Class 1: Ukrainian Questions Posed by Russian Invasion (3)
and we're trying to do this big question
of where nations come from at the very beginning.
I'm trying to do just a little bit
about what history actually is, cause we're gonna need it.
So one of the things which,
since history is about beginnings and endings,
it's also unpredictable, right?
It's about things that you couldn't expect,
and that may seem counterintuitive,
because you probably think,
well, okay you probably don't,
cause I know you're all very sophisticated,
but someone in some other classroom might think
history is about old dusty books
and we know what's gonna happen in the old dusty books.
But here's the thing,
even if you read all the old dusty books that you wanted
about the year 1439 and you became
the world's leading expert on 1439,
you still would not know what happened in 1440, right?
That's the level you wouldn't have,
and that's the level of unpredictability of history,
and it comes up to the present.
You can read all, I mean you could know everything
you could possibly humanly know about 2021,
but you wouldn't know what's gonna happen in 2022.
You just wouldn't.
It's only afterwards that it all seems like
it had to happen, right? Like up until February 24th.
"Of course Russia's not gonna invade Ukraine."
After February 24th.
"Oh, of course Russia was gonna invade Ukraine."
That's how our minds work and history is there to remind us
that actually we're wrong pretty much all the time,
that things are not actually predictable, right?
That what people expect to happen
is generally what doesn't happen,
and that novelty is an authentic thing,
that there are new things which come about all the time.
In our case, the new thing that we'll be thinking about
the most is nature. I mean, sorry is the nation.
Now one of the things which gets elided,
and I've already mentioned this and it's pretty important
in the notion that history is some kind of eternity
or some kind of repetition.
Like you may have heard the phrase,
you may have heard the idea that history repeats itself.
I don't know about you guys. I hear it all the time.
Because whenever I talk about the past, then people say,
"Well, history is repeating itself"
because this thing is like this thing,
but if history really,
oops, I'm getting out of the camera view probably.
I'm not used to doing this.
If history repeats itself,
that would mean that nothing we do matters, right?
If history literally repeated itself,
then there would be no human agency.
It's the same thing as saying things never change.
If things change according to a pattern,
that also means no human agency, right,
and so the notion that history is a cycle, right,
there was a time when we were great
and now we have to make ourselves great again,
like the notion that there's a cycle,
that there was a Golden Age and then something went wrong
and then we correct it.
That's also not historical.
That's also a way of eliminating human agency, right?
So history doesn't repeat.
It doesn't repeat.
You learn things from history
which can then help you recognize other things.
You might see some certain patterns,
but history doesn't repeat.
Okay, so the thing which goes missing in these accounts,
which I want us to get better at recognizing
over the course of this class,
and as we think about the nation,
is the notion of human agency.
Not volunteerism,
like not the idea that you can do whatever you want,
but the notion of human agency that you,
history helps us to identify the structures as best we can,
and then the better we understand the structures,
the better we see what humans can and can't do
or could imagine that they can do within those structures.
So when we do history, we're trying to,
as it were objectively,
understand the situation around a person,
but we're also trying to subjectively understand
what that person might have been thinking or trying to do,
and we never give up on the second part, right?
So to take the example of this baptism in 988 to,
don't worry, we'll return to it over and over again,
but when Valdemar got himself baptized,
we know he was not thinking about Russia and Ukraine
a thousand years later, like that we can be sure about.
We can be pretty sure he wasn't even thinking
about Christianity because we know enough
about his predicament to say what he was probably thinking
about was geopolitics and what form of conversion
would be best to preserve his own rule, right?
And we'll try to explain how that all works out,
but what we're always trying to do
is to understand the situation around someone
which is, so to speak, of an objective undertaking.
But then we're also trying to get inside
the individual actors and their own minds
and recognize that they have a subjective appreciation
of these, and you can never quite do away
with that tension between what I'm calling very simply
the objective and the subjective forms of history.
Okay, so we've already talked about many of the ways
that this kind of myth of eternity is wrong.
Another way that I wanted to talk about it
is in terms of diversity or in terms of change.
If I give you a myth of a Golden Age,
I'm usually getting rid of diversity.
I'm usually getting rid of all the interesting stuff.
If I'm talking about how, and this is, by the way,
all myths of a Golden Age are pretty much
structurally the same.
Interestingly, it always turns out
that we were the good guys.
Right, like try to think of a myth of a Golden Age
where the other guys were the good guys.
If it's, funnily, it all kind of comes down to the same thing.
It's always, we were the good guys.
We were innocent, and then the bad people came
and they polluted us or they did something very bad.
It's structurally always the same,
and it doesn't even matter whether you're an empire or not.
You can be the most powerful empire in the world,
the most powerful empire in the most powerful country
in the world, hint USA,
and you can still come up with a story
of how you were the victim and the other people came
and they polluted you, but the structure is always the same,
and so when you have a story of which Putin's version
of the baptism in Kyiv is one example.
You have a story about how everything was always static.
Everything was pure, right?
That's why the baptism, by the way, is so attractive.
It's not that Putin actually goes to church
or that the Russian church really exists as such,
but baptism is a notion of, it's a cleansing, right,
it's a purifying, it's a starting again,
and that's why it's such an attractive image in this story.
The baptism allows us to forget all the things
that happened before and present history or the past
as this kind of clean unity where anything
which was polluting came from the outside,
and that is a way of getting rid of diversity
or getting rid of the things which might,
as historians or as students of history,
we might actually find to be interesting,
where it gets rid of things coming from other places.
It gets rid of origins.
It gets rid of innovation.
It gets rid of all of the interesting stuff.
Like, for example, the alphabet.
The alphabet might seem like something which is eternal.
I mean, when was the last time you guys
thought about the alphabet?
All right, that's not the question that you were dreaming
your professor was gonna ask you the first week of Yale.
"He was asking me about the alphabet, mom.
I can't believe it. I studied so hard."
So the alphabet is a really interesting creation.
It was actually only invented once, like a lot of things
that we take for granted and then copied a bunch of times,
the specific Cyrillic alphabet,
which came to Kyiv after the baptism,
was invented by a couple of, we'll talk about this,
a couple of Byzantine priests who were trying to convert,
not Kyiv, but Moravia, not then,
but a couple centuries before,
and they had an interesting career
and it wandered and ended up in Kyiv,
and then suddenly you have this alphabet.
And then that Cyrillic alphabet can seem like
a kind of eternal marker of like east and west or whatever
once it's established, but it's actually an innovation
which came from the outside, right,
like, for that matter Christianity itself.
So when you focus on how things,
or if you pretend that things are static,
what you're doing is you're excluding all the diversity,
all of the innovation,
and all the things which came from the outside.
What we're gonna be trying to do in this class
is make the opposite point.
That what's interesting about Ukraine
is that rather than being part
of somebody else's myth of purity, right,
is that Ukraine actually embodies in a very intense form
most of the major themes of European history
and some of the major themes of European history,
of world history.
What we're gonna try to be arguing.
is that as a result of Ukraine's geography,
as a result of this north-south axis at the beginning,
and then east-west axis later on,
all of the themes of European history
appear in Ukrainian history,
just in a slightly more interesting form, right?
So the Vikings, for example,
if you're interested in European history,
you may be interested in the Vikings.
The Vikings, let's face it, they're interesting. Okay.
So you have this mainstream of European development
where the Franks start a state and the Vikings react
to the Franks and they start raiding the Franks
and they invent these boats
and they travel all over the world. Very cool.
But maybe the single most lasting trace of the Viking Age
is Kyiv, right?
The Vikings founded states.
They knocked over states.
They founded the states all over the place.
Normandy, for example.
Normandy, as you might remember, invades England
and establishes England in the form that we know it today.
Vikings matter a lot, but Norwegian democracy,
it also began with Vikings,
but Kyiv may be the single most interesting legacy
of the Viking Age, maybe the most durable legacy
of the Viking Age.
When you look at pictures of wartime Kyiv now,
which, you know, where San Sophia is still standing,
thankfully, like that's a legacy of Viking civilization.
That's a legacy of Vikings converting to Christianity.
If you think about the history of the Reformation, right?
Oh the Reformation, we all know the Reformation
is a big theme of European history.
Suddenly there are Protestants as well as Catholics,
and maybe there's a Hundred Years War
and a third of the population of Germany
is going to get wiped out
and the printing press comes along
and suddenly there can be disputations
which seem to lead to a lot of violence.
This whole thing about the internet causing trouble so far
is like nothing compared to the printing press.
Like we may get there, but like the printing press
came along and that was a mess.
But in Ukraine you have the Reformation,
but it's not Catholics and Protestants,
it's the Orthodox and the Greek Catholics
and the Catholic and the Catholics and the Protestants
and all kinds of Protestants.
And you have a religious war in 1648,
which is also a proto national war, and an anti-colonial war
and something which is extremely interesting.
So basically everything that happens in European history
happens in Ukrainian history,
just slightly more intensely and sometimes slightly earlier.
And indeed one of the themes or one of the things