Making of Modern Ukraine, Lecture 1
"Ukrainian Questions Answered by Russian Invasion"
If Ukraine resisted on 24 February 2022, it must have existed the day before. Why has Ukrainian history been so hard to see?
In this lecture, the key question is the relationship between history and myth. I use Vladimir Putin’s notion of “historical unity” between Russia and Ukraine as an example of a political myth with political significance. The point is not only to show the problems within a particular myth, but to show the difference between myth and history. Myth closes down the questions that history is meant to ask. And it prevents us from learning almost anything of interest. In the case of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, myth is one cause of a war that is intended to exclude or eliminate the elements of the actual past that do not fit the framework most comfortable to a present-day tyrant.
The lecture can be found as video here and as audio here or here.
Assigned reading: The following are the books the students were expected to have to hand: Ascherson, Black Sea; Plokhii, Gates of Europe; Snyder, Reconstruction of Nations; Snyder, Red Prince; Snyder, Bloodlands; Snyder, Road to Unfreedom; Pomerantsev, Nothing is TruRudnyts'kyi, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History; Shore, Ukrainian Night
For this lecture the assigned reading was a chapter from another book: Yekelchyk, Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation, chapter 1.
Terms:
Kherson oblast, named after ancient Greek city
Sevastopol, Crimea
Kyivan Rus, Lithuania, Poland, Ottoman Empire
Putin
Zelens'kyi
988, Kyiv
Vikings
Byzantium
Alphabet
Colonialism
Memory laws
First globalization
Genocide, Rafał Lemkin
Filtration
Thank you for all of this, Prof. Snyder. You do such a good job of making history understandable. It is so complex that I nearly gave up the first year I started reading it--mostly the 19th c. through the July Crisis. About a year in, everything started to come together. Then when I read S.P.'s "The Gates of Europe" I had to start all over again to familiarize myself with (to me) new characters, new wars, new treaties, new everything. But it was worth it.
Just one thing: I've noticed there have been calls for historical maps. I don't need them because I have them and have studied them. But others don't, else they wouldn't be asking for them. And historical maps have been crucial in helping me to understand what I'm reading. The boundaries of Europe have changed so much over the centuries. If not for historical maps, I would have felt like I was blind had I tried to read history without them. It just occurred to me that there may be copyright issues. Well hmpf. Still, students can't understand history without maps.
I watched your entire Yale series on Ukraine and learned so much. I keep coming back to your YouTube and SubStack.