can
talk about other crimes. So for example, Jews in Eastern Europe 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 sort of story and you're not being forced to
think about the other crimes, let alone the other peoples further east. In the 1970s, West German
social democratic governments begin a process of reconciliation
with the Soviet Union. And this is a Soviet Union, which you know from the reading from the class, this is the Soviet Union of Brezhnev. And so what we have
underneath this reconciliation is the meeting of two stories
about what actually happened in the Second World War. And by this time, by the
1970s, there's a Soviet story and the Soviet story is a cult of the war in which we were the victims
as well as the victors, the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact and Soviet Alliance with Nazi Germany, completely taboo. The documents are hidden away.
No one's remembering that. It's a Russified cult of the war. It's a Russified cult of the war. This meets a German story in
which Germans are increasingly willing to take responsibility
for the Second World War and the way that Germans
move in this direction is to direct the apologetic energy towards the Moscow Center. And so in Germany as in the Soviet Union, the idea that the Second World War was about tens of millions of
dead Russians becomes normal. Now, the Second World War did involve millions of dead Russians, but the scale of suffering was
actually greater in Ukraine and in Belarus than it was in Russia. And the story in which Russia monopolizes both the victory and the victimhood also starts to become natural in Germany. And so then, in this weird way, what is actually meeting is
a Russian quiet imperialism, the administrative
Russification of the 1970s with a German or with the
remnants of a German imperialism, or German implicit imperialism,
or at the very least, the total absence of a reckoning
with German imperialism, which means that it's totally natural that in this situation, no one
talks about Ukraine, at all. No one talks about Ukraine, at all. The Germans have no reason
to talk about Ukraine, because there's been no
historical reckoning. And so Russia's silences about Ukraine or control about Ukraine
seems completely natural. After 1989, we reach a
moment where we have, as you've seen already in this class, After 1989, we're in a
moment of tremendous change of rapid geopolitical realignment, where, from the German point of view, and we're now under Christian democratic governments
headed by Helmut Kohl, from the German point of view, what we have is historical justice. We have a unification. East Germany and West
Germany are brought together. The most interesting anti-imperial move that's made at this time was made, as we've seen again in the
lectures and the reading, was made by the Poles, actually. When the Poles recognize
the Ukrainian border before Ukraine is even independent, they're making an anti-imperial
move vis-a-vis themselves, which makes it much easier for the Germans to make the same move vis-a-vis Poland. Because all the way up until 1990, Germany had not recognized
its border with Poland. The fact that the Poles
put any national quarrels with Ukrainians out of the question made it somewhat more
likely that the same outcome would prevail on the German-Polish border. And the lack of national
conflict or border conflict is one of the reasons
why the European Union can enlarge as it will to embrace many of the former communist
states in 2004, 2007, 2013. During this time, Germany is
the most important democracy in Europe, unified Germany. It's the biggest economy. It's a very functional democracy. It may already be the most
important democracy in the world, but you can't tell the Germans that. And as we enter the 21st century, the Germans have a reputation for having dealt with the past, which is only partially justified. One has to be very careful here, because the Germans are, of course, pioneers in identifying a
particular historical evil, which is the Holocaust, and beginning a story of addressing 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 thought
to have been completed. The idea was that by the time we got to the end of the Cold War, we, the Germans, have already
gone through this process and now, we're in a position
to be a model for other people. Whereas in fact, the end
of the Cold War created, I would've said, an opportunity to think about eastern Europe more broadly and about the German war
in the East more broadly, which is the thing that doesn't happen. So the form the criticism very often takes is that other people in Eastern Europe, in Poland, for example, or in Ukraine, don't understand how important peace is. So peace is the crucial category. What the Germans will say again and again, and here I say the Germans
with some confidence, because this is a consensus which goes, which spans most of
the political spectrum, is that peace is the important thing. But peace is not what happened to Germany. Defeat is what happened to Germany. But you won't find Germans arguing that imperial powers have to be defeated. What you find them arguing is
that peace is a good thing. So there's no reflection on empire. There's no imperial
analysis in this framework. There is room for criticism of decline of democracy in a minor key, but here, the Germans, and
again, this is a broad consensus, generally miss the most
important and obvious case, the decline of democracy, which
is Russia in 1999 to 2000, or maybe Russia, 1993 to 2000. But in any event, the rise
of Putin in 1999 to 2000 is a hugely important turning point, because it's here that Russia fails to have competitive elections
where one Russian president, Yeltsin, anoints the next one, Putin, Putin stages a war. And so you avoid that
thing, which is so crucial for the success of a democratic system, in which somebody coming from
somewhere else unexpectedly is a candidate and wins, and wins. Here you have instead the person
at the center of the system picking the next person who's
the center of the system. This is the moment where
Russian democracy fails. Likewise, there was very
little recognition in Germany, I think it's fair to
say, of the significance of the reverse happening
in 2004, 2005 in Ukraine. In 2004, there was
similarly attempt in Ukraine for a president to anoint his successor and then elections were faked to see that that successor would win and this was held off by
civil society protest. And in this way, Ukrainians
were able to arrange for an actual democratic succession where the person that the incumbent wanted to come into power to succeed him did not actually come to
power and someone else did. So 2004, at this time.... There's something I have
to go on the record now. It's at this time when Gerhard Schroeder, who's the social democratic,
now, prime minister of Germany, it's at this time, November 2004, that Schroeder says Putin
is a flawless Democrat. And that kind of rhetoric from Schroeder is going to continue, essentially, almost to the present day. In the 21st century, under Schroeder and then under his
successor, Angela Merkel, the key that the Germans tend to apply in their foreign policy
towards Russia is economics. And I wanna stress this point again, although I'm sure it's clear, this arises from a certain misanalysis of how the European Union and how European integration arose. The theory of European integration was war is bad, trade is good. I mean, one doesn't wanna
dispute those two premises, but the missing part in the story is, we, the Germans, decisively lost a war and admit that we lost it. (chuckles) We gave up on imperial solutions, because we had to 'cause we were defeated and then we moved on to something else and that that was true of most of the other Europeans as well. And so the economics becomes a magic where the notion is, then, if we cooperate economically with Russia, for example, if we buy Russian natural gas, that must have a positive
effect on Russia, because that's the theory. So Gerhard Schroeder,
who's the leading figure in all of this, negotiates a
gas pipeline with the Russians a few weeks after he
leaves office in 2005. In what not only the Germans might find to be unseemly haste, he then joins the board of
the gas company in question and is employed, in one way or another, by the Russian hydrocarbon industry with accumulating titles and salaries for the next many years. This policy, though, in
fairness, one has to say, is a consensus policy,
which is then continued by the Christian Democrats. And when I say the Germans
over and over again, I'm basically meaning the two Volkspartei and the two big parties. Now, the irony of all of this, especially given that Schroeder is from the Social Democrats, which, historically, is
an antifascist party, the irony of all of this is that this is a time when an
astute observer, at least, might have noticed that
certain important parts of the Russian elite,
including the president of the Russian Federation, are beginning to talk
in openly fascist terms. And that the president
of the Russian Federation is quoting Russian fascists in his most important political addresses. There is no notice of this in Germany. No notice at all. I think the logic of insulating Germany from all of this is something like we are the antifascists and therefore, if we're negotiating with
them, they can't be fascists. And this logic prevails
deep into the 2020s and probably until the
beginning of the war. So the Maidan of 2013-2014 can be seen in this light as well. Actually, the Maidan of 2013-2014,
which you've read about, which you've heard about
in a separate lecture, confirms this post-imperial
analysis of the EU, because that's how everybody sees it. Everybody who matters anyway. The Ukrainians wanna
join the European Union, because they understand
that the European Union is there to rescue slightly problematic post-imperial states, such as their own. The Russians wanna stop Ukraine from joining the European Union, because they recognize the same thing. They understand that should
Ukraine join the European Union, it is much more likely that Ukraine will become a successful rule-of-law state and prosper and become
a model for Russians, which, from the point of
view of the Putin regime, would be a very bad thing. Everyone outside the European Union sees the logic that I'm trying to share. It's only inside the European
Union that it becomes unclear. When Russia invades Ukraine in 2014, we see the implicit imperialism of Russian-German
cooperation become explicit in the language which the Russians use and which the Germans, then, pick up. The Russian invasion of Ukrainian in 2014 is muddled and made unclear and a great success for
Russian foreign policy. And the muddling and the un-clarity is a result of certain kinds of tropes about Ukrainians, which
are imperial tropes. That Ukraine was never
really a real state, that Ukrainians aren't really a people, and if they are a people, they are corrupt and their state is gonna
fail because they're corrupt. And by the way, they're all Nazis. Oh, and they're gay,
that fit in there, too. And they were you know... (students laughing) No, you know how this works. It's social media targeted
audiences, that's how it works. If you don't like gay people, they tell you the Ukrainians are all gay. If you don't like Nazis, they
tell you they're all Nazis. If you do like Nazis, they
tell you that they're all Jews. That also happened.
(students chuckling) Social media, it's your
life, you understand this. But this imperial rhetoric,
and here's the point, is largely accepted,
at least in 2013-2014, in the German media. At least as the central points of discussion, are they all Nazis? Which is just a way of asking
are they all barbarians? Are they all Nazis? Is it a failed state? Did the Ukrainians somehow
bring this upon themselves? All of this language, which speaks to the German
imperial tradition about Ukraine. And of course, the Russians are consciously manipulating this. They're consciously playing on what they understand to
be German sensibilities. Now, I said this was
a consensus and it is, when after Russia invades Ukraine, the Christian Democratic
government under Angela Merkel then brings into existence Nord Stream 2, which is interpreted at
the time by a broad swath of Europeans, not just
Ukrainians and Poles, but many of Germany's
West European allies, as nothing more than a reward
for Russia invading Ukraine. Because what Nord Stream 2
does is it allows the Russians to very easily bring their gas to Europe without having it to pass
through Ukrainian territory. So there is a consensus of
implicit imperialism here, which has to do with, on the Russian side, an aggressive retelling of history, which I'm gonna say more about now. But on the German side, a
lack of historical reflection combined with a certainty
that the historical reflection has already taken place, which
is not only a German problem, you can find that elsewhere, too. So when we get to the war of 2022, this is an imperial war,
I think, fairly obviously. It's an imperial war in
that it's based on a story of history in which some people
exist and some people don't. Putin's account of the
history of Russian Ukraine, which he gives in July of 2021, tells you that what happens
today is predetermined by things that happened
a thousand years ago. That things that happened
a thousand years ago give him the right to say
who's actually a people and who's actually not a people. It's imperial in the
classic sense of denying that the people you
encounter are a people, instead they're a tribe or a clan or they're corrupt or whatever. And it's imperial in the
classic sense of denying that the state you encounter is a state, they're not subject to law, law doesn't really apply,
what is law anyway? The more interesting
thing which is happening, continuing the Russia-German theme here, is that the Russian invasion of Ukraine very, very closely follows the model of the German invasion
of the Soviet Union, which the Russians themselves
tip off at the very beginning. They tip this off at the very beginning by saying that this is all
a war about de-Nazification and all you have to do is remove the de. Just takes a little bit
of Freudian analysis here. Just a tiny, tiny bit of Freud to get what they're really after. What they're really after
is they're fighting a war on the German model, on the German model. And with the de-Nazification, they're doing their
typical thing of rolling something in front of the western media, especially the German media and saying, "Hey, why don't you talk about this. Let's change the subject to how many Nazis there might be in Ukraine, as opposed to we're invading the country right now." But the de-Nazification thing, I think, is actually deeply a
clue to what's happening. 'Cause the similarities are
actually really striking. The notion that Ukraine only
exists because of conspiracies. The idea that Russia is not the aggressor, but it is the victim of conspiracies and therefore, it must attack Ukraine. The ideological assumption that the state you're attacking doesn't really exist. It's just propped up by said conspiracies. So the moment you hit
it, it will fall apart, which is literally what Hitler
said about the Soviet Union. Putin says the same thing about Ukraine. There is also, it's obviously
not nearly as important, but there's also an antisemitic element in which the thing which is artificial is the presidency of
Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself, because he's Jewish. And that element has
grown larger with time as the Russian media now
presents Zelenskyy routinely as the devil or as the anti-Christ. Also, the idea which is
practically plagiarized that the Ukrainians are a colonial people, they have one master now, but they would be happier
with a different master. Now they have the Americans, the Jews, the gay international
conspiracy, whatever, they have some master, but
we would be a better master. But the Ukrainians are colonial people and they'll be happy when we
replace the previous master. All of these ideas are not
just uncomfortably close, they're practically copies
of the German motivations or the German's stated ideologies
in the invasion in 1941. There's even the haunting fact that the Russians were
planning one kind of genocide, which was the extermination
of the Ukrainian elite, and they have since moved on
to other forms of genocide when that one didn't work out. Which again, in a minor key, is very similar to what
happened to the Germans who were planning a mass
starvation campaign, which they were not able to carry out, but then moved on to
other forms of genocide when the war actually continued. So the actual policies of Russian Ukraine include things like the deportation of a 10th of the Ukrainian
population, including children, the execution of elites, rape as politics, the bombing of evacuation
routes and so on. And currently, the deprivation
of water and energy. And this moment we're in now, as we move into the winter of 2022, is, if you're a German, at least, should be uncomfortably
close to the winter of 1941, where the idea is you're killing people by depriving them of access to things. The Soviet prisoners of
war died in the millions, not because they were shot,
although many of them were shot, especially the Jewish ones, but they died in the preponderance, because they were denied
access to other things, which is of course what Russia
is now trying to carry out on the scale of Ukraine itself. This is not a reference which
Germans themselves make. And I would say that's
because the Germans generally don't think of the Second World War in terms of the things
which happened in the east. So of course, the war in 2022, to be fair, does change people's views. The general consensus, which
is not just a German idea, it's 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 gonna fall apart within three days was not
just, and this is important, it wasn't just a Russian
idea, that was also basically believed in
Washington and in Berlin 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 kinds of arguments about how other people are corrupt and they haven't ever 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 and of itself, but it's a short step from
there, I would like to think, for Germans to think about
how their own hunger plan in 1941-1942 was related to the Holodomor, not just in the experience of people, but also in its planning. The Ukrainians who survived
both certainly linked both. So it's an interesting moment to see what's going to happen
in the winter of 2022. But when we speak about empire, it's important to recall that empire is about the denial of the
subjectivity of others. It's about monopolizing agency. We exist and they don't really exist. And so the story of Russian
imperialism in Ukraine is also the story, or more importantly, the story of the Ukrainian reaction. So Ukrainian subjectivity
and all this matters and not just as an answer or
as the answer to a negation of, 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 just
to Cossacks but to Vikings, that will no longer seem like a curiosity, that will seem like something
which is not very surprising. When they claim the Second World War as their own war against the Russians, this is also, probably,
now understandable. But the most interesting
things in the history, frankly, may have to do with the
history of the last 30 years. A lot of what the Ukrainians are doing in their communications has to do 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 who govern Russia are the same elites as 20 years ago. Which, in Ukraine, is not the case. The people who are running Ukraine now tend to be younger than me. I'm not as old as you think, I mean. They're closer to my age than your age, let's put it that way,
but they're young still. (students laughing) They're still young, they're still young. They're still learning,
they're still growing. The people who are running Ukraine now are in their late 30's and
early 40's, just to be clear. And so there's been a
generational turnover, which is, itself, very important. And this is also the generation
which experienced Maidan, participated in it or saw
the consequences of it and that has a lot to do
with the sheer subjectivity of the Ukrainian battlefield response, which is based, not just on a state, which turns out to be far more functional than people thought,
but largely on the basis of what we call civil society, of people in horizontal
organizations filling in the gaps and doing the things
that the state can't do or in a way that the state can't do them. It's also reflected in the
pluralism of the army itself and the army's ability
to take local decisions, but also the various kinds of formations, which appear in the
Ukrainian armed forces. Which include, by the way,
as probably everybody knows, but it's roughly one in six female and includes gay soldiers who actually mark themselves very often as such. Prominent cases, but not the
only cases of the variety, which is possible in a pluralist army. But the war itself is largely
about this subjectivity. The word that Ukrainians
use, as I have found, others might correct me, most often to say what it's about is freedom. Freedom in the positive sense, not just of being free of Russians, but freedom in the sense of
what is going to come next. And the resistance, and this is the point that I meant to get to last
time and didn't get to, the resistance is also
carried out by the people who would ordinarily be
creating the culture. It was two lectures ago that a historian, a colleague of mine, a
guy called Vadym Stetsiuk, was killed in combat
and this death in combat was reported in turn by a
journalist, a very courageous, intelligent journalist
called Vakhtang Kipiani, who's a Ukrainian of Georgian origin. That name, which I very much
hope I have on the sheet, that name, Kipiani, he wrote
the book about Vasyl Stus, who was the poet I cited
at length last time, the most important of
the Ukrainian-Soviet era dissident poets and in that
book, just follow me here, in that book, he devotes a chapter to a man called Viktor Medvedchuk, because this guy,
Medvedchuk, was Stus' lawyer in 1980 when Stus was on trial. And at that time, your
lawyer was not somebody who represented you, he
was someone who stood up and said, "Yeah, he's
guilty, he actually did it and he probably should go to a camp." And Stus, then, did go to a camp and went on a hunger strike
and died five years later. This fellow, Medvedchuk, you're gonna see why I'm mentioning this, this fellow, Medvedchuk,
is Putin's personal friend and he was one of the
candidates in February to be the person that the Russians were gonna drop in to run Ukraine. So there are continuities in
this, not just a personal, literal example, that go back to the 70s. And one way to think about
the moment we're in now, not just in Russian-Ukraine,
but for the whole world, is whether we can ever
actually get out of the 1970s. Whether we get out of the
1970s into something else. Because the 1970s, and
this is a bit of a pivot, but just work with me here. The 1970s are also the origin of all of the literary theory, which is behind Russian propaganda. And one way to understand
this conflict in Ukraine is one version of the 70s against
another version of the 70s where the other version of the 70s is the dissidents, the human rights idea. The notion that you're
bearing responsibility. So there are many ways to criticize the Russian media about Ukraine. You can talk about how it's genocidal and say genocide and all of that's true, whole long list of critiques. But maybe the most
interesting thing about it is the total shunning of responsibility. The idea that the war itself
is just a performance. That we ourselves are not involved. We're not really involved personally. It's a performance, it's a spectacle in which Ukrainians
should die because that... it's like when our soccer team
scores a goal or something. They should die because that's
the way that the world works. That's the way we are entertained. And in this, of course, the people who are urging all of this, I mean, to make the obvious
point, but it's important, they're not themselves ever
going to go to the front. They're not themselves ever
going to go to the front. It's a spectacle. It's a spectacle. Signifier is separated from signified. What is actually true? Everything that really
matters is the medium itself. That version of the 1970s versus
the other version of 1970s, which is the dissident version, which says you're always bearing 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 some responsibility anyway, even when the conditions are against you. And this is, by the way,
one of the things that, when I did talk to
Zelenskyy back in September, we spent a lot of time talking about. So on the other side,
of course, it's the case and I put some of the names on the list, because I can't mention all of them and even that list would
be very incomplete. But on the other side,
Ukrainian cultural figure after Ukrainian cultural
figure is killed in this war, some in bombing and shelling
but many of them in combat. Many of them in combat,
from famous movie actors to multiple ballet dancers, to athletes, and of course, journalists,
humanists, scientists. Most recently, the conductor
of the Kherson Orchestra was executed for refusing
to conduct a concert for the Russians, which of
course, recalls Leontovych, the Ukrainian composer
I mentioned earlier, who was executed because he
represented Ukrainian music. I could mention a Russian cultural figure who was killed in Ukraine. There is one person I can think of and no doubt there are more, but the one who I can think of, and people will no doubt help me in the sea of emails I'll get about this, but the one who I can
think of is Oksana Baulina. She was a Russian reporter who was killed by Russian shelling in
the Podil district of Kyiv and the way she was killed is
by what's called a double tap. A double tap is when you
fire an artillery shell and then you wait for the
rescue workers to come and then you fire on
them, that's a double tap. It's a way that journalists
often die, that's how she died. And so she died in Podil. She was a Russian, she
did die in this war. She is a known cultural figure, she died. Of course, someone who opposed the war. 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
now to the 8th century, 9th century, beginning of the class. It was the port area of the Khazars before the Vikings even showed up. The Vikings controlled in 900, which is a sign that
they and not the Khazars are the ones who are in charge of Kyiv. If you walk down to Podil
from the center of Kyiv, there's a beautiful route downwards, there's 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 the site of markets, which were dominated by Jews and Poles. Was it made Russian by shelling it? Was it made Russian by the
death of a Russian journalist? So Podil was there before any of this. Podil was there a long time ago and it's been a theme of this class that nations are real political entities in the 20th century, the 21st
century, the 19th century. They're formed by all kinds
of contact along the way. But there are some things
which are actually, authentically old. I ended the class last time by reading Julia Moskovski's poem about the problematic
politically incorrect verses. But, of course, the thing
about that poem is that it's not actually the
poem that's problematic. It's we who are problematic. And the poem is perfectly elegant. It's the we, we who are problematic. This thought that this is leading me to is the way the poem answers itself. Because the premise of the poem is that this is all we have to offer, these awkward words, but
that's not true at all. The example of Ukrainians resisting this war offers much more than that and it offers much more
than that even in poetry. When Julia answered me
on, I can't even tell you what platform, 'cause 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 of the Ukrainians who are continuing to
create in times of war," which is an acknowledgement
of an important point. That it's not just that
the war is going on, the culture is going on the entire time, which leads me to where I began and where I'm gonna end,
I promise, very soon. On Sunday, I was at a
concert in Carnegie Hall, which is not something I do all the time. You have to make me, but I have kids. You can imagine, it was three hours long. But I really wanted to be
there, it was very interesting. Among other things, the performers were the Ukrainian's Children's Choir, which is called Shchedryk. And Shchedryk is named after
a song called, "Shchedryk," but Shchedryk is an interesting word, because Shchedryk involves an adjective which can mean both
generous and bountiful. A person is generous, but
a situation is bountiful. And that it's generous
that gives me a cue, which I need to use to thank
all of the Ukrainian historians and also the Ukrainian listeners. This class has turned
out to have been listened to a lot of people in Ukraine. So I'm very glad that you've done so and that you've indulged
my interpretations. But the blurriness between generosity and bountiful is interesting, because it points us back
to a pre-Christian era where in a pagan world where the deities are present in the world, there isn't really a line
between generous and bountiful. The world is gonna be bountiful, because the deities are generous. And that's why you perform certain rituals and that's why you celebrate the season. So that song, the (vocalizes
"Carol of the Bells") that song, which we have as
an American Christmas Carol, is, of course, you know
where I'm going with this. It's a Ukrainian song and the
reason why it's so different from all the American Christmas carols is because it arises from
Ukrainian polyphonic singing. From multi-part harmony,
Ukrainian singing. And the song itself, the
song that Mykola Leontovych took almost 20 years to adapt is ancient. It's ancient. And it's not about winter actually, it's actually about spring. Because if you're a pagan, I mean, if you're a sensible person actually living in the world, when does the year actually begin? It begins when things start
growing out of the ground. And it begins when the
swallows come and sing. It begins when the first lambs are born, which is February or March, which is what the song is actually about. It's about those things. So this song, which was adapted and played in Carnegie Hall a century ago and then played again
on Sunday, is ancient. It's pre-Christian, it
goes back before 988. It's actually about spring. It's about fertility,
it's about prosperity, it's about love, it's about 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
your wife is beautiful. (Timothy and students chuckling) Things are going really well for you. You're gonna make lots of money this year. The farm's going really
well and by the way, your wife is beautiful.
(students chuckling) And what it literally says is that she's dark-browed, which is beautiful. That's a beautiful woman in Ukraine. It's a woman who has dark eyebrows. It's a song about spring. It's a song which we
think of as about winter, which is about spring, which I close on, because I just wanna suggest
that sometimes that things that seem like an end can
actually be a beginning. Thanks. (students applauding) (gentle music)
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I watched all the lectures as they came online. Brilliant class. It enlights a lot about Europe as a whole.
Snyder's class is a brilliant, must watch - all 23 lectures. Also download the reading list for further reflection. Snyder and Stephen Kotkin (in separate interviews and works) completely disassemble the Russian and western supporters of Russian imperialism.
Such a good class! Kind if sad this will be the last lecture.
Great series. Highly recommend the watch.
However the title is a bit long, maybe include the original title and add that into a comment instead?
I watched the entire series up until now. I really enjoyed all the lectures, but I really enjoyed the last 4, particularly the one about the Maidan Revolution.