Class 1: Ukrainian Questions Posed by Russian Invasion (3) Klasse 1: Die ukrainischen Fragen nach der russischen Invasion (3) Τάξη 1: Ουκρανικά ερωτήματα που τέθηκαν από τη ρωσική εισβολή (3) Clase 1: Cuestiones ucranianas planteadas por la invasión rusa (3) Classe 1 : Questions ukrainiennes posées par l'invasion russe (3) Classe 1: Le questioni ucraine poste dall'invasione russa (3) 授業1：ロシアの侵攻が投げかけたウクライナの疑問（3） 1 klasė: Rusijos invazijos keliami Ukrainos klausimai (3) Les 1: Oekraïense vragen naar aanleiding van de Russische invasie (3) Aula 1: Questões ucranianas colocadas pela invasão russa (3) Занятие 1: Украинские вопросы, возникшие в результате российского вторжения (3) Sınıf 1: Rus İşgalinin Ortaya Çıkardığı Ukrayna Sorunları (3) Заняття 1: Питання, поставлені перед Україною російським вторгненням (3) 第 1 课：俄罗斯入侵给乌克兰带来的问题 (3) 第一課：俄羅斯入侵引發的烏克蘭問題（三）

and we're trying to do this big question und wir versuchen, diese große Frage zu beantworten

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. о том, что такое история, потому что она нам понадобится.

So one of the things which, Итак, один из моментов,

since history is about beginnings and endings, поскольку история - это начало и конец,

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 So funktioniert unser Verstand, und die Geschichte ist da, um uns daran zu erinnern.

that actually we're wrong pretty much all the time,

that things are not actually predictable, right?

That what people expect to happen Das, was die Menschen erwarten

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? das würde bedeuten, dass nichts, was wir tun, zählt, richtig?

If history literally repeated itself,

then there would be no human agency. то не було б ніякої людської волі.

It's the same thing as saying things never change.

If things change according to a pattern, Wenn sich die Dinge nach einem bestimmten Muster ändern,

that also means no human agency, right, das bedeutet auch keine menschliche Agentur, richtig,

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 aber wir versuchen auch subjektiv zu verstehen

what that person might have been thinking or trying to do,

and we never give up on the second part, right? und wir geben den zweiten Teil nie auf, richtig?

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. que é, por assim dizer, uma empresa objetiva.

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. dass diese Art von Mythos der Ewigkeit falsch ist.

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. Ich werde normalerweise die Vielfalt los. Normalmente, estou a livrar-me da diversidade.

I'm usually getting rid of all the interesting stuff. Normalmente, estou a livrar-me de todas as coisas interessantes.

If I'm talking about how, and this is, by the way, Se estou a falar de como, e isto é, já agora,

all myths of a Golden Age are pretty much todos os mitos de uma Idade de Ouro são praticamente

structurally the same. estruturalmente iguais.

Interestingly, it always turns out Curiosamente, acontece sempre

that we were the good guys. que éramos os bons da fita.

Right, like try to think of a myth of a Golden Age Certo, como tentar pensar num mito de uma Idade de Ouro

where the other guys were the good guys. onde os outros tipos eram os bons.

If it's, funnily, it all kind of comes down to the same thing. Если это так, то, как ни странно, все сводится к одному и тому же.

It's always, we were the good guys. Мы были хорошими парнями.

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, in der Welt, Hinweis 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. Elimina los orígenes.

It gets rid of innovation.

It gets rid of all of the interesting stuff. Dadurch wird alles Interessante weggelassen.

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, die wir für selbstverständlich halten und dann ein paar Mal kopieren,

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, e vagueou e acabou em Kiev,

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 ist, dass die Ukraine tatsächlich in einer sehr intensiven Form verkörpert

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? nur in einer etwas interessanteren Form, oder?

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. Os Vikings fundaram Estados.

They knocked over states. Derrubaram Estados.

They founded the states all over the place. Fundaram os Estados em todo o lado.

Normandy, for example. A Normandia, por exemplo.

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 але Київ може бути найцікавішою спадщиною

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. Dankenswerterweise, als wäre das ein Erbe der Wikingerzivilisation.

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