Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War

00:00:00.000 | What happened during World War II was that

00:00:04.480 | once the Germans started to run out of manpower,

00:00:09.480 | they created foreign legion groups,

00:00:13.680 | but because those people were not Aryans,

00:00:16.420 | they couldn't be trusted.

00:00:17.920 | So they were put under the command of Henry Himmler,

00:00:21.760 | under command of SS,

00:00:23.320 | and became known as SS Waffen units.

00:00:28.080 | And one of such units was created in Ukraine.

00:00:31.540 | - The following is a conversation with Serhi Plohi,

00:00:36.760 | a historian at Harvard University

00:00:39.020 | and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute,

00:00:42.140 | also at Harvard.

00:00:43.600 | As a historian, he specializes in the history

00:00:46.220 | of Eastern Europe with an emphasis on Ukraine.

00:00:50.200 | He wrote a lot of great books on Ukraine and Russia,

00:00:53.900 | the Soviet Union, on Slavic peoples in general

00:00:57.080 | across centuries, on Chernobyl and nuclear disasters,

00:01:00.640 | and on the current war in Ukraine.

00:01:03.220 | A book titled "The Russo-Ukrainian War,

00:01:06.200 | "The Return of History."

00:01:08.980 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:01:10.920 | To support it, we check out our sponsors in the description.

00:01:14.160 | And now, dear friends, here's Serhi Plohi.

00:01:17.360 | What are the major explanations

00:01:20.020 | for the collapse of the Soviet Union?

00:01:22.200 | Maybe ones you agree with and ones you disagree with.

00:01:25.520 | - Very often, people confuse three different processes

00:01:29.060 | that were taking place in the late '80s and early '90s.

00:01:33.320 | And the one was the collapse of communism as ideology.

00:01:38.320 | Another was the end of the Cold War.

00:01:41.240 | And the third one was the end of the Soviet Union.

00:01:45.580 | All of these processes were interrelated, interconnected.

00:01:51.000 | But when people provide ideology as the explanation

00:01:55.000 | for all of these processes, that's where I disagree.

00:01:58.280 | Because ideological collapse happened on the territory

00:02:03.040 | of the Soviet Union in general.

00:02:05.120 | Soviet Union lost the Cold War,

00:02:07.760 | whether we are talking about Moscow,

00:02:10.380 | Leningrad or St. Petersburg now, or Vladivostok.

00:02:14.700 | But the fall of the Soviet Union is about a story

00:02:17.780 | in which Vladivostok and St. Petersburg

00:02:21.280 | ended up in one country.

00:02:23.400 | And Kiev, Minsk, and Dushanbe ended in different countries.

00:02:27.840 | So the theories and explanations about how did that happen,

00:02:32.520 | for me, this really very helpful theories

00:02:36.000 | for understanding the Soviet collapse.

00:02:38.720 | So the mobilization from below, the collapse of the center,

00:02:43.720 | against the background of economic collapse,

00:02:48.240 | against the background of ideological implosions,

00:02:52.480 | that's how I look at the fall of the Soviet Union,

00:02:57.660 | and that's how I look at the theories

00:03:01.760 | that explain that collapse.

00:03:03.360 | - So it's a story of geography, ideology, economics,

00:03:08.360 | which are the most important to understand

00:03:10.540 | of what made the collapse of the Soviet Union happen?

00:03:14.540 | - The Soviet collapse was unique,

00:03:17.280 | but not more unique than collapse of any other empire.

00:03:21.380 | So what we really witnessed,

00:03:24.240 | or the world witnessed back in 1991,

00:03:27.380 | and we continue to witness today,

00:03:29.840 | with the Russian aggression against Ukraine,

00:03:32.380 | is a collapse of one of the largest world empires.

00:03:36.560 | We talked about the Soviet Union,

00:03:39.840 | and now talk about Russia as possessing

00:03:42.120 | plus/minus one-sixth of the surface of the Earth.

00:03:46.760 | You don't get in possession of one-sixth of the Earth

00:03:50.940 | by being a nation state.

00:03:53.120 | You get that sort of size as an empire,

00:03:56.720 | and the Soviet collapse is continuation

00:03:59.480 | of the disintegration of the Russian Empire

00:04:02.160 | that started back in 1917,

00:04:05.780 | that was arrested for some period of time

00:04:08.320 | by the Bolsheviks, by the communist ideology,

00:04:12.040 | which was internationalist ideology,

00:04:14.400 | and then came back in full force

00:04:17.200 | in the late '80s and early '90s.

00:04:19.360 | So the most important story for me,

00:04:22.360 | this is the story of the continuing collapse

00:04:24.740 | of the Russian Empire,

00:04:25.940 | and the rise of not just local nationalism,

00:04:30.440 | but also rise of Russian nationalism

00:04:32.620 | that turned out to be as a destructive force

00:04:36.220 | for the imperial or multi-ethnic, multi-national state,

00:04:41.220 | as was Ukrainian nationalism, or Georgian,

00:04:45.820 | or Estonian, for that matter.

00:04:49.340 | - Well, you said a lot of interesting stuff there.

00:04:50.840 | 1917, Bolsheviks, internationalists,

00:04:53.820 | how that plays with the idea of Russian Empire and so on,

00:04:56.740 | but first let me ask about US influence on this.

00:04:59.540 | So one of the ideas is that through the Cold War,

00:05:04.200 | that mechanism, US had major interest

00:05:07.560 | to weaken the Soviet Union,

00:05:09.060 | and therefore the collapse could be attributed

00:05:13.440 | to pressure and manipulation from the United States.

00:05:17.580 | Is there truth to that?

00:05:18.780 | - The pressure from the United States,

00:05:21.100 | this is part of the Cold War.

00:05:23.100 | And Cold War, part of that story,

00:05:25.860 | but it doesn't explain the Soviet collapse.

00:05:29.780 | And the reason is quite simple.

00:05:32.880 | The United States of America didn't want

00:05:36.860 | the Soviet Union to collapse and disintegrate.

00:05:40.400 | They didn't want that at the start of the Cold War in 1948,

00:05:44.260 | we now have the strategic documents.

00:05:47.260 | They were concerned about that.

00:05:48.620 | They didn't want to do that.

00:05:50.000 | And certainly they didn't want to do that

00:05:51.740 | in the year 1990, '91.

00:05:54.740 | As late as August of 1991, the month of the coup in Moscow,

00:05:59.740 | President Bush, Judge H.W. Bush,

00:06:04.780 | travels from Moscow to Kiev and gives famous

00:06:08.100 | or infamous speech called Chicken Kiev speech,

00:06:11.340 | basically warning Ukrainians against going for independence.

00:06:16.740 | The Soviet collapse was a huge headache

00:06:19.160 | for the administration in the White House

00:06:21.860 | for a number of reasons.

00:06:23.240 | They liked to work with Gorbachev.

00:06:26.140 | The Soviet Union was emerging as a junior partner

00:06:28.920 | of the United States in the international arena.

00:06:32.380 | Collapse was destroying all of that.

00:06:35.540 | And on the top of that, there was a question

00:06:38.220 | of the nuclear weapons, unaccounted nuclear weapons.

00:06:42.380 | So the United States was doing everything humanly possible

00:06:47.140 | to keep the Soviet Union together in one piece

00:06:51.180 | until really late November of 1991 when it became clear

00:06:55.920 | that it was a lost cause and they had to say goodbye

00:07:00.920 | to Gorbachev and to the project that he introduced.

00:07:05.160 | A few months later, or a year later,

00:07:09.100 | there was a presidential campaign

00:07:10.820 | and Bush was running for the second term

00:07:13.700 | and was looking for achievements.

00:07:15.540 | And there were many achievements.

00:07:17.540 | I basically treat him with great respect.

00:07:21.020 | But destruction of the Soviet Union

00:07:25.060 | was not one of those achievements.

00:07:26.700 | He was on the other side of that divide.

00:07:30.420 | But the politics, the political campaign,

00:07:33.620 | of course, have their own rules.

00:07:35.500 | And they produce and give birth to mythology,

00:07:40.540 | which we still, at least in this country,

00:07:42.820 | we live till now, till today.

00:07:44.620 | - So Gorbachev is an interesting figure in all of this.

00:07:47.820 | Is there a possible history where the Soviet Union

00:07:51.360 | did not collapse and some of the ideas that Gorbachev had

00:07:54.700 | for the future of the Soviet Union came to life?

00:07:57.100 | - Of course, history, on the one hand, there is a statement.

00:08:01.220 | It doesn't allow for what ifs.

00:08:04.540 | On the other hand, in my opinion,

00:08:06.540 | history is full of what if.

00:08:09.700 | That's what history is about.

00:08:11.100 | And certainly, certainly there are scenarios

00:08:13.140 | how the Soviet Union would continue,

00:08:16.980 | would continue beyond, let's say, Gorbachev's tenure.

00:08:21.900 | And the argument has been made that the reforms

00:08:26.840 | that he introduced, that they were mismanaged

00:08:28.900 | and they could be managed differently,

00:08:30.540 | or there could be no reforms

00:08:32.420 | and there could be continued stagnation.

00:08:34.860 | So that is all possible.

00:08:36.700 | What I think would happen one way or another

00:08:39.940 | is the Soviet collapse in a different form

00:08:43.100 | on somebody else's watch at some later period in time

00:08:47.780 | because we're dealing with not just processes

00:08:52.020 | that were happening in the Soviet Union,

00:08:54.580 | we're dealing with global processes.

00:08:56.420 | And the 20th century turned out to be the century

00:08:59.700 | of the disintegration of the empires.

00:09:03.740 | You look at the globe at the map of the world in 1914

00:09:07.700 | and you compare it to the map at the end

00:09:11.340 | of the 20th century in 1991, 1992,

00:09:14.620 | and suddenly you realize that there are many candidates

00:09:18.460 | for being the most important event,

00:09:20.220 | the most important process in the 20th century.

00:09:24.020 | But the biggest global thing that happened

00:09:27.260 | was redrawing the map of the world

00:09:29.620 | and producing dozens, if not hundreds, of new states.

00:09:34.620 | That's the outcome of the different processes

00:09:39.260 | of the 20th century.

00:09:40.820 | Look, Yugoslavia is falling apart around the same time.

00:09:44.340 | Czechoslovakia goes through what can be called

00:09:48.060 | a civilized divorce, a very, very rare occurrence

00:09:51.940 | in the fall of multinational states.

00:09:55.100 | So yeah, the writing was on the wall,

00:09:57.060 | whether it would happen under Gorbachev or later,

00:10:00.100 | whether it would happen as the result of reforms

00:10:03.460 | or as the result of no reforms.

00:10:06.740 | But I think that sooner or later that would happen.

00:10:11.620 | - Yeah, it's very possible, hundreds of years from now,

00:10:13.780 | the way the 20th century is written about

00:10:16.460 | as the century defined by the collapse of empires.

00:10:22.580 | You call the Soviet Union the last empire.

00:10:25.580 | The book is called The Last Empire.

00:10:27.240 | So is there something fundamental

00:10:29.020 | about the way the world is that means

00:10:31.900 | it's not conducive to the formation of empires?

00:10:35.140 | - The meaning that I was putting in the term,

00:10:37.620 | the Soviet Union as the last empire,

00:10:39.700 | was that the Soviet collapse was the collapse

00:10:44.420 | of the last major European empires, traditional empires.

00:10:49.420 | That was in the 18th century, 19th century,

00:10:53.100 | and through most of the 20th century.

00:10:55.840 | The Austria-Hungary died in the midst of World War I.

00:11:00.840 | The Ottoman Empire disintegrated.

00:11:04.460 | The Brits were gone and left India.

00:11:07.740 | And there was the successor to the Russian empire

00:11:10.980 | called the Soviet Union was still hanging on there.

00:11:14.980 | And then came 1991, and what we see even with today's Russia,

00:11:20.900 | it's a very different sort of policies.

00:11:25.900 | The Russian leadership tried to learn a lesson from 1991,

00:11:31.220 | so there is no national republics in the Russian Federation

00:11:38.140 | that would have more rights

00:11:39.800 | than the Russian administrative units.

00:11:44.620 | So the structure is different.

00:11:46.780 | The nationality policies are different.

00:11:50.020 | The level of reciprocation is much higher.

00:11:52.980 | So it is in many ways already a post-imperial formation.

00:11:57.980 | - And you're right about that moment, 1991,

00:12:04.420 | the role that Ukraine played in that

00:12:06.500 | seems to be a very critical role.

00:12:08.740 | Can you describe just that?

00:12:11.900 | What role Ukraine played in the collapse of the Soviet Union?

00:12:15.100 | - History is many things,

00:12:17.420 | but it started in a very simple way

00:12:20.420 | of making notes on the yearly basis,

00:12:24.340 | what happened this year at that.

00:12:26.160 | So it's about chronology.

00:12:28.260 | Chronology in the history of the collapse

00:12:30.380 | of the Soviet Union is very important.

00:12:31.980 | You have Ukrainian referendum on December 1st, 1991,

00:12:36.380 | and you have dissolution of the Soviet Union

00:12:38.720 | by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus one week later

00:12:41.860 | and the question is why?

00:12:46.820 | Ukrainian referendum is the answer,

00:12:50.220 | but Ukrainians didn't answer their referendum question

00:12:54.540 | of whether they want the Soviet Union

00:12:56.040 | to be dissolved or not.

00:12:57.780 | They answered very limited in terms of,

00:13:00.660 | it's been in question whether you support the decision

00:13:05.420 | of (speaking in foreign language)

00:13:06.740 | of your parliament for Ukraine to go independent.

00:13:10.460 | And the rest was not on the ballot.

00:13:14.020 | So why then one week later the Soviet Union is gone?

00:13:18.780 | And President Yeltsin explained to President Bush

00:13:23.340 | around that time the reason why Ukraine was so important.

00:13:28.300 | He said that, well, if Ukraine is gone,

00:13:30.840 | Russia is not interested in this Soviet project

00:13:34.460 | because Russia would be outnumbered and outvoted

00:13:37.540 | by the Muslim republics.

00:13:39.540 | So there was a cultural element.

00:13:42.300 | There was also another one.

00:13:43.800 | Ukraine happened to be the second largest Soviet republic

00:13:48.440 | and then post-Soviet state in terms of population,

00:13:51.400 | in terms of the economy, economic potential,

00:13:53.700 | and so on and so forth, and as Yeltsin suggested,

00:13:56.640 | closed culturally, linguistically, and otherwise to Russia.

00:14:01.180 | So with the second largest republic gone,

00:14:05.620 | Russia didn't think that it was in Russia's interest

00:14:08.180 | to continue with the Soviet Union,

00:14:10.700 | and around that time, Igor Gaidar,

00:14:13.340 | who was the chief economic advisor of Yeltsin,

00:14:17.180 | was telling him, well, we just don't have money anymore

00:14:21.620 | to support other republics.

00:14:22.980 | We have to focus on Russia.

00:14:24.260 | We have to use oil and gas money

00:14:28.220 | within the Russian Federation.

00:14:30.940 | So the state was bankrupt.

00:14:33.500 | Imperial projects, at least in the context

00:14:36.960 | of the late 20th century, they costed money.

00:14:40.540 | It wasn't a money-making machine

00:14:43.140 | as it was back in the 18th or 19th century.

00:14:46.620 | And the combination of all these factors

00:14:49.620 | led to the processes in which Ukraine's decision

00:14:54.620 | to go independent spelled the end to the Soviet Union.

00:15:00.000 | And if today anybody wants to restore

00:15:04.540 | not the Soviet Union but some form of Russian control

00:15:07.380 | over the post-Soviet space,

00:15:09.140 | Ukraine is as important today

00:15:11.180 | as it was back in December of 1991.

00:15:14.460 | - Let me ask you about Vladimir Putin's statement

00:15:19.460 | that the collapse of the Soviet Union

00:15:22.460 | is one of the great tragedies of history.

00:15:25.480 | To what degree does he have a point?

00:15:28.100 | To what degree is he wrong?

00:15:29.920 | - His formulation was that this is the greatest

00:15:33.260 | geopolitical catastrophe or tragedy of the 20th century.

00:15:37.640 | And I specifically went and looked at the text

00:15:41.500 | and put it in specific time when it was happening.

00:15:45.880 | And it was interesting that the statement

00:15:47.900 | was made a few weeks before the May 9 parade

00:15:52.900 | and celebrations of the victory.

00:15:56.920 | Key part of the mythology of the current Russian state.

00:16:02.900 | So why say things about the Soviet collapse

00:16:07.620 | being the largest political strategy

00:16:10.640 | and not in that particular context, the Second World War?

00:16:14.460 | My explanation at least is that the World War II,

00:16:19.160 | the price was enormous, but the Soviet Union emerged

00:16:23.140 | as a great victor and captured half of Europe.

00:16:26.880 | 1991, in terms of the loss of power,

00:16:32.860 | lives lost at that point, the price was actually very low.

00:16:37.860 | But for Putin what was important that the state was lost

00:16:43.380 | and he in particular was concerned about the division

00:16:46.440 | of the Russian people which he understood back then

00:16:50.300 | like he understands now in very, very broad terms.

00:16:54.140 | So for him the biggest tragedy is not the loss of life.

00:16:59.820 | The biggest tragedy is the loss of the great power status

00:17:03.780 | or the unity of those whom he considered

00:17:07.180 | to be Russian nation.

00:17:08.740 | So at least this is my reading, this is my understanding

00:17:11.500 | of what is there, what is on the paper

00:17:15.620 | and what is between the lines.

00:17:17.420 | - So both the unity of the sort of quote Russian empire

00:17:21.940 | and the status of the superpower.

00:17:25.460 | - That's how I read it.

00:17:27.620 | - You wrote a book, The Origins of the Slavic Nations.

00:17:30.940 | So let's go back into history.

00:17:33.540 | What is the origin of Slavic nations?

00:17:36.940 | - We can look at that from different perspectives

00:17:40.300 | and we are now making major breakthroughs

00:17:44.540 | in answering this question with the very interesting

00:17:48.500 | innovative linguistic analysis, the study of DNA.

00:17:52.340 | So that's really the new frontier.

00:17:55.580 | We are getting into prehistorical period

00:17:59.660 | where there is no historical sources.

00:18:02.340 | And from what we can understand today

00:18:04.940 | and that can of course change tomorrow

00:18:07.220 | with all these breakthroughs in sciences

00:18:11.620 | is that the Slavs came into existence somewhere

00:18:16.380 | in the area of marshes, Pripyat marshes,

00:18:21.220 | northwestern part of Ukraine, southwestern part of Belarus,

00:18:26.100 | eastern part of Poland, and that is considered

00:18:30.020 | to be historical homeland of Slavs and then they spread.

00:18:33.780 | And they spread all the way to the Adriatic.

00:18:36.440 | So we have Croats, we have Russians

00:18:38.980 | spreading all the way to the Pacific.

00:18:41.560 | We have Ukrainians, we have Belarusians, Poles.

00:18:45.280 | Once we had Czechoslovaks, now we have Czechs and Slovaks.

00:18:49.540 | So that's the story of starting with the eighth

00:18:53.460 | and ninth century, we can, even a little bit earlier,

00:18:56.260 | we can already follow that story with the help

00:18:58.300 | of the written sources, mostly from Byzantine

00:19:02.620 | then later from Western Europe.

00:19:07.140 | But what I was trying to do, not being a scientist,

00:19:11.980 | not being an expert in linguistics

00:19:14.260 | or not being an expert in DNA analysis,

00:19:18.500 | I was trying to see what was happening

00:19:21.900 | in the minds of those peoples and their elites in particular

00:19:26.100 | whom we call today not Slavs but Eastern Slavs,

00:19:30.540 | which means Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians,

00:19:33.100 | how they imagined themselves, how they imagined their world,

00:19:36.720 | and eventually I look at the so-called

00:19:39.200 | nation-building projects.

00:19:41.720 | So trying to answer the question of how we arrived

00:19:44.940 | to the situation in which we are today

00:19:48.280 | where there are not just three East Slavic nations

00:19:51.440 | but there are also three East Slavic states,

00:19:54.200 | Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian,

00:19:56.460 | so this is the focus of my book.

00:20:00.000 | I end, admittedly, in that particular book,

00:20:02.660 | I end on the 18th century before the era of nationalism,

00:20:07.480 | but then there are other books like Lost Kingdom

00:20:11.220 | that I bring the story all the way up to today.

00:20:14.800 | - So what aspects of the eighth and ninth century,

00:20:18.760 | the East Slavic states, permeates to today

00:20:23.980 | that we should understand?

00:20:25.340 | - Well, the most important one is that

00:20:28.620 | the existence of the state of Kievan Rus

00:20:31.180 | back during the medieval period created foundations

00:20:37.500 | for historical mythology, common historical mythology,

00:20:41.820 | and there are just wars and battles

00:20:43.700 | over who has the right or more right for Kievan Rus.

00:20:47.240 | The legal code that was created at that time

00:20:51.480 | existed for a long period of time.

00:20:54.100 | The acceptance of Christianity from Byzantium,

00:20:57.980 | that became a big issue that separated

00:21:00.780 | then Eastern Slavs from their Western neighbors,

00:21:04.260 | including Czechs and Poles,

00:21:07.380 | but united in that way to, let's say,

00:21:12.360 | Bulgarians or Serbs, and the beginning

00:21:16.060 | of the written literature, beginning in Kiev.

00:21:19.660 | So all of that is considered to be part of heritage.

00:21:23.700 | All of that is being contested.

00:21:25.560 | And this debates that were academic

00:21:31.240 | for a long period of time, what we see now,

00:21:34.180 | tragically, are being continued on the battlefield.

00:21:38.860 | - What is Kiev, what is Rus that you mentioned?

00:21:41.700 | What's the importance of these?

00:21:43.200 | You mentioned them as sort of defining places

00:21:48.320 | and terms, labels, at the beginning of all this.

00:21:52.800 | So what is Kiev?

00:21:54.000 | - Kiev became a capital, or the outpost,

00:21:59.840 | of the Vikings who were trying to establish control

00:22:04.840 | over the trade route between what is today's

00:22:09.960 | Western Russia and Belarus and Northern Ukraine,

00:22:14.960 | so the forest areas, and the biggest and the richest market

00:22:21.160 | in the world that existed at that time,

00:22:23.420 | which was in Constantinople, in Byzantium.

00:22:26.260 | So the idea was to get whatever goods you can get

00:22:30.420 | in that part of Eastern Europe,

00:22:32.160 | and most of those goods were slaves, local population,

00:22:37.240 | put them on the ships in Kiev,

00:22:40.160 | because Kiev was on the border with the steppe zones.

00:22:43.240 | Steppe zones were controlled by other groups,

00:22:47.480 | Scythians, Sarmatians, Polovtsians, Pechenegs,

00:22:53.640 | and so on, you name it, and then staying on the river,

00:22:58.640 | being protected from attacks of the nomads

00:23:03.360 | to come to the Black Sea and sell these products

00:23:06.540 | in Constantinople, that was the idea.

00:23:09.760 | That was the model, Vikings tried to practice

00:23:14.620 | that sort of business model also in other parts of Europe,

00:23:19.620 | and like in other parts of Europe,

00:23:22.460 | they turned out to be, by default,

00:23:25.680 | creators of new polities, of new states.

00:23:29.060 | And that was the story of the first Kievan dynasty.

00:23:34.620 | And Kiev, as the capital of that huge empire

00:23:38.060 | that was going from the Baltics to today's central Ukraine,

00:23:42.600 | and then was trying to get through the southern Ukraine

00:23:45.480 | to the Black Sea, that was a major, major European state,

00:23:50.480 | kingdom, if you want to call it, of medieval Europe,

00:23:57.360 | with creating a lot of tradition in terms of dynasty,

00:24:01.960 | in terms of language, in terms of religion,

00:24:05.200 | in terms of, again, historical mythology.

00:24:07.960 | So Kiev is central for the nation-building myth

00:24:12.960 | of a number of groups in the region.

00:24:19.220 | - So in one perspective and narrative,

00:24:23.300 | Kiev is at the center of this Russian empire.

00:24:28.440 | At which point does Moscow come to prominence

00:24:33.440 | as the center of the Russian empire?

00:24:36.200 | - Well, the Russian empire is a term

00:24:38.280 | and really creation of the 18th century.

00:24:41.300 | What we have for the Kievan, we call it Kievan Rus,

00:24:45.760 | again, this is a term of the 19th century,

00:24:48.580 | they call themselves Rus.

00:24:50.440 | - Rus.

00:24:51.620 | - And there was metropolitan of Rus,

00:24:53.780 | and there was Rus principalities,

00:24:56.440 | so very important to keep in mind that Rus is not Russia,

00:25:00.420 | because that was a self-name for all multiple groups

00:25:04.360 | on that territory.

00:25:07.100 | And Moscow doesn't exist at the time

00:25:11.120 | when Kiev emerges as the capital.

00:25:13.640 | The first reference to Moscow comes from the 12th century,

00:25:20.020 | when it was founded by one of the Kievan princes.

00:25:25.160 | And Moscow comes to prominence really

00:25:28.240 | in a very different context

00:25:30.240 | and with a very different empire

00:25:32.120 | running the show in the region.

00:25:34.160 | The story of Moscow and the rise of Moscow,

00:25:36.280 | this is the story of the Mongol rule

00:25:39.360 | over former Rus lands and former Rus territories.

00:25:44.740 | The part of the former Rus eventually overthrows

00:25:51.760 | the Mongol control with the help of the small group

00:25:56.760 | of people called Lithuanians,

00:26:00.320 | which had a young state and young dynasty

00:26:05.400 | and united this lands, which were mostly in today's terms,

00:26:09.240 | Ukrainian and Belarusian, so they separate early.

00:26:13.280 | And what is today is Russia, mostly Western Russia,

00:26:16.340 | Central Russia, stays under the Mongol control

00:26:19.440 | up until late 15th century.

00:26:22.440 | And that was the story when Moscow rises

00:26:26.280 | as the new capital of that realm,

00:26:29.080 | replacing the city of Vladimir as that capital.

00:26:34.080 | For those who ever went to Russia,

00:26:38.240 | they're familiar with, of course, Vladimir

00:26:41.440 | as the place of the oldest architectural monuments,

00:26:48.720 | the so-called the Golden Ring of Russia

00:26:50.680 | and so on and so forth, Vladimir is central

00:26:52.880 | and there are so many architectural monuments there

00:26:56.200 | because before there was Moscow, there was Vladimir.

00:26:58.480 | Eventually, in this struggle over control

00:27:02.940 | of the territory, struggle for favors from the Mongols

00:27:07.240 | and the Tatar horde, Moscow emerges as the center

00:27:11.760 | of that particular realm under Mongols

00:27:15.240 | after the Mongol rule is removed.

00:27:19.120 | Moscow embarks on the project that historians,

00:27:22.080 | Russian historians of the 19th century called

00:27:24.680 | the gathering of the Russian lands.

00:27:26.740 | Using Russian now for Rus and trying to bring back

00:27:33.520 | the lands of former Kievan Rus

00:27:39.200 | but also the lands of the former Mongol Empire.

00:27:43.120 | The Russians get to the Pacific before they get to Kiev,

00:27:48.120 | historically, and really the quote, unquote gathering

00:27:54.800 | of the quote, unquote Russian lands ends only in 1945

00:28:01.880 | when the Soviet Union bullies the Czechoslovak government

00:28:07.400 | into turning what is today's Transcarpetian Ukraine

00:28:12.840 | to the Soviet Union.

00:28:13.960 | It is included in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

00:28:17.000 | So that's the moment when that destiny,

00:28:21.160 | the way how it was imagined by the 19th century

00:28:24.800 | Russian historian was eventually fulfilled.

00:28:27.500 | Moscow was in control of all these lands.

00:28:30.720 | - So to what degree are the Slavic people one people,

00:28:34.640 | and this is a theme that will continue throughout, I think,

00:28:37.200 | versus a collection of multiple peoples,

00:28:39.480 | whether we're talking about the Kievan Rus

00:28:43.880 | or we're talking about the 19th century

00:28:46.640 | Russian Empire conception?

00:28:48.460 | - Well, a number of ways to look at that.

00:28:51.700 | One, the most obvious, the most clear is language.

00:28:55.060 | And there is no question that Poles speak

00:29:01.520 | a separate language and they are Slavs.

00:29:06.100 | And there is no question for anyone going to Ukraine

00:29:11.100 | and hearing Ukrainian realizing that this is not Russian.

00:29:16.260 | The level of comprehension can be different.

00:29:18.620 | You can understand certain words

00:29:21.500 | and you don't understand others.

00:29:23.360 | And the same would be with Polish

00:29:25.920 | and the same would be with Czech.

00:29:27.920 | So there is this linguistic history that is in common,

00:29:33.660 | but languages very clearly indicate

00:29:36.440 | that you're dealing with different peoples.

00:29:40.860 | We know that language is not everything.

00:29:45.440 | Americans speak a particular way of English.

00:29:49.280 | Australians speak a particular variant of English.

00:29:54.280 | But for reasons of geography history,

00:29:57.080 | we pretty much believe that despite linguistic unity,

00:30:01.600 | these are different nations and different peoples.

00:30:03.920 | And there are some parts of political tradition

00:30:08.880 | are in common, others are quite different.

00:30:12.860 | So the same when it comes to language,

00:30:15.740 | the same when it comes to political tradition,

00:30:17.840 | to the loyalty to the political institution

00:30:19.800 | applies to Slavic nations.

00:30:24.060 | So that's, again, there is nothing particularly unique

00:30:28.480 | about the Slavs in that regard.

00:30:30.720 | - You wrote the book, the Cossack Myth,

00:30:33.440 | History and Nationhood in the Age of Empires.

00:30:37.400 | It tells the story of an anonymous manuscript

00:30:40.340 | called the History of the Rus.

00:30:42.140 | It started being circulated in the 1820s.

00:30:44.720 | I would love it if you can tell the story of this.

00:30:47.680 | This is supposedly one of the most impactful texts

00:30:50.160 | in history, modern history.

00:30:52.120 | So what's the importance of this text?

00:30:53.980 | What did it contain?

00:30:54.820 | How did it define the future of the region?

00:30:56.920 | - In the first decades of the 19th century,

00:30:59.640 | after Napoleonic Wars, a mysterious text emerged

00:31:03.920 | that was attributed to an Orthodox archbishop

00:31:07.200 | that was long dead, which was claiming

00:31:12.200 | that the Cossacks of Ukraine were, in fact,

00:31:18.040 | the original Rus people, and that they had the right

00:31:25.960 | for a particular place, for central place in the Russian

00:31:29.840 | Empire, and it tells the history of the Cossacks.

00:31:34.240 | Full, it's the era of romanticism, full of all sorts

00:31:37.800 | of drama, there are heroes, there are villains,

00:31:41.080 | and the text captivates the attention of some key figures

00:31:46.080 | in the Russian intellectual elite in St. Petersburg.

00:31:53.520 | People like Kondraty Oreliev, who was executed

00:31:58.520 | for his participation in 1825 uprising, writes poetry

00:32:04.200 | on the basis of this text.

00:32:07.840 | Pushkin pays attention to it as well.

00:32:10.880 | And then comes along the key figure in Ukrainian

00:32:15.480 | national revival of the 19th century,

00:32:20.560 | Ukrainian National Project, the Rosh Tovchenko,

00:32:23.920 | and reads it as well.

00:32:25.200 | And they all read it very differently.

00:32:28.120 | Eventually, by the beginning of the mid-20th century,

00:32:34.760 | some of the Russian mostly nationalist writers

00:32:41.600 | called this text the Quran of Ukrainian nationalism.

00:32:46.100 | So what is there?

00:32:49.400 | The story, it's very important in a sense that

00:32:53.480 | what the authors, and that's what I claim in the book,

00:32:56.680 | what the authors of the text were trying to say,

00:33:00.280 | they were trying to say that the Cossack elite

00:33:04.200 | should have the same rights as the Russian nobility,

00:33:08.960 | and brings the long historical record to prove

00:33:13.360 | how cool the Cossacks were over the period of time.

00:33:17.860 | But at the beginning of the 19th century,

00:33:20.360 | they put this claim already, they used new arguments.

00:33:24.480 | And these arguments are about nation and nationalism.

00:33:27.960 | And they're saying that the Cossacks are a separate nation.

00:33:30.860 | And that's a big, big, big claim.

00:33:36.860 | The Russian Empire, and this is a very, very good argument

00:33:43.020 | in historiography, that Russian Empire grew and acquired

00:33:46.540 | this one-sixth of the earth by using one very specific way

00:33:51.440 | of integrating those lands.

00:33:53.440 | It integrated elites.

00:33:55.320 | It was making deals with the elites,

00:33:57.600 | whether the elites were Muslim,

00:33:59.400 | or the elites were Roman Catholic, as the case was the Poles,

00:34:03.280 | they would be, elites would be integrated,

00:34:05.480 | and the Empire was based on that estate,

00:34:09.160 | the estate loyalty and estate integration.

00:34:15.360 | But once you bring in the factor of nation and nationalism

00:34:20.360 | and language, then once in a sudden,

00:34:25.280 | the whole model of the integration of the elites,

00:34:28.680 | irrespective of their language, religion, and culture,

00:34:32.520 | starts falling apart.

00:34:34.460 | And the Poles were the first who really produced

00:34:38.100 | this sort of a challenge to the Russian Empire

00:34:43.720 | by apprisings, to apprisings in the 19th century.

00:34:47.640 | And Ukrainians then followed in their footsteps.

00:34:51.400 | So the text, the importance of the text is that

00:34:55.480 | it was making claim on the part of a particular estate,

00:34:59.540 | the Kazakh officer class,

00:35:03.020 | which was that Empire could survive.

00:35:05.960 | But it turned it, given the conditions of the time,

00:35:08.920 | into the claim for the special role

00:35:12.760 | of Cossacks as a nation,

00:35:16.560 | creating that this is a separate nation,

00:35:18.840 | a Rus' nation, and that is the challenge of nationalism,

00:35:23.540 | that no empire really survived,

00:35:25.900 | and the Russian Empire was not an exception.

00:35:28.140 | So that's a turning point when the discourse switches

00:35:31.760 | from loyalty based on the integration of the elites

00:35:35.800 | to the loyalty based on attachment to your nation,

00:35:39.680 | to your language, and to your culture, and to your history.

00:35:42.960 | - So that was like the initial spark, the flame,

00:35:46.180 | that led to nationalist movements.

00:35:50.480 | - That was the beginning, and the beginning

00:35:52.760 | that was building a bridge between the existence

00:35:56.840 | of the Kazakh state in the 17th and 18th century

00:35:59.640 | that was used as a foundation for the Kazakh mythology,

00:36:02.880 | Ukrainian national mythology,

00:36:04.920 | went into the Ukrainian national anthem,

00:36:08.160 | and the new age and the new stage

00:36:10.880 | where the Cossacks were not there anymore,

00:36:12.680 | where there were professors, intellectuals, students,

00:36:15.640 | members of the national organizations,

00:36:20.640 | and it started, of course, with romantic poetry,

00:36:23.600 | it was started with collecting folklore,

00:36:26.360 | and then later goes to the political stage,

00:36:29.800 | and eventually the stage of mass politics.

00:36:33.200 | - So to you, even throughout the 20th century under Stalin,

00:36:37.000 | there was always a force within Ukraine

00:36:41.960 | that wanted to be independent.

00:36:43.880 | - There were five attempts for Ukraine

00:36:47.600 | to declare its independence and to maintain it

00:36:50.920 | in the 20th century.

00:36:53.060 | Only one succeeded in 1991, but there were four,

00:36:57.040 | four different attempts before,

00:37:00.040 | and you see the Ukrainian national identity

00:37:04.880 | manifesting itself in two different ways.

00:37:08.920 | In the form of national communism,

00:37:11.040 | after the Bolshevik victory, in Bolshevik-controlled Ukraine,

00:37:17.040 | and in the form of radical nationalism

00:37:22.400 | in the parts of Ukraine that were controlled

00:37:24.580 | by Poland and Romania, and part of that

00:37:29.580 | was also controlled by Czechoslovakia and later Hungary.

00:37:34.000 | So in those parts outside of the Soviet Union,

00:37:38.440 | the form of the national mobilization,

00:37:41.480 | the key form of national mobilization,

00:37:43.400 | became radical nationalism.

00:37:45.520 | In Soviet Ukraine, it was national communism

00:37:49.840 | that came back in the 1960s and 1970s,

00:37:53.920 | and then in 1991, the majority of the members

00:37:58.920 | of the Ukrainian parliament who voted for independence

00:38:02.040 | were members of the Communist Party.

00:38:04.000 | So that spirit, on a certain level, never died.

00:38:08.920 | - So there's national communism and radical nationalism.

00:38:12.040 | Well, let me ask you about the radical nationalism

00:38:15.520 | because that is a topic that comes up

00:38:17.600 | in the discussion of the war in Ukraine today.

00:38:22.600 | Can you tell me about Stepan Bandera?

00:38:25.840 | Who was he, this controversial,

00:38:27.880 | far-right Ukrainian revolutionary?

00:38:31.040 | - There are at least two Stepan Banderas.

00:38:34.720 | One is the real person and another is mythology

00:38:39.440 | that really comes with this name.

00:38:43.700 | And the real person was a young student,

00:38:48.700 | nationalistically-oriented student

00:38:50.480 | in the late 1920s and early 1930s

00:38:53.400 | in the part of Ukraine that was controlled by Poland

00:38:55.960 | who belonged to the generation who regretted

00:39:00.680 | that they were not born in time for the big struggles

00:39:04.260 | of World War I and revolution at that time.

00:39:09.260 | They believed that their fathers lost opportunity

00:39:12.760 | for Ukraine to become independent

00:39:15.200 | and that a new ideology was needed.

00:39:18.620 | And that ideology was radical nationalism

00:39:22.400 | and new tactics were not needed.

00:39:25.400 | So Bandera becomes the leader of the organization

00:39:30.480 | of Ukrainian nationalists in Ukraine at the young age

00:39:34.000 | and organizes a number of assassinations

00:39:37.360 | of the Polish officials or members

00:39:40.880 | of the Ukrainian community who this young people

00:39:44.520 | in their 17, 18, 19 considered to be collaborators.

00:39:49.520 | He is arrested, put on trial,

00:39:56.200 | and that's where the myth of Bandera starts to emerge

00:40:00.880 | because he uses the trial to make statements

00:40:05.880 | about the Ukrainian nationalism,

00:40:10.960 | radical nationalism and its goals

00:40:13.840 | and suddenly becomes a hero among the Ukrainian youth

00:40:18.720 | at that time.

00:40:20.080 | He is sentenced for execution, for death,

00:40:25.960 | so when he delivers his speech he knows

00:40:28.300 | that he probably would die soon.

00:40:31.440 | And then it was the sentence was commuted to life in prison.

00:40:36.440 | Then World War II happens, the Polish state collapses

00:40:41.640 | and the pressure coming of course from Nazi Germany

00:40:45.080 | and the Soviet Union, Bandera walks away

00:40:50.080 | and presides over the act of the split

00:40:53.460 | over the organization of Ukrainian nationalists

00:40:55.800 | into two groups.

00:40:57.080 | The most radical one you used to call revolutionary,

00:41:00.660 | they call themselves revolutionary, is led by Bandera.

00:41:04.520 | They work together with the Nazi Germany at that time

00:41:10.120 | with the hope that Nazi Germany

00:41:12.400 | would deliver them independent Ukraine.

00:41:15.460 | First days of the German attack,

00:41:20.520 | Nazi attack on the Soviet Union,

00:41:23.240 | the units formed on the basis of organization

00:41:27.960 | of Ukrainian nationalists march into the city of Lviv

00:41:31.400 | and declare Ukrainian independence.

00:41:34.240 | That was not sanctioned by the German authorities,

00:41:37.700 | that was not in German plans.

00:41:40.000 | So they arrest Bandera, members of his family,

00:41:43.800 | his brothers, leaders of the organization.

00:41:48.280 | So his two brothers go to Auschwitz, die there.

00:41:53.280 | He was sent to Sachsenhausen for most duration of the war

00:41:58.500 | until 1944, refusing to revoke declaration

00:42:05.200 | of Ukrainian independence, which again contributes further

00:42:09.460 | to his mythology.

00:42:11.520 | After the war, he never comes back to Ukraine.

00:42:15.040 | He lives in exile in Munich.

00:42:18.720 | So between 1930 and his death in 1959,

00:42:23.720 | he spent in Ukraine maybe up to two years,

00:42:29.060 | maybe a little bit more, but most of the time

00:42:32.480 | was either in the Polish prison

00:42:34.480 | or in the German concentration camp or in exile.

00:42:38.860 | But the myth of Bandera lived and all the members

00:42:44.640 | of the organization of Ukrainian nationalists

00:42:46.760 | and then the Ukrainian Insurgent Army

00:42:49.520 | that fought against the Soviets all the way

00:42:53.000 | into the early 1950s, they were called Banderites.

00:42:56.660 | They were called Banderites by the Soviet authorities.

00:43:01.120 | They were known also in that way to the local population.

00:43:04.580 | So there was a faraway leader that barely was there

00:43:08.240 | on the spot, but whose name was attached to this movement

00:43:14.360 | for really liberation of Ukraine at that time,

00:43:17.140 | again, the battle that failed.

00:43:18.840 | - The fact that he collaborated with the Nazis sticks.

00:43:22.240 | From one perspective, he's considered by many

00:43:24.680 | to be a hero of Ukraine for fighting

00:43:27.820 | for the independence of Ukraine.

00:43:29.880 | From another perspective, coupled with the fact

00:43:34.480 | that there's this radical revolutionary extremist flavor

00:43:38.900 | to the way he sees the world,

00:43:41.640 | that label just stays that he's a fascist, he's a Nazi.

00:43:46.640 | To what degree is this true?

00:43:49.040 | To what degree is it not?

00:43:51.400 | - This label is certainly promoted by the first,

00:43:53.920 | by the Soviet propaganda and then by Russian propaganda.

00:43:57.340 | It works very nicely.

00:43:59.200 | If you focus on the years of collaboration,

00:44:04.560 | those were the same years when Joseph Stalin

00:44:07.440 | collaborated with Hitler, right?

00:44:09.940 | So we have the same reason

00:44:13.380 | to call Stalin Nazi collaborator

00:44:17.580 | as we have the reason to call Bandera Nazi collaborator.

00:44:21.760 | We look at the situation in the Pacific,

00:44:26.660 | in Indonesia, in other places.

00:44:29.520 | The leaders who worked together with Japanese,

00:44:33.900 | with the idea of promoting independence of their countries,

00:44:37.360 | after the Japanese collapse become leaders of the empire.

00:44:40.500 | So the difference with Bandera is that he never becomes

00:44:43.180 | the leader of empire and immunity

00:44:46.860 | that comes with that position certainly doesn't apply to him.

00:44:52.320 | But there are other parts of his life

00:44:57.000 | which certainly put this whole thing in question,

00:45:00.320 | the fate of his family, his own time

00:45:03.720 | in the German concentration camp.

00:45:06.660 | Certainly don't fit the propaganda,

00:45:10.340 | one-sided image of Bandera.

00:45:13.260 | In terms of him being a hero,

00:45:15.140 | that's a very, very interesting question

00:45:18.020 | because he is perceived in Ukraine today

00:45:21.260 | by not by all and probably not by the majority,

00:45:25.940 | but by many people in Ukraine

00:45:27.900 | as a symbol of fighting against the Soviet Union

00:45:33.940 | and by extension against Russia and Russian occupation.

00:45:37.300 | So his popularity grew after February 24th, 2022

00:45:42.300 | as a symbol of that resistance.

00:45:45.700 | Again, we are talking here about myth and mythology

00:45:48.940 | because Bandera was not leading the fight

00:45:52.380 | against the Soviet occupation in Ukraine

00:45:57.380 | because at that time he was just simply not in Ukraine.

00:46:01.620 | He was in Germany and you can imagine

00:46:04.020 | that geography mattered at that time

00:46:05.820 | much more than it matters today.

00:46:08.180 | - There's a million questions to ask here.

00:46:09.900 | I think it's an important topic

00:46:11.640 | because it is at the center of the claimed reason

00:46:16.640 | that the war continues in Ukraine.

00:46:19.660 | And so I would like to explore that from different angles.

00:46:22.100 | But just to clarify, was there a moment

00:46:24.580 | where Bandera chose Nazi Germany over the Red Army

00:46:31.060 | when the war already began?

00:46:32.980 | So in the list of allegiances,

00:46:36.600 | is Ukraine's independence more important

00:46:40.340 | than fighting Nazi Germany, essentially?

00:46:43.700 | - The Ukrainian independence was their goal

00:46:47.220 | and they were there to work with anybody

00:46:51.820 | who would support and in one way

00:46:55.340 | or at least allow the Ukrainian independence.

00:46:57.980 | So there is no question that they are

00:47:01.180 | just classic nationalists.

00:47:02.980 | So the goal is, nationalism is the principle

00:47:07.980 | according to which the, or at least one definition is,

00:47:11.660 | according to which the cultural boundaries

00:47:14.960 | coincide with political boundaries.

00:47:17.460 | So their goal was to create political boundaries

00:47:22.100 | that would coincide with the geographic boundaries

00:47:25.340 | in the conditions of the World War II

00:47:27.500 | and certainly making deals with whoever

00:47:31.180 | would either support, as I said,

00:47:36.180 | or tolerate that project of theirs.

00:47:39.820 | - So I would love to find the line between nationalism,

00:47:43.940 | even extreme nationalism and fascism and Nazism.

00:47:46.760 | So for Bandera the myth and Bandera the person,

00:47:50.880 | to what degree, let's look at some of the ideology

00:47:55.520 | of Nazism, to which degree did he hate Jews?

00:47:58.700 | Was he anti-Semitic?

00:47:59.800 | - We know that basically in his circle

00:48:05.840 | there were people who were anti-Semites

00:48:09.560 | in a sense that, okay, we have the texts, right?

00:48:12.180 | We know that.

00:48:13.400 | We don't have that information about that sort of text

00:48:18.400 | or that sort of evidence with regard to Bandera himself.

00:48:24.740 | In terms of fascism, there is very clear

00:48:29.080 | and there is research done that in particularly

00:48:31.360 | Italian fascism had influence on the thinking

00:48:36.360 | of people in that organization, including people at the top.

00:48:41.100 | But it is also very important to keep in mind

00:48:44.860 | that they call themselves nationalists and revolutionaries.

00:48:51.020 | And despite the fact that in 1939, in 1940, in 1941,

00:48:56.020 | it was very beneficial for them to declare themselves

00:49:00.740 | to be Ukrainian fascists and establish this bond

00:49:05.740 | not just with Italy but with Nazi Germany,

00:49:11.340 | they refused to do that.

00:49:13.420 | And then they refused to recall their independence.

00:49:17.660 | So influences, yes.

00:49:21.660 | But clearly it's a different type of a political project.

00:49:26.660 | - So let me fast forward into the future

00:49:31.520 | and see to which degree the myth permeates.

00:49:34.500 | Does Ukraine have a neo-Nazi problem?

00:49:38.540 | - My understanding is there are Nazis in Ukraine.

00:49:41.100 | And there are supporters of,

00:49:47.500 | of white supremacy theories.

00:49:49.360 | But also my understanding is that

00:49:54.340 | they're extremely marginal

00:49:58.020 | and they're more marginal than the same sort of groups

00:50:05.100 | are in Central Europe, maybe in the U.S. as well.

00:50:12.940 | And for me the question is not whether the Ukraine has it

00:50:17.940 | but why even in the conditions of the war

00:50:22.340 | the radical nationalism and extremism

00:50:28.980 | and white supremacist is such a marginal force.

00:50:33.460 | When in the countries that are not at the war,

00:50:36.560 | this is, you look at France, you look at,

00:50:39.660 | again, it's not exactly Nazis but really right,

00:50:43.900 | radical right is becoming so important.

00:50:47.940 | Why Ukraine in the conditions of the war

00:50:52.900 | is the country that manages relations

00:50:56.180 | between different ethnic groups and languages

00:51:00.340 | in the way that strengthens political nation?

00:51:03.420 | So for me as a scholar and a researcher,

00:51:06.740 | what I see is that in Ukraine the influence

00:51:11.740 | of the far right in different variations

00:51:15.580 | is much lower than it is among some of Ukraine's neighbors

00:51:20.580 | and in Europe in general.

00:51:22.780 | And the question is why?

00:51:23.900 | I don't know, I have guesses, I don't know answer

00:51:27.380 | but that's the question that I think is interesting

00:51:32.400 | to answer, how Ukraine ended up to be the only country

00:51:37.400 | in the world outside of Israel who has a Jewish president

00:51:41.720 | who is, my at least understanding,

00:51:44.280 | is the most popular president in history

00:51:48.280 | in terms of how long his popularity goes after the election.

00:51:52.280 | So this really from my point of view interesting questions

00:51:57.280 | and again we can certainly debate that.

00:52:00.700 | - So just for context, the most popular far right party

00:52:05.700 | won 2.15% of the vote in 2019, this is before the war.

00:52:09.920 | So that's where things stood.

00:52:12.140 | It's unclear where they stand now.

00:52:14.260 | It'd be an interesting question

00:52:15.580 | whether it escalated and how much.

00:52:17.700 | What you're saying is that war in general

00:52:20.780 | can serve as a catalyst for expansion of extremist groups,

00:52:25.780 | of extremist nationalistic groups especially

00:52:29.160 | like the far right and it's interesting to see

00:52:33.400 | to what degree they have or have not risen to power

00:52:37.320 | in the sort of in the shadows.

00:52:39.280 | - So no nationalist or nationalistic party

00:52:42.240 | actually crossed the barrier to get into the parliament.

00:52:45.280 | So Ukraine is the country where there is no right

00:52:48.200 | or far right in the parliament.

00:52:51.000 | We can't say that about Germany,

00:52:52.400 | we can't say that about France.

00:52:53.680 | So that's just one more way to stress

00:52:59.120 | this unique place of Ukraine in that sense

00:53:03.200 | and the year 2019 is the year already of the war.

00:53:07.480 | The war started in 2014 with the annexation of the Crimea.

00:53:11.960 | The frontline was near Donbas.

00:53:14.900 | All these groups were fighting there.

00:53:17.040 | So Ukraine maybe not to a degree that it is now

00:53:20.360 | was already on the war footing and yet,

00:53:23.640 | and yet the right party couldn't get more than 2%.

00:53:28.920 | So that's the question that I have in mind.

00:53:31.160 | And yes, the war historically, historically of course

00:53:35.080 | puts forward and makes from the more nationalist views

00:53:40.080 | and forces turn them from marginal forces

00:53:43.520 | into more central ones.

00:53:45.500 | We talked about Bandera and we talked about organization

00:53:48.840 | of Ukrainian nationalists.

00:53:50.440 | They were the most marginal group in the political spectrum

00:53:54.280 | in Ukraine in the 1930s that one can only imagine.

00:53:58.760 | But World War II comes and they become

00:54:04.840 | the most central group because they also

00:54:07.560 | were from the start to go.

00:54:09.200 | They knew that they had the organization.

00:54:11.840 | The violence was basically one of their means.

00:54:15.160 | They knew how to fight.

00:54:16.760 | So historically, historically wars

00:54:18.960 | indeed produce those results.

00:54:20.880 | So we are looking at Ukraine.

00:54:22.860 | We are trying to see what is happening there.

00:54:25.220 | - So Vladimir Putin in his interview with Tucker Carlson

00:54:28.480 | but many times before said that the current goal

00:54:31.920 | for the war in Ukraine is denazification.

00:54:35.620 | That the purpose of the war is denazification.

00:54:40.680 | Can you explain this concept of denazification

00:54:43.680 | as Putin sees it?

00:54:45.680 | - Denazification is the trope that is accepted

00:54:51.280 | quite well by the former Soviet population

00:54:54.740 | and Russian population in particular.

00:54:57.080 | The most powerful Soviet mythology

00:55:00.120 | that then was basically passed as part of heritage

00:55:04.340 | to the Russian Federation was World War II,

00:55:07.640 | was fighting against fascism.

00:55:09.760 | So once you use terms fascism and Nazi and denazification,

00:55:13.920 | suddenly people not just start listening,

00:55:18.160 | they just stop analyzing.

00:55:20.840 | And as a propaganda tool,

00:55:23.280 | this is of course a very, very powerful tool.

00:55:26.240 | In terms of to what degree this is the real goal or not,

00:55:32.560 | we discussed the importance of the far right

00:55:35.240 | in Europe and in Ukraine.

00:55:38.080 | So if that's the real goal of the war,

00:55:41.160 | probably the war would have to start not against Ukraine

00:55:44.020 | but probably against France or some other country

00:55:46.560 | if you take this at face value.

00:55:48.920 | - There's something really interesting here,

00:55:51.480 | as you mentioned.

00:55:53.040 | So I've spoken to a lot of people in Russia

00:55:55.800 | and you said analysis stops.

00:55:59.700 | In the West, people look at the word denazification

00:56:04.440 | and look at the things we've just discussed

00:56:06.400 | and kind of almost think this is absurd.

00:56:10.840 | When you talk to people in Russia,

00:56:13.260 | maybe it's deep in there somewhere,

00:56:15.520 | the history of World War II still reverberates

00:56:19.080 | through maybe the fears, maybe the pride,

00:56:23.500 | whatever the deep emotional history is there,

00:56:27.820 | it seems that the goal of denazification

00:56:31.420 | appears to be reasonable for people in Russia.

00:56:34.900 | They don't seem to see the absurdity or the complexity

00:56:39.320 | or even the need for analysis, I guess,

00:56:42.340 | in this kind of statement, word of denazification.

00:56:45.780 | - I would say this is broader, this is broader.

00:56:50.000 | The war that started under the banner

00:56:53.900 | that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people

00:56:57.340 | and produces that sort of casualty

00:56:59.740 | really goes against also any sort of logical thinking.

00:57:08.140 | But Russia is a place where the free press

00:57:12.460 | doesn't exist already for a long period of time.

00:57:15.840 | Russia is the place where there is an echo chamber,

00:57:20.840 | to a degree, and as war started first in 2014

00:57:26.220 | and then all out war in 2022,

00:57:30.380 | I came across a lot of people on the personal level

00:57:34.180 | but also in the media reporting

00:57:35.980 | that they really can't find common language

00:57:38.500 | with their close relatives in Russia.

00:57:42.480 | People who visited Ukraine who know

00:57:44.340 | that it is not taken over by nationalists

00:57:47.180 | is not taken over by Nazis.

00:57:49.120 | But the media around them, the neighbors around them,

00:57:53.700 | the people at their work basically say

00:57:56.380 | one and the same thing.

00:57:58.740 | And we as humans in general, whatever our background,

00:58:02.740 | we are very, very, our mind is really,

00:58:06.860 | it's relatively easy to manipulate it.

00:58:10.580 | And to a degree that even family connections

00:58:15.900 | and even family ties don't sometimes help

00:58:20.900 | to maintain that ability to think

00:58:25.860 | and to analyze on your own, to look at the facts.

00:58:30.060 | - So Putin has alluded to the Yaroslav Honka incident

00:58:34.700 | in the Canadian parliament, September, 2023.

00:58:38.660 | This man is a veteran of World War II on the Ukrainian side

00:58:43.660 | and he got two standing ovations in the Canadian parliament

00:58:47.940 | but they later found out that he was part of the SS.

00:58:52.940 | So can you explain on this?

00:58:54.980 | What are your thoughts on this?

00:58:56.740 | This had a very big effect on the narrative, I guess,

00:59:01.740 | propagated throughout the region.

00:59:04.380 | - Yes, what happened during World War II

00:59:08.540 | was that once the Germans started to run out of manpower,

00:59:14.440 | they created sort of foreign legion groups

00:59:21.980 | but because those people were not Aryans,

00:59:26.040 | they were created for fighting on the battleground.

00:59:30.260 | Because they were not Aryans, they couldn't be trusted.

00:59:33.280 | So they were put under the command of Henry Himmler,

00:59:37.160 | under command of SS and became known as SS Waffen units.

00:59:43.040 | And one of such units was created in Ukraine

00:59:47.700 | with great difficulties because Nazis didn't consider Slavs

00:59:53.360 | to be generally worthy of even that sort

00:59:57.800 | of foreign legion formations.

00:59:59.540 | But they made an exception because those people

01:00:03.500 | were coming from Galicia, which was part of Austria-Hungary,

01:00:06.540 | which means part of Austria, which means somehow

01:00:10.180 | we're open to the benevolent influence of the Germanic race

01:00:15.180 | and called the division Galitsyn or Galicia.

01:00:21.120 | Part of Ukrainian youth joined the Galitsyn, the division.

01:00:26.120 | One of the explanations was that they were looking

01:00:31.940 | at the experience of World War I and seeing that the units,

01:00:36.940 | the Ukrainian units in the Austrian army then played

01:00:40.580 | a very important role in the fight for independence.

01:00:43.440 | So that is one of the explanations.

01:00:44.960 | You can't just use one explanation to describe motivations

01:00:49.500 | of everyone and every single person who was joined in there.

01:00:54.120 | So they were sent to the front.

01:00:56.500 | They were defeated within a few short days by the Red Army.

01:01:01.500 | And then were retreating through Slovakia where they were

01:01:08.980 | used to fight with the partisan movement there

01:01:12.600 | and eventually surrendered to the British.

01:01:15.200 | So that's the story.

01:01:18.540 | You can personally maybe understand what the good

01:01:23.540 | motivations were of this person or that person,

01:01:27.120 | but that is one of the best, one of the very tragic

01:01:32.740 | and unfortunate pages in Ukrainian history.

01:01:37.740 | You can't justify that as a phenomenon.

01:01:43.900 | So from that point of view, the celebration

01:01:48.800 | of that experience as opposed to looking at that,

01:01:51.100 | okay, that happened and we wish that those young men

01:01:56.100 | who were idealistic or joined the division

01:01:59.340 | for idealistic purposes had better understanding

01:02:03.460 | of things or made other choices.

01:02:06.260 | But you can't certainly celebrate that.

01:02:08.860 | And once that happened, that of course became

01:02:11.020 | a big propaganda item in the current war.

01:02:16.020 | We are talking about 10 to 20,000 people in the division

01:02:23.140 | and we are talking about two to three million Ukrainians

01:02:29.500 | fighting in the Red Army.

01:02:30.820 | And again, it's not like Red Army is completely blameless

01:02:36.820 | in the way how it behaved in Prussia or in Germany

01:02:40.100 | and so on and so forth.

01:02:41.140 | But it's basically, it's again, we are going back

01:02:44.240 | to the story of Bandera.

01:02:45.580 | So there is a period of collaboration

01:02:47.580 | and that's what propaganda tries to define him by.

01:02:51.740 | Or there is a division glitzened by 20,000 people

01:02:55.820 | and somehow it makes irrelevant the experience

01:02:59.380 | of two to three million people.

01:03:01.340 | - I mean, just to clarify, I think there's just a blunder

01:03:04.900 | on the Canadian parliament side, the Canadian side

01:03:08.720 | of not doing research of, maybe correct me if I'm wrong,

01:03:13.080 | but from my understanding, they were just doing stupid,

01:03:16.660 | shallow political stuff.

01:03:18.120 | Let's applaud, you know, when Zelensky shows up,

01:03:21.300 | let's have a Ukrainian veteran, let's applaud a veteran

01:03:23.920 | of World War II and then all of a sudden you realize,

01:03:26.780 | well, there's actually complexities to wars.

01:03:29.120 | We can talk about, for example, a lot of dark aspects

01:03:32.880 | on all sides of World War II, the mass rape

01:03:35.480 | at the end of World War II by the Red Army.

01:03:38.820 | When they say martial or German, there's a lot

01:03:40.820 | of really dark complexity on all sides.

01:03:44.440 | So, you know, that could be an opportunity

01:03:46.660 | to explore the dark complexity that some of the Ukrainians

01:03:49.560 | were in the SS or Bandera, the complexities there,

01:03:53.700 | but I think they were doing not a complex thing.

01:03:57.120 | They were doing a very shallow applaud

01:03:59.780 | and we should applaud veterans, of course,

01:04:02.040 | but in that case, they were doing it for show

01:04:04.500 | for Zelensky and so on, so we should clarify

01:04:07.000 | that the applause wasn't knowing, it wasn't for the SS.

01:04:12.960 | It was for a Ukrainian, it was for World War II veterans,

01:04:17.940 | but the propaganda, or at least an interpretation

01:04:22.940 | from the Russian side, from whatever side,

01:04:27.140 | is that they were applauding the full person

01:04:31.000 | standing before them, which wasn't just a Ukrainian veteran,

01:04:33.780 | but a Ukrainian veteran that fought for the SS.

01:04:36.720 | - I don't have any particular insights,

01:04:39.700 | but I would be very much surprised if even one person

01:04:44.120 | in the parliament, I mean the members of the parliament,

01:04:46.620 | actually knew the whole story.

01:04:48.880 | I would be very surprised.

01:04:50.220 | - Yeah, the whole story of this person,

01:04:52.300 | and frankly, the whole story of Ukraine and Russia

01:04:57.180 | in World War II, period.

01:04:58.340 | - Yes, yes.

01:04:59.260 | - Nevertheless, they had a lot of power

01:05:02.220 | and really reverberated in support of the narrative

01:05:05.440 | that there is a neo-Nazi, a Nazi problem in Ukraine.

01:05:09.880 | - This is the narrative that is out there,

01:05:12.880 | and it's especially powerful in Russia.

01:05:17.820 | It's especially powerful in Russia,

01:05:19.460 | given that there are really the atmosphere that is created,

01:05:28.660 | really is not conducive to any independent analysis.

01:05:32.620 | - Well, I wonder what is the most effective way

01:05:34.420 | to respond to that particular claim?

01:05:37.940 | Because there could be a discussion about nationalism

01:05:42.300 | and extreme nationalism and the fight for independence

01:05:45.160 | and whether it isn't, like Putin wrote, one people.

01:05:49.660 | But the question of are there Nazis in Ukraine

01:05:52.900 | seems to be a question that could be...

01:05:55.340 | Analyzed rigorously with data.

01:06:00.340 | - That has been done on the academic level,

01:06:05.440 | but in terms of the public response and public discourse,

01:06:09.860 | the only response that I see is not to focus

01:06:16.100 | on the questions raised and put by the propaganda,

01:06:20.340 | because you're already become victim

01:06:22.140 | of that propaganda by definition.

01:06:24.700 | But talk about that much broadly,

01:06:28.700 | and talk about different aspects of,

01:06:33.700 | if it is World War II, about different aspects

01:06:35.840 | of World War II.

01:06:37.340 | If it's about issue of the far right in Ukraine,

01:06:41.020 | let's talk about US, let's talk about Russia,

01:06:44.300 | let's talk about France, let's compare.

01:06:47.100 | That's the only way how you deal with propaganda,

01:06:50.080 | because propaganda is not necessarily something

01:06:53.500 | that is an outright lie.

01:06:58.060 | Can be just one factor that's taken out of the context

01:07:03.060 | and is blown out of proportion, and that is good enough.

01:07:08.260 | - And the way to defend against that

01:07:11.320 | is to bring in the context.

01:07:12.940 | Let us move gracefully throughout,

01:07:16.140 | back and forth through history, back to Bandera.

01:07:20.060 | You wrote a book on the KGB spy, Bogdan Stashinsky.

01:07:24.840 | Can you tell his story?

01:07:26.940 | - This is a story of the history of the organization

01:07:31.260 | of Ukrainian nationalists, and Bandera as well,

01:07:34.340 | already after the end of the Second World War.

01:07:37.160 | Because what you got after the Second World War,

01:07:42.600 | so imagine May of 1945, the red banner

01:07:47.620 | is all over Riksdag, the Red Army is in control

01:07:51.900 | of half of Europe, but the units of the Red Army

01:07:55.020 | are still fighting the war, and not just behind

01:08:00.020 | the Soviet lines, but within the borders

01:08:02.420 | of the Soviet Union.

01:08:03.500 | And this war continues all the way into the early 1950s,

01:08:08.820 | up to, almost up to Stalin's death.

01:08:10.980 | The war is conducted by the organization

01:08:15.780 | of Ukrainian nationalists, which have a Ukrainian

01:08:18.580 | insurgent army, and the government tries

01:08:22.220 | to crush that resistance.

01:08:25.320 | So what it does is basically recruits local people

01:08:29.100 | to spy on the partisans on the underground.

01:08:34.540 | And Bogdan Stashinsky is one of those people.

01:08:37.380 | His family is supporting the resistance.

01:08:41.100 | They provide food, his sister is engaged

01:08:44.980 | with one of the local commanders of this underground unit,

01:08:49.980 | and they know everything about Stashinsky's family,

01:08:54.940 | and they know everything about him,

01:08:56.960 | because he is also collecting funds for the underground.

01:09:00.260 | So they have a conversation with him,

01:09:03.900 | saying that, okay, that's what we got,

01:09:07.060 | and you and your family can go to prison,

01:09:11.100 | or you help us a little bit.

01:09:13.780 | We are interested in the fiance of your sister,

01:09:18.340 | and we want to get him.

01:09:19.540 | And Stashinsky says yes.

01:09:22.620 | And once they round up the fiance,

01:09:27.780 | he basically betrayed a member,

01:09:29.460 | or almost member of his family.

01:09:31.300 | He is done.

01:09:33.460 | He can't go back to his village.

01:09:36.020 | He can't go back to his study.

01:09:37.620 | He was studying in Lviv at that time.

01:09:40.020 | So he becomes, as I write in my book,

01:09:43.860 | the secret police becomes his family.

01:09:46.420 | And he is sent to Kiev, he is trained for two years,

01:09:50.880 | sent to East Germany, into Berlin,

01:09:53.500 | and becomes an assassin.

01:09:56.400 | So they sent him across the border

01:10:00.300 | to Western Germany, to Munich,

01:10:05.140 | which was the headquarter of different organizations,

01:10:10.140 | anti-Soviet organizations.

01:10:12.020 | Ukrainian, and Russian, and Georgian,

01:10:14.660 | and so on and so forth.

01:10:16.420 | And he kills two leaders of the organization

01:10:21.420 | of Ukrainian nationalists.

01:10:24.180 | One editor of the newspaper,

01:10:26.060 | and eventually he kills Bandera.

01:10:28.700 | He does that with the new weapon, a spray pistol,

01:10:34.220 | that eventually makes it into the Bond novel,

01:10:37.820 | "The Man with the Golden Gun."

01:10:40.280 | And that whole episode is a little bit reshaped,

01:10:44.740 | but it is not in the film,

01:10:47.560 | but it is in the novel itself.

01:10:51.900 | And then later has a change of mind

01:10:55.100 | under the influence of his German fiance and then wife.

01:11:00.100 | They decide to escape to the West.

01:11:04.900 | And while they're doing that,

01:11:07.820 | they discover that their apartment was bugged,

01:11:10.860 | and probably the KGB knows all of that.

01:11:13.660 | So a long story short, his son dies in Berlin.

01:11:18.660 | The KGB doesn't allow him to go there,

01:11:25.820 | but his wife has a nervous breakdown,

01:11:28.900 | so they allow him to go there to just calm her

01:11:31.660 | so that there would be no scandal.

01:11:34.140 | And two of them, one day before their son's burial,

01:11:39.140 | because after that they would be sent to Moscow,

01:11:44.240 | they jumped the ship and go to West Berlin,

01:11:49.080 | two hours before the Berlin Wall was being built.

01:11:54.080 | So if they would stay for the funeral,

01:11:58.100 | probably the KGB would not let them go.

01:12:01.260 | But also if they would stay, the border would be there.

01:12:05.220 | And he goes to the American intelligence and says,

01:12:08.740 | "Okay, that's who I am, and that's what I did."

01:12:12.120 | And they look at him and they say, "I don't trust you.

01:12:17.060 | "We don't know who you are.

01:12:18.120 | "You have documents in five names.

01:12:21.000 | "You say you killed Bandera.

01:12:23.880 | "Oh, we have different information."

01:12:26.020 | He was poisoned and probably by someone

01:12:30.060 | in his close circle.

01:12:34.500 | A spray pistol, did you reach too much Ian Flaming?

01:12:39.500 | Where does this come from?

01:12:43.900 | He insists.

01:12:44.860 | They said, "Okay, you insist.

01:12:46.980 | "If you committed all those crimes,

01:12:49.060 | "we're giving you to the German police

01:12:51.000 | "and German police will be investigating you."

01:12:54.940 | And then the trial comes,

01:12:57.540 | and if he says, if he takes back his testimony,

01:13:02.540 | the whole case against him collapses.

01:13:06.580 | He can go free.

01:13:08.140 | But he knows that if he goes free,

01:13:09.720 | he is a target of his colleagues from the same department.

01:13:14.540 | So his task in the trial is to prove that he is guilty,

01:13:17.860 | that he has did that.

01:13:20.660 | And then he disappears.

01:13:22.600 | Nobody knows where he goes,

01:13:25.820 | and there are all sorts of cover stories.

01:13:27.760 | And I was lucky to interview a commander,

01:13:31.260 | former chief of the South African police,

01:13:34.860 | confirmed to me that Stashinsky was in South Africa.

01:13:40.940 | - He fled.

01:13:41.980 | - The West German intelligence thought

01:13:44.020 | that it was too dangerous for him to stay in Germany.

01:13:46.720 | They sent him under a different name to South Africa.

01:13:51.940 | So that's the story of Stashinsky himself.

01:13:56.540 | But going back to Bandera,

01:13:58.260 | of course, the fact that he confessed

01:14:02.460 | and it became known that KGB assassinated Bandera

01:14:05.460 | that added to the image

01:14:09.460 | and to general mythology about Bandera.

01:14:12.140 | - What a fascinating story of a village boy

01:14:14.540 | becoming an assassin who killed

01:14:17.380 | one of the most influential revolutionaries

01:14:20.260 | of the region in the 20th century.

01:14:22.680 | So what, just zooming out broadly on the KGB,

01:14:26.980 | how powerful was the KGB?

01:14:29.880 | What role did it play in this whole story

01:14:33.340 | of the Soviet Union?

01:14:34.740 | - It depends on the period.

01:14:36.640 | At the time that we just described,

01:14:39.080 | late '50s and early '60s,

01:14:42.240 | they were not powerful at all.

01:14:44.340 | And the reasons for that was that

01:14:49.740 | people like Khrushchev were really concerned

01:14:53.340 | about the secret police becoming too powerful.

01:14:56.260 | It became too powerful in their mind

01:14:58.700 | under Stalin, under Beria.

01:15:00.420 | And it was concern about the Beria's power

01:15:05.340 | as a secret police chief that led to the coup against Beria.

01:15:10.340 | And Khrushchev come into power

01:15:13.980 | and Beria was arrested and executed.

01:15:17.320 | And what Khrushchev was trying to do after that

01:15:20.640 | was trying to put,

01:15:22.660 | since '54, the name was already KGB,

01:15:27.680 | KGB under his control.

01:15:29.820 | So he was appointing the former Komsomol leaders

01:15:33.460 | as the heads of the KGB.

01:15:36.860 | So the people who really,

01:15:38.600 | really owned everything to him,

01:15:43.220 | that sort of position.

01:15:44.640 | And the heads of the KGB were not members of Politburo.

01:15:48.420 | It changed in the '70s with Andropa

01:15:51.260 | where KGB started to play, again,

01:15:55.340 | very important role in the Soviet history.

01:15:57.940 | And let's say decisions on Afghanistan

01:16:02.700 | and the Soviet troops marching into Afghanistan

01:16:05.980 | were made by the, apart from Brezhnev,

01:16:10.300 | by the trio of the people who would be called today

01:16:14.420 | Seleviki maybe, or not all of them were Seleviki,

01:16:17.220 | but one, of course, was Andropa, the head of the KGB.

01:16:19.860 | Another was the minister of defense.

01:16:23.380 | And then there was secretary in charge

01:16:25.160 | of the military industrial complex,

01:16:26.680 | a minister of foreign affairs.

01:16:29.480 | So, but the head of the KGB became really

01:16:33.000 | not just the member of Politburo,

01:16:34.820 | but the member of that inner circle.

01:16:38.700 | And then the fact that Andropa succeeds Brezhnev

01:16:42.020 | is also a manifestation of the power

01:16:45.140 | that KGB acquired really after Khrushchev in the 1970s

01:16:49.140 | and then going into the 1980s.

01:16:53.060 | - Who was more powerful, the KGB or the CIA

01:16:56.260 | during the Soviet Union?

01:16:58.540 | - The CIA, it's the organization that is charged

01:17:03.540 | with the information gathering and all sorts of operations,

01:17:10.980 | including assassinations in the '50s and '60s abroad.

01:17:15.140 | The KGB was the organization that really had

01:17:20.980 | both the surveillance over the population

01:17:25.380 | within the Soviet Union and also the operations abroad

01:17:30.380 | and its members, its leaders were members

01:17:36.440 | of the inner circle for making decisions.

01:17:39.220 | I, again, from what I understand about the way

01:17:42.420 | how politics and decisions work

01:17:45.300 | and decisions are made in the United States,

01:17:48.560 | the CIA, the chief of the CIA is not one

01:17:52.900 | of the decision-making group that provided information.

01:17:56.880 | Yes, so I would say it's not day and night,

01:17:59.900 | but their power, political influence,

01:18:02.060 | political significance, very different.

01:18:04.840 | - Is it understood how big the KGB was?

01:18:08.700 | How widespread it was, given its secretive

01:18:11.540 | and distributed nature?

01:18:13.380 | - Certain things we know, others we don't

01:18:15.820 | because the Stasi archives are open

01:18:18.260 | and most of the KGB, especially in Moscow, they're not.

01:18:22.700 | But we know that the KGB combined not only

01:18:28.140 | the internal sort of secret police functions at home

01:18:34.660 | and counterintelligence branch and intelligence branch

01:18:39.660 | abroad, but also the border troops, for example, right?

01:18:44.040 | So really, institutionally, it was a huge, huge mammoth.

01:18:49.040 | And another thing that we know, we can sort of extrapolate

01:18:53.520 | from what we know from the Stasi archives,

01:18:57.900 | that the surveillance at home,

01:18:59.660 | the surveillance was really massive.

01:19:03.380 | The guess is the Soviets were not as effective

01:19:07.740 | and as meticulous and as scrupulous and as methodical

01:19:12.740 | as probably as Germans were, but that gives you

01:19:17.380 | a basic idea of how penetrated the entire society was.

01:19:21.300 | - What do you think is important to understand

01:19:23.060 | about the KGB if we want to also understand Vladimir Putin,

01:19:27.500 | since he was a KGB foreign intelligence officer for 16 years?

01:19:33.280 | - From my research, including on the Stashinsky,

01:19:37.980 | what I understand is that in KGB,

01:19:42.980 | and it was a powerful organization again,

01:19:45.940 | less powerful in '50s and '60s,

01:19:47.660 | but still very powerful organization.

01:19:50.300 | There was, on the one hand, the understanding

01:19:54.300 | of the situation in the country and abroad

01:19:57.460 | that probably other organizations didn't have.

01:20:02.320 | They had also first peak in terms of the selecting cadres.

01:20:07.320 | The work in the KGB was well paid

01:20:10.300 | and considered to be very prestigious.

01:20:13.100 | So that was part, to a degree, of the Soviet elite

01:20:17.300 | in terms of whom they recruited.

01:20:20.420 | And they had a resentment toward the party leadership.

01:20:23.340 | They didn't allow them to do James Bond kind of things

01:20:27.900 | that they would want to do because there were

01:20:29.660 | political risks.

01:20:31.340 | After this scandal with Stashinsky,

01:20:35.280 | at least on many levels, the KGB stopped the practice

01:20:41.860 | of the assassinations, political assassinations abroad

01:20:45.640 | because it was considered politically

01:20:47.620 | to be extremely, extremely dangerous.

01:20:50.040 | The person who was in charge of the KGB

01:20:52.480 | at the time of Bandera's assassination,

01:20:55.000 | Shelepin, was one of the candidates to replace Khrushchev.

01:21:00.260 | And Brezhnev used against him that scandal abroad,

01:21:03.900 | eventually to remove him from Politburova.

01:21:07.460 | So the KGB was really looking at the party leadership

01:21:11.580 | as, to a degree, ineffective, corrupt,

01:21:13.540 | and was on their way.

01:21:16.780 | And from what I understand, that's exactly the attitudes

01:21:21.780 | that people like Putin and people of his circle

01:21:30.220 | brought to power in Kremlin.

01:21:34.060 | So the methods that KGB used, they can use now

01:21:38.140 | and there is no party or no other institution

01:21:42.100 | actually stopping them from doing that.

01:21:45.260 | And they think about, my understanding,

01:21:48.580 | the operations abroad about foreign policy in general

01:21:52.860 | in terms of the KGB mindset of planning operations

01:21:56.180 | and executing particular operations and so on and so forth.

01:21:59.060 | So I think a lot of culture

01:22:01.980 | that came into existence in the Soviet KGB

01:22:05.700 | now became part of the culture of the Russian establishment.

01:22:10.700 | - You wrote the book, The Russo-Ukrainian War,

01:22:16.300 | The Return of History, that gives the full context

01:22:21.300 | leading up to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia

01:22:27.900 | in February 2022.

01:22:29.660 | So can you take me through the key moments in history

01:22:35.580 | that led up to this war?

01:22:37.420 | So we'll mention the collapse of the Soviet Union.

01:22:41.060 | We could probably go much farther back.

01:22:44.340 | But the collapse of the Soviet Union, mentioned 2014,

01:22:48.020 | maybe you can highlight key moments

01:22:51.260 | that led up to 2022.

01:22:54.740 | - The key moments would be first the year 2004,

01:22:58.980 | known for Orange Revolution in Ukraine,

01:23:03.060 | and then the year 2013, known as the Revolution of Dignity.

01:23:08.060 | Both were the revolts against the something

01:23:12.940 | that by significant part of Ukrainian population

01:23:16.860 | was considered to be completely, completely unacceptable

01:23:22.620 | actions on the part of the government

01:23:24.780 | and people in the government at that time.

01:23:27.220 | So the Orange Revolution of 2004 was a protest

01:23:31.340 | against falsified presidential elections.

01:23:33.920 | And rejection of a candidate that was supported by Russia,

01:23:40.420 | publicly supported by Russia.

01:23:42.380 | I remember being in Moscow at that time

01:23:44.180 | and couldn't believe my eyes when in the center of Russia

01:23:47.380 | I saw a billboard with Yanukovych.

01:23:51.220 | And the trick was that there were a lot of Ukrainians

01:23:53.980 | in Russia and in Moscow in particular,

01:23:56.020 | and they had the right to vote.

01:23:58.020 | And it led to the election of,

01:24:03.700 | as Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko,

01:24:09.260 | who put on the agenda the issue

01:24:13.420 | of Ukraine's membership in NATO.

01:24:15.740 | So it was very clear pro-Western orientation.

01:24:19.400 | And the second case was the Revolution of Dignity 2013,

01:24:24.400 | with some of the same characters including Yanukovych,

01:24:29.640 | who at that time was already President of Ukraine.

01:24:34.160 | And there the question was of the government

01:24:39.160 | promising the people for one year at least

01:24:44.340 | to sign association agreement with European Union.

01:24:47.740 | And then turning over, almost overnight,

01:24:51.360 | and saying that they were not going to do that.

01:24:53.660 | And that's how things started.

01:24:56.940 | But then when they became really massive,

01:24:59.900 | and why something that was called Euro Revolution

01:25:04.900 | became Revolution of Dignity,

01:25:07.340 | was when the government police

01:25:10.860 | beat up students in downtown Kiev,

01:25:17.340 | who, judging by the reports,

01:25:19.740 | were basically already almost ready to disperse,

01:25:22.820 | almost ready to go home.

01:25:24.940 | And that's when roughly half of Kiev

01:25:27.660 | showed up on the streets.

01:25:29.100 | That sort of the police behavior,

01:25:33.660 | that sort of the, was absolutely unacceptable in Ukraine.

01:25:37.460 | The still in elections and falsification of elections

01:25:43.520 | was unacceptable.

01:25:45.740 | That's where around that time,

01:25:48.380 | and around 2004, the President of Ukraine at that time,

01:25:52.660 | Leonid Kuchma writes a book called "Ukraine is Not Russia."

01:25:57.660 | And apparently the term comes from his discussion

01:26:03.700 | with Putin, when Putin was suggesting to him

01:26:08.060 | quite strongly to use force against people

01:26:10.500 | on the Maidan on the square in Kiev.

01:26:13.780 | And Kuchma allegedly said to him,

01:26:17.400 | "You don't understand, Ukraine is not Russia.

01:26:20.900 | "You can't do things like that, you get pushed back."

01:26:26.320 | And that's these two events, 2004 and then 2013,

01:26:31.320 | and became really crucial point

01:26:34.080 | in terms of the Ukraine direction,

01:26:37.420 | the survival of Ukrainian democracy,

01:26:39.740 | which is one of very few countries

01:26:42.140 | in the post-Soviet space where democracy survived

01:26:45.820 | the original flirt between the government leaders

01:26:50.820 | and democracy of the 1990s.

01:26:55.300 | It was the all-Soviet story in Russia, everywhere else,

01:26:59.180 | there was high democratic expectations,

01:27:02.440 | but they came pretty much to an end.

01:27:04.980 | By the end of the decade, Ukraine preserved the democracy.

01:27:09.100 | And the orientation of Ukraine toward integration

01:27:14.100 | in some form into Western and European structures,

01:27:19.860 | that Ukrainian democracy plus Western orientation

01:27:25.220 | was something, and in Russia we see the strengthening

01:27:30.380 | of the autocratic regime under Vladimir Putin.

01:27:33.720 | That, if you look deeper, these are the processes

01:27:37.740 | that put the two countries on the collision course.

01:27:40.460 | - So there's a division, a push and pull inside Ukraine

01:27:44.600 | on identity of whether they're part of Russia

01:27:48.660 | or part of Europe, and you highlighted two moments

01:27:52.940 | in Ukrainian history that there's a big flare-up

01:27:56.300 | where the statement was first, "Ukraine is not Russia,"

01:28:01.300 | and essentially, "Ukraine is part of Europe."

01:28:04.860 | But there's other moments.

01:28:07.140 | What were the defining moments that began an actual war?

01:28:10.020 | And the--

01:28:10.860 | - The war started in February of 2014

01:28:13.540 | with the Russian takeover of Crimea by military force,

01:28:18.540 | the so-called Green Man.

01:28:20.200 | And the big question is why?

01:28:27.060 | And it's very important to go back to the year 2013

01:28:32.300 | and the start of the protests

01:28:36.860 | and the story of the Ukraine signing Association Agreement

01:28:40.340 | with the European Union.

01:28:41.540 | So from what we understand today,

01:28:44.980 | the Ukrainian government under President Yanukovych

01:28:48.860 | did this suicidal, sharp turn after one year

01:28:53.460 | of promising Association Agreement, saying that,

01:28:55.780 | "Okay, we changed our mind," under pressure from Moscow.

01:28:59.220 | And Moscow applied that pressure for one reason,

01:29:06.740 | at least in my opinion.

01:29:08.120 | The Ukraine signing Association Agreement

01:29:12.380 | with the European Union would mean that Ukraine

01:29:17.380 | would not be able to sign Association Agreement

01:29:21.100 | with any Eurasian Union in any shape or form

01:29:24.060 | that was at that time in the process of making.

01:29:29.020 | And for Vladimir Putin, that was the beginning of his,

01:29:32.740 | or part of his third term.

01:29:35.700 | One of his agenda items for the third term

01:29:39.660 | was really a consolidation of the post-Soviet space

01:29:43.820 | and Eurasian space and not membership in NATO,

01:29:48.600 | not membership in European Union.

01:29:50.980 | But Association Agreement with European Union meant

01:29:54.940 | that that post-Soviet space would have to exist

01:29:59.940 | under Moscow's control but without Ukraine,

01:30:03.740 | the second largest post-Soviet republic,

01:30:06.420 | the republic on whose vote depended

01:30:09.500 | the continuing existence of the Soviet Union

01:30:12.780 | and whose vote ended, in many ways,

01:30:15.340 | the existence of the Soviet Union.

01:30:17.460 | So that is broadly background,

01:30:20.220 | but also there are, of course, personalities,

01:30:22.420 | there are also their beliefs, their readings of history,

01:30:26.740 | and all of that became part of the story.

01:30:31.700 | But if you look at that geopolitically,

01:30:33.860 | the Association Agreement is Putin, Putin, Ukraine,

01:30:39.780 | outside of the Russian sphere of influence.

01:30:43.320 | And the response was an attempt

01:30:48.780 | to topple the government in Kiev,

01:30:53.780 | that clearly was going to sign that agreement,

01:30:59.940 | to take over Crimea and to help to deal

01:31:04.740 | with a lot of issues within Russia itself

01:31:07.420 | and boost the popularity of the president

01:31:12.400 | and it certainly worked in that way as well.

01:31:16.580 | And once Ukraine still, after Crimea,

01:31:21.580 | continued on its path, then the next step started

01:31:25.380 | the so-called hybrid warfare in Donbas.

01:31:29.180 | But again, unlike Crimea, from what I understand,

01:31:34.180 | Russia was not really looking forward

01:31:39.020 | to taking possession over Donbas.

01:31:41.660 | Donbas was viewed as the way how to influence Ukraine,

01:31:45.340 | to stop it from drift toward the West.

01:31:49.460 | - Maybe you can tell me about the region of Donbas.

01:31:52.420 | - I mentioned that nationalism and principle of nationalism

01:31:55.700 | is the principle of making the political borders

01:31:59.700 | to coincide with ethnic and cultural borders.

01:32:03.040 | And that's how the maps of many East European countries

01:32:08.040 | had been drawn in the 19th and 20th century.

01:32:11.540 | On that principle, Donbas, where the majority constituted

01:32:17.820 | by the beginning of the 20th century were Ukrainians,

01:32:24.260 | was considered to be Ukrainian and was claimed

01:32:27.420 | in the middle of this revolution and revolutionary wars

01:32:31.820 | and civil wars by Ukrainian government.

01:32:35.040 | But Donbas became a site, one of the key sites

01:32:41.060 | in the Russian empire of early industrialization.

01:32:44.580 | And it's mining industry, it's mythological industry.

01:32:48.580 | So what that meant was that people from other parts

01:32:52.820 | of, not Ukraine, but other parts of the Russian empire

01:32:55.700 | congregated there, that's where jobs were.

01:32:58.500 | That's how Khrushchev and his family came to Donbas.

01:33:02.380 | The family of Brezhnev overshoot a little bit,

01:33:05.300 | they got to the industrial enterprises

01:33:07.420 | in the city of Kaminsky near Dniprovsk,

01:33:12.420 | the place, the city that was called Dnipropetrovsk.

01:33:15.520 | So those were Russian peasants moving into the area

01:33:18.260 | in looking for the job.

01:33:22.980 | And by the, the population became quite mixed.

01:33:27.980 | Ukrainians still constituted the majority of the population,

01:33:34.020 | but not necessarily in the towns and in the cities.

01:33:37.780 | And culturally, the place was becoming more and more Russian

01:33:41.460 | as the result of that moment.

01:33:44.060 | So apart from the Crimea, Donbas was the part of Ukraine

01:33:50.940 | where the ethnic Russians were the, the biggest group.

01:33:55.940 | They were not the majority, but they were very,

01:33:58.700 | very big and significant group.

01:34:00.500 | For example, in the city of Mariupol,

01:34:02.940 | that was all but destroyed in the course of the last,

01:34:06.340 | of the last two years, the ethnic Russians constituted

01:34:11.340 | over 40% of the population, right?

01:34:14.940 | So that's not exactly part of Donbas,

01:34:17.500 | but that gives you, that gives you general idea.

01:34:21.200 | Now, the story of Donbas and what happened now

01:34:26.300 | is multidimensional, and this ethnic composition

01:34:29.320 | is just one part of the story.

01:34:31.420 | Another very important part of the story is economy.

01:34:35.260 | And Donbas is a classical rust belt,

01:34:41.460 | and we know what happens with the cities

01:34:45.880 | that were part of the first or second wave

01:34:48.000 | of industrialization in the United States.

01:34:50.220 | And globally, you know about social problems

01:34:52.780 | that exist in those places.

01:34:55.080 | So Donbas is probably the most dramatic and tragic case

01:34:59.480 | of implosion of the rust belt,

01:35:02.720 | because the mines not anymore producing the sort of the,

01:35:07.360 | and at the acceptable price,

01:35:09.960 | the coal that they used to produce,

01:35:12.700 | is people losing jobs, with the politicians

01:35:17.500 | looking for subsidies as opposed to trying

01:35:21.160 | very unpopular measures of dealing something

01:35:26.080 | and bring new money and new investment into the region.

01:35:30.940 | So all of that, all of that become part of the story

01:35:35.340 | that made it easy for Russia, for the Russian Federation,

01:35:41.420 | to destabilize the situation.

01:35:43.220 | We have interviews with Mr. Yerkin,

01:35:47.800 | who is saying that he was the first who pulled the trigger

01:35:50.880 | and fired the shot.

01:35:52.680 | In that war, he became the minister of defense

01:35:56.860 | in the Donetsk People's Republic.

01:36:00.360 | You look at the prime minister,

01:36:02.760 | he is another person with Moscow residency permit.

01:36:10.060 | So you see key figures in those positions

01:36:13.520 | at the start and the beginning,

01:36:15.600 | not being Russians from Ukraine,

01:36:18.580 | but being Russians from Russia and Russians from Moscow,

01:36:22.300 | closely connected to the government structure

01:36:24.960 | and the intelligence structure and so on.

01:36:27.480 | So that is the start and the beginning,

01:36:29.880 | but the way how it exploded, the way it did,

01:36:34.880 | was also a combination of the economic

01:36:38.640 | and ethnocultural and linguistic factors.

01:36:42.800 | - So for Putin, the war in Donbas, and even in 2022,

01:36:47.800 | is a defensive war against what the Ukrainian government

01:36:51.980 | is doing against ethnically Russian people in Donbas.

01:36:54.720 | Is that fair to say, how he describes it?

01:36:58.100 | - What we see, this is certainly the argument.

01:37:03.100 | This is certainly the argument.

01:37:05.760 | And a pretext, because what we see there

01:37:10.760 | is that there would be no,

01:37:14.840 | and there was no independent mobilization in Crimea,

01:37:18.440 | either in Crimea or in Donbas, without Russian presence.

01:37:23.240 | Without Russian occupation, the fact of the Crimea,

01:37:28.780 | there would be no, and there was no before,

01:37:33.960 | at least in the previous five to six years,

01:37:36.600 | any mass mobilizations of Russians.

01:37:39.240 | There was none of such mobilizations in Donbas

01:37:43.400 | before Gherkin and other people with military,

01:37:46.420 | with parts of military units showed up there.

01:37:52.360 | So it is an excuse.

01:37:56.120 | You've been to Ukraine.

01:37:57.440 | You know that Russian language is not persecuted in Ukraine.

01:38:04.720 | And if you've not been to Donbas,

01:38:07.920 | it would be difficult, or to the Crimea,

01:38:09.800 | it would be difficult to find one single Ukrainian school.

01:38:13.740 | Not that they didn't exist at all,

01:38:15.600 | but it would take quite an effort for you to find it.

01:38:20.080 | Or sometimes even to hear Ukrainian language

01:38:22.800 | outside of the institutions or the farmers market.

01:38:27.800 | So that's the reality.

01:38:33.340 | That's the reality that is clear, that is visible.

01:38:35.900 | So imagine under those conditions and contexts

01:38:39.780 | that someone is persecuting ethnic Russians

01:38:44.780 | or Russian speakers, want to believe in something like that.

01:38:50.160 | One important precondition is never to step your foot

01:38:56.200 | in Ukraine.

01:38:57.740 | - I should mention, maybe this is a good moment

01:39:00.720 | to mention, when I traveled to Ukraine,

01:39:03.100 | this is after the start of the war,

01:39:04.900 | I mentioned farmer's market, which is funny.

01:39:09.480 | Basically every single person I talked to,

01:39:12.800 | including the leadership, we spoke in Russian.

01:39:15.100 | For many of them, Russian is the more comfortable language

01:39:20.520 | even.

01:39:21.760 | And the people who spoke Ukrainian are more on the

01:39:24.900 | west, western side of Ukraine.

01:39:29.120 | And young people that are kind of willing to show that

01:39:33.380 | in an activist way that they want to fight

01:39:37.840 | for the independence of their country.

01:39:39.500 | So I take your point.

01:39:40.840 | I wonder if you want to comment about language.

01:39:43.160 | And maybe about the future of language in Ukraine.

01:39:45.600 | Is the future of language going to stabilize on Ukrainian?

01:39:51.960 | Or is it going to return to its traditional base

01:39:57.440 | of Russian language?

01:39:59.500 | - Very roughly, before the start of the war in 2014,

01:40:03.220 | we can talk about parity between Russian and Ukrainian

01:40:06.660 | and also with, as you said, clearly Ukraine being

01:40:11.260 | a dominant language in the west and Russian being

01:40:15.300 | a dominant language on the streets,

01:40:18.060 | certainly in the east of the country.

01:40:20.260 | And then in between of that, to polls,

01:40:27.660 | a number of these transitional areas.

01:40:30.220 | And Ukraine, in my experience,

01:40:35.060 | and I visited a lot of countries, not all of them

01:40:38.500 | and probably maybe I will be still surprised,

01:40:42.020 | but in my experience, this is the only truly bilingual

01:40:46.820 | country that I ever visited.

01:40:48.860 | I lived in Canada for a long period of time.

01:40:51.260 | There is Quebec and the rest.

01:40:52.860 | And in Ukraine, you can talk in either Russian

01:40:57.860 | or Ukrainian in any part of the country

01:41:02.580 | and you would be understood and you would be responded

01:41:06.100 | in a different language with the expectation

01:41:09.380 | that you would understand.

01:41:10.980 | And if you don't understand, that means

01:41:13.340 | you don't come from Ukraine.

01:41:15.180 | That's the reality.

01:41:16.300 | The war and loss of the Crimea and partial loss of Donbas

01:41:22.300 | if it's major industrial areas really shifted

01:41:27.300 | the balance toward mostly Ukrainian-speaking regions.

01:41:32.380 | And also what you see and you clearly pointed to that,

01:41:41.140 | starting with 2014, even a little bit earlier,

01:41:46.660 | the younger generation chooses Ukrainian

01:41:50.460 | as a marker of its identity.

01:41:53.660 | And that started in 2014, but we have a dramatic,

01:41:57.740 | dramatic shift after 2022.

01:42:02.060 | And on the anecdotal level, I can tell you

01:42:06.380 | that I speak to people who be in Geneva at the time,

01:42:11.380 | this is east of Crimea, at the time of the Russian

01:42:17.580 | aggression and bombardment and so on and so forth,

01:42:20.940 | who had passive knowledge of Ukrainian

01:42:23.420 | but spoke all their life Russian.

01:42:26.840 | And they would speak Ukrainian to me and when I say,

01:42:29.380 | okay, why are you doing that?

01:42:31.380 | We know each other for decades and you used Russian.

01:42:34.300 | And he said, oh, I don't want to have anything

01:42:37.700 | in common with people who did that to us.

01:42:40.700 | So there is a big, big push of course with this current war.

01:42:46.420 | Now the question is whether this change is something

01:42:50.060 | that will stay or not, what is the future?

01:42:53.100 | Linguistic practices are very, very conservative ones.

01:42:56.680 | And we at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute

01:43:01.700 | have a project called Mappa Digital Atlas of Ukraine

01:43:05.820 | and we were documenting and mapping different data in time.

01:43:12.620 | And what we noticed a spike in the people self-reporting

01:43:17.100 | of use of Ukrainian in 2014 and 2015 at the time

01:43:20.640 | of the start of the war when the threat

01:43:25.160 | was the most clear one, this is self-reporting.

01:43:29.180 | That doesn't mean that people exactly do what,

01:43:32.260 | but they believe that that's what they are supposed to do.

01:43:35.660 | And then return back to where it was

01:43:39.160 | by the year 2016 and 2017.

01:43:42.580 | So this dynamic can repeat itself.

01:43:46.660 | But given how long the war is going on,

01:43:50.860 | how big the impact is, how big the stress is,

01:43:53.540 | and that the wave of the future is probably associated

01:43:58.540 | with younger people who are switching to Ukrainian.

01:44:01.340 | So I would, my bet would be on Ukrainian language

01:44:06.340 | rising in prominence.

01:44:11.780 | - So as we get closer to February of 2022,

01:44:15.120 | there's a few other key moments.

01:44:18.880 | Maybe let's talk about in July 2021,

01:44:23.440 | Putin publishing an essay titled

01:44:25.620 | On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.

01:44:28.980 | Can you describe the ideas expressed in this essay?

01:44:33.980 | - The idea is very conveniently presented already

01:44:38.220 | in the first paragraph, in the first sentences, really,

01:44:42.020 | of the article, where Putin says that for a long time

01:44:46.580 | I was saying that Russians and Ukrainians

01:44:49.100 | were one and the same people, and here is the proof.

01:44:52.300 | This is the historical, he develops

01:44:56.460 | his historical argumentation, apparently,

01:44:58.700 | with the help of a lot of people around him.

01:45:03.480 | And he started to talk about Russians and Ukrainians

01:45:07.860 | being one and the same people

01:45:09.780 | one year before the start of the war in 2014.

01:45:12.980 | So in 2013, he was together with

01:45:15.720 | Patryarch Kirill on visit to Kyiv,

01:45:20.100 | and there was a conference specifically organized

01:45:22.540 | for him in the Kyiv and Kyiv's monastery,

01:45:24.940 | and that's where he stated that.

01:45:28.980 | The fact that he was with Patryarch Kirill

01:45:31.940 | is very important factor for understanding

01:45:36.900 | where the idea is coming from.

01:45:38.460 | This is the idea that was dominant in the Russian Empire

01:45:45.180 | of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century,

01:45:48.540 | that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians

01:45:51.660 | are really great Russians, little Russians,

01:45:54.560 | and white Russians, and that they constitute one people.

01:45:59.560 | Yes, there are some dialectical differences.

01:46:05.900 | Yes, Ukrainians sin well.

01:46:08.780 | Yes, they dance funny, but overall, that doesn't matter.

01:46:13.780 | And that idea actually was really destroyed,

01:46:20.820 | mostly destroyed by the revolution of 1917,

01:46:27.860 | because it wasn't just social revolution.

01:46:30.640 | That's how it is understood in US,

01:46:34.220 | in good part of the world.

01:46:35.580 | It was also national revolution.

01:46:37.060 | It was an empire.

01:46:38.340 | It was a revolution in the Russian Empire.

01:46:41.420 | And to bring these pieces of empire back

01:46:46.120 | within the Soviet Union,

01:46:47.460 | the Bolsheviks had to make concessions.

01:46:50.220 | One of those concessions was to recognition

01:46:54.160 | of the existence of Ukrainians as a separate nation,

01:46:57.500 | Belarusians as a separate nations,

01:46:59.200 | Russians as a separate nations,

01:47:01.040 | endowing them with their own territorial, with borders,

01:47:06.040 | with institutions, and so on and so forth.

01:47:09.840 | But there was one institution that was not reformed.

01:47:14.200 | That institution was called the Russian Orthodox Church,

01:47:19.200 | because one of the ways that Bolsheviks dealt with it,

01:47:21.940 | they couldn't eradicate religion completely,

01:47:25.080 | but they arrested the development of the religion

01:47:29.360 | and thinking and theology

01:47:32.780 | on the level as it existed before the revolution of 1917.

01:47:39.140 | So the Russian Orthodox Church of 1917

01:47:43.780 | continued to be the Russian Orthodox Church in 1991,

01:47:48.780 | and in 2013, continuing the same imperial mantra

01:47:53.860 | of the existence of one big Russian nation,

01:47:57.780 | one unified people.

01:48:00.800 | And when you see the formation of the ideas

01:48:05.800 | about nations, about foreign policy

01:48:09.320 | in the Russian Empire after 1991,

01:48:12.320 | they're going back to the pre-Bolshevik times.

01:48:17.320 | Ukrainians do that as well, Estonians do that as well.

01:48:21.240 | The difference is that when Ukrainians go back,

01:48:25.640 | they go back to the pre-1917, their intellectual fathers

01:48:30.560 | and writings of basically liberal nationalism.

01:48:34.360 | Or sometimes they go to the radical nationalism of Bandera,

01:48:37.920 | which would be not pre-1917, but pre-1945.

01:48:42.640 | When the Russians go to pre-Bolshevik past,

01:48:47.640 | looking for the ideas, looking for inspiration,

01:48:50.040 | looking for the narratives, what they find there is empire.

01:48:53.980 | What they find there are imperial projects.

01:48:56.640 | And that's certainly the story of Putin's claim,

01:49:02.820 | that's the story of the argument.

01:49:05.140 | And to conclude, the argument that he lays out there,

01:49:09.640 | historical argument, comes also almost directly

01:49:13.240 | from the narratives of the late 19th

01:49:15.140 | and the beginning of the 20th century.

01:49:17.040 | So it's not only the argument is coming from that era,

01:49:21.040 | but also the argumentation is coming from that era as well.

01:49:24.820 | - But those arguments are all in the flavor of empire.

01:49:29.120 | - It's empire on the one hand,

01:49:31.920 | but also there is imperial understanding

01:49:33.980 | of what Russian nation is.

01:49:36.100 | That doesn't allow for independence of its little Russian

01:49:41.020 | and white Russian branches, alleged branches, right?

01:49:44.600 | So what you see is the concept of the big Russian nation,

01:49:49.360 | that's late 19th, beginning 20th century.

01:49:52.280 | Empire sees the writing on the wall,

01:49:54.340 | that nationalism is on the rise.

01:49:57.360 | And it tries to survive by mobilizing the nationalism

01:50:02.360 | of the largest group in the empire,

01:50:04.880 | which happens to be Russian.

01:50:06.280 | Stalin is a big promoter of some form of Russian nationalism,

01:50:12.440 | especially during the war and after war.

01:50:15.600 | And he started his career as a very promising Georgian writer

01:50:19.960 | writing in Georgian.

01:50:21.160 | So he's not doing that for some personal affinity

01:50:26.880 | or cultural intellectual roots

01:50:28.960 | within Russian nation or Russian people.

01:50:33.960 | He is doing that for the sake of the success

01:50:40.320 | of his Soviet and communist project.

01:50:44.240 | And he has to get the largest ethnic group on board,

01:50:48.400 | which are Russians.

01:50:49.880 | But Stalin and Putin have different understanding

01:50:53.980 | who Russians are.

01:50:55.220 | Stalin already accepted Ukrainians and Belarusians.

01:50:59.800 | Their existence, Putin goes back to pre-Stalin

01:51:03.360 | and pre-Lenin times.

01:51:05.040 | - So if we step back from the historical context of this

01:51:11.360 | and maybe the geopolitical purpose of writing such an essay

01:51:16.160 | and forget about the essay altogether.

01:51:18.860 | You know, I have family in Ukraine and Russia.

01:51:21.560 | I know a lot of people in Ukraine and Russia.

01:51:24.180 | Forget the war, forget all of this.

01:51:27.920 | There's a kind of, they all kind of sound the same.

01:51:31.940 | Like if I go to France,

01:51:36.560 | they sound different than in Ukraine and Russia.

01:51:40.160 | Like if you lay out the cultural map of the world,

01:51:45.160 | there's just a different beat and music

01:51:47.980 | and flavor to a people.

01:51:49.300 | I guess what I'm trying to say is there seems to be

01:51:52.520 | a closeness between the cultures of Ukraine and Russia.

01:51:55.660 | And how do we describe that?

01:51:57.180 | Do we acknowledge that?

01:51:59.880 | And how does that attention with the national independence?

01:52:04.880 | - First of all, especially when it comes to Eastern Ukraine

01:52:10.120 | or to big cities, many people in Ukraine spoke Russian.

01:52:15.120 | Generally, it's the same language.

01:52:19.100 | On the top of that, we started our discussion

01:52:22.720 | with talking about the Slavs, right?

01:52:25.320 | So both Ukrainian and Russian language are Slavic languages.

01:52:29.340 | So there is proximity there as well.

01:52:33.080 | On the top of that, there is a history of existence

01:52:36.440 | in the Soviet Union and before that in one empire

01:52:40.520 | for a long period of time.

01:52:42.600 | So you see a lot of before the war,

01:52:45.600 | a lot of Ukrainian singers and entertainers

01:52:49.880 | performing in Russia and vice versa.

01:52:52.880 | Biography of President Zelensky is certainly one of the,

01:52:55.720 | fits that particular model as well.

01:53:02.080 | That all talks about similarities.

01:53:06.180 | But these similarities also very often obscure

01:53:11.180 | things that became so important in the course of this war.

01:53:16.320 | And I already mentioned the book titled

01:53:21.220 | by President Kuchma of Ukraine, "Ukraine is not Russia."

01:53:25.500 | So that's the argument.

01:53:27.320 | Despite the fact that you think that we are the same,

01:53:30.800 | we behave differently.

01:53:31.980 | And it turned out that they behave differently.

01:53:35.900 | You have Bolotnaya in Moscow and police violence

01:53:39.720 | and that's the end of it.

01:53:41.520 | You have the Maidan in Ukraine and you have police violence

01:53:46.520 | and that's the beginning.

01:53:48.560 | That's not the end.

01:53:50.280 | History really matters in the way why

01:53:55.280 | sometimes people speak in the same language

01:53:59.080 | with different accents behave very differently.

01:54:02.520 | Russia and Russian identity was formed around the state

01:54:07.220 | and has difficulty imagining itself outside of the state.

01:54:11.740 | And that state happened to be imperial

01:54:13.740 | for most of Russian history.

01:54:15.860 | Ukrainian project came into existence

01:54:18.620 | in revolt against the state.

01:54:21.020 | Ukraine came into existence out of the parts

01:54:25.680 | of different empires which means they left

01:54:28.220 | different cultural impact on them.

01:54:30.580 | And for Ukrainians to stay together,

01:54:32.780 | autocratic regime so far didn't work.

01:54:36.660 | It's like the colonies of the United States.

01:54:38.980 | You have to find common language.

01:54:42.560 | You have to talk to each other.

01:54:45.180 | And that became part of the Ukrainian political DNA.

01:54:50.180 | And that became a huge factor in the war.

01:54:54.780 | And very few people in Ukraine believed

01:54:58.360 | what Vladimir Putin was saying,

01:55:00.700 | that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people.

01:55:03.800 | But the majority believed that they're certainly close

01:55:08.800 | culturally and historically nations.

01:55:11.260 | And from that point of view,

01:55:13.360 | the bombardment of the Ukrainian cities

01:55:15.660 | became such a shock to the Ukrainians.

01:55:19.280 | Because deep down, they maybe looked at Syria,

01:55:23.080 | they looked at Chechnya and were explaining that

01:55:27.160 | through the fact that there was basically

01:55:28.820 | such a big cultural gap and difference

01:55:32.100 | between Russians and those countries and those nations.

01:55:36.920 | But my understanding, at least,

01:55:40.500 | most of them had difficulty imagining

01:55:43.700 | the war of that proportion and that sort of ferocity

01:55:46.700 | and that sort of war crimes,

01:55:49.460 | the bringing that sort of war crimes and on that level.

01:55:55.460 | - It's interesting that you say that

01:55:57.380 | in the DNA of Ukraine versus Russia,

01:56:00.440 | so maybe Russia is more conducive to authoritarian regimes

01:56:05.440 | and Ukraine is more conducive to defining itself

01:56:13.320 | by rebelling against authoritarian regimes.

01:56:16.380 | - By rebellion, absolutely.

01:56:19.880 | And that was the story pretty much before 1991.

01:56:23.840 | So what you see since 1991 and what you see today

01:56:28.660 | is, I would say, a new factor,

01:56:31.720 | certainly in Ukrainian modern history.

01:56:34.200 | Because Ukrainians traditionally

01:56:35.920 | were very successful rebels.

01:56:38.360 | The largest peasant army in the civil war

01:56:41.800 | in the Russian Empire was the Mahmo army

01:56:46.300 | in southern Ukraine.

01:56:47.480 | And one revolt, Kazakh revolts and other revolts,

01:56:52.680 | one after another.

01:56:54.320 | But Ukrainians had historically difficulty

01:56:57.320 | actually maintaining the sort of freedom

01:57:00.360 | that they acquired.

01:57:01.920 | Had difficulty associating themselves with the state.

01:57:05.640 | And what we see, especially in the last two years,

01:57:10.880 | it's a quite phenomenal development in Ukraine

01:57:14.680 | when Ukrainians associate themselves with the state,

01:57:18.400 | where Ukrainians see a state not just as a foreigner,

01:57:23.400 | as historically it was in Ukrainian history,

01:57:26.000 | not just someone who came to take,

01:57:29.720 | but the state that is continuation of them,

01:57:32.520 | that helps to provide security for them,

01:57:36.360 | that the Ukrainian armed forces,

01:57:39.420 | even before the start of this war,

01:57:41.460 | had the highest support and popularity in Ukraine.

01:57:46.460 | The state today functions unbelievably effectively

01:57:51.460 | under attacks and missile attacks.

01:57:55.540 | And again, city government and local government.

01:57:59.340 | And we are witnessing, when it comes to Ukraine,

01:58:03.900 | we are witnessing a very important historical development

01:58:07.660 | where Ukrainians found their state for the first time

01:58:12.660 | through most of their history.

01:58:15.420 | And try to make a transition from successful rebels

01:58:20.420 | to successful managers and state builders.

01:58:25.680 | - Yeah.

01:58:27.180 | I talked to John Mearsheimer recently.

01:58:29.720 | There's a lot of people that believe NATO

01:58:31.940 | had a big contribution to the Russian invasion

01:58:36.260 | of Ukraine in 2022.

01:58:37.420 | So what role did NATO play in this full history

01:58:42.980 | from Bucharest in 2008 to today?

01:58:47.980 | - NATO was a big part, certainly,

01:58:53.940 | of the Russian justification for the war.

01:58:58.040 | That was the thing that was up there

01:59:02.820 | in the months leading to the aggression.

01:59:05.680 | The truth is that, and Vladimir Putin went on records,

01:59:12.900 | sustained that, that the Western leaders

01:59:16.540 | were telling him again and again

01:59:18.340 | that there is no chance for Ukraine

01:59:21.500 | to become member of NATO anytime soon.

01:59:25.080 | Russia was very effective back in the year 208

01:59:29.820 | in stopping Ukraine and Georgia

01:59:33.460 | on the path of joining NATO.

01:59:36.860 | There was a Bucharest summit

01:59:38.580 | at which the US president at that time,

01:59:42.740 | George W. Bush, was pushing for the membership

01:59:46.580 | and Putin convinced leaders of France and Germany

01:59:51.300 | to block that membership.

01:59:54.560 | And after that, membership for Ukraine and for Georgia

01:59:59.560 | was really removed from the realistic agenda for NATO.

02:00:05.580 | And that's what the leaders of the Western world

02:00:11.020 | in the month leading to the February 2022 aggression

02:00:15.020 | were trying to convey to Vladimir Putin.

02:00:19.500 | What he wanted, there was an ultimatum

02:00:22.620 | that really was there not to start negotiations,

02:00:27.620 | but really to stop negotiations.

02:00:30.020 | He demanded the withdrawal of NATO

02:00:32.860 | to the borders of the 1997, if I am not mistaken.

02:00:37.460 | So completely something that neither leaders

02:00:40.300 | would accept nor the countries members of NATO would accept.

02:00:43.860 | But for me, it's very clear that that was an excuse,

02:00:48.520 | that that was a justification.

02:00:50.700 | And what happened later in the year 2022 and 2023

02:00:55.620 | certainly confirms me in that belief.

02:00:58.860 | Finland joined NATO and Sweden is on the way to join in NATO.

02:01:07.140 | So Finland joined in NATO increased border

02:01:12.140 | between Russia and NATO twofold and probably more than that.

02:01:17.160 | So if NATO is the real concern,

02:01:20.600 | it would be probably not completely unreasonable

02:01:24.820 | to expect that if not every single soldier,

02:01:28.660 | but at least half of the Russian army fighting in Ukraine

02:01:32.540 | would be moved to protect the new border with NATO in Finland.

02:01:37.540 | So I have no doubt that no one in Kremlin

02:01:42.580 | either in the past or today looks favorably

02:01:46.000 | or is excited about NATO moving

02:01:50.000 | or the countries of Eastern Europe joining NATO.

02:01:55.980 | But I have very difficult time imagining

02:01:59.960 | that that was the primary cause of the war.

02:02:02.860 | And what we see also, we talked about Tucker's interview.

02:02:07.380 | He was surprised, but he believed that Putin

02:02:12.260 | was completely honest when the first 25 minutes of interview

02:02:17.260 | he was talking about relations between Russia and Ukraine,

02:02:20.220 | was talking about history.

02:02:22.180 | And that was also the main focus of his essay.

02:02:27.460 | Essay was not on NATO and Russia.

02:02:30.600 | Essay was on Russia and Ukraine.

02:02:33.040 | So that is where the real causes are.

02:02:37.100 | The broader context is the fall of empire

02:02:40.160 | and process of disintegration of empire,

02:02:42.900 | not the story of NATO.

02:02:45.360 | - What was, to clarify, the reason Putin,

02:02:50.360 | Russia, engaged in Ukraine in 2022?

02:02:53.600 | - The immediate goal in 2014, when the war started,

02:02:58.400 | was to stop the drift of Ukraine toward the West

02:03:02.360 | and outside of the Russian sphere of influence.

02:03:06.740 | The invasion of 2022 perceived the same goals,

02:03:11.740 | keeping Ukraine in the Russian sphere of influence.

02:03:19.320 | Once we have the resistance, quite effective resistance

02:03:24.320 | on the part of Ukraine, the Ramstein and coalition,

02:03:30.200 | international coalition in support of Ukraine,

02:03:33.000 | then we see the realization of plan B,

02:03:35.560 | where parts of Ukrainian territory are being annexed

02:03:40.560 | and included in the constitution of the Russian Federation.

02:03:44.540 | So the two scenarios don't exclude each other,

02:03:47.280 | but if scenario number one doesn't work,

02:03:51.580 | then scenario number two goes into play.

02:03:56.580 | - In the Gates of Kiev chapter,

02:03:59.700 | you write about Volodymyr Zalensky

02:04:02.320 | in the early days of the war.

02:04:04.600 | What are most important moments to you about this time,

02:04:08.440 | the first hours and days of the invasion?

02:04:12.960 | - The first hours and the first days

02:04:14.920 | were the most difficult, psychologically.

02:04:18.140 | The rest of the world really didn't expect Kiev

02:04:20.880 | to last for more than a few days,

02:04:22.920 | didn't expect Ukraine to last for more than a few weeks.

02:04:27.560 | And all the data suggested that that's what would happen.

02:04:32.020 | Ukraine would collapse, would be taken over.

02:04:34.320 | Putin called his war a special military operation,

02:04:41.080 | which suggests you also expectations about the scope,

02:04:44.680 | expectations about the time.

02:04:46.400 | So semi-military, semi-police, police operation.

02:04:51.060 | So every reasonable person in the world

02:04:55.200 | believed that that would happen.

02:04:57.560 | And it's the heroism of quote-unquote unreasonable people,

02:05:03.780 | like Zalensky, like the commander

02:05:07.120 | of Ukrainian Armed Forces, Zaluzny,

02:05:09.480 | like mayors of the cities, Klitschko and others,

02:05:13.100 | I'm just naming names that are familiar

02:05:16.480 | to almost all of us now.

02:05:18.940 | But there are thousands of those people,

02:05:21.440 | unreasonable people, who decided that it was unreasonable

02:05:25.820 | to attack their country.

02:05:27.280 | And that was the most difficult times and days.

02:05:33.160 | And speaking about Zalensky, every,

02:05:38.860 | I understand, reasonable leader in the West

02:05:41.920 | was trying to convince him to leave Ukraine

02:05:44.380 | and to set a government in exile in Poland or in London.

02:05:49.220 | And it was reasonable to accept one of his predecessors,

02:05:55.240 | Mr. Yanukovych, flat cave.

02:05:57.040 | A few months before that in Afghanistan,

02:06:01.720 | the president of Afghanistan fled Afghanistan.

02:06:04.480 | That was a reasonable thing to expect.

02:06:09.880 | And he turned out to be very, very unreasonable

02:06:14.880 | in that sense, that comes with the gods,

02:06:18.880 | his gods and God's people around him

02:06:22.240 | and Ukrainians in general.

02:06:23.920 | - Why do you think you stayed in Kiev,

02:06:25.660 | this former comedian who played a president on TV,

02:06:30.660 | when Kiev is being invaded by the second most powerful

02:06:36.960 | military in the world?

02:06:38.600 | - Because I think he believes in things.

02:06:41.340 | And one of those things was that if he,

02:06:48.120 | a president and he is in the presidential office,

02:06:53.040 | he is there to play his role to the end.

02:06:56.000 | And another thing, my personal,

02:07:01.060 | again, I never met Volodymyr Zalensky.

02:07:04.620 | My personal understanding of him is that he has talent

02:07:09.620 | that helped him in his career before the presidency

02:07:15.380 | and then helps now.

02:07:17.340 | He fills the audience and then channels the attitude

02:07:22.340 | of the audience and amplifies it.

02:07:26.800 | And I think that another reason why he didn't leave Kiev

02:07:33.340 | was that he filled the audience.

02:07:35.780 | The audience in that particular context were the Ukrainians.

02:07:40.520 | - So he had a sense that the Ukrainians would unify

02:07:44.320 | because he was quite, if you look at the polls

02:07:46.160 | before the war, quite unpopular.

02:07:48.640 | And there was still divisions and factions

02:07:53.200 | and the government is divided.

02:07:54.980 | I mean, there's the East and the West

02:07:57.120 | and all this kind of stuff.

02:07:58.680 | You think he had a sense that this could unite people?

02:08:03.040 | - The East and the West was not already such an issue

02:08:06.100 | after Crimea and part of Donbas being gone.

02:08:11.100 | So Ukraine was much more united than it was before.

02:08:16.840 | He brought to power his, before that,

02:08:23.080 | really non-existent party of regions

02:08:26.300 | on his personal popularity.

02:08:27.940 | But the important thing is that he created a majority

02:08:32.140 | in the parliament, which really reflected the unity

02:08:36.620 | that existed among Ukrainians that was not there before.

02:08:40.700 | He won with 73% of the population,

02:08:44.780 | of those who took part in the elections.

02:08:49.340 | His predecessor, Pedro Poroshenko,

02:08:52.360 | also carried 90% of the precincts.

02:08:56.580 | And the same happened with Zelensky.

02:08:58.380 | So the country unified after 2014,

02:09:03.020 | to a degree it was impossible to imagine before,

02:09:06.600 | and Zelensky filed that.

02:09:08.100 | Zelensky knew that.

02:09:09.340 | And that's where the talent of politician really matters.

02:09:15.260 | That's something that you can see beyond just data,

02:09:23.620 | and you can feel that.

02:09:26.260 | Apparently, Yeltsin had that ability.

02:09:28.840 | - Why did the peace talks fail?

02:09:33.820 | There was a lot of peace talks.

02:09:35.420 | - The main reason is that the conditions

02:09:39.460 | that Russia was trying to impose on Ukraine

02:09:44.060 | were basically unacceptable for Ukraine.

02:09:47.180 | Because one of the conditions apart from this strange thing

02:09:53.340 | called denazification was, of course,

02:09:57.100 | de facto loss of the territory, and for the future,

02:10:00.180 | really staying outside either of NATO or any Western support,

02:10:06.260 | which was very clear, you can buy a couple of weeks,

02:10:11.940 | you can buy a couple of months,

02:10:13.620 | but in the conditions like that,

02:10:15.060 | Russia will come back tomorrow and will take over everything.

02:10:19.720 | And once Ukrainians realize

02:10:23.660 | that they can win on the battlefield,

02:10:25.500 | once the Russians were defeated and withdraw from Kiev,

02:10:31.740 | the opportunity emerged to get out of the negotiations,

02:10:40.360 | which was very clear, were leading, if not today,

02:10:43.740 | then tomorrow to the complete destruction of Ukraine.

02:10:47.400 | And then, of course, once the territory

02:10:49.860 | started to be liberated, things like Butchah

02:10:53.180 | and the massacres of the civilian population

02:10:56.240 | came to the fore, which made also quite difficult,

02:10:59.700 | if not impossible, to conduct negotiations

02:11:02.780 | from this moral and emotional point of view.

02:11:05.620 | - What about the claims that Boris Johnson, the West,

02:11:09.480 | compromised the ability of these peace talks

02:11:12.540 | to be successful?

02:11:13.720 | Basically, you kind of manipulated the talks?

02:11:17.900 | - I asked people who accompanied Boris Johnson

02:11:22.240 | to give that question.

02:11:23.960 | The answer was no, and I believed this answer,

02:11:29.260 | and I'll tell you why.

02:11:31.220 | Because it is very difficult for me

02:11:36.100 | to imagine President Zelensky

02:11:42.260 | to take orders from anybody in the world,

02:11:47.180 | either Boris Johnson or Joe Biden or anybody else,

02:11:51.840 | and basically doing things that Zelensky believes

02:11:56.840 | are not in his interest or in the interest of his country.

02:12:01.240 | I just can't imagine that anybody in the world

02:12:05.820 | telling Zelensky what to do,

02:12:09.500 | and Zelensky actually following it against his own,

02:12:13.540 | his own wishes and desires, at least if that is possible,

02:12:17.560 | what is in the public sphere

02:12:19.980 | doesn't allow us to suggest that it is.

02:12:23.380 | - That said, Zelensky is a smart man,

02:12:25.820 | and he knows that the war can only continue

02:12:30.340 | with the West's support.

02:12:32.100 | - That is a different supposition to know

02:12:35.380 | that it can continue with the West's support,

02:12:37.960 | but if we are talking about

02:12:39.900 | withdrawing from the negotiations,

02:12:42.640 | that's not about the continuation of the war,

02:12:46.580 | that you don't need Western support.

02:12:49.220 | - Well, what I mean is if he started to sense

02:12:53.960 | that the West will support no matter what,

02:12:56.560 | then maybe the space of decisions you're making

02:12:58.940 | is different.

02:12:59.960 | - We can interpret that that way,

02:13:02.880 | but Boris Johnson represented

02:13:08.040 | at that point Britain, not the United States.

02:13:11.500 | And really what the war showed,

02:13:16.460 | and it was clear already at that time,

02:13:19.320 | that what was needed was massive support

02:13:22.620 | from the West as a whole.

02:13:25.560 | And the promise of that support came only

02:13:28.680 | after the West realized that Ukraine can win

02:13:31.880 | and came only in late April,

02:13:36.060 | with the Rammstein, so at least a few weeks later.

02:13:40.500 | So I don't know how much Boris Johnson could promise.

02:13:43.900 | He probably could promise to try to help

02:13:46.980 | and try to convince and try to work on that.

02:13:50.540 | If Zelensky acted on that promise,

02:13:53.040 | he certainly was taking a risk.

02:13:54.700 | But the key issue, again,

02:13:56.220 | I am going back where I started,

02:13:58.420 | it's principle and acceptance for Ukraine,

02:14:02.280 | the conditions that were offered.

02:14:04.700 | And Ukraine was,

02:14:06.760 | the moment they saw the possibility

02:14:10.600 | that they could fight back,

02:14:12.700 | with Johnson's support, without Johnson's support,

02:14:15.940 | they took the chance.

02:14:17.980 | - So what are the ways this war can end, do you think?

02:14:20.840 | What are the different possible trajectories,

02:14:23.900 | whether it's peace talks,

02:14:25.620 | what does winning look like for either side,

02:14:28.740 | what is the role of US,

02:14:30.020 | what trajectories do you see that are possible?

02:14:32.700 | - It's a question on the one level,

02:14:36.100 | very easy to answer, on the other, very difficult.

02:14:40.060 | The level on which it is very easy,

02:14:43.260 | it's a broad historical perspective.

02:14:45.980 | If you really believe, and I believe in that,

02:14:49.780 | that this is the war of the Soviet succession,

02:14:53.340 | that this is the war of the disintegration of empire,

02:14:57.500 | you know how the story ends.

02:15:00.460 | And they end with disintegration of empire,

02:15:04.820 | they end with the rise of the new states

02:15:07.660 | and the parents of the new colored sports on the map.

02:15:10.940 | That's the story that started with the American Revolution.

02:15:14.900 | So that's long-term perspective.

02:15:18.300 | The difficult part is, of course, what will happen tomorrow.

02:15:21.540 | The difficult part is what they will be

02:15:25.020 | in two days or even in two years.

02:15:29.640 | And in very broad terms,

02:15:32.040 | the war can end in one of three scenarios,

02:15:36.180 | the victory of one side, the victory of another side,

02:15:40.220 | and a sort of a stalemate and compromise,

02:15:43.140 | especially when it comes to the territories.

02:15:46.300 | This war is already approaching the end of the second year.

02:15:52.340 | I follow the news and look analysis,

02:15:57.220 | I don't remember one single piece suggesting

02:16:00.520 | that the next year will bring peace

02:16:03.400 | or will bring peace for sure.

02:16:05.300 | And we are in a situation where both sides still believe

02:16:11.520 | that they can achieve something or improve their position

02:16:18.600 | on the battlefield.

02:16:20.140 | Certainly that was the expectations of Ukrainian side

02:16:24.220 | back in the summer and early fall of 2023.

02:16:28.600 | And from what I understand now,

02:16:32.380 | this is certainly the expectations of the Russian side today.

02:16:35.380 | This is the largest war in Europe since World War II,

02:16:41.420 | the largest war in the world since Korean War.

02:16:44.900 | And we know that the Korean War ended

02:16:52.140 | in this division of Korea,

02:16:55.780 | but the negotiations were going on for more than two years.

02:16:59.980 | While those negotiations were going on,

02:17:02.100 | both sides were trying to improve their position there.

02:17:05.420 | And until there was a political change,

02:17:09.020 | death of Stalin, arrival of Eisenhower in the United States,

02:17:14.020 | and the realization that the chances of succeeding

02:17:18.380 | on the battlefield are huge, the peace talks didn't come.

02:17:23.380 | So at this point, all three scenarios are possible.

02:17:28.260 | I don't really discount any of them.

02:17:31.440 | It's early to say what will happen.

02:17:34.620 | - So without any political change,

02:17:36.780 | let's try to imagine what are the possibilities

02:17:40.280 | that the war ends this year?

02:17:41.760 | Is it possible that it can end with compromise,

02:17:47.960 | basically at the place it started?

02:17:49.860 | - Meaning back to the borders of 2022?

02:17:52.700 | - Yeah, back to the borders of '22

02:17:55.160 | with some security guarantees

02:17:57.860 | that aren't really guarantees, but are hopeful guarantees.

02:18:01.860 | - No, it is not just virtual impossibility.

02:18:05.580 | It is impossible without political change in Moscow.

02:18:08.980 | The reason is that back in the fall of 2022,

02:18:16.180 | Vladimir Putin included five of Ukrainian region's oblasts,

02:18:21.180 | even those that he didn't control or didn't control fully

02:18:25.000 | into the Russian constitution,

02:18:27.220 | which basically, in simple language,

02:18:29.440 | is that the hands are tied up not only for Putin himself,

02:18:33.000 | but also for his possible successors.

02:18:35.700 | So that means that no return to the borders of 2022

02:18:40.700 | without political change in Moscow are possible.

02:18:45.840 | A few days after that decision in Moscow,

02:18:50.840 | Zelensky issued a decree saying

02:18:55.840 | that no negotiations with Russia.

02:18:58.320 | What that really meant in plain language

02:19:01.360 | is that basically we are not prepared

02:19:03.240 | to negotiate a stable agreement with five of our oblasts,

02:19:08.040 | not just the next,

02:19:10.120 | but also included into the Russian constitution.

02:19:12.760 | So that's where we are, so that scenario is,

02:19:17.760 | again, everything is possible, of course,

02:19:21.000 | but it's highly, highly unlikely.

02:19:22.880 | - So the Russian constitution is a thing

02:19:25.040 | that makes this all very difficult.

02:19:27.680 | - Yes, and not only as a negotiation tactic

02:19:30.440 | for Putin or whoever would negotiate on the Russian side,

02:19:34.380 | but also as a legal issue.

02:19:37.260 | - So the practical aspect of it, even, is difficult.

02:19:40.160 | You really have to change the constitution

02:19:44.080 | before the peace agreement takes hold

02:19:46.800 | or immediately after that.

02:19:48.880 | And with the Minsk agreements,

02:19:50.840 | that was one of the things that Russia wanted from Ukraine,

02:19:54.540 | change of the constitution,

02:19:56.240 | and it turned out to be really impossible.

02:19:58.720 | So that's one of the backstories of the Minsk

02:20:03.400 | and collapse of the Minsk agreements.

02:20:05.680 | - Is there something like Minsk agreements

02:20:08.060 | that are possible now to, maybe this is a legal question,

02:20:11.520 | but to override the constitution,

02:20:13.100 | to sort of shake everything up?

02:20:15.680 | So see the constitutional amendment

02:20:18.720 | as just a negotiation tactic,

02:20:22.000 | to come to the table to something like Minsk agreement.

02:20:25.120 | - Given how fast those amendments

02:20:29.560 | to the constitution were adopted,

02:20:31.480 | that suggests that really executive power in Russia

02:20:37.080 | has enormous power over the legislative branch.

02:20:41.560 | So it's, again, difficult to imagine,

02:20:43.880 | but technically this is possible again,

02:20:45.920 | but possible if there is a political change in Moscow.

02:20:50.580 | - I don't understand why assuming political change

02:20:53.140 | in Moscow is not possible this year.

02:20:55.860 | So I'm trying to see if there's a way

02:20:57.740 | to end this war this year, right?

02:20:59.780 | - There is a possibility of armistice, right?

02:21:03.260 | But armistice more along the, like any armistice,

02:21:07.240 | along the lines of the current front lines.

02:21:10.320 | But withdrawal of the Russian troops

02:21:13.820 | to the borders of 2022 at this point,

02:21:17.180 | whether it's reasonable or unreasonable,

02:21:19.020 | can be achieved all only as the result

02:21:21.400 | of the defeat of the Russian army,

02:21:23.620 | like it happened near Kiev.

02:21:25.260 | Is it possible, possible?

02:21:26.560 | Is it likely, especially given what is happening

02:21:30.620 | with the Western support, military support for Ukraine?

02:21:35.460 | Probably not.

02:21:36.380 | - But if Putin, the executive branch, has a lot of power,

02:21:40.460 | why can't the United States president,

02:21:43.780 | the Russian president, the Ukrainian president

02:21:45.920 | come to the table and draw up something

02:21:48.340 | like the Minsk agreements where,

02:21:51.060 | and then rapid constitutional changes made,

02:21:54.260 | and you go back to the borders of 2022, before 2022,

02:21:58.220 | like through agreements, through compromise,

02:22:02.540 | impossible for you?

02:22:03.540 | - Certainly not this year.

02:22:05.300 | I look at this year as the time when at least one side,

02:22:09.940 | Russian side, will try to get as much as it can

02:22:14.500 | through the, through military means.

02:22:17.020 | - But that's been happening last year too.

02:22:19.460 | There's been a counter-offensive, there's been attempts.

02:22:22.420 | - It doesn't mean that every, that new year somehow

02:22:27.420 | is supposed to bring new tactics.

02:22:29.340 | That, the last year was pretty much a lot of fighting,

02:22:35.460 | a lot of suffering, very little movement of the frontline.

02:22:41.500 | The biggest change of the last year was Ukraine victory

02:22:45.680 | on the Black Sea, where they pushed the Russian Navy

02:22:50.680 | into the western part of the pond,

02:22:54.920 | and restored the grain corridor and export from Odessa,

02:22:59.920 | apparently up to 75% of what it used to be before the war.

02:23:06.020 | So that's the only major change.

02:23:10.360 | But again, the price is enormous in terms of wealth,

02:23:14.360 | in terms of, especially in terms of lives.

02:23:17.940 | - So thinking about what 2024 brings,

02:23:20.760 | Zelensky just fired Ukraine's head of the army,

02:23:24.900 | a man you've mentioned, General Valery Zaluzny.

02:23:29.820 | What do you make of this development?

02:23:31.980 | - This is a very, very dangerous moment in the war.

02:23:36.980 | The reason for that is that Zaluzny is someone

02:23:42.700 | who is very popular with the army,

02:23:44.600 | and with people in general.

02:23:47.900 | So if you look at that through American prism,

02:23:51.940 | that would be something analogous to President Truman

02:23:56.940 | firing General MacArthur,

02:24:00.200 | given that stakes for U.S. at that time were very high,

02:24:06.940 | but probably not as high as they are for Ukraine today.

02:24:11.020 | In both cases, what is at stake is certainly the idea

02:24:17.120 | that the political leadership and military leadership

02:24:20.300 | have to be on the same page.

02:24:22.320 | And the question is whether, on the part of Zelensky,

02:24:27.320 | this is just the change of the leadership,

02:24:31.460 | or this is also the change of his approach to the war.

02:24:36.340 | And that can mean many things.

02:24:39.380 | One can mean him taking more active part

02:24:42.820 | in planning operations.

02:24:45.420 | It can mean also possible change of the tactic

02:24:49.600 | in the war, given that counteroffensive didn't work out.

02:24:53.760 | We don't know yet.

02:24:56.700 | I don't know whether President Zelensky at this point

02:24:59.320 | knows exactly what will come next.

02:25:03.000 | But this is the time when the change of the leadership

02:25:06.780 | in the country and in the army that is at war,

02:25:10.100 | it's one of the most trying, most dangerous moments.

02:25:14.860 | - So the thing that President Zelensky expressed

02:25:17.700 | is that this is going to be a change of tactics,

02:25:21.720 | making the approach more technologically advanced,

02:25:25.820 | this kind of things.

02:25:26.960 | But as you said, I believe he is less popular

02:25:32.920 | than the chief of the army, Zelensky,

02:25:37.580 | 80% to 60%, depending on the polls.

02:25:40.780 | Do you think it's possible that Zelensky's days are numbered

02:25:45.100 | as the president, and that somebody like Zelushny

02:25:49.620 | comes to power?

02:25:52.020 | - What we know is that in this war,

02:25:55.900 | Ukrainian people really united around their president.

02:26:02.680 | And the armed forces were always,

02:26:07.580 | even before the start of the war,

02:26:09.020 | more popular than was the presidential office.

02:26:11.920 | So the change, if it happened in that realm,

02:26:16.780 | was not so dramatic.

02:26:19.660 | And from what I can see from social media in Ukraine,

02:26:24.560 | there is a lot of unhappiness, a lot of questions,

02:26:28.780 | but there is also realization, very strong realization

02:26:33.780 | that the country has to stay united.

02:26:37.060 | And certainly the behavior of Zelushny himself

02:26:41.420 | is there basically not suggesting any sort of a

02:26:45.820 | precaution type of scenario.

02:26:49.020 | That gives me some hope, actually a lot of hope.

02:26:54.020 | And in terms of whether Zelensky's days are numbered or not,

02:26:58.640 | I don't think they're numbered.

02:27:00.180 | But if Ukraine stays a democracy,

02:27:04.340 | and I believe it will stay,

02:27:06.620 | what comes to my mind is the story of Churchill,

02:27:11.620 | the story of De Gaulle in Poland, the story of Pilsudski.

02:27:19.540 | So once the war is over, really,

02:27:22.540 | the electorate in the democratic elections,

02:27:26.000 | they want to change the political leadership.

02:27:29.620 | They want to move forward.

02:27:31.580 | But Pilsudski came back to power,

02:27:34.860 | and De Gaulle came back to power,

02:27:37.220 | and Churchill came back to power.

02:27:39.260 | So no, whatever happens in the short run

02:27:44.100 | or medium term run, I think that Zelensky's days

02:27:49.100 | in politics are not numbered.

02:27:50.820 | - So what to you is interesting, for example,

02:27:54.860 | if I get a chance to interview Zelensky,

02:27:56.500 | what to you is interesting about the person

02:27:58.940 | that would be good to ask about, to explore,

02:28:02.380 | about the state of his mind, his thinking,

02:28:04.060 | his view of the world as it stands today.

02:28:06.320 | - Next month, we're supposed to take place

02:28:10.660 | Ukrainian elections.

02:28:12.580 | They're not taking place,

02:28:14.360 | because the majority of Ukrainians don't think

02:28:19.040 | this is the right thing to do, to change the president,

02:28:21.900 | to have the elections, to have a political struggle

02:28:24.280 | in the middle of the war.

02:28:25.540 | So Zelensky refused to call those elections

02:28:30.340 | despite the fact that he is and continues

02:28:35.100 | to be the most popular politician in Ukraine,

02:28:37.620 | so it would be to his benefit,

02:28:39.780 | but that's clearly not what the Ukrainians want.

02:28:43.540 | But the question of continuing as the president

02:28:47.500 | beyond five years also, one way or another,

02:28:51.860 | would raise questions about the legitimacy.

02:28:54.180 | And certainly Russia will be playing this card

02:28:58.640 | like there is no tomorrow.

02:28:59.940 | And what I would be interested in asking Zelensky about,

02:29:04.940 | whether he sees that his second term,

02:29:09.880 | which comes on those conditions,

02:29:12.300 | would suggest a different attitude over the opposition,

02:29:17.300 | maybe some form of the coalition government

02:29:22.700 | like it was the case in Britain with Churchill

02:29:26.020 | under different circumstances, of course,

02:29:28.300 | or this is basically, in his opinion,

02:29:30.380 | something that would be destructive

02:29:32.300 | and something that would really be an impediment

02:29:35.780 | for the question of unity and war effort.

02:29:40.380 | And I would ask this question not to basically suggest

02:29:45.380 | that that's the way to go,

02:29:47.920 | but I would be very much interested to hear

02:29:52.300 | what his thinking about that is.

02:29:54.460 | - Do you think there's a degree during wartime

02:29:57.960 | that the power that comes with being a war president

02:30:01.680 | can corrupt the person?

02:30:03.480 | Sort of push you away from the democratic mindset

02:30:08.480 | towards an authoritarian one?

02:30:13.640 | - I think that there is a possibility of that, right?

02:30:17.720 | In the conditions of any emergency,

02:30:22.720 | the war, in the case of the Soviet Union,

02:30:25.320 | there was a Chernobyl disaster and so on and so forth.

02:30:28.920 | You make decisions much faster,

02:30:32.160 | you create this vertical,

02:30:35.640 | and then it's very easy to get really used to that way,

02:30:40.640 | dealing with the issues in the conditions of emergency, right?

02:30:46.440 | And then they continue emergency or with no emergency,

02:30:53.080 | they are continuing the emergency mode.

02:30:55.440 | I think, again, that would be a very natural thing

02:31:00.440 | for any human being to do to make it easier.

02:31:05.080 | Should I do that easier and in a more effective way,

02:31:09.880 | or should I do it the right way?

02:31:11.720 | That's a challenge.

02:31:13.400 | Sometimes it's difficult to answer this question.

02:31:17.680 | - Let me stay in power for just a little longer

02:31:20.020 | to do it the efficient way.

02:31:21.880 | And then time flies away

02:31:23.760 | and all of a sudden you're going for the third term

02:31:28.080 | and the fourth term.

02:31:28.920 | - And suddenly it's easy to realize

02:31:30.600 | that actually you can't rule in any other way.

02:31:32.680 | You just, whatever skills you had of people around

02:31:37.680 | that can help is that already gone.

02:31:40.000 | - Exactly, the people that surround you

02:31:41.760 | are not providing the kind of critical feedback

02:31:46.360 | necessary for a democratic system.

02:31:48.400 | One of the things that Tucker said

02:31:50.960 | after his interview with Putin,

02:31:52.880 | he was just in his hotel, just chatting on video.

02:31:56.720 | And he said that he felt like Putin

02:32:01.720 | was not very good at explaining himself,

02:32:06.060 | like a coherent whole narrative

02:32:10.360 | of why the invasion happened and it's just this big picture.

02:32:13.800 | And he said, that's not because he doesn't have one,

02:32:17.460 | but it's been a long time since he's had somebody around him

02:32:22.460 | where he has to explain himself to.

02:32:25.180 | So he's out of practice, which is very interesting.

02:32:28.320 | It's a very interesting point.

02:32:29.820 | And that's what war and being in power

02:32:33.860 | for a prolonged period of time can do.

02:32:35.900 | So on that topic, if you had a chance to talk to Putin,

02:32:39.860 | what kind of questions would you ask him?

02:32:42.500 | What would you like to find out about the man

02:32:44.780 | as he stands today?

02:32:46.240 | - As a historian, I have a lot of questions

02:32:48.460 | and I have questions about when the decision was made

02:32:53.320 | to attack Ukraine and what went into this decision

02:32:57.280 | because we are thinking about that, we are trying.

02:33:00.600 | So as a historian, I have this big question,

02:33:05.040 | a question about the Crimea when those decisions were made.

02:33:09.700 | So that sort of questions that interests me,

02:33:14.080 | but the rest either I think that I understand

02:33:17.340 | what is going on with him

02:33:18.700 | or I don't expect the answer that can help.

02:33:21.220 | For example, a good question,

02:33:23.680 | whether you regret or not the start of the war in 2022,

02:33:28.680 | given the enormous, enormous casualties on both sides,

02:33:34.300 | but you can't expect from a politician

02:33:38.680 | an honest answer to this question, right?

02:33:42.420 | So there are questions to which I know he can't answer,

02:33:46.780 | honestly, and then there are other questions

02:33:48.320 | to which I think he already provided all answers

02:33:51.580 | that he could.

02:33:52.780 | So what for me is of interest are basically questions

02:33:57.780 | for a historian about the timing

02:34:01.180 | and the logic of particular decisions.

02:34:04.820 | - Well, I do wonder how different what he says publicly

02:34:08.700 | is from what he thinks privately.

02:34:10.980 | So a question about when the decision

02:34:15.100 | to invade Ukraine happens is a very good question

02:34:18.700 | to give insight to the difference

02:34:22.500 | between how he thinks about the world privately

02:34:24.380 | versus what he says publicly.

02:34:26.220 | And same about other, you know, about empire.

02:34:32.460 | Because if you ask Putin,

02:34:34.220 | he will say he has no interest in empire

02:34:36.340 | and he finds the notion silly.

02:34:39.420 | But at the same time, perhaps privately,

02:34:43.340 | there's a sense in which he does seek

02:34:47.180 | the reunification of the Russian Empire.

02:34:52.180 | - Not in the form of the Russian Empire,

02:34:54.900 | not in the form of the Soviet Union,

02:34:57.020 | but certainly in some form of the Russian control.

02:34:59.940 | That's, for me at least, it's quite clear.

02:35:05.980 | Otherwise there would be no busts to the Russian emperors

02:35:10.980 | and Catherine and Peter and others.

02:35:17.140 | - You wrote in your book titled

02:35:20.740 | The Frontline Essays on Ukraine's Past and Present

02:35:25.000 | about the Russian question,

02:35:26.540 | I guess articulated by Solzhenitsyn, first in 1994.

02:35:33.180 | Solzhenitsyn, of course, is the author of Gulag Archipelago.

02:35:36.860 | He's half Ukrainian.

02:35:38.260 | What is the Russian question?

02:35:41.020 | - Solzhenitsyn clearly identifies himself as Russian.

02:35:45.180 | And his opposition to the communist regime

02:35:50.260 | was a position of a Russian nationalist.

02:35:53.760 | So his argument was that communism was bad for Russia.

02:36:03.000 | And for him, Russian question is about the ethnic Russians,

02:36:08.000 | but also he was thinking about Russians in Putin's terms,

02:36:14.780 | or Putin thinks in Solzhenitsyn's terms,

02:36:18.980 | about Ukrainians and Belarusians

02:36:21.180 | constituting part of that.

02:36:23.120 | So the Russian question is the biggest tragedy

02:36:25.680 | of the 20th century, the division of the Russians,

02:36:29.020 | the loss of the statehood and division of the Russians

02:36:31.800 | between different states.

02:36:34.820 | This is for Solzhenitsyn's Russian question.

02:36:39.460 | And his original idea and plan was presented

02:36:44.460 | in the essay that he published in 1990,

02:36:49.260 | which was called How We Should Restructure Russia.

02:36:52.480 | And Restructure Russia meant getting rid

02:36:55.020 | of the Baltics, Central Asia, and Caucuses,

02:36:59.600 | and have Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians,

02:37:03.620 | including those who live in Northern Kazakhstan,

02:37:06.500 | to create one nation state.

02:37:09.380 | So he was a Russian nationalist,

02:37:11.540 | but he was thinking about Russian nation state

02:37:15.020 | as the state of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians.

02:37:18.600 | And once the Soviet Union collapsed

02:37:21.760 | and his idea was not implemented,

02:37:25.060 | in the 1990s he formulated Plan B,

02:37:29.400 | taken over by Russia of Donbas, Crimea, and Southern Ukraine,

02:37:34.400 | the areas that now are included in the Russian Constitution.

02:37:40.100 | So in terms, in historical terms and intellectual terms,

02:37:45.460 | what is happening today in the war

02:37:48.940 | between Russia and Ukraine is the division

02:37:53.720 | on one level or another level

02:37:57.060 | that was formulated by the noble laureate,

02:38:01.120 | Alexander Solzhenitsyn, half Russian, half Ukrainian.

02:38:04.900 | - If there is such a thing,

02:38:06.260 | what would you say is the Ukrainian question

02:38:09.580 | as we stand today?

02:38:10.760 | - The Ukrainian question is very simple.

02:38:13.260 | It's now, it's not anymore acquisition of the nation state,

02:38:18.120 | but actually a sovereign state.

02:38:20.820 | But it's maintenance.

02:38:23.080 | So it's Ukrainian question is like dozens of other questions

02:38:27.840 | in the 20th and 21st century.

02:38:30.500 | The rise of the new state.

02:38:32.680 | And that's what is the Ukrainian question,

02:38:36.280 | whether Ukraine will continue to its existence

02:38:40.680 | as a nation, as an independent state,

02:38:42.860 | because that existence has been questioned

02:38:46.960 | by stating that Russians and Ukrainians

02:38:50.140 | are one and the same people,

02:38:51.280 | which the fact is saying, "Your guy is Russian."

02:38:54.560 | And also trying to destroy the state.

02:38:58.720 | - Is it possible that if the war in Ukraine continues

02:39:01.680 | for many more years,

02:39:04.060 | that the next leader that follows Zelensky

02:39:08.580 | would take Ukraine away

02:39:11.820 | from a sort of democratic Western-style nation

02:39:15.660 | towards a more authoritarian one,

02:39:17.960 | maybe even with a far-right influence,

02:39:21.440 | this kind of direction,

02:39:22.840 | because of the war, the influence of war?

02:39:25.560 | - Everything is possible.

02:39:27.200 | And the longer the war continues,

02:39:30.520 | the more likely scenario like that becomes.

02:39:34.760 | But realization of that scenario

02:39:38.360 | would go against the grain

02:39:40.480 | of largest part of Ukrainian history,

02:39:45.360 | where Ukraine really emerged

02:39:50.040 | as a pluralistic state

02:39:51.760 | in which the elements of democracy were built

02:39:55.720 | in the last 30 years,

02:39:57.780 | would go against the grain of the Ukrainian society,

02:40:01.960 | where as one author formulated in the 1990s,

02:40:05.720 | he wrote a book, "Ukrainian Nationalism and Minority Faith,"

02:40:10.280 | where the nationalist was a minority faith,

02:40:12.480 | and radical nationalism continues to be,

02:40:15.360 | or at least continue to be in 2019 a minority faith

02:40:19.120 | during the last elections.

02:40:21.040 | So possible but unlikely given the historical realities

02:40:24.880 | of the last 30-plus years.

02:40:27.420 | - I could talk to you for many more hours

02:40:30.360 | on Chernobyl alone.

02:40:34.840 | Since you've written a book on Chernobyl and nuclear disaster,

02:40:37.320 | there's just a million possible conversations here.

02:40:40.220 | But let me just jump around history a little bit.

02:40:43.160 | Back to World War II, back before World War II,

02:40:47.580 | my grandmother lived through Holodomor and World War II,

02:40:51.180 | Nazi-occupied Ukraine.

02:40:53.400 | Holodomor, what do you learn,

02:40:57.680 | let's say about human nature

02:41:01.080 | and about governments and nations

02:41:05.040 | from the fact that Holodomor happened?

02:41:07.680 | And maybe you could say what it is and why it happened.

02:41:11.380 | - Holodomor is a massive famine in Ukraine

02:41:15.460 | between the years 1932 and 1934.

02:41:18.460 | And it happened as the result

02:41:24.340 | of forceful collectivization of the agriculture.

02:41:28.740 | And a tamp on the part of Stalin also

02:41:35.260 | really roll Ukraine into the Soviet Union

02:41:38.860 | with basically no potential opposition

02:41:43.220 | from Ukraine, now national communists.

02:41:47.880 | So two things came together in December of 1932

02:41:52.860 | when in the same decree,

02:41:55.180 | Stalin and Molotov signed a decree

02:41:57.100 | on the requisition of the grain,

02:41:59.820 | which lead eventually to the mass starvation

02:42:03.320 | and on the banning of Ukrainian language publications

02:42:07.100 | and education in other Soviet republics outside of Ukraine

02:42:12.100 | and introducing limitations

02:42:14.940 | on the so-called Ukrainianization policies.

02:42:18.980 | So on the use of Ukrainian language in Ukraine itself.

02:42:23.980 | And the numbers are debated.

02:42:30.100 | The numbers that most of the scholars work today

02:42:34.520 | are four million, but again,

02:42:35.760 | there are larger numbers as well that circulate.

02:42:40.700 | And this is the famine of '32, '33

02:42:45.700 | was not exclusive Ukrainian phenomenon.

02:42:50.540 | But most of Ukraine in the Soviet Union died in Ukraine.

02:42:55.420 | And Ukraine was the only place

02:42:57.480 | where the policy on collecting grain

02:43:00.540 | were coming together with the policy

02:43:03.180 | of the cleansing of the political leadership,

02:43:06.180 | sending people from Moscow to take over the leadership

02:43:09.940 | and attack on Ukrainian culture.

02:43:11.860 | So in terms of what I learn about human nature,

02:43:17.740 | it's more me learning about the ideologies

02:43:23.900 | of the 20th century, because it's not the only famine

02:43:27.680 | in the communist lands.

02:43:29.120 | The famine in China, which was in terms of the numbers,

02:43:32.720 | much more devastating than that.

02:43:35.120 | It's in a different category and for a good reason,

02:43:37.640 | but you have Holocaust.

02:43:38.920 | What unites these things is the time.

02:43:43.920 | This is 20th century.

02:43:48.080 | What unites them are the dominance in the societies

02:43:53.560 | that are doing that.

02:43:54.800 | Really, ideologies that not just devalued human life,

02:43:59.800 | but considered that actually the way forward

02:44:05.680 | is by destroying large group of populations

02:44:09.200 | defined ethnically, religiously, socially, or otherwise.

02:44:12.960 | Which tells about the time, but tells also about humanity,

02:44:18.120 | because for centuries before that,

02:44:21.680 | human life was valued.

02:44:23.920 | There were enemies, but the idea was that human life

02:44:27.240 | can put and you can, at the end of the day,

02:44:31.100 | there can be slaves.

02:44:32.200 | There can be, you can use them for productive force.

02:44:35.560 | Countries in the 18th century with southern Ukraine,

02:44:40.440 | they were looking for settlers for people to bring

02:44:42.900 | and live on land.

02:44:45.080 | You move into the 20th century and there is mass destruction

02:44:48.080 | of the population in the name of ideologies,

02:44:52.720 | which basically are, by definition, destroy human lives.

02:44:57.720 | And that's what's really so shocking and striking,

02:45:01.800 | because that break was not just with issues of morale,

02:45:06.800 | not just with issues of humanity,

02:45:10.240 | it was any common sense what is happening.

02:45:14.560 | And I am absolutely convinced

02:45:19.560 | that we didn't learn the lesson.

02:45:22.000 | I am absolutely convinced that we didn't learn the lesson.

02:45:25.480 | With turning our page on fascism and communism,

02:45:29.880 | we somehow decided that we are free of that.

02:45:32.980 | That at least in those terms, history came to an end.

02:45:36.500 | That what is ahead is the future and nothing of that sort

02:45:40.240 | would happen, would take place to a degree

02:45:44.380 | that people would get in trouble

02:45:46.580 | for comparing any statements or events

02:45:50.580 | that are happening today with the communism of fascism.

02:45:55.580 | And so I feel responsibility of myself

02:46:02.840 | and as a historian in particular

02:46:05.640 | for not doing a better job about telling people

02:46:13.540 | that, well, we are who we are

02:46:18.540 | and we have as humans our dark side

02:46:22.400 | and we have to be very careful.

02:46:25.680 | - So there is a human capacity

02:46:28.000 | to be captured by an idea, an ideology

02:46:32.920 | that claims to bring up a better world,

02:46:35.600 | as the Nazis did, as Soviet Union did.

02:46:40.800 | And on the path of doing that devaluing human life,

02:46:45.800 | that we will bring a better world

02:46:48.400 | and if millions of people have to be tortured

02:46:51.400 | on the way to that, all right,

02:46:54.700 | but at least we have a better world

02:46:56.260 | and human beings are able to, if not accept that,

02:47:00.000 | look the other way.

02:47:01.480 | - Yes, and in the name of a particular nation or race,

02:47:06.480 | like it was the Third Reich

02:47:07.960 | or in the name of the humanity of the future.

02:47:12.720 | So not just devalue human life, destroy human life.

02:47:17.720 | - Is there something fundamental about communism

02:47:20.500 | and centralized planning that's part of the problem here?

02:47:23.320 | Maybe this also connects the story of Chernobyl

02:47:27.000 | where the Chernobyl disaster is not just a story

02:47:31.320 | of failure of a nuclear power plant,

02:47:34.800 | but it's an entire institution of,

02:47:38.920 | the scientific and nuclear institution,

02:47:40.480 | but the entirety of the government.

02:47:42.320 | - There is, and there is a number of factors

02:47:44.960 | of political and social character that produced Chernobyl.

02:47:49.960 | And one of them is generally the atmosphere of secrecy

02:47:55.120 | in the Soviet Union in the conditions of the Cold War.

02:48:02.800 | The Chernobyl reactor was a dual purpose reactor.

02:48:05.840 | It could boil water today

02:48:08.080 | and produce enriched uranium tomorrow, right?

02:48:11.040 | So it was top secret.

02:48:12.940 | And if there were problems with that reactor,

02:48:17.180 | those problems were kept secret

02:48:18.800 | even at people who operated the reactor.

02:48:21.760 | That's what happened in Chernobyl.

02:48:25.560 | Another big, big part of the story,

02:48:29.120 | which is specifically Soviet,

02:48:33.820 | that's the nature of the managerial culture

02:48:37.440 | and administrative culture

02:48:39.720 | in which people had no right to make their own decisions

02:48:43.400 | in their place, in their position.

02:48:45.800 | A few years before the Three Mile Island happened,

02:48:50.600 | which was a big, big nuclear disaster,

02:48:53.640 | but in terms of consequences, nothing like Chernobyl.

02:48:58.440 | And there in the context of the American legal culture

02:49:02.760 | and managerial culture, people who were operators

02:49:07.760 | who were in managerial positions,

02:49:11.600 | that was their responsibility to take decisions.

02:49:15.000 | President Carter came there,

02:49:16.600 | but he was not calling shots on none of those issues.

02:49:20.960 | What you see with Chernobyl,

02:49:22.320 | and people who saw HBO series know that very well,

02:49:26.320 | the moment the high official arrives,

02:49:29.520 | everyone actually falls in line,

02:49:31.900 | it's the official who calls the shot.

02:49:33.820 | And to move population from the city of Pripyat,

02:49:37.480 | you needed the okay coming from Moscow from the very top.

02:49:42.480 | So that is Soviet story.

02:49:45.040 | And there is a global story of cutting corners

02:49:49.960 | to meet the deadlines.

02:49:52.580 | Like it was with that test that they were running

02:49:56.300 | at that time, or to meet production quarters.

02:50:00.780 | This is not just socialist thing.

02:50:02.980 | You can replace production quarters with profit

02:50:06.980 | and you get the same story.

02:50:14.400 | So some parts in that story are generally reflective

02:50:19.420 | of our today's world in general.

02:50:23.440 | Others are very specific, very specific for Soviet Union,

02:50:26.920 | for Soviet experience.

02:50:28.500 | And then the biggest probably Soviet part of that story

02:50:33.500 | is that on the one hand, the government in Moscow and Kiev,

02:50:38.640 | they mobilize all resources to deal with that.

02:50:41.600 | But they keep information about what is happening

02:50:45.800 | and the radiation clouds secret

02:50:49.840 | from the rest of the population.

02:50:51.920 | Something that completely would be impossible

02:50:54.140 | and was impossible in US, in UK,

02:50:56.520 | where other accidents happened.

02:50:58.880 | And then guess what?

02:51:01.240 | A few years later, the Soviet Union collapses very much,

02:51:06.240 | also thanks to the mobilization of people

02:51:10.580 | over the issue of Chernobyl and nuclear energy

02:51:13.740 | in people writing about that subject,

02:51:18.740 | call it eco-nationalism, ecological nationalism,

02:51:23.300 | which comes at least in part from withholding information

02:51:28.060 | from people.

02:51:28.900 | And in Ukraine, mobilization didn't start over the issues

02:51:33.120 | that led to independence,

02:51:34.840 | didn't start over the issue of language

02:51:37.180 | or didn't start over the issue of national autonomy.

02:51:41.880 | It started under the slogans, tell us the truth

02:51:44.420 | about Chernobyl.

02:51:45.480 | We want to know whether we live in contaminated areas or not.

02:51:50.840 | And that was a very, very strong factor

02:51:55.080 | that crossed the not just ethnic, religious,

02:51:59.300 | linguistic lines, lines between members of the party

02:52:02.580 | and not members of the party of the top leadership

02:52:05.140 | and not in military and civilian,

02:52:07.020 | because it turned out that the party card

02:52:10.300 | didn't protect you from being affected by radiation.

02:52:15.300 | So the all-national mobilization happens.

02:52:20.140 | The first mass manifestations are about Chernobyl,

02:52:23.260 | not about anything else.

02:52:24.780 | - That's fascinating.

02:52:25.620 | I mean, for people who might not know,

02:52:27.500 | Chernobyl is located in Ukraine.

02:52:29.780 | It would be, it's a fascinating view

02:52:31.620 | that Chernobyl might be one of the critical

02:52:34.700 | sort of threshold catalysts

02:52:36.020 | for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

02:52:37.860 | That's very interesting.

02:52:39.500 | Well, just as a small aside,

02:52:41.680 | I guess this is a good moment to give some love

02:52:45.940 | to the HBO series.

02:52:47.340 | It made me, even though it's British accents and so on,

02:52:50.860 | it made me realize that some of these stories

02:52:52.840 | in Eastern Europe could be told very effectively

02:52:55.660 | through film, through series.

02:52:58.820 | It was quite a, I mean, it was so incredibly well done.

02:53:03.280 | And maybe I can ask you, historically speaking,

02:53:07.200 | were you impressed?

02:53:09.140 | - I was, I was.

02:53:12.120 | And I think that the miniseries are very truthful

02:53:17.120 | on a number of levels and very untruthful on some others.

02:53:26.300 | And they got excellent in very well

02:53:32.440 | the macro and micro levels.

02:53:36.660 | So the macro level is the issue of the big truth.

02:53:39.900 | And the story there is very much built around

02:53:43.740 | the theme that I just discussed now.

02:53:46.300 | It's about the cost of lies, right?

02:53:48.580 | And the Soviet Union lying to the people

02:53:52.340 | and that's what the film explores.

02:53:56.820 | So that's, I call it, a big truth about Chernobyl.

02:54:00.260 | And they got a lot of minor things

02:54:05.420 | really, really very well.

02:54:07.580 | Like the curtains on the windows,

02:54:09.900 | like how the houses looked from inside and outside.

02:54:13.540 | I didn't see any post-Soviet film or any Western film

02:54:18.220 | that would be so good at capturing those everyday details.

02:54:23.220 | But then there is a huge gray area in between big truth

02:54:28.300 | and small truths of the recreating the environment.

02:54:32.660 | And that's how you get from one to another.

02:54:34.820 | And then you see the KGB officers coming

02:54:38.500 | and taking someone out of the meeting and arresting,

02:54:42.060 | which was not necessary.

02:54:44.140 | You see the Soviet boss threatening someone

02:54:47.180 | to throw the person from the helicopter.

02:54:50.000 | So you get this Hollywood sort of things

02:54:53.220 | despite the fact that it's HBO or serious.

02:54:56.900 | And they're the best really in terms as a film

02:55:01.460 | in the fourth episode where they completely decided

02:55:05.460 | just to hell with the reality and let's make a film.

02:55:10.460 | So they bring Legasov, one of the key characters,

02:55:14.660 | to this court meetings that they bring.

02:55:18.940 | Soviet party boss, Shcherbina, he wasn't there.

02:55:22.740 | They create a drama there.

02:55:26.500 | So they got the main thing, the big truth, right?

02:55:31.500 | And that's why I like this production.

02:55:35.860 | - Sometimes you have to show what something felt like.

02:55:40.860 | You have to go bigger than it actually was.

02:55:44.180 | I mean, if you, I don't know,

02:55:46.480 | if you experience heartbreak and you see a film about it,

02:55:51.480 | you want there to be explosions.

02:55:53.780 | You want to see this in images, visible, right?

02:55:58.280 | So, but the question, again, I just mentioned KGB

02:56:03.280 | marching in and some party leader giving a speech.

02:56:08.380 | They were not given that speech,

02:56:10.800 | but the sense was there and it was in the air.

02:56:14.100 | And I, as people of my generation who were there,

02:56:18.120 | knew that and recognized that.

02:56:20.060 | But for new generation, whether they are in Ukraine

02:56:23.660 | in Russia, in US, in Britain, in Zimbabwe, anywhere,

02:56:28.300 | yeah, you have to do this little untruths

02:56:33.300 | and introduce them.

02:56:37.540 | And had a very interesting on air conversation

02:56:42.180 | with the author of the script, amazing.

02:56:49.300 | And I asked him the question of, the film declared really

02:56:54.300 | the importance of the truth, but how do you square that

02:56:57.940 | with the need in the film to really put it mildly,

02:57:02.940 | to go beyond the measures of truth,

02:57:09.580 | whatever understanding of that term is.

02:57:12.160 | - Well, I suppose it is a bit terrifying

02:57:15.300 | that some of the most dramatic moments in history

02:57:18.500 | are probably quite mundane.

02:57:20.260 | The decisions to begin wars, invasions,

02:57:24.760 | they're probably something like a Zoom meeting

02:57:29.340 | on a random Tuesday in today's workplace.

02:57:33.780 | So it's not like there's dramatic music playing.

02:57:36.820 | These are just human decisions and they command armies

02:57:40.160 | and they command destruction.

02:57:41.700 | I personally, because of that, believe in the power

02:57:46.620 | of individuals to be able to stop wars,

02:57:49.220 | not just start wars, individual leaders.

02:57:51.860 | So let me just ask about nuclear safety,

02:57:54.540 | because there's an interesting point you make.

02:57:56.020 | You wrote in the book, in "Atoms and Ashes,"

02:57:58.880 | a global history of nuclear disaster.

02:58:00.820 | So technically nuclear energy is extremely safe.

02:58:05.820 | There's a number of people died per energy generated.

02:58:08.940 | It's much safer than coal and oil, for example,

02:58:11.800 | as far as I understand.

02:58:13.060 | But the case you also make is, you write, quote,

02:58:16.660 | "Many of the political, economic, social,

02:58:18.700 | and cultural factors that led to the accidents of the past

02:58:22.100 | are still with us today, making the nuclear industry

02:58:25.700 | vulnerable to repeating old mistakes

02:58:27.460 | in new and unexpected ways, and any new accidents

02:58:31.380 | are certain to create new anti-nuclear mobilization."

02:58:35.000 | And then you continue with, "This makes the nuclear industry

02:58:38.260 | not only risky to operate, but also impossible to count on

02:58:42.420 | as a long-term solution to an overwhelming problem."

02:58:46.620 | So can you explain that perspective?

02:58:48.380 | It's an interesting one.

02:58:51.140 | So speaking to the psychology of when an accident

02:58:53.380 | does happen, it has a dramatic effect.

02:58:56.940 | And also speaking to the fact that accidents can happen

02:59:01.940 | not because of the safety of the nuclear power plant,

02:59:06.420 | but of the underlying structure of government

02:59:11.980 | that oversees it.

02:59:14.100 | - Yes, I wrote a book on Chernobyl,

02:59:17.360 | and then tried to understand Chernobyl better,

02:59:20.820 | but placing it in the context of other disasters

02:59:24.820 | as a historian and was looking at the political factors

02:59:27.560 | and social factors and cultural factors,

02:59:29.500 | not the physics or engineering part of the story.

02:59:34.500 | And the factors that are still with us

02:59:41.500 | are the, like it was the case in Chernobyl,

02:59:45.540 | the authoritarian regimes, right?

02:59:47.220 | And high centralization of the decision-making.

02:59:50.700 | And desire to cut corners and also the issues

02:59:55.700 | associated with secrecy, so that is with us.

03:00:00.820 | If you look at where the future of the nuclear industry

03:00:06.660 | is now at this point, it's the regimes and parts

03:00:11.660 | in the Middle East.

03:00:13.940 | That's a big new frontier.

03:00:16.500 | The countries that are not particularly known

03:00:18.860 | for the history of democratic existence,

03:00:22.020 | where we also have the situation that we had

03:00:27.540 | at Three Mile Island, that we had at Chernobyl,

03:00:32.900 | this is the first generation nuclear engineers, right?

03:00:37.660 | So people where the country doesn't have a lot

03:00:42.660 | of experience in generations after generations

03:00:45.540 | working in that particular industry, where it's all new,

03:00:48.980 | that is certain additional risk.

03:00:53.600 | And what we got now is this current war,

03:00:57.460 | is something that, not that people completely didn't expect,

03:01:02.160 | but didn't happen in the past.

03:01:03.780 | You see the war coming to the nuclear sites.

03:01:07.680 | Chernobyl was taken over by the Russian Army,

03:01:10.520 | or National Guard rather, on the first day of the invasion.

03:01:15.500 | Then there was Zaporizhya, the largest nuclear power plant

03:01:18.860 | in Europe, where the battle was waged on the territory

03:01:22.660 | of the nuclear power plant, the missiles being fired,

03:01:27.900 | buildings catching fire, and the situation

03:01:32.900 | that brought the Fukushima disaster

03:01:38.120 | was there at Zaporizhya more than once.

03:01:40.800 | And Fukushima came because the reactors were shut down

03:01:44.760 | as they are at Zaporizhya, but they still needed electricity

03:01:49.520 | to bring water and to cool them down.

03:01:52.480 | And in Fukushima case, it was the tsunami

03:01:55.260 | that cut off the supply of electricity.

03:01:57.400 | In the case of Zaporizhya, there was the warfare

03:02:00.000 | that was happening in the area around Zaporizhya

03:02:02.780 | that did the same effect.

03:02:05.960 | So we have 440 reactors in the world today, plus/minus.

03:02:10.500 | None of them was designed to withstand

03:02:14.960 | the direct missile attack or to function

03:02:18.320 | in the conditions of the warfare.

03:02:20.660 | If operators, they're human, they make mistakes,

03:02:23.600 | like they did at Three Mile Island or Chernobyl,

03:02:26.600 | but think also if the war is happening around them,

03:02:30.360 | if they're not sure what is happening with their families.

03:02:35.000 | If they don't know whether they will be next to missile,

03:02:38.200 | whether they'll hit their room,

03:02:40.520 | whether the control room or not, that multiplies also.

03:02:46.560 | So we are in a situation where we are not done yet

03:02:51.560 | with the nuclear accidents.

03:02:54.400 | You, each time, it's not like we don't pay attention

03:02:58.120 | or we don't learn, smart people work on that.

03:03:01.920 | And after every accident, try to figure the way

03:03:04.880 | how not to step into the same trap.

03:03:09.880 | But next accident would actually expose

03:03:15.840 | a new vulnerability.

03:03:18.340 | You deal with Chernobyl and then tsunami comes.

03:03:21.480 | You deal with tsunami and then war comes.

03:03:24.520 | And we really, in that sense,

03:03:28.500 | we have sometimes wild imagination,

03:03:32.040 | but sometimes it's difficult to imagine

03:03:34.240 | what can happen next.

03:03:35.560 | So we are not done, there will be nuclear accidents,

03:03:38.960 | unfortunately, in the future.

03:03:41.260 | And that makes nuclear energy so problematic

03:03:47.560 | when you count on it to fight climate change.

03:03:52.040 | I'll explain why.

03:03:53.600 | You gave the figures how many people die from burning coal,

03:03:57.800 | from how many people die from radiation.

03:04:01.600 | And it's a good argument.

03:04:05.980 | Some people would question them

03:04:07.520 | because it's also the issue of not just dying,

03:04:10.000 | but impact of radiation on cancer, on our health,

03:04:15.000 | which is not completely understood yet.

03:04:17.040 | So it's still, there is a lot of question marks.

03:04:19.560 | But let's assume what you are saying, that's the figures.

03:04:23.080 | That's how it is.

03:04:24.340 | But we as people, we, for whatever reason,

03:04:30.420 | are not afraid of coal,

03:04:32.040 | but we are very much afraid of radiation.

03:04:35.600 | It's invisible.

03:04:37.120 | It's COVID, it's everywhere.

03:04:41.080 | And you can't see it.

03:04:42.480 | And then you start having issues.

03:04:45.760 | And then you have stomach problems.

03:04:50.000 | And during the COVID, the governments closed the borders.

03:04:55.000 | Maybe a good idea, maybe not so good ideas.

03:05:01.000 | Isolation, so that was the way.

03:05:04.000 | Governments started to fight for access to Pfizer,

03:05:09.440 | to Moderna, to Sputnik, to whatever it is, to vaccine.

03:05:15.440 | So now back to the radiation.

03:05:19.240 | What is happening once Chernobyl happens?

03:05:23.120 | That's the highest point in the development

03:05:27.360 | of nuclear industry so far,

03:05:28.880 | in terms of how many new reactors were commissioned

03:05:33.640 | or the licenses were issued.

03:05:35.640 | The next reactor after Three Mile Island in the US

03:05:44.000 | go ahead was given, it seems to me, 10 years ago

03:05:46.920 | or something like that.

03:05:48.240 | The Fukushima happens, the reaction is in China to that

03:05:51.360 | as well, they're very much concerned.

03:05:53.600 | So there is a saying in the field,

03:05:56.000 | Chernobyl anywhere is Chernobyl everywhere.

03:05:59.780 | After Fukushima, Germany decides to go nuclear free

03:06:04.040 | and gets there at the expense of burning coal.

03:06:08.520 | So that's how we react.

03:06:10.520 | And each major accident, that means global freeze

03:06:15.520 | on the nuclear reactor production

03:06:20.240 | for at least another 10 years.

03:06:22.280 | So that's what I mean that nuclear industry is,

03:06:26.240 | not just in terms of technology,

03:06:31.160 | not just in terms of radiation, impact on health,

03:06:34.760 | but also politically a very, very unreliable option.

03:06:38.720 | And to you, you suspect that that's an irreparable aspect

03:06:43.320 | of human nature and the human mind,

03:06:45.880 | that there are certain things that just create a panic,

03:06:49.520 | invisible threats of this kind,

03:06:51.160 | whether it's a virus or radiation.

03:06:55.860 | There's something about the mind,

03:06:57.240 | if I get a stomachache in the United States after Fukushima,

03:07:02.240 | I think it's probably radiation,

03:07:04.600 | this irrational type of thinking.

03:07:08.360 | - And that's not possible to repair?

03:07:10.880 | - I think we can be trained, right?

03:07:14.580 | We can be trained. - Pretty smart, aren't we?

03:07:16.520 | Education.

03:07:17.360 | - But generally, we are afraid of things that we see,

03:07:22.360 | but even more, we are afraid of things that we don't see.

03:07:26.200 | And radiation is one of those.

03:07:27.760 | - Let's zoom out on the world.

03:07:30.160 | We talked about the war in Ukraine.

03:07:31.920 | How does the war in Ukraine change the world order?

03:07:36.500 | Let me just look at everything that's going on.

03:07:39.760 | Zoom out a bit.

03:07:40.980 | China, the Israel-Gaza war, the Middle East,

03:07:45.980 | India, what is interesting to you,

03:07:52.500 | important to think about in the coming years and decades?

03:07:56.380 | - As a historian, and I'm trained that way,

03:07:59.620 | I have a feeling of deja vu.

03:08:05.200 | I see the Cold War is coming back in many of its features.

03:08:10.200 | And the war started, and we discussed that,

03:08:17.300 | in 2014, at least in my interpretation,

03:08:22.320 | with Russia trying to really reestablish its control

03:08:27.320 | over the post-Soviet space,

03:08:31.180 | and Ukraine was crucial for that project.

03:08:35.040 | And the more globally Russian vision since 1990s

03:08:38.560 | was that they didn't like the American monopolar world.

03:08:43.560 | They knew and realized that they couldn't go back

03:08:49.620 | to the bipolar world of the Cold War era.

03:08:54.620 | So the vision was multipolar world,

03:08:58.440 | in which, again, it wasn't just academic exercise,

03:09:02.680 | it was a political exercise in which Russia

03:09:04.800 | would be one of the centers, one of the poles,

03:09:08.200 | on par with China, on par with European Union,

03:09:11.280 | on par with the United States.

03:09:13.060 | That's very broadly speaking the context

03:09:17.120 | in which the war starts in 2014.

03:09:21.580 | Where we are now?

03:09:22.900 | Well, we are now in Russia,

03:09:27.120 | certainly trying to regain its military strength,

03:09:31.160 | but no one actually believes that Russia

03:09:34.880 | is the sort of a superpower it was imagined before 2022.

03:09:39.540 | We see, certainly, Russia finding the way

03:09:46.280 | to deal with the sanctions,

03:09:49.720 | but we don't see, certainly, Russia as an economic power

03:09:54.720 | with any sort of a future.

03:09:58.900 | So it is not an implosion of the Russian military,

03:10:03.560 | economic, and political power,

03:10:05.140 | but it's significantly, actually, it is diminished.

03:10:08.480 | So today, very difficult to imagine the Russia emerging

03:10:13.480 | as another pole of the multipolar world.

03:10:18.000 | Not impossible, but the war certainly made

03:10:20.680 | that very problematic and much more difficult.

03:10:26.240 | On the other hand, what the war did,

03:10:29.020 | it basically awakened the West, the Old West,

03:10:34.020 | United States and Western Europe, transatlantic alliance.

03:10:39.360 | On the top of that, there are East European countries

03:10:45.620 | that are even much stronger proponents

03:10:49.260 | of assistance for Ukraine than is Germany

03:10:53.060 | or the United States of America.

03:10:56.600 | So it is the replay of the Cold War story,

03:11:00.100 | The Return of the West, that one of the chapters

03:11:02.660 | in my book, The Russo-Ukrainian War, is called that way.

03:11:06.480 | We also can see the elements of the rebuilding

03:11:09.780 | of the Beijing-Moscow alliance of the 1950s,

03:11:14.040 | which was a very important part of the Cold War.

03:11:17.120 | It was extremely important part of the Korean War

03:11:19.820 | that in many ways launched also the Cold War globally.

03:11:24.820 | So I see a lot of parallels of going back

03:11:28.360 | to the time of the Cold War and the bipolar world

03:11:33.360 | that emerges, it's not anymore the world focused

03:11:35.880 | on Washington and Moscow, it's more like world focused

03:11:39.420 | on Washington and Beijing.

03:11:41.820 | And then there are countries in between.

03:11:44.380 | There are countries in between that join one block

03:11:48.580 | or another block that is emerging

03:11:50.340 | that is not fully formed.

03:11:53.260 | This is, in my opinion, makes the task of us historians

03:11:58.260 | to really go back to the Cold War and look

03:12:03.900 | and look through new perspective on the history

03:12:08.900 | of that conflict because there is a lot

03:12:10.460 | of things that we can learn.

03:12:12.400 | - So in some ways, history does repeat itself here.

03:12:18.740 | So now it's a Cold War with China and the United States.

03:12:23.740 | What's a hopeful trajectory for the 21st century

03:12:26.980 | for the rest of it?

03:12:27.900 | - The hopeful trajectory is really trying

03:12:32.960 | to be as wise and as lucky as our predecessors

03:12:41.540 | during the Cold War, because the dominant discourse

03:12:47.980 | so far about the Cold War was, what a horrible thing

03:12:51.300 | that Cold War was.

03:12:53.500 | What did we do wrong?

03:12:54.660 | How did we end up in the Cold War?

03:12:57.240 | And I think, especially today, this is a wrong question

03:13:02.800 | to ask, the right question to ask is, how did it happen?

03:13:07.800 | What did we do so right that for now more than 70 years,

03:13:15.780 | we don't have a World War?

03:13:19.180 | How come that after World War I, World War II

03:13:22.180 | came within 20 years?

03:13:24.740 | How come that what helped us to keep the world

03:13:29.740 | on the brink but still away from the global war

03:13:34.620 | for such a long period of time?

03:13:36.980 | How to keep the Cold War cold?

03:13:40.740 | That's the biggest lesson that the history

03:13:43.980 | of the Cold War can give us.

03:13:45.260 | And I don't think we ask the question quite often enough,

03:13:49.100 | ask the question that way.

03:13:50.840 | And if you don't ask right questions,

03:13:52.560 | we don't get right answers.

03:13:53.900 | - Yeah, you've written a book, a great book

03:13:56.920 | on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and we came very close,

03:14:01.920 | not to just another World War, but to a nuclear war

03:14:07.180 | and the destruction of human civilization as we know it.

03:14:13.300 | So I guess it's a good question to ask,

03:14:18.300 | what do we do so right?

03:14:21.460 | And maybe one of the answers could be

03:14:24.180 | that we just got lucky.

03:14:25.840 | And the question is, how do we keep getting lucky?

03:14:30.420 | - Luck is clearly one of the factors

03:14:35.620 | in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

03:14:40.260 | Because what happened then, there is one of the lessons,

03:14:44.100 | is that eventually the commanders at the top,

03:14:49.100 | they believe that they have all the cards.

03:14:52.060 | They negotiate with each other.

03:14:54.300 | They try to see who blinks first

03:14:58.300 | in the game of nuclear brinkmanship.

03:15:01.820 | The trick is that they don't control fully people

03:15:06.820 | on the ground.

03:15:10.280 | The most dangerous moment, or one of the most dangerous

03:15:13.220 | moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis was the Soviet missile

03:15:17.960 | shooting down the American airplane, killing the pilots.

03:15:22.880 | An act of war, right?

03:15:24.320 | So technically we're already in war.

03:15:26.980 | And the order to shoot the missile was given

03:15:33.460 | with Moscow having no clue what was going on the ground.

03:15:36.600 | Moscow never gave approval for that.

03:15:39.200 | And again, I described that in book many times

03:15:43.840 | about Kennedy bringing back his wisdom

03:15:47.040 | from World War II years.

03:15:48.660 | There always will be SOB who didn't get the order

03:15:52.840 | or miss things and that was happening

03:15:56.920 | on the American side as well.

03:15:59.000 | So people who believe that they're in control

03:16:02.540 | really are not in control.

03:16:04.000 | And that can escalate very often against their issues.

03:16:09.000 | So that is one lesson.

03:16:12.440 | But going back to why we're still here

03:16:17.140 | and why the world didn't end up in 1962

03:16:22.140 | is that the leadership, and I come to the issue

03:16:26.880 | that you strongly believe in, that people,

03:16:30.240 | personalities matter, leaders matter.

03:16:33.740 | They were very different, right?

03:16:37.740 | Age, education, political careers,

03:16:43.060 | understanding what politics are, and so on and so forth.

03:16:45.740 | - You mean Khrushchev?

03:16:47.040 | - Khrushchev and Kennedy, yes.

03:16:49.540 | But they had one thing in common,

03:16:51.180 | that in one way they belong to the same generation.

03:16:55.700 | That was generation of the bikini atoll.

03:17:00.580 | That was the generation of the hydrogen bomb.

03:17:04.220 | The bomb that, unlike the atomic bomb,

03:17:07.900 | they knew could destroy the world.

03:17:09.980 | And they were scared.

03:17:12.200 | They were scared of the nuclear weapons.

03:17:16.740 | And they tried to do whatever they could,

03:17:21.420 | pushing against their advisors

03:17:23.620 | or trying to deal with their anxieties,

03:17:28.620 | or with their anxieties, the first is true for Kennedy,

03:17:32.660 | the later maybe for Khrushchev,

03:17:36.580 | to make sure that the war between the United States

03:17:41.160 | and the Soviet Union doesn't start

03:17:45.060 | because they knew that that war would be a nuclear war.

03:17:50.060 | So we have a very, very paradoxical sort of situation.

03:17:56.460 | The crisis occurred because of the nuclear weapons,

03:17:59.340 | because Khrushchev put them on Cuba.

03:18:02.040 | But the crisis was resolved and we didn't end

03:18:04.740 | in the Third World War because of the nuclear weapons,

03:18:07.640 | because people, litters, were afraid of them.

03:18:12.640 | And that's where I want to put emphasis.

03:18:16.780 | It's not that the nuclear weapons created crisis

03:18:20.420 | or solved the crisis, it's basically our perception of them.

03:18:24.220 | And we are now in the age after the Cold War era,

03:18:29.220 | with the new generation of voters,

03:18:31.620 | with the new generation of politicians,

03:18:34.320 | we don't belong to the generation of bikini at all.

03:18:37.740 | We maybe know what bikini is,

03:18:39.340 | but we think that this is something else.

03:18:43.420 | And it's very important.

03:18:46.540 | - It's so fascinating how that fades into memory,

03:18:49.460 | that the power and the respect and fear

03:18:52.860 | of the power of nuclear weapons just fades into memory.

03:18:55.940 | And that we may very well make the same mistakes again.

03:18:59.040 | - Yes, we can.

03:19:00.040 | - Another leader said that, I believe.

03:19:03.460 | But a totally different topic.

03:19:06.220 | Well, like you said, I'm also glad that we're here.

03:19:10.140 | As a civilization, that we still seem to be going on.

03:19:14.020 | There's several billion of us.

03:19:15.500 | And I'm also glad that the two of us are here.

03:19:17.820 | I've read a lot of your books, I've been recommending it.

03:19:20.780 | Please keep writing, thank you for talking today.

03:19:22.980 | This is an honor.

03:19:23.940 | - Thank you very much, Alex.

03:19:24.940 | It was a pleasure.

03:19:26.220 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

03:19:28.820 | with Serhi Plohi.

03:19:30.200 | To support this podcast,

03:19:31.460 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

03:19:34.100 | And now, let me leave you with some words

03:19:36.180 | from Ernest Hemingway.

03:19:37.780 | Never think that war, no matter how necessary,

03:19:43.200 | nor how justified, is not a crime.

03:19:48.040 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

03:19:50.860 | (silence)

03:19:53.020 | (silence)

03:19:55.180 | [ Silence ]

Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War | Lex Fridman Podcast #415

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