Ukraine: From Propaganda to Reality

[Applause] thank you very much uh one of my favorite things in public speaking is when someone else chooses the title if you if you choose the title yourself it's as though you already know what you're going to say when someone else chooses the title it gives you a moment to reflect and and sometimes reflect deeply in this case the the title Ukraine from propaganda to reality has indeed caused me to reflect deeply and what I'd like to do in the next 40 or 45 minutes is share some of these reflections with you now these will be reflections about Ukraine they will be reflections about Russia about Europe about the state of contemporary politics but in the end and I hope a bit throughout they'll also be reflections about us about what it means for us that we would start with propaganda and only then struggle our way towards reality what it is about the present moment when a title like this could attract a crowd like you to listen to this lecture so as Paul was kind enough to say I am a historian and in many ways a very traditional and conservative and old-fashioned one so before I get to the propaganda which there is going to be plenty I'm going to start with a tiny bit of historical reality a tiny a tiny bit of centering of our attention on Ukraine now all all European nations if they're respectable have have thousand-year histories that's a nice round number if you can't make it to 2,000 you know like the Greeks or 6,000 like the Jews it settle for 1000 a thousand year history sounds very nice all European nations have a story about this Ukraine has a story as well it's a story of the capital city which is Kiev I'm going to try to bring across to you some of the central dates some of the central events just not because we can really do a thousand years of history in three minutes but because we might be able to convey a sense of what's familiar with unfamiliar what we know what we don't know the ways that we can get into this history and the ways that it might remain a little bit opaque so the the city of Kiev the rulers of Kiev converted the Christianity a 988 which is a conventional date for the beginning of history because in general Christians wrote things down we're losing the habit now admittedly but for a long time we wrote things down one of our hallmarks um the what was this Kiev it's a controversial and important question because many people have strong opinions about this all the way to the present day so let me tell you what it was historically um the the Vikings who generally have a hand in anything interesting in medieval and European we're trying at this time to establish a trade route from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea along the way if you can remember your East European geography there is the NEPA doted over and in the city of Kiev for the Vikings working their way from north to south this was a Trading Post the Vikings have a bad name of course when we think of Vikings we think of rape and pillage and other things that are preoccupations but let's remember the Vikings had other preoccupations they were trying to re-establish European trade very sensible thing to be doing what they found in Kiev was a decaying ha not known as has Aria run by people called the Hazare's who were doing something very interesting at the time I recommended as a parlor game if you have time this afternoon they were trying to you're laughing you don't even what the games going to be you must be really hard up for games which is not how I remember this town the I spent a lot of my teenage years here again you don't even know what you're laughing at in your laughing that's it so nice what the what the Haws ours did at Wright at around this time was trying to decide which monotheistic religion they were going to convert to they invited in scholars of from from the Judaic tradition the Christian tradition the Muslim tradition they had debates and in the end they decide to convert a Christian a ISM um which means despite what we learned in school or Hebrew school or whatever might be there actually was a Jewish state between the fall of the temple and an Israel um but you can draw conclusions you like from this but as soon as they converted to Judaism they they disappeared from history and were immediately swallowed up by this new Viking entity which came to be known by the name of a ruse now why am i stressing all this colorful detail it's because I want you to see that this word ruse which you all know because you live in the world where was a country called Russia that this word a ruse is a very old word at the beginning they had nothing to do with Russia or Ukraine because there was no Russia in Ukraine there were no Russians or Ukrainians the people like that weren't going to exist for almost another thousand years ruse was initially this very interesting amalgamation of Vikings and Hazare's and surrounding Slavic speaking peoples to whose culture the the Viking leader is slowly assimilated after they converted to Christianity okay so that's that's where ruse begins in an interesting sort of way another date that I would I would call to your attention is 12:41 1241 is the year that Europe almost ceased to exist 12:41 is the year when the the Mongol horde horde is such an unpleasant word right again the Mongols have a bad name like the Vikings we imagine them destroying things wiping out armies okay it's all true but like the Vikings they were doing something which is historically very sensible and not so foreign to the way many of us live our lives especially those of you who are asked to give money to this festival what they were doing was they were trying to establish a trade route they were trying to establish a trade route from Mongolia to Europe admittedly along the way you know there were certain regimes which were which they found to be problematic and they destroyed them all but what they were really trying to do is to establish a trade route and they got as far if those of you who have read you know the big classic histories of Europe or remember they got as far as Eastern Europe they defeated polish armies Hungarian armies and they also wiped out ruse the reason why they the reason why we don't all remember the Batu Haughton who was the commander of these armies or worship him for that matter that's also possible the reason we don't all remember him is because of an accident of succession which caused he and his armies to go back to Mongolia for a funeral if they hadn't done that no doubt those little horses would have been watering themselves in the sin and European history would never exist in the Chicago humanities festival would have entirely different foci than it does and it does now so 1241 is a turning point in history of Europe but also in the history of Kiev of this Kiev in ruse state the next state that I'll try to dodge retention is 1569 now 1569 is an interesting moment it is the time of the creation of what was then the largest state in Europe something called the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth a big state which includes what's now the Baltic States most of them Poland Belarus Ukraine a bit of Russia a very a very large state and the reason I mentioned this entity is because it helps us to see a kind of continuity right so Roose Falls to pieces in 1241 and when things fall to pieces in the past often you just sort of jumped forward a few centuries until things get better right I mentioned the temple that just taken us an example okay so the temple Falls you jump forward a couple thousand years until things get better you call the middle part the Diaspora you kind of bracket it you forget about it right didn't really have it um that is often how we think about history and I'm trying to stress there's a certain amount of continuity so when Roose falls apart um not everything disintegrates the culture remains they had a very interesting language of law which was called Chancery Slavonic it came from something called Church Slavonic which was invented by cyril and methodius for religious purposes of conversion they the ruse had law which is no small thing right ruse had law it had law codes and these things went to where they went to Lithuania they went to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania the Grand Dukes of Lithuania who were fur-clad pagans took on all of this for themselves as they took on the lands of what had been the Grand Duchy of Lithuania expanded southwards towards the Black Sea and itself became the inheritor of Roose territory early and intellectually right of most of the territory of Roose of the western part the more eastern part remained under Mongol control and that more eastern part where the main town was something called Moscow becomes the origins of a state called Muscovy and later at the Russian Empire so Roose gets divided up and the westernmost parts fall into Lithuania Lithuania it's an intern joint joins Poland and in 1569 you have this grand this grand European state um so I I mentioned that because also within this European state Kiev takes part in all of the major European traditions all of the things that we think about as being the hallmarks of European intellectual or cultural social history the the Gothic even a little bit but the Renaissance the Reformation the Counter Reformation the Enlightenment all of these things whether its architectural II intellectually theologically the territories are now Ukraine pass through them okay so another date then just as I as we I'm not quite doing this in three minutes but I'm trying another date that I would ask you to keep in mind is 1863 now by the middle of the 19th century the polish-lithuanian Commonwealth has ceased to exist which means that all of its territories have been divided among more modern empires an Austrian one a German one a Russian one 1863 is around the time that a ukrainian national movement has begun to assert itself first in the russian empire then in them then in the austrian empire that people who speak your crane are divided first in a city which you might appear here up in the news called hot cave later moving west towards Kiev which is now the capital and finally moving further west towards the view and what's now Western Ukraine this national movement was very typical of you of you of European national movements in the 19th century I will say something very typical of historians when I say that all of these national movements are essentially new like a trademark of national histories is that you say that you're old because you're new there's only one exception to this or one major exception which is us Americans are actually an the nation but we claim to be new right we are we are the midlife crisis of Nations we are the nation that drives the convertible right with a toupee sort of flopping in the wind that that is that is us because in fact we are old I mean America has a mass blow community at you know at over two centuries old is actually rather old the European nations interestingly except for the British and maybe the French are new compared to us but we don't like to admit that do we right and neither do they so it's a kind of it's a kind of interesting agreement that we have to kind of lie but then a lot of relationships work like that and you know especially long-distance ones right and our relationship with Europe is a long-distance relationship so it could go on for a while anyway the the point of this is that Ukraine in the 19th century was rather typical there were intellectuals who were trying to consolidate a language use it as an instrument for gathering the masses around them hoping for an opportunity in politics and this opportunity in politics was also in a way typical for Ukraine as for Eastern Europe the opportunity seemed to be the first world war the first world war was the great Zura the great turning point the great moment where things were possible it suddenly weren't possible before right the result of the defeat of the Habsburg the Austrian monarchy the defeat of Germany the collapse of the Russian Empire meant that new nation-states could be formed right and this was American policy remember Wilson Woodrow Wilson and his 14 points this was everybody's policy at the time it seemed that national self-determination was both politically and morally that the natural response to the end of empire so we had to tackle Slovakia we had a Poland right nation-states like Romania were enlarged Europe becomes this this new scatter plot of nation states but not Ukraine not Ukraine and this is where things become a bit interesting because it's not the case that Ukrainians didn't suffer and die in wars of Independence on the contrary they suffered and died in rather large numbers and extremely complicated Wars so the city of Kiev for example was occupied 12 times 12 times maybe 13 over the course of the the civil wars that followed the first world war very complicated stuff involving Russia conservatives involving the Red Army involving a couple of brands of Ukrainian Patriots involving the Polish army which actually got as far in May 1920 as as Kiev they did something very beautiful by the way when they got so the poles as you know were excellent horsemen and when they got to Kiev they staged something which was sort of typical of Polish foreign policy then now and forever which is that they march their horses down the main avenue of U of Kiev which have you ever been there is called the clash tactic they March the horses all the way down right is beautiful fantastic and seemingly endless and the reason why was seemingly endless was that they made a circle and and they came back around right so the peer that there was this massive Polish army but in fact it was like a film going over over and over again they were quickly driven out okay my polish friends I love you all I know you're out here okay so but the point the larger point is that Ukraine was it Ukraine was in a complicated position after the first war there are many claimants upon it polish as well as Ukrainian as well as communists as well as Imperial Russian and at the end of it all and let's pick as a date here 1922 when the Soviet Union was formed at the end of it all most of what is now Ukraine was became part of the Soviet Union so here Ukrainian history tilts off a little bit you know in a certain easterly direction away say from polish history towards a point which I would define in the year 1933 now this is this is the the darkest point and maybe the most important one maybe the most significant if we're trying to understand the politics of myth now in 1933 two things are happening that are very relevant for the lands that are now Ukraine the first is that we are at the height of Stalin's attempt to make a revolution inside the Soviet Union to make what Stalin called a second revolution a social revolution not the political revolution of 1917 but the social revolution the economic revolution which would actually push the Soviet Union and its peoples ahead onto the right track of history turn the Soviet Union from a backward country as they saw it into a progressive industrial country which meant taking the peasants who are the majority of the population off the land getting them into the factory is getting them or their children into the factories if not into the gulag and turning what had been productive very often as in Ukraine privately owned farmland into state-owned cooperatives this was a very difficult process because you know as Midwesterners don't have to be told people who own private lands tend to want to keep it and don't look too kindly upon it being taken away so there was a certain amount of resistance to this the resistance was met with overwhelming force and indeed a campaign of starvation collectivization brought about food shortages all over the soviet union but those food shortages that hunger was channeled politically into certain places and Ukraine was the place to which it was most obviously channeled as a result of this more than 3 million people starve to death in Ukraine in the course of 1932 and 1933 now this is part of it there's a policy here I mean there's a punishment but there's a policy when the policy is something that's Stalin called internal colonization that you make you exploit what you have inside your own country in order to move the entire country in direction you want at the same time that Stalin distinctive internal colonization someone else is also thinking of colonizing Ukraine in a slightly different way and that is out of Hitler so 1933 is also the year that Hitler comes to power and Hitler comes to power with a program of I mean precisely Levens Wow right living space what is living space mean geographically it means above all Ukraine Ukraine from Hitler's point of view as interestingly from Stalin's is the very rich very fertile bit of Ukrainian territory European territory which is important to be controlled because if you control it you can be self-sufficient and you can be self-sufficient then you can become a great power it's about breaking out of just being a German nation-state into becoming some kind of grand new German Empire and along the way German planners imagine that when they move East when they invade the Soviet Union when they destroy it in the first winter after the war they are going to starve tens of millions tens of millions of citizens to death so the year 1933 I mentioned symbolically as a way to emphasize that Ukraine is in the middle of not one but two inter European or intra European colonization projects I can't tell the whole story here it's it's in the book blood lands which Paul was kind enough to mention but the result of this overlap is that Ukraine was the most dangerous place in the world to be between 1933 and 1945 more people were deliberately killed in Ukraine than in any other country during during that during that period in the famine in Soviet terror in the German Holocaust the Ukraine of course is the homeland of actually most of the Jews who are alive in North America or Israel today are descended from territories that are now Ukraine so the the Holocaust the the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war and of course military casualties themselves this was the most dangerous place in the world to be now 1991 I'm getting towards the present is another moment where Ukraine is at the center of history the Soviet Union was created largely because of Ukraine right the Soviet Union if we remember we called it Russia but it wasn't Russia it was a union of a number of nominally federal units right um Russia was one of them Ukraine was a second most important and there was Belarus Kazakhstan the Central Asian republics Azerbaijan the Caucasian republics the Baltics so when the Soviet Union was assembled it was assembled because there was a Ukrainian national question the reason it wasn't just some vague socialist thing with no internal boundaries was because the people who created that lended above all understood after the first world war after the civil wars that there really was a Ukrainian national question and you had to do something about it so what they did was they established this ukrainian republic which meant that in 1991 when the Soviet Union fell apart there were lines on the map which defined what the new states could be right and one of those new states was going to be Ukraine so just as you the Soviet was created by a kind of union between Russia and Ukraine it also was dissolved when the leaders of Russia and Ukraine and also Belarus agreed in December 1991 that was going to be dissolved now the the next moment when Ukraine is at the center of European history is is is today but before we get to today I want to just point out a couple of things that I hope Jen are very general things that we can see from from my my 17 minute introduction to Ukrainian history the the first is that Ukraine is very much at the center of European history and if it has a problem it's not that it's not in European history if there's a bit too much European history right so take the case of both Hitler and Stalin right it's a typical European experience too to have some contact with German occupation it's another typical European experience to have some contact with Soviet rule Ukraine is characteristic in that it has both right or take colonization that's a very typical of European history right that's what Europeans did for a couple of centuries but to be colonized inside Europe is a bit more right that's a bit more intense that's something that's something new different but it's not less European history in a way it's it's it's it's it's more so that that's the first thing that I would want to stress here um the second thing that I want to stress here is that all the way that all these things that I have been telling you about can accumulate in a certain kind of of myth so we all have we all have myths I'm not going to bore you with what I think America's myths are I'm not the historian of America so I'm pretty ruthless with them but we all have myths about the but right I'm not paid to reproduce them or challenge them so I can just say whatever I want um but that we all have historical myths and this particular story notice that everything I talked about was based on more or less on territory I was talking about the territory around the city of Kiev and that is way that is the way the historical imagination of Ukrainians basically works that there is a territory and we were here the whole time now that might not seem so you know conceptually interesting and worth pointing out I noted though because that's not how all nations think in fact there's a particular contrast between the Ukrainian cede the way they see their history that we were always here in this place with the way that Russian history is organized so the way that Russian history or the Russian myth is organized goes like this we started in Kiev but then our whole history somehow to Moscow but nevertheless it still somehow incorporates Kiev and Kiev is a Russian city right so it's much it's abstract it's not about how we were always here it's a it's abstract it requires a certain kind of narrative which jumps around over thousands of miles in space right but it's a very successful narrative I'm sure many of you studied it in college not realizing that it's you know a myth which is it just as goofy as other myths are so there's a difference in a way that Russia and Ukraine see a common history and that's that's very important to to the present okay um the the this brings us up to 2014 that we're where the revolution where the crisis in Ukraine started in 2013 was not in the streets of Kiev and it was not in the Kremlin it started with a different understanding of Europe if you are a student or a small businessman or something like this in Ukraine in Kiev you understand Europe in the following way Europe has somehow been part of our history this is not disputable right and Europe today means the European Union which means intern bureaucratic predictability and the rule of law which are the things which Ukrainians do not have and that is why the association agreement which you know from our distant perspective might just seem like some boring trade pact but that is why the association agreement with the European Union meant so much to so many Ukrainians last year because they saw it as a pathway out of the problems they have which which have to do chiefly with corruption into a rule of law on simplifying a lot but from a contemporary Russian point of view Europe can look very different Europe can look like something where you can ask the question are we European or not and we have polling data on this by the way this is not just me being like historically mythical right now the number of Russians who say they are European when asked is down to 8% whereas in Ukraine it's it's edging towards 80% which is a big difference right that's a substantial difference so so you can can ask but regardless of that in Russia you can always ask the question like are we European or are we Asian right this goes back to the 19th century or even before and Ukraine that's not really a question and from a Russian point of view where you're a great power you can look at Europe and you can say you can I don't think it's right when something only gets smart but you can look at Europe and say we're a great power they're great power their arrival their adversary and Ukraine you simply can't do that you're too small you need Europe you need something but if you're Russia you can decide that Europe is a rival and you can decide that you can you can overcome this rival and you can criticize this rival which is what starts to happen in 2013 as being decadent inside Russia there's a campaign which begins in in 2013 which characterizes European the European civilisation of the European Union as decadent and this is tied into the the Russian campaign against homosexuality by the way because Europe is characterized as being decadent which means homosexual or homosexual which means decadent and so this plays into domestic politics right wing domestic politics in Russia as well so you can see that I just note this to point out some divergences which actually precede the crisis and in some sense explain it so the crisis as one watched it unfold was a protest in Kiev the Ukrainian government was going to sign this association agreement at the last minute that changed its mind after the president spoke with the Russian President Vladimir Putin probably there was a threat involved I think I know what that threat was but in any event the there was a radical shift in position Ukrainian students began to protest students because they're the ones who have the most to gain from predictability in the future they actually came out because I mean this is a very sort of nice modern moment they came out because of a Facebook post by a young journalist who happens to be of Muslim Afghan origin but is one of the leading Ukrainian investigative journalists in the country he posted a Facebook post which said more or less if you don't like this don't just click like but go out to the Independence Square and then people came and that's how it started then a couple of days after that those students were beaten by the police which led to the expansion of the protest interestingly enough this protest which was started by this young student this young man of I shouldn't be calling people on their thirty students anymore this young man of Afghan origin the people who joined the protest after that many of them were veterans of the Afghan war which is an interesting sort of irony along with other adults the the protest then became multi-generational and the idea was to protect our children but the use of violence actually meant that the protests spread across not only generations but across regions across political affiliations the gathering on Independence Square which is known in Ukrainian interestingly from an Arabic or Persian word as the Maidan the the gather on Independence Square soon became thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands this the Russian policy engaged here tried to get Ukrainian authorities to stop the protests promised loans and so on the protests would stop um this led to repressive laws which banned freedom of expression it led to a horrible series of shootings in in February of 2013 and finally it led to a revolution now I want to explain what I think this revolution really means I want to explain what I think is happening and also what that what what this war that we see before our eyes and Ukraine means before I do this I want to explain to you what I think the revolution meant for Ukrainians because the mode that's the most important thing they're the ones who suffered and in many cases sadly died or are still suffering and will still die there's of course a war going on right now shots are being fired and shells are being exchanged right now as I speak to you people are like people are dying as I speak to you there's a humanitarian crisis involving millions of people which is unfolding in southeastern Ukraine right now as I speak to you so how Ukrainians saw it is the most important thing I want to make sure we get that clear before we move on to the more conceptual stuff from from the point of view of Ukrainian politics the most important issue the central issue the issue is getting from what I call all the GAR kacal pluralism to real pluralism so Ukraine is an oligarchical not just in the sense that we're becoming one right I mean this way Ukraine is our future it really is that's not a joke actually like if you want to see what America could look like like read Ukrainian Russian fiction you know and then close your eyes a tiny bit and you're almost there um that it really is a country where there you know that there are a half-dozen oligarchical clans who control a huge proportion of the national wealth and the question the real question there is and this is a question that America faced of course right 130 years ago how you get from that to real pluralism not just competition among clans but actual Democratic competition among larger pluralist groups and that's what this revolution was actually about that's what the rule of law means it means that if you're a little guy you know if you're the if you're the little person and you have a small business and you get stopped because the oligarchs are stronger than the law then you're upset right so this was a middle class revolution it was a kind of revolution that many of you people in fact some of you actually did take part in it's the kind of revolution where corporate lawyers literally threw Molotov cocktails and not one corporate lawyer but multiple corporate lawyers during multiple Molotov cocktails on multiple nights over and over again it was a middle class revolution about something like the rule of law and predictability against oligarchy and unpredictability now this is this I stress this also because it's a difference with Russia in Russia the current regime for better or for worse and there are their ups and downs to each side succeeded in crushing post communist oligarchy and bringing it to heel and in creating the centralised state in which there are clans but all the clans are beholden at least the time being to the presidency that is to the regime of President Putin this means that civil society in Ukraine or a revolution in Ukraine or protests in Ukraine was a threat not only to the Ukrainian order but a threat in a different way to the Russian order because if you're trying to centralize power then you don't like then you don't like civil society in fact you might like it even less and that's the simplest connection the simplest reason why Russia invade intervenes or had intervene and Ukrainian in Ukrainian revolution but what what I what I want to try to suggest is that is that the issues are much deeper and much more interesting than than than this what I want to try to suggest is that following the track of events we also have a track we can call it vaguely propaganda we have a track of a Russian response to those events which is in itself interesting and important and ultimately maybe more important for us as we try to define ourselves ok so let me try to be more specific about all of this um it's it's it's certainly true that one can one can continue the story of the revolution on the Maidan after the Revolution that president who refused to sign the association agreement that president under whose auspices several dozen people were were shot he flees to Russia there were then free and fair democratic presidential elections in Ukraine in May then a couple of weeks ago there were free and fair parliamentary elections in Ukraine Ukraine is moving towards a kind of much more clearly Western normality at least on the political level the three leading parties in the parliamentary elections all all pro-western so that that has been resolved at some level of normality but at the same time as they were holding these democratic elections which is no mean trick they're also fighting a war Russia intervened in in Ukraine in a double way it invaded occupied and annexed the Crimean Peninsula which is the southernmost territory of Ukraine and it is currently fighting a proxy and real war in the southeastern Ukraine in regions or Oh blasts known as Donetsk and Lugansk that is the war which is going on today Russian troops are on the roads as we speak along with Russian tanks armored and heavy weapons so that is the story as it were but what is the story about this story and now we're getting to the real subject and now we're going to the thoughts which I want to try to share with you in the next 15 or 20 minutes what what how what can we say about what's happening what is interesting about what's happening I want to say a word about tactics I want to say word about strategy I want to say it's a word about philosophy and what I want to try to convince you of in all this that is that what the stakes of what is happening are not just some you know some minor struggle in a faraway country of which we know little the stakes are intellectually and morally and politically much much greater than that okay let me try to convince you of that I want to start at the bottom I want to start by talking about tactics tactics in the military sense of the word because what Russia has done in its war in Ukraine is tactically innovative and interesting and it's proven this hard to be rather effectively rather effective what I would call it is a reverse asymmetrical warfare okay so asymmetrical warfare means the weapons of the weak if you were a partisan army or if you are civilians if you were on the weaker side if you were terrorists you're fit and you're facing some big conventional army asymmetrical warfare is what you do right you do things which are not so kosher you do things which break the laws of war you disguise yourself as civilians you hide amongst civilians you break the rules on the battlefield you fight quick engagements and you run that's asymmetrical warfare right not agreeing you're going to play by the rules because and you have an argument why that's okay which is that you're small and weak and your opponent is big and strong what Russia has done is it's reversed this Russia is big and strong at least compared to Ukraine the Russian army compared to Ukrainian Ukranian army is overwhelmingly strong and yet and yet the Russians have chosen to fight as it were an asymmetrical war inside Ukraine rather than declaring war and just overwhelming the opponent which they which presumably they could do they have chosen to fight and they clearly plan to fight this odd reverse asymmetrical war so let me give you some examples how do they invade Crimea they sent troops in unmarked uniforms right which is both asymmetrical warfare when you send troops and you say that they're not yours and they're from the civilians or from the local population there's no invasion going on which is of course what they said but also it's I mean the kind of thing only a state could do only a state can produce thousands of identical unmarked uniforms right and thousands of identical unmarked camouflage personnel carriers and tanks right so it's it's this reverse asymmetry we're not we're not going to take responsibility but clearly a state is is behind it the way the war has been prosecuted in the southeast or is being prosecuted is very similar Russia is present they've intervened massively with their own troops when necessary but generally what they do is they train people in in tactics of partisan warfare warfare so the local separatists trained and accompanied by Russians are fighting wars from cities right which is the classic partisan tactic because then you draw the fire of your opponent into the cities which alienates the civilian population brings them towards your side that's what partisans have to do but the interesting thing is presumably Russia doesn't have to do that it's just doing it right it's choosing to present itself as the weaker side it's choosing to pretend that there's no war on right right now literally everyone knows that there are I mean literally everyone knows even the people who deny it no in fact they know it best of all that there are Russian troops inside Ukraine that there's Russian armor in Ukraine that there's more now than there was when I started my lecture everybody literally everybody knows that and yet they will not stay will not only not say it they will go to extraordinarily convoluted lis links to deny it which is interesting what does it all mean I mean I think what it means is that Russia is is is attaching itself to the story that they are on the stay or the small guy against the weak guy that really what's going on here is not a war of Russia against Ukraine right which could be seem like something unfair and illegal not to mention brutal unnecessary and counterproductive but what's really going on is a Russian defensive struggle against the overwhelming might of the United States which is a theme to which I'm going to return so I think their their tactics are related to that overall way of presenting things now as they do this they have an interesting way of talking about their strategic goal the way they talk about their strategic goal is to describe it as though it's already happened which is the end of the ukrainian state in five or six different ways russian authorities have talked about the non-existence of the ukrainian state they've said that Russia and Ukraine are really one nation a pointer which has a lot of evidence to contrary that there never has been a ukrainian state that there was a ukrainian state but that it ceased to exist which is how they explained whether or not obeying treaties right we signed it with Ukraine but Ukraine no longer exists therefore the tree no longer binds us all this business about you may have heard it about novorossiya that's that is a that is a historical claim to someone else's territory when you make a historical claim you're denying the reality of statehood the idea of a Russian world leukemia is an ethnic or cultural claim to someone else's territory if you say there's a Russian world where Russia gets to rule that's like saying there's an English world right so we would then be part of England which in some respects might be better in some respects might be worse but you see how absurd it is when I put it that way right we know that that culture doesn't actually match up with political boundaries once you say that it does you're denying the reality of political boundaries you're denying the existence of States so the the goal as its announced in all these ways is a destruction of the Ukrainian state now this itself is really interesting because I think it's it's it suggests surgery it's an element of a much larger strategy which has to do precisely with disintegration a race strategy want to be taken seriously even though it's unconventional and new and therefore easy to dismiss I would call the strategy strategic relativism and its principle is this if you are absolutely not that strong which Russia isn't is not on a world scale if you have real demographic and technological limits if a lot of your financial power is based on fossil fuels necessarily finite um you are limited compared to let's say the United States or the European Union or most terrifyingly China you have real limits how do you overcome those limits you can't make yourself absolutely stronger but you can make other people relatively weaker and I think it's that insight which is at the root of the new Russian strategy of strategic relativism what you do since other people's power is based upon various kinds of connections and you are alone you're a tyranny operating alone you're flexible you're fast you can do what you want what you do is you try to break down those connections and once you once one sees this as an overall strategy an approach to the world then a lot of the pieces begin to line up and make sense so at the biggest level the strategic relativism is of the transatlantic relationship it's about the relationship the united states at the european union something which can be attacked for example by leaking telephone conversations of high american officials where they talk out of context about the european union it's something which can be weakened by the propaganda of a geopolitical struggle which i mentioned before where america is put behind everything which happens in ukraine which confuses some europeans in good faith usually and bad because if we're behind it all therefore it's not their responsibility they don't have to do anything and maybe we should be blamed for all of our imperialism so the over that the highest level of the disintegration is the us-eu relationship the next level is the european union itself which has already mentioned has been characterized for more than a year now as decadent and that's a serious word right i mean when i say decadent you're probably thinking of fat room and emperors surrounded by their harems eating grapes right I know you are I know you are in this sort of pleasant like that but what decadence actually means is decay it means destruction from within it means rot it's a story with an end so when you say that something else something is decadent you mean that it's coming to an end and that's exactly what is meant by this Russian description of Europe that it can't go on and Russian policy is designed to bring that end about as quickly as possible the destruction of the Ukrainian state is a disruption of Europe and of itself because the whole European order is based upon territorial integrity and also because the project of European integration is based upon the project of integrating not people's but States so if you can break States up then you can also break up the project of a larger Union but it goes a little bit deeper than that the Russian campaign against Ukraine has been accompanied and this is no coincidence whatsoever by a very interesting Russian recruitment of the European far-right now on the surface you could say well this is because Putin has an anti ham it had a homosexual campaign and they don't like gays and so on there are some ideological overlaps but the real substantial overlap is that the European far-right by which I mean the populist and the people to the right of the populist the fascists and the Nazis are all against the European Union project as is Putin and so they now have a very substantial relationship very substantial which involves for example members of the European far-right going to monitor the elections which were just held in in in in the occupied parts of Ukraine um so and of course what all this is ultimately about with Europe and I'm going to say the magic word now is energy Russian power depends upon the sale of hydrocarbons the European Union is aware of this and as the European Union will eventually get it together and have some kind of long-term energy policy as Germany Italy Luxembourg Switzerland Sweden Norway and so on they will not well Norway will because they've got tons of hydrocarbons but the individual European countries will always be very weak compared to Russia they will always be dependent on Russian natural gas whereas the European Union will not which is why I has to go now from this point of view the destruction of Ukraine which I've already mentioned becomes part of a much larger view of things which I'm going to edge towards calling a philosophy the the attempt to break up the Maidan the attempt to break up the revolution um begins to seem not just like an attempt to break up something which might be threatened if if it were exported and copied in Russia which of course it is a threat for that reason but also as a deeper kind of threat representing something which I would call civil society the the underlying philosophy and I'm going to edge towards talking about this philosophy more explicitly but the underlying philosophy of the strategic relativism is that there aren't any real connections they don't really exist they might seem to exist but they don't really exist there's some hidden hand behind it all in fact it's if you listen to Putin carefully or not so carefully it's an American hidden hand behind it all there aren't really people who would go out and take risks and suffer and spend a night and on cold pavement in December there aren't really such people they're only paid henchmen to the CIA right um they're only paid henchmen to the CIA there are not and there isn't really a European Union either there's just an American hegemon who would likes things to be this way right so there's no one is ever acting according to their own view of the world there's there are larger plots in in the background now where this comes problem you know whether it has to do with with Putin CIA trace at KGB sorry not CIA training czars I know KGB training where this cover that comes from Soviet experience I don't know but I think it is a way of seeing the world and the the terrifying thing about seeing the world this way is that even though it's not true it is enforceable it can be made to be true right it's not true that there are no free associations it's not true that you're all here because you know you were paid by Exxon Mobil or whatever it's not true that I'm here because I'm part of some you know lurching American conspiracy we're all here for our own individual reasons and together we make up a group in that civil society and something rather wonderful and beautiful um it's not true that there's no such thing but you can make a world in which there's no such thing you can break these things up from the inside or from the outside that can be done that's what Soviet history basically shows so even if you're wrong in your diagnosis you can still be as it were correct in your in your prognosis you can you can break up civil society and that is a way of understanding I think at the deepest level what is actually happening because I think what is actually happening is based upon a difference in fundamentally in philosophy I want to close by trying to define what I think that difference in philosophy really is I would call it um and you can just like all of my fancy words like the strategic relativism and the reverse asymmetry and so on you can just forget all of those right I'm just but they're just labels of arguments which I'm trying to make clear I would call this a kind of applied post-modernism okay what do I mean by post-modernism aside from like the dominant trend of my education you know in the 1980s what do I mean by post-modernism I mean a certain ways of seeing reality as as being fragmented where words and things don't have any necessary connection to each other and that's all fine and good so let me give you an example you all know let's say you're looking at an advertisement for a display at a grocery store and there are beautiful pears and olive oil and wines and there's a Sancerre that you really like and so on and then at the bottom of that beautiful picture of food you see a little thing which says for illustration purposes only now think about what that really means it doesn't mean for illustration purpose it's not actually an illustration what for illustration purposes means is that this stuff is not in the store right not that it is in the store or like if you okay so let's say you like to watch ads for BMW convertibles and they go up you know they go up mountains and then they go up buildings they go all kinds of a possible stuff right and the first thing it says is a professional driver on closed course come on and then the second thing it says is something like for illustration purposes only or demonstration purposes only which means precisely the opposite it's not illustrating anything this can't actually happen it's not demonstrate anything either it can't actually happen right this is the postmodern world we live in that we take for granted that these words mean the opposite of what they seem - okay now a couple of weeks ago there was a mass propaganda campaign which which which most likely came from Russia in which thousands people around the world received emails with atrocity photos having to do with the supposed Ukrainian mistreatment of prisoners of war and the flyer came with a photo and the photo was of a second world war era german concentration camp right okay so that's propaganda very bad when the people who sent out that flyer work worried about it their official response was yes that picture has nothing to do with the subject it is for illustration purposes only okay so this is what I mean by applied post-modernism we should think I'm getting this towards thinking about how far we are from all this all right a second example of this post-modernism is um is marketing politics as marketing right which we're all familiar with so the two kinds of Russian propaganda which I've already mentioned each has a market um when when the Russians say it's all the Ukrainian revolution is all a geopolitical struggle their market is the European left and parts of the American Left who really do kind of tend to think that America's behind everything and therefore if it's a geopolitical struggle then maybe we should be against America rather than Russia and most insidiously if it's a geopolitical struggle that just removes all of the Ukrainians from the picture entirely right if it's all about some chessboard between America and Russia you know where it's just guys in ties in the Kremlin you know we're in the Pentagon thinking about things then there are no real Ukrainians there are no real human beings there are no people who suffer there no there's no NAT takes risks there's no one who votes in higher numbers and we do right there's no one fighting a war even though they have no army the people are evacuated from the scene completely in this geopolitical struggle that's the market it reaches us that way likewise the idea which they started out with that the Ukrainians are all fascists that had a market right the market was all of us who are concerned that the greatest danger comes from renewal of fascism or from anti-semitism if you just say your enemy is a Nazi and a fascist over and over and over again which some of them still do I mean the probably the Deputy Prime Minister of Russia who himself is no friend of the left actually had his party banned because of you know racist advertising's in an earlier better era in Russian history um he refers to the Ukrainians still as the what is it the fascist Nazi Hunta fascist Nazi Hunta and someone has taught him that every time he refers to them instead of saying Ukraine he should say fascist Nazi koonta and if you say it over and over again people might start to think it's plausible if you say it enough times it starts to sound ridiculous right Nazi fascist - into Nazi fascist - into Nazi fascist and Nazi fascist - into Nazi fascist Junta but uhm but clearly he's aiming for a market and then the point about all this is that it it it works you may not be convinced in the end but it slows you down it certainly slows you down at the very minimum uhm it creates a slippery world I'll let me give you the third example of post-modernism which we do ok which Fox News does and where this is where it came from actually and they perfected it there's a Russian television broadcaster called Russian today Russia today which is I think the second largest english-language broadcasts are now in the world and the way they present news and this will be familiar is they bring on five experts experts each of whom present five different variety versions of what happened one of which might even be true right but it doesn't matter because when you hear the five different versions at the end of it a you have no idea what actually happened be the event itself has been trivialized by this ridiculous discussion and see you've maybe lost a little bit more of whatever faith you might have had in journalism right and that is intentional okay so in Russia today or other Russia I mean doubtless discussed for example the shooting down of the Malaysian airline flight over Ukraine which was a real event in which 289 real people lost their lives but the theories are thrown out about it like this Malaysian airliner was the same the disappeared over the Pacific or this Malaysian airliner was launched from its runway with dead bodies who were put in there by the CIA or this Ukrainian airliner was actually shot down by Ukrainian fighter jet or maybe an American fighter jet or this Ukrainian this Malaysian airliner was was shot down by Ukrainian artillery which is actually aiming for president Putin's plane if you put enough of this stuff out there right then people might I probably just done it you're going to go home and say you know do you know the strangest thing you know I just heard professor Schneider say that UFOs carrying Elvis's baby shot down that plane and this is how it works right that you you give these multiple views and at the end something which really matters right that the tragic death of children and women and men some of which really matters at the end of it it becomes nothing and and then you only believe in journalism anymore and that's what's intended that's the final way this postmodern stuff works now the the III I'm already sort of testing you to see how deep this has gotten into us and of course it dusk it comes from us in some considerable measure and I'm getting back towards our title which is from propaganda to reality where the question is where are we really in all of this and how much of this comes from us and how much of it reaches us now the where this ultimately heads I think is in in it to to the dispensation the dispensing of truth itself or dispensing the dispensing of truth itself that there is no such thing of truth truth has been dispensed with um and if you no longer believe in it right if you no longer believe in it's no longer there and the hardest test of this would be the old Aristotelian test of I'm in Chicago I was like to say Aristotle when I'm in Chicago the old Aristotelian there's like there's one University of Chicago graduate here who laughed at that there's the old Aristotelian test of non-contradiction so you might think no that's ridiculous professor Snyder of course we we follow the principle of non-contradiction we don't allow ourselves to contradict ourselves on a daily basis and if somebody else did we'd catch it immediately okay so let's see let's see let me recite some things from Russian propaganda about this war which you have will have all heard probably in one way or another because the American media picks up most of the stuff let me just cite a couple of things and let's see how we how we've been doing um you have heard you have heard there's no Ukrainian state you've also heard the ukrainian state is very repressive you have heard there is no ukrainian nation you've also heard that all ukrainians are nationalists you have heard that there is no Ukrainian language you've also heard that Russians are being forced to speak Ukrainian language most most disturbingly you have heard that Russia is fighting a war to save the world from fascism and you've also heard that maybe fascism isn't such a bad thing after all honestly how much of that did you pick up how much of the fact that the entire propaganda campaign from beginning to end was not just wrong but self contradictory honestly how much of that was clear to all of us at the time I think surprisingly and depressingly little and and this is the place where I want to try to bring this to an end we are at a point where I really think we are at a point of to be or not to be for the West whatever you might think of as the West this policy of strategic relativism of bringing down the various kinds of connections that exist the transatlantic one the European one the the integrity of states themselves civil society is ultimately about us as well the policies against civil society interestingly are not just being pursued on the Maidan or in Russia where NGOs are banned or forced to advertise themselves as being foreign agents they're also pursued here Russian money is used to fund non-governmental organizations here and then the Russians reveal that they're doing this and then we all become skeptical about non-governmental organizations in general right um there or journalists are paid to admit that they were working for the CIA at by Russian money and then we then we become a little more skeptical about journalism this all of this is not just about Ukraine it's about it's about something much much much bigger in that sense I think it's best understood as a child so we can say you know what might sensible policy be and I think their answers to that what sensible policy should be you know these the if we really believe in these unities if you believe in civil society of the integrity of states or if we believe in European integration or pre believe in the transatlantic relationship it's probably a good time to say so probably a good time to try to support those things there are sensible policies I think that the best Russia policy is a good Ukraine policy the thing the United States government should be doing in addition to sanctions against Russia which are important because they force a conversation in Russia eventually is to support the Ukrainian state as an example with Ukrainian state holds together that's the best rebuff to this kind of policy but but fundamentally I mean and I can talk more about that but but fundamentally this is about concepts I think fundamentally this is a kind of Orwellian moment this is a moment where we decide whether we have concepts whether we know who we really are because the let me to put a different way I described all this as tactics the asymmetry strategy the relativism and then philosophy the post-modernism but really the philosophy is also the tactics the philosophy comes first if you buy into this version of post-modernism um then you are going to also buy into the strategic relativism and then you're going to lose a whole lot of asymmetric battles which is a description of what has happened in the last year in large measure not a description of Ukraine and Russia the Ukrainians are actually much more savvy about these things than we are of course haven't had much more experience with them it's not a description of Ukrainian Russia it's a description of us at the description of us if we buy into this kind of way of seeing the world which is in part our way of seeing the world we had a good hand in generating it then there are certain consequences like that there will be Wars there will be broken orders there there there there will be chaos so I think really that's that's that's where we come to to an end here the title from from propaganda to reality is not about Ukraine you know you can talk about Ukraine without talking about prop again and reality from Ukrainian point of view the things that have happened are actually fairly straightforward and the things the way that we describe it from the outside can also be fairly straightforward on Authority and authoritarian State has invaded a democratic state destroying a European order it's really not that complicated it's happened that way the reasons why we find it complicated are largely reasons which have to do with us with our vulnerability to certain kinds of propaganda and not and not really with reality so ultimately I see all this as a challenge I mean if you want to be optimistic an interesting challenge but I think a serious moral intellectual challenge in which the people who come up with these ideas know us much better than we know them these are these are serious intelligent people who have to be taken seriously which we're not I think at the moment doing very well and what concerns me is the extent to which this event in Ukraine which is important in all kinds of ways has given way precisely to this yielding moment in our own in our own culture because after all if we see what's happened in Ukraine as nothing more than just some little conflict in some faraway country if we see this as just a kind of politics as usual um well then propaganda has already won and reality has already lost and the story is already over thank you [Applause]

Channel: Chicago Humanities Festival

Views: 52,392

Rating: 4.3305955 out of 5

Keywords: chicago humanities festival, chf, humanities, chicago, festival, Propaganda (Quotation Subject), Ukraine (Country), Russia (Country), Timothy Snyder, Eastern Europe (Location), crimea, Autonomous Republic Of Crimea (Administrative Division), Soviet Union (Country), Kiev (City/Town/Village), Kiev Oblast (Ukraine Oblast), ukraine, Ukrainian SSR (Country)

Id: eKFObB6_naw

Length: 57min 35sec (3455 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 14 2014