Class 1: Ukrainian Questions Posed by Russian Invasion (2)

it's gonna be that if a dictator tells you

a thousand years ago, somebody got baptized,

that doesn't mean your nation is the same as his nation.

If we can get through that, we'll have done a good job.

So at least for the first 15 minutes of class.

But my point is that we cannot forget that these Southern

territories were not part of Kyivan Rus' at all,

where the fighting is happening now was not,

it was part of the ancient Greek world.

It was part of the Ottoman world for a long time,

but it was not actually part of Kyivan Rus'.

Southern Ukraine has a different history and it is

brought into this larger Ukrainian thing later on.

So let's. I'm just saying that because we have to mark the

Ottoman empire and we have to mark Islam,

and in general, by the way, we have to mark Ukraine

as a major center, not just of Christian history,

because when you focus on Kyiv

and the conversion to Christianity,

then you're in this kind of Christian teleological arc.

Somebody, maybe or maybe didn't get dunked in water

and therefore it's Christian forever,

but Ukraine is actually a center of

Muslim and Jewish and Christian civilization,

and this is one of the things which makes it interesting

and of note and in the ancient period,

it was a center of what you could think of as a contest

between those three monotheistic traditions

to convert the pagans who lived there,

which we'll get to in a later lecture.

For now though, what I wanna make sure that we get to

is this issue of how you get to be a nation.

Okay, so that's gonna be one of our major themes,

and I don't mean it teleologically, just to stress,

I don't mean why Ukraine had to be,

because that's a terrible question.

As soon as you're in the world of

why a nation had to be,

you've obliviated, you've eliminated, you've erased

all human agency in the whole story, right?

If I'm able to say right now from the pulpit

Ukraine had to exist, then we're removing everything

which makes history interesting, right,

the human choices along the way.

The way people saw the circumstances they were in,

what people thought was possible,

what they thought they were doing,

and what they sometimes even did.

All that goes away.

If I can say,

"Oh, there had to be America or there had to be Russia,

or there had to be China."

There didn't have to be any of these things.

We can explain how they came into being,

but what we can't say, and this is what Putin does,

we can't say that it's predetermined.

As soon as we say it's predetermined,

this is no longer a history class,

it's in some kind of,

we're in some kind of exercise in, you know,

applied physics or something.

Okay, but the bad, so there's a bad answer

to why, you know, to where history comes from,

which is that things had to be the way they are,

and that bad answer is closely related to this war

because Putin gave that bad answer in July of 2021,

when he wrote an incredibly long, for a politician,

not long for you guys,

an incredibly long essay which he called

"On the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine"

and his bad answer is that things are the way they are

because they had to be this way basically, right?

Russia and Ukraine have always been together,

and if they're not together, that's the result of alien,

non-historical forces.

This is really important, by the way,

because when a tyrant makes an argument

about how history has to be,

then some of the forces that are actually

resident in history,

then get classified as being ahistorical or non-historical

or exotic or alien, right?

So in Putin's telling you the story,

all the Lithuanian stuff and all of the Polish stuff

and all of the Jewish stuff, for that matter,

all the things which aren't about Christianity or Russia

are now suddenly exotic, alien, foreign.

They're not really history.

They're the things that have to be removed

so that history can go the way that it's supposed to go,

and that is precisely a rationale for war.

In fact, it is the rationale for this war,

because the argument for this war is that

Ukrainians don't know who they really are

because they've been polluted by all this Polish stuff

or Lithuanian stuff or Habsburg stuff,

or maybe latterly European Union stuff or American stuff.

So you have to peel away all this artificial things

to get down to who they really are,

and they may not know who they really are and that's tragic

and we have to apply enough violence

so that they can understand who they really are, right?

And once you're in that way of seeing things,

then of course the war makes perfect sense to you, right?

And so the way that history is presented

has an integral connection with the decision to make a war,

and also for the way that a war seems to make sense

while it's going on, right,

while it's going on to people who are taking part of it.

So the point is though that is not that we're gonna

start with this bad history

because it's the right kind of history,

the point is that the bad history or what I would prefer

to call the myth or the political memory

gives us an occasion to see how history

might actually have been.

It's a kind of, the bad history is a kind of

invitation to what might actually be more interesting.

Okay. So what's wrong with the idea,

let me just open this up to you guys very quickly.

What's wrong with, this is kind of a trick question.

I'm sorry. What's wrong with an essay which is titled

"On the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine?"

Go for it.

- [Student] There is no historical unity of Russia.

- Okay. That's alright. I'll give you that.

But I'm looking for yes. Okay.

Why not? I mean, why not?

Because you don't think so?

- [Student] No, I think it's been forced,

but the unity has been forced.

- Okay.

- [Student] Doesn't never like substantial.

- Okay. All right.

I'm going for something more fundamental. Yeah?

- [Student] Russia and Ukraine might not have existed

in the way we talked about them.

- Good. Okay. That's good. That's good.

Russia and Ukraine as nations definitely didn't exist

in the year 988, right?

The nation is a modern historical construct characterized by

the notion that you feel a kind of solidarity with people

you don't know.

That's Benedict Anderson imagined community.

It's a good argument that you,

somebody else is American or Ukrainian or Chinese,

and you think you have something in common with them,

even though you don't know them personally,

that's the nation.

The nation also involves a certain,

at least a certain notion of equality.

We may not be equal in every ways,

but I'm not more American than you are, right,

if you're American

We're, at least in the, at least notionally,

we're equal as members of a nation, right?

That does not exist in the ancient world,

or it doesn't exist in the medieval world.

So that's a good one.

Now, can we go even deeper than that?

All right, I'm gonna have to answer my own trick question.

Yeah, go for it.

- [Student] This might be a long shot,

but this statement itself is inherently contradictory.

Can you say the unity,

but he's also recognizing Ukraine sovereignty

by saying that Russia and Ukraine is separate entities.

- That's kind of where, I mean,

I'm gonna give you like extra credit points for that,

because I think you're right.

And I think what I'm aiming for is the actual language

of the statement.

The way that "On the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine"

plays a certain trick.

The trick is that if I begin a title with, "On"

the thing that's there is supposed to be real, right?

So if the title is "On the historical unity

of Russia and Ukraine"

the trick is that, well, since it's "On" this,

that thing must exist, right?

If I write a book which says

"On quick chess strategies to defeat Garry Kasparov"

then it's like, that thing must exist, right,

even though it doesn't exist, right?

But if I say on this thing, then it exists

and so that kind of language,

the kind of implicit assertion of existence

is non-historical language.

It's the language of legend, the language of myth.

It's tricky language which gets you thinking

in terms of categories of eternity,

categories of durability, categories which isn't changed,

what things which don't change,

which leads you to where Putin is,

which his idea that some things are, as he says,

predetermined, right, which is a very strong word.

His idea is that because there was a baptism in Kyiv in 988,

the rest of it is predetermined

and anything which doesn't go the way it's supposed to go

is somehow exotic or foreign and has to be suppressed,

and then historical unity, I mean,

I'm gonna make your point a little bit more strongly.

It's not just that Russia and Ukraine,

there's no such thing as historical unity, right?

History is not about unity.

History is about, okay, I'm gonna throw this one open.

What's history about in two words?

You can have two, you have three if one of them's an "and."

War and peace.

I guess that's what I deserve for my military history

comment earlier on.

(students laughing)

- I mean, it's not bad. It's not a bad answer by the way.

It's a pretty good answer.

Anything. Anyone else wanna go for it?

Yeah.

- [Student] People.

- Did it in one word.

That's good. It's people who can write stuff down,

actually, that's where history stops

is the line between history and archeology or anthropology.

History is all about written records.

So we're gonna do a lot of warmup

before we get to written records,

but one of the reasons why baptism is important

in the history of Eastern Europe or Europe in general

is that with baptism and Christianity comes written language

and with written language comes the ability

to make different kinds of interpretations

where historians are comfortable.

All right, I'm gonna give this one more shot.

What's history about?

Don't you guys dream of, isn't this like your dream

you're gonna come to Yale and a professor's gonna ask you

what history's all about and you're gonna raise your hand

and say something brilliant?

(class laughing)

- Like isn't that what you guys dream about?

This is your moment.

Yeah, Jack.

- [Jack] States in society.

- State in society.

That's good. That's good.

That's pretty good. Okay.

So what I'm thinking about is something even more basic

and dumb, which is change in continuity.

Okay, so you don't have to write that down.

It's a very fundamental thing

that sometimes things change and sometimes they don't

and history is aware of both of them, right,

and you're in, history is aware,

so the historical unity is a non-historical concept

because what it does is that it's a trick

because historical doesn't mean historical,

it means unchanging, right?

Historical unity in that phrase means forever.

It means eternal, right

It doesn't actually mean historical,

cause historical would mean it changes.

Maybe there was some unity at some point,

but if it's historical,

then it would change because that's what history is.

History is change as well as continuity.

So history is about change in continuity,

which means it's about ends and beginnings,

and it's also about unpredictability.

Okay, so as you might have gathered,

this lecture is also because we're doing this big question,

we're handling this big subject of war,