What is Ukraine?

The fifth lecture in my new class, "Hitler and Stalin Today"

Ukraine has to be at the center of a class on Hitler and Stalin, because it was at the center of both men’s mental worlds. Each of them saw Ukraine as the key to a global transformation: be it the Stalinist plan to collectivize agriculture and build industry, or the Hitlerian plan to treat Ukraine as a breadbasket. In both cases, hugely ambitious ideologies found their axial point in a certain place; and in both cases, the attempt to transform Ukraine led to mass death. Between 1933 and 1945, the most dangerous place in the world was Ukraine. All this, as I seek to show in the lecture, was the latest stage in an ancient history. Ukraine has been less a crossroads and more a source of human innovation for centuries and millennia and indeed tens of thousands of years. Ancient history associated with Mesopotamia, Greece, or Rome very often only makes sense in connection with lands that are now Ukraine. With the globalization associated with modern history, Ukraine became for the first time an object rather than a subject of history, as its special position at the connection of steppe and salt water became less important, and as empires with global reach sought to base their power in its resources.

Welcome to the fifth lecture of my new lecture series, “Hitler and Stalin Today.”

This lecture is titled “What is Ukraine?”

Below are the readings that go along with this week:

As always, thank you for engaging with these lectures. I hope you enjoy and consider sharing them.

Below are some more of my works if you’d be interested in reading: