10 Comments

Fantastic lecture, one of several that I wish could have been divided into 8-10 lectures because the material you cover is just too complex for one. Another is the lecture on the Habsburg Empire.

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BTW, are you ever going to teach your Eastern Europe to 1914 class again? I'm dying to know the assigned reading, which is no longer up on the Yale course schedule page. That is a class I'd love to have on video.

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Thank you for your generosity and your insight, Prof Snyder.

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Russia used Republican political operative Paul Manafort and the WikiLeaks website to help Trump win the 2016 election, a Republican-led Senate committee said in its final review of the matter. #PardonMe 😎

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Several themes through the topics on Ukraine can be discussed -- as per the assignment that Prof Snyder set to his class.

First, the concept of Wilsonian self-determination and Ukraine. The country has evolved from Ruthenian or Rus backgrounds, to a mixed Slav and Rus, to the Cossack identity, and finally to the Ukrainian identity via Shevchenko and Hrushevsky. Is this identity persist in Crimea or the Donbas? How does one resolve the issue of identity in these parts? Russia claims that these are with Russian identity. Does going back to Wilsonian self-determination help? Plebiscite? The Czechs and Poles solved the problem after the 2nd WW by simply expelling the Germans from Sudetenland and Polish corridor in 1946 -- if there are no Germans any more, then there is no more a problem of self-determination....

Second, the concept of "eternity" in history as applied to Ukraine; Prof Snyder has played with this notion without being too explicit about it. Russia obviously thinks of Ukraine as eternal part of Russia, starting with Vladimir's conversion. One can build the argument how this has affected Russian attitudes to Cossacks -- from Peter the Great to Catherine and after, and why this is not a paradigm that is acceptable.

Another idea has been mentioned a few times -- After Empire, What? This was a theme in Tony Judt's Postwar, and has been referred to various times by Prof Snyder. He is of the belief that as Empires collapse (viz France, Britain), they look to other ways to maintain their economic pre-eminence, and the EU perhaps is the cunning French way of doing this! (I am joking!) The Russian Empire collapse -- and how it affects the way Russia thinks of itself, and its relations to Ukraine - could be a good topic to explore.

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At this late stage of the course, and my second time through, I am still unclear as to exactly how to define a "nation". It would seem this is a basic understanding that somehow eludes me.

Is a nation merely synonymous with an ethnic grouping ever? With a tribe? Or must it be a political entity? If political, how does one distinguish a nation from a nation state? I have tried Wiki, but it didn't help.

Is there someone reading this, someone actually expert in the language and terminology of political science as an academic discipline, who can help me here, please?

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