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

Speaker 1 The following is a conversation with Serhi Plohi, a historian at Harvard University and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute, also at Harvard.

Speaker 1 As a historian, he specializes in the history of Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on Ukraine.

Speaker 1 He wrote a lot of great books on Ukraine and Russia, the Soviet Union, on Slavic peoples in general across centuries, on Chernobyl and nuclear disasters, and on the current war in Ukraine.

Speaker 1 A book titled The Russo-Ukrainian War, The Return of History.

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And now, dear friends, here's Serhi Blohi.

Speaker 1 What are the major explanations for the collapse of the Soviet Union? Maybe ones you agree with and ones you disagree with?

Speaker 2 Very often, people confuse three different processes that were taking place in the late 80s and early 90s. And the one was the collapse of communism as ideology.
Another was the end of the Cold War.

Speaker 2 And the third one was the end of the Soviet Union.

Speaker 2 All of these processes were interrelated, interconnected. But when people provide ideology as the explanation for all of these processes, that's where I disagree.

Speaker 2 Because ideological collapse happened on the territory of the Soviet Union in general. The Soviet Union lost the Cold War, whether whether we are talking about Moscow, Leningrad, or St.

Speaker 2 Petersburg now, or Vladivostok.

Speaker 2 But the fall of the Soviet Union is about a story in which Vladivostok and St. Petersburg ended up in one country, and Kiev, Minsk, and Dushanbe

Speaker 2 ended in different countries. So the theories and explanations about how did that happen, for me, these are really very helpful theories for understanding the Soviet collapse.

Speaker 2 So the mobilization from below, the collapse of the center

Speaker 2 against the background of economic collapse, against the background of

Speaker 2 ideological implosion.

Speaker 2 That's how I look at the fall of the Soviet Union and that's how I

Speaker 2 look at the theories that explain that collapse.

Speaker 1 So it's a story of geography, ideology, economics, Which are the most important to understand of what made the collapse of the Soviet Union happen?

Speaker 2 The Soviet collapse was unique, but not more unique than the collapse of any other empire.

Speaker 2 So what we really witnessed or the the world witnessed back in 1991 and we continue to witness today with the Russian aggression against Ukraine is a collapse of one of the largest world empires.

Speaker 2 We talk about or talked about the Soviet Union and now talk about Russia as possessing plus minus one sixth of the surface of the earth.

Speaker 2 You

Speaker 2 don't get in possession of one sixth of the earth by being a nation state. You get that sort of size as an empire.

Speaker 2 And the Soviet collapse is continuation of the disintegration of the Russian Empire that started back in 1917,

Speaker 2 that was arrested for some period of time by the Bolsheviks, by the communist ideology, which was internationalist ideology, and then came back in full force in the late 80s and early 90s.

Speaker 2 So the most important story for me, this is the story of the continuing collapse of the Russian Empire and the rise of

Speaker 2 not just local nationalism, but also rise of Russian nationalism that turned out to be as a destructive force for the imperial or

Speaker 2 multi-ethnic, multinational state as was

Speaker 2 Ukrainian nationalism or Georgian or

Speaker 2 Estonian for that matter.

Speaker 1 Oh, you said a lot of interesting stuff there, 1917, Bolsheviks, internationalists, how that plays with the idea of Russian Empire and so on. But first, let me ask about U.S.
influence on this.

Speaker 1 So one of the ideas is that

Speaker 1 you know, through the Cold War, that mechanism, U.S. had major interest to weaken the Soviet Union, and therefore

Speaker 1 the collapse could be attributed to pressure and manipulation from the United States. Is there truth to that?

Speaker 2 The pressure from the United States, this is part of the Cold War. And Cold War, part of that story, but

Speaker 2 it doesn't explain the Soviet collapse. And the reason is quite simple.
The United States of America didn't want the Soviet Union to collapse and disintegrate.

Speaker 2 They didn't want that at the start of the Cold War in 1948. We now have the strategic documents.
They were concerned about that. They didn't want to do that.

Speaker 2 And certainly they didn't want to do that in the year 1990, 91.

Speaker 2 As late as August of 1991,

Speaker 2 the month of the coup in Moscow, President Bush, George H.W.

Speaker 2 Bush, travels from Moscow to Kiev and gives famous or or infamous speech called Chicken Kiev speech, basically warning Ukrainians against going for independence.

Speaker 2 The Soviet collapse was a huge headache for the administration in the White House for a number of reasons. They liked to work with Gorbachev.

Speaker 2 The Soviet Union was emerging as a junior partner of the United States in the international arena.

Speaker 2 collapse was destroying all of that. And on the top of that, there was a question of the nuclear weapons, unaccounted nuclear weapons.

Speaker 2 So the United States was doing everything humanly possible to keep the Soviet Union together in one piece until really late November of 1991 when it became clear that

Speaker 2 it was a loss. cause and they had to say goodbye to to Gorbachev and to the project that he he introduced.

Speaker 2 A few months later, or a year later, there was a presidential campaign and Bush was running for the second term and was looking for achievements. And there were many achievements.

Speaker 2 I basically treat him with great respect.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 destruction of the Soviet Union was not one of those achievements. He was on the other side of that divide.
But

Speaker 2 the politics, the political campaign, of course, have their own rules. And they produce and give birth to mythology

Speaker 2 which we still, at least in this country, we live till now, till today.

Speaker 1 So Gorbachev is an interesting figure in all of this.

Speaker 1 Is there a possible history where the Soviet Union did not collapse and some of the ideas that Gorbachev had for the future of the Soviet Union came to life?

Speaker 2 Of course, history, on the one hand, there is a statement, it doesn't allow for what-ifs. On the other hand, in my opinion, history is full of what if.
That's what history is about.

Speaker 2 And certainly there are scenarios how the Soviet Union

Speaker 2 would continue,

Speaker 2 would continue beyond, let's say, Gorbachev's tenure.

Speaker 2 And the argument has been made that the reforms that he introduced, that they were mismanaged and they could be managed differently, or there could be no reforms and there could be continuing stagnation.

Speaker 2 So that is all possible.

Speaker 2 What I think would happen one way or another is the Soviet collapse in a different form on somebody else's watch at some later period in time because we're dealing with not just processes that were happening in the Soviet Union, we are dealing with global processes.

Speaker 2 And the 20th century turned out to be the century of the disintegration of the empires.

Speaker 2 You look at the globe, at the map of the world in 1914, and you you compare it to the map at the end of the 20th century, 1991, 1992, and suddenly you realize that there are many candidates for being the most important event, the most important process in the 20th century.

Speaker 2 But the

Speaker 2 biggest global thing that happened was redrawing the map of the world and producing

Speaker 2 dozens, if not hundreds, of new states. That's the outcome of the different processes of the 20th century.

Speaker 2 Look, Yugoslavia is falling apart around the same time. Czechoslovakia goes through what can be called a civilized divorce, a very, very rare occurrence in the fall of

Speaker 2 multinational states. So, yeah, the writing was on the wall, whether it would happen under Gorbachev or later, whether it would happen as the result of reforms or as the result of no reforms.
But

Speaker 2 I think that sooner or later

Speaker 2 that would happen.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's very possible hundreds of years from now, the way the 20th century is written about

Speaker 1 as the century defined by the collapse of empires. You call the Soviet Union the last empire.
The book is called the last empire.

Speaker 1 So is there something fundamental about the way the world is that means it's not conducive to the formation of empires?

Speaker 2 The meaning that I was putting in the term the Soviet Union as the last empire was that that was the Soviet collapse was the collapse of the

Speaker 2 last major European empires, traditional empires. That was there in the 18th century, 19th century, and through most of the 20th century.

Speaker 2 The Austria-Hungary

Speaker 2 died in the midst of World War I. The Ottoman Empire disintegrated.
The Brits were gone and left India. And there was the successor to the Russian Empire called the Soviet Union was still

Speaker 2 hanging on there.

Speaker 2 And then came 1991 and what we see even with today's Russia, it's

Speaker 2 a very different sort of policies.

Speaker 2 The Russia

Speaker 2 or Russian leadership tried to learn a lesson from 1991. So there is no national republics

Speaker 2 in the Russian Federation that would have more rights than

Speaker 2 the Russian administrative units.

Speaker 2 So the structure is different. The nationality policies are different.

Speaker 2 The level of retification is much higher. So

Speaker 2 it is in many ways already a

Speaker 2 post-imperial formation.

Speaker 1 And you're right about the...

Speaker 1 that moment, 1991, the role that Ukraine played in that, which seems to be a very critical role. Can you describe

Speaker 1 just that?

Speaker 1 What role Ukraine played in the collapse of the Soviet Union?

Speaker 2 History is many things,

Speaker 2 but it started in a very simple way of making notes about on the yearly basis what happened this year at that. So it's about chronology.

Speaker 2 Chronology in the history of the collapse of the Soviet Union is very important.

Speaker 2 You have Ukrainian referendum on December 1st, 1991, and you have dissolution of the Soviet Union by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus one week later.

Speaker 2 And the question is why?

Speaker 2 Ukrainian referendum is the answer, but Ukrainians didn't answer at their referendum question of whether they want the Soviet Union to be dissolved or not. They answered very limited in terms of

Speaker 2 it's been in question whether you support the decision of Vorkovna Rado, of your parliament for Ukraine to go independent. And the rest

Speaker 2 was not on the ballot. So why then one week later the Soviet Union is gone? And President Yeltsin explained to President Bush around that time the reason

Speaker 2 why Ukraine was so important. He said that, well, if Ukraine is gone, Russia is not interested in this Soviet project because Russia would be outnumbered and outvoted by the Muslim Muslim republics.

Speaker 2 So there was a cultural element.

Speaker 2 But there was also another one.

Speaker 2 Ukraine happened to be the second largest Soviet republic and then post-Soviet state in terms of population, in terms of the economy, economic potential, and so on and so forth.

Speaker 2 And as Yeltsin suggested, close culturally, linguistically, and otherwise to Russia.

Speaker 2 So with the second largest republic gone, Russia didn't think that it was in Russia's interest to continue with the Soviet Union.

Speaker 2 And around that time, Yegor Gaidar, who was the chief economic advisor of Yeltsin, was telling him, well, we just don't have money anymore to support other republics. We have to focus on Russia.

Speaker 2 We have to use oil and gas money within the Russian Federation. So the state was bankrupt.
Imperial projects, at least in the context of the late 20th century, they costed money.

Speaker 2 It wasn't a money-making machine as it was back in the 18th or 19th century. And the combination of all these factors led to

Speaker 2 the processes in which Ukraine's decision to go independent spelled the end to the Soviet Union.

Speaker 2 And if today anybody wants to restore not the Soviet Union, but some form of Russian control over the post-Soviet space. Ukraine is as important today as it was back in December of 1991.

Speaker 1 Let me ask you about

Speaker 1 Vladimir Putin's statement that the collapse of the Soviet Union is one of the great tragedies of history. To what degree does he have a point? To what degree is he wrong?

Speaker 2 His formulation was that this is the greatest, the greatest geopolitical catastrophe, a tragedy of the 20th century.

Speaker 2 And I specifically went and looked at the text and put it in specific time when it was happening.

Speaker 2 And it was interesting that the statement was made a few weeks before the May 9 parade and celebrations of the victory, a key part of the mythology of

Speaker 2 the current Russian state. So why say things about the

Speaker 2 Soviet collapse being the the largest geopolitical strategy and not in that particular context the Second World War.

Speaker 2 My explanation at least is that the World War II, the price was enormous, but the Soviet Union emerged as a great victor and captured half of Europe.

Speaker 2 1991

Speaker 2 in terms of the lives lost at that point, the price was actually very, very low. But for Putin what was important that the state was lost and he in particular was concerned about the division of

Speaker 2 the Russian people, which he understood back then, like he understands now, in very, very broad terms. So

Speaker 2 for him, the biggest tragedy is not the loss of life. The biggest tragedy is the loss of the great power status or the unity of those whom he considered to be Russian nations.

Speaker 2 So at least this is my reading. This is my understanding of

Speaker 2 what is there, what is

Speaker 2 on the paper and what is between the lines.

Speaker 1 So both the unity of the sort of quote Russian Empire and the status of the superpower.

Speaker 2 That's how I read it.

Speaker 1 You wrote a book, The Origins of the Slavic Nations. So let's go back.
into history. What is the origin of Slavic nations?

Speaker 2 We can look at

Speaker 2 that from different perspectives. And we are now making major breakthroughs in answering this question with the

Speaker 2 very interesting innovative linguistic analysis, the study of DNA. So

Speaker 2 that's really the new frontier. We are getting into a prehistorical period where there is no historical sources.

Speaker 2 And from what we can understand today, and that can of course change tomorrow with all these breakthroughs

Speaker 2 in sciences, is that

Speaker 2 the Slavs came into existence somewhere in the area of

Speaker 2 marshes, prepet marshes, northwestern part of Ukraine, southwestern part of Belarus, eastern part of Poland.

Speaker 2 and that is considered to be historical homeland of Slavs and then and then they spread. And they spread all the way to the Adriatic.

Speaker 2 So we have Croats, we have Russians spreading all the way to the Pacific, we have Ukrainians, we have Belarusians, Poles. Once we had Czechoslovaks, now we have Czechs and Slovaks.

Speaker 2 So that's the story of starting with the 8th and 9th century. We can, even a little bit earlier, we can already follow that story with the help of

Speaker 2 the written sources, mostly. from Byzantine, then later from

Speaker 2 Western Europe. But what

Speaker 2 I was trying to do, not being a scientist, not being an expert in linguistics, or not being an expert in DNA analysis, I was trying to see what was happening in the minds of those peoples and the elites in particular,

Speaker 2 whom we call today not Slavs, but Eastern Slavs. which means Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians.
How they imagine themselves, how they imagine their world.

Speaker 2 And eventually I look at the so-called nation-building projects. So trying to answer the question of how we arrived

Speaker 2 to the situation in which we are today, where there are not just three East Slavic nations, but there are also three East Slavic states. Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian.
So this is the focus of

Speaker 2 my book. I end, admittedly, in that particular book, I end on the 18th century, before the era of nationalism.
But then there are other books like

Speaker 2 Lost Kingdom that where I bring the story all the way up to today.

Speaker 1 So what aspects of the 8th and 9th century

Speaker 1 the East Slavic states permeate to today that we should understand?

Speaker 2 Well, the most important one is that the existence of the state of Kievan Rus

Speaker 2 back during the medieval period created the foundations

Speaker 2 for historical mythology, common historical mythology, and there are just wars and battles over who has the right or more right for Kievan Rus.

Speaker 2 The legal code that was created at that time existed for a long period of time.

Speaker 2 The acceptance of Christianity from Byzantium, that became a big issue that separated then Eastern Slavs from their western neighbors, including Czechs and

Speaker 2 Poles,

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 2 united in that way to let's say Bulgarians or Serbs. And the beginning of the written literature,

Speaker 2 beginning in Kiev. So all of that is considered to be part of heritage.
All of that is being contested.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 this debates that were academic for a long period of time, what we see now tragically are being continued on the battlefield.

Speaker 1 What is Kiev? What is Rus' that you mentioned? What's the importance of these?

Speaker 1 You mentioned them as a sort of defining places and

Speaker 1 terms, labels at the beginning of all this. So what is Kiev?

Speaker 2 Kyiv became a capital

Speaker 2 or the outpost of the Vikings who were trying to establish control over the

Speaker 2 trade route between

Speaker 2 what is today's western Russia and Belarus and northern Ukraine, so the forest areas, and the biggest and the richest market in the world that existed at that time, which was in Constantinople, in Byzantium.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 the idea was to get whatever goods you can get in that part of Eastern Europe, and most of those goods were slaves, local population, put them on the ships in Kiev, because Kiev was on the border with the steppe zones.

Speaker 2 Steppe zones were controlled by other

Speaker 2 groups,

Speaker 2 Scythians, Armatians, Polovtsians, Pechiniags and so on,

Speaker 2 you name it, and then staying on the river, being protected from attacks of the Mohammeds, to come to the Black Sea and sell these products in Constantinople.

Speaker 2 That was the idea. That was the model.

Speaker 2 Vikings tried to practice that sort of

Speaker 2 business model also in other parts of Europe. And like in other parts of Europe, they turned out to be

Speaker 2 by default creators of new polities, of new states.

Speaker 2 And that was the story of

Speaker 2 the first Kievan dynasty.

Speaker 2 And Kiev as the capital of that huge empire that was going from the Baltics to today central Ukraine and then was trying to get through the southern Ukraine to the Black Sea, that was a major, major European state kingdom, if you want to call it, of medieval Europe with a lot creating a lot of tradition in terms of dynasty, in terms of language, in terms of religion, in terms of again historical mythology.

Speaker 2 So Kiev is central

Speaker 2 for the

Speaker 2 nation-building myth of

Speaker 2 a number of groups in the region.

Speaker 1 So in one perspective and narrative, Kiev is at the center of this Russian Empire.

Speaker 1 At which point does Moscow

Speaker 1 come to prominence? as the center of the Russian Empire?

Speaker 2 Well, the Russian Empire is a term term and really creation of the 18th century.

Speaker 2 What we have for the Kievan, we call it Kiev and Rus'. Again, this is a term of the 19th century.
They call themselves Rus'.

Speaker 1 Rus'.

Speaker 2 And there was Metropolitanate of Rus and there was Rus' principalities.

Speaker 2 So very important to keep in mind that Rus is not Russia, because that was a self-name for all multiple groups

Speaker 2 on that territory. And Moscow doesn't exist at the time when Kiev emerges as the capital.

Speaker 2 The first reference to Moscow comes from the twelfth century when it was founded by

Speaker 2 one of the Kievan princes.

Speaker 2 And Moscow comes to prominence really in a very different context and with a very different empire running the show in the region.

Speaker 2 The story of Moscow and the rise of Moscow, this is the story of the Mongol rule over

Speaker 2 former Rus lands and former Rus territories.

Speaker 2 The part of the former Rus eventually overthrows the Mongol control with the help of the small group of people called Lithuanians,

Speaker 2 which had a Jan state and Jan dynasty and united these lands, which were mostly in today's terms, Ukrainian and Belarusian. So they separate early.

Speaker 2 And what is today is Russia, mostly Western Russia, Central Russia, stays under the Mongol control up until late 15th century. And that was the story when

Speaker 2 Moscow rises as the new capital of that realm, replacing the city of Vladimir.

Speaker 2 as that capital.

Speaker 2 For those who ever went to Russia,

Speaker 2 they familiar with

Speaker 2 Vladimir as the place of the

Speaker 2 oldest

Speaker 2 architectural monuments, the so-called the Golden Ring of Russia and so on and so forth.

Speaker 2 Vladimir is central and there are so many architectural monuments there because before there was Moscow there was Vladimir. Eventually

Speaker 2 in this struggle over control of the territory, struggle for favors

Speaker 2 from the Mongols and the Tatar horde, Moscow emerges as the center of that particular realm under Mongols.

Speaker 2 After the Mongol rule is removed, Moscow embarks on the project that historians, Russian historians of the 19th century called the gathering of the Russian lands.

Speaker 2 using Russian now for Rus' and

Speaker 2 trying to

Speaker 2 bring back

Speaker 2 the lands of former Kiev and Rus', but also the lands of the former Mongol Empire.

Speaker 2 The Russians get to the Pacific before they get to Kiev,

Speaker 2 historically, and

Speaker 2 really

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 quote-unquote gathering of the

Speaker 2 quote-unquote Russian lands ends only in 1945 when the Soviet Union

Speaker 2 bullies the Czechoslovak government into turning what is today's Transcarpathian Ukraine to the Soviet Union. It is included in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
So that's the moment when that

Speaker 2 destiny, the way how it was imagined by the 19th century Russian historian, was eventually fulfilled. Moscow was in control of all these lands.

Speaker 1 So to what degree... are the Slavic people one people, and this is a theme that will continue throughout, I think, versus a collection of multiple peoples, whether we're talking about the

Speaker 1 Kievan Rus or we're talking about the 19th century Russian Empire conception?

Speaker 2 Well, a number of ways to look at that. One, the most obvious, the most clear is language.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 there is no question that

Speaker 2 Poles speak a separate language and they're Slavs.

Speaker 2 And there is no question for anyone going to Ukraine and hearing Ukrainian, realizing that this is not Russian. The level of comprehension can be different.

Speaker 2 You can understand certain words and you don't understand others. And the same would be with Polish and the same would be with Czech.
So there is this

Speaker 2 linguistic history that is in common, but languages very clearly indicate that

Speaker 2 you are dealing dealing with

Speaker 2 different peoples.

Speaker 2 We know that language is not everything. Americans speak a particular way of English.
Australians speak a particular variant of English.

Speaker 2 But for reasons of geography, history, we pretty much believe that despite linguistic unity, these are different nations and different peoples and th there are there are

Speaker 2 some parts of political tradition are in common, others are quite different.

Speaker 2 So, the same when it comes to language, the same when it comes to political tradition, to the loyalty to the political institution applies to Slavic

Speaker 2 nations.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 that's, again, there is nothing particularly unique about the Slavs in that regard.

Speaker 1 You wrote the book, The Cossack Myth, History and Nationhood in the Age of Empires. It tells the story of an anonymous manuscript called The History of the Rus.

Speaker 1 It started being circulated in the 1820s.

Speaker 1 I would love it if you can tell the story of this.

Speaker 1 This is supposedly one of the most impactful texts in history, modern history. So, what's the importance of this text? What did it contain? How did it define the future of the region?

Speaker 2 In the first decades of the 19th century, after Napoleonic Wars,

Speaker 2 a mysterious text emerged that was attributed to an Orthodox archibishop that was long

Speaker 2 dead,

Speaker 2 which was claiming that the Cossacks of Ukraine were in fact the original Rus people

Speaker 2 and that they

Speaker 2 had the right

Speaker 2 for a particular place, for central place

Speaker 2 in the Russian Empire.

Speaker 2 And it tells the history of the Cossacks.

Speaker 2 It's the era of romanticism, full of all sorts of drama. There are heroes, there are villains.
And the text captivates the attention of

Speaker 2 some key figures in the Russian intellectual elite in St. Petersburg.

Speaker 2 People like Kondrat Yerileev, who was executed for his participation in 1825 uprising,

Speaker 2 writes poetry on the basis of this text. Pushkin pays attention to it as well.
And then comes along the

Speaker 2 key figure in Ukrainian national

Speaker 2 revival of the 19th century,

Speaker 2 Ukrainian national project, Tarashevchenko, and reads it as well, and they all read it very differently.

Speaker 2 Eventually,

Speaker 2 by the beginning of the

Speaker 2 in the mid-twentieth century, some of the Russian

Speaker 2 mostly nationalist writers call this text the Quran of Ukrainian nationalism.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 what is there? The story,

Speaker 2 it's very important in a sense that what the authors, and that's what I claim in the book,

Speaker 2 what the authors of the text were trying to say, they were trying to say that the Cossack elite

Speaker 2 should have the same rights as the Russian nobility

Speaker 2 and brings the long historical record to prove how cool the Cossacks were over the period of time.

Speaker 2 But at the beginning of the 19th century, they put this claim already, they use new arguments, and these arguments are about nation and nationalism.

Speaker 2 And they are saying that the Cossacks are a separate nation.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that's a big, big, big claim.

Speaker 2 The Russian Empire, and this is a very, very good argument in historiography, that Russian Empire grew and acquired this one sixth of the earth by using one very specific way of integrating those lands.

Speaker 2 It integrated elites. It was making deals with the elites.
Whether the elites were Muslim, or the elites were Roman Catholic, as the case with the Poles,

Speaker 2 elites would be integrated and the empire was

Speaker 2 based on estate

Speaker 2 uh

Speaker 2 the the state loyalty and the state integration

Speaker 2 but once you bring in the factor of nation and nationalism and language then once in a sudden the whole model of the integration of the elites irrespective of their language, religion and culture starts falling apart.

Speaker 2 And the Poles were the first who really

Speaker 2 produced this sort of a challenge to the Russian Empire by uprisings, two uprisings in the 19th century. And Ukrainians then followed in their footsteps.

Speaker 2 So the text, the importance of the text is that it was making claim on the part of a particular estate,

Speaker 2 the Cossack officer class.

Speaker 2 which was that empire could survive. But it turned it, given the conditions of the time, into the claim for the special role of

Speaker 2 Cossacks as a nation, creating that this is a separate nation, a Rus nation. And that is the challenge of nationalism, that no empire really survived and the Russian Empire was not an exception.

Speaker 2 So that's a turning point when the discourse switches from loyalty based on the integration of the elites to the loyalty based on attachment attachment to your nation, to your language, and to your culture, and to your history.

Speaker 1 Aaron Ross Powell, so that was like the initial spark, the flame

Speaker 1 that led to nationalist movements.

Speaker 2 That was the beginning, and the beginning that was building a bridge between the existence of the Cossack state in the 17th and 18th century that was used as a foundation for the Cossack mythology, Ukrainian national mythology, went into the Ukrainian national anthem

Speaker 2 and the new age and the new stage where the Cossacks were not there anymore, where they were professors, intellectuals, students, members of

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 national and organizations. And it started, of course, with romantic poetry.

Speaker 2 It was started with collecting folklore and then later goes to the political stage and eventually the stage of mass politics.

Speaker 1 So to you, even throughout the 20th century, under Stalin, there was always

Speaker 1 a force within Ukraine that wants it to be independent?

Speaker 2 There were five attempts

Speaker 2 for Ukraine to declare its independence and to maintain it in the 20th century. Only one succeeded in 1991, but there were four different

Speaker 2 attempts before.

Speaker 2 And you see the Ukrainian national identity manifesting itself

Speaker 2 in two different ways. In the form of national communism

Speaker 2 after the Bolshevik victory

Speaker 2 in

Speaker 2 Bolshevik-controlled Ukraine, and in the form of radical nationalism in the parts of Ukraine that were controlled by Poland

Speaker 2 and Romania, and

Speaker 2 part of that was also controlled by Czechoslovakia and later Hungary. So in those parts outside of the Soviet Union,

Speaker 2 the form of the national mobilization, the key form of national mobilization, became radical nationalism.

Speaker 2 In

Speaker 2 Soviet Ukraine, it was national communism that came back in the 1960s and 1970s.

Speaker 2 And then in 1991, the majority of the members of the Ukrainian parliament who voted for independence were members of the Communist Party. So that spirit

Speaker 2 on certain level never died.

Speaker 1 So there's national communism and radical nationalism.

Speaker 1 Well, let me ask you about the radical nationalism because that is a topic that comes up in the discussion of the war in Ukraine today. Can you tell me about Stepan Bandera?

Speaker 1 Who was he, this controversial far-right Ukrainian revolutionary?

Speaker 2 There are at least two Stepan Banderas.

Speaker 2 One is the real person

Speaker 2 and another is mythology that really

Speaker 2 comes with this name.

Speaker 2 And the real person was a young student, nationalistically oriented student in the late 1920s and early 1930s in the part of Ukraine that was controlled by Poland.

Speaker 2 who belonged to the generation who regretted that they were not born in time for the big struggles of the

Speaker 2 World War I and

Speaker 2 revolution at that time. They believed that their fathers lost opportunity for Ukraine to become independent and that a new ideology was needed.
And that ideology was radical nationalism

Speaker 2 and new tactics were needed. So

Speaker 2 Bandera becomes the leader of the organization of Ukrainian nationalists in Ukraine at the young age and organizes a number of assassinations of the Polish officials or members of the Ukrainian community who this young people in the

Speaker 2 17, 18, 19 considered

Speaker 2 to be collaborators.

Speaker 2 He is arrested,

Speaker 2 put on trial, and that's where the myth of Pandera starts to emerge, because he uses the trial to

Speaker 2 make statement about the

Speaker 2 Ukrainian nationalism, radical nationalism and its goals, and suddenly becomes a hero among the Ukrainian youth at that time. He is

Speaker 2 sentenced

Speaker 2 for execution for death. So when he delivers his speech, he knows that he probably would die soon.

Speaker 2 And then it was the sentence was commuted to

Speaker 2 life in prison. Then World War II happens.
The Polish state collapses under the pressure coming, of course, from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Speaker 2 Bandera

Speaker 2 walks away and presides over the act of the split of the organization of Ukrainian nationalists into two groups.

Speaker 2 The most radical one you used to call revolutionary, they call themselves revolutionary, is led by Bandera.

Speaker 2 They worked together with Nazi Germany at that time with the hope that Nazi Germany would deliver them independent Ukraine.

Speaker 2 First days of the German attack, Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, the

Speaker 2 units formed on the basis of organization of Ukrainian nationalists marching to the city of Lviv and declare Ukrainian independence. That was not sanctioned by the German authorities.

Speaker 2 That was not in German plans. So they arrest Bandera, members of his family, his brothers,

Speaker 2 leaders of the organization. So his two brothers go to Auschwitz, die there.

Speaker 2 He was sent to Zachsenhausen

Speaker 1 for

Speaker 2 most

Speaker 2 duration of the war until 1944, refusing to revoke Declaration of Ukrainian Independence, which again

Speaker 2 contributes further to his mythology. After the war, he never comes back to Ukraine.
He lives in exile in Munich.

Speaker 2 So between 1930 and his death in 1959, he spent in Ukraine maybe

Speaker 2 up to two years.

Speaker 2 maybe a little bit more, but most of the time was either in the Polish prison or in the German concentration camp or in exile.

Speaker 2 But the myth of Bandera lived and all the members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and then the Ukrainian Insurgent Army that fought against the Soviets all the way into the early 1950s, they were called Banduraites.

Speaker 2 They were called Banduraites by the Soviet authorities. They were known also in that way to the local population.
So there was a faraway leader that barely was there there on the spot, but

Speaker 2 whose name was attached to this movement for really liberation of Ukraine at that time, again the battle that failed.

Speaker 1 The fact that he collaborated with the Nazis sticks. For one perspective, he's considered by many to be a hero of Ukraine for fighting for the independence of Ukraine.
From another perspective,

Speaker 1 coupled with the fact that there's this radical revolutionary extremist flavor to the way he sees the world,

Speaker 1 that label

Speaker 1 just stays that he's a fascist, he's a Nazi.

Speaker 1 To what degree is this true, to what degree is it not?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 this label is certainly promoted by the first by the Soviet propaganda and then by Russian propaganda. It works very nicely.

Speaker 2 If you focus on the years of collaboration, those were the same years when Joseph Stalin collaborated with Hitler, right?

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 we have the same reason to call

Speaker 2 Stalin Nazi collaborator as we have the reason to call Bandara Nazi collaborator.

Speaker 2 We

Speaker 2 look at the situation in the Pacific, in Indonesia, in other places.

Speaker 2 The leaders who worked together with Japanese with the idea of promoting independence of their countries after the Japanese Japanese collapse, become leaders of the empire.

Speaker 2 So the difference with Bandara is that he never becomes

Speaker 2 the leader of empire,

Speaker 2 and immunity

Speaker 2 that comes with that position certainly doesn't apply to him.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 there are other parts of his life which certainly put this whole thing in question. The fate of his family, his own time in the German concentration camp,

Speaker 2 certainly

Speaker 2 don't fit the the propaganda one one-sided image of Bandara in terms of him being a hero that's that's a very very interesting question because he is perceived in Ukraine today by not by

Speaker 2 by by all and probably not by the majority but by many people in Ukraine as a symbol of fighting against against the the

Speaker 2 Soviet Union and by extension against Russia and Russian occupation. So his popularity grew after February 24th, 2022, as a symbol of that resistance.

Speaker 2 Again, we are talking here about myth and mythology, because Bandera was not leading the fight against

Speaker 2 the Soviet occupation in

Speaker 2 Ukraine, because at that time he was just simply not in Ukraine. He was in Germany, and you can imagine that geography mattered at that time much more than it matters today.

Speaker 1 There's a million questions to ask here. I think it's an important topic because it is at the center of the claimed reason that the war continues in Ukraine.

Speaker 1 And so I would like to explore that from different angles. But just to clarify, was there a moment where Bandera chose

Speaker 1 Nazi Germany over the Red Army when the war already began? So in the list of allegiances, is Ukraine's independence more important

Speaker 1 than fighting Nazi Germany, essentially?

Speaker 2 The Ukrainian independence was their goal, and they were there to

Speaker 2 work with anybody

Speaker 2 who would support and in one way, or at least allow the Ukrainian independence. So there is no question that

Speaker 2 they are just classic nationalists. So

Speaker 2 the goal is

Speaker 2 nationalism is the principle principle according to which the, or at least one definitions is, according to which the cultural boundaries coincide with political boundaries.

Speaker 2 So their goal was to create political boundaries that would coincide with the geographic boundaries in the conditions of the World War II and certainly

Speaker 2 making deals with

Speaker 2 whoever would would

Speaker 2 either support, as I said, or tolerate

Speaker 2 project of theirs.

Speaker 1 So I would love to find the line between nationalism, even extreme nationalism, and fascism and Nazism.

Speaker 1 So for Bandera, the myth, and Bandera the person,

Speaker 1 to what degree,

Speaker 1 let's look at some of the ideology of Nazism. To which degree did he hate Jews? Was he anti-Semitic?

Speaker 2 We

Speaker 2 know that basically in his circle, there were people who were

Speaker 2 anti-Semites in a sense that okay we have the texts right we know that we don't have that that information about about or that that sort of text or that sort of evidence with regard to to Bandera himself

Speaker 2 in terms of fascism

Speaker 2 there is very clear and there is research done that in particular Italian fascist fascism had influence on the on the thinking of people in that organization, including people at the top.

Speaker 2 But it is also very important to keep in mind

Speaker 2 that they call themselves nationalists and revolutionaries. And despite the fact that in 1939, in 1940, in 1941, it was very beneficial for them to declare themselves to be Ukrainian fascists.

Speaker 2 and establish this bond with not just with Italy, but with

Speaker 2 Nazi Germany, they refuse to do that.

Speaker 2 And then they refuse to recall their independence. So

Speaker 2 influences, yes, but clearly

Speaker 2 it's a different type of a political

Speaker 2 political project.

Speaker 1 So let me fast forward into the future and see to which degree the myth permeates.

Speaker 1 Does Ukraine have a neo-Nazi problem?

Speaker 2 My understanding is there are Nazis in Ukraine

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 there are supporters of

Speaker 2 white supremacy theories.

Speaker 2 But also my understanding is that

Speaker 2 they are extremely marginal

Speaker 2 and they are more marginal than the same sort of groups are in Central Europe,

Speaker 2 maybe in the US as well.

Speaker 2 And for me, the question is

Speaker 2 not whether Ukraine has it,

Speaker 2 but why, even in the conditions of the war,

Speaker 2 the radical nationalism

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 extremism and white supremacist is such a marginal force. When in the countries that are not at the war,

Speaker 2 you look at France, you look at, again, it's not exactly Nazis, but really right, radical right

Speaker 2 is becoming so important.

Speaker 2 Why Ukraine in the conditions of the war is the country that manages relations between different ethnic groups and languages

Speaker 2 in the way that strengthens political nation. So

Speaker 2 for me as a scholar and a researcher, what I see is that

Speaker 2 in Ukraine, the influence of the far right in different variations is much lower than it is

Speaker 2 among some of Ukraine's neighbors and in Europe in general. And the question is why.
I don't know. I have guesses.

Speaker 2 I don't know answer. But

Speaker 2 that's the question that I think is interesting to answer.

Speaker 2 How Ukraine ended up to be the only country in the world outside of Israel who has a Jewish president, who is,

Speaker 2 my at least understanding, is

Speaker 2 the most popular president in history in terms of how long his popularity goes after the election. So

Speaker 2 these are the

Speaker 2 really, from my point of view, interesting. interesting questions.
And again,

Speaker 2 we can certainly debate that.

Speaker 1 So just for context,

Speaker 1 the most popular far-right party won 2.15% of the vote in in 2019. This is before the war.
So that's where things stood. It's unclear where they stand now.

Speaker 1 It'd be an interesting question whether it escalated and how much.

Speaker 1 What you're saying is that war in general can serve as a catalyst for expansion of extremist groups, of extremist nationalistic groups, especially, like the far right. And it's interesting to see

Speaker 1 to what degree they have or have not r risen to power in the sort of in the shadows.

Speaker 2 So no nationalist or nationalistic party actually crossed the barrier to get into the parliament. So Ukraine is the country where there is no right

Speaker 2 or far right in the parliament. We can't say that about Germany.
We can't say that about France. So that's just

Speaker 2 one more way to stress this

Speaker 2 unique place of Ukraine in that sense. And the year 2019 is the year already of the war.
The war started in 2014 with the annexation of the Crimea. The front line was near Donbas.

Speaker 2 All these groups were fighting there. So Ukraine, maybe not to a degree that it is now, was already on the war footing.
And

Speaker 2 yet

Speaker 2 the right party couldn't get more than 2%.

Speaker 2 So that's the question that I have in mind. And yes, the war historically, historically, of course, puts forward and makes from

Speaker 2 the more nationalist views and forces, turn them from marginal forces into more central ones. We talked about Bandera and we talked about organization of Ukrainian nationalists.

Speaker 2 They were the most marginal group in the political spectrum in Ukraine in the 1930s that one can only imagine.

Speaker 2 But World War II comes.

Speaker 2 and they become the most central group because they also were from the start goal. They knew that they had the organization.

Speaker 2 Violence was basically one of their means. They knew how to fight.
So historically, historically, wars indeed produce those results. So we are looking at Ukraine.

Speaker 2 We are trying to see what is happening there.

Speaker 1 So Vladimir Putin, in his interview with Taka Carlson, but many times before, said that the current goal for the war in Ukraine is denazification.

Speaker 1 That the purpose of the war is denazification. Can you explain this concept of denazification as Putin sees it?

Speaker 2 Denazification is the trope

Speaker 2 that is accepted quite well by

Speaker 2 the former Soviet population and Russian population in particular.

Speaker 2 The most powerful mythology, Soviet mythology that then was basically passed

Speaker 2 as part of heritage to the Russian Federation was World War II, was fighting against fascism. So once you use terms fascism and Nazi and denizification,

Speaker 2 suddenly people not just start listening, they just stop analyzing.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 as a propaganda tool,

Speaker 2 this is of course a very, very powerful tool.

Speaker 2 In terms of to what degree

Speaker 2 this is the real goal or not, we discussed the importance of the far-right in Europe and in Ukraine.

Speaker 2 So if that's the real goal of the war, probably the war would have to start not against Ukraine, but probably against France or some other country, if you take this at face value. Aaron Ross Powell,

Speaker 1 there's something really interesting here, as you mentioned, because I've spoken to a lot of people in Russia.

Speaker 1 And you said analysis stops.

Speaker 1 In the West, people look at the word denazification and look at the things we've just discussed and kind of

Speaker 1 almost think this is absurd. But when you talk to people in Russia, maybe it's deep in there somewhere.

Speaker 1 The history of World War II still reverberates through maybe the fears, maybe the pride, whatever the deep emotional history is there.

Speaker 1 It seems that the goal of denazification appears to be reasonable for people in Russia.

Speaker 1 They don't seem to see the absurdity or the complexity or the even the need for analysis, I guess, in this kind of statement, word of denazification.

Speaker 2 I will say this is broader. This is broader.

Speaker 2 The war that started under the banner that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people and produces that sort of casualty

Speaker 2 really goes against also

Speaker 2 any sort of

Speaker 2 logical thinking.

Speaker 2 But the Russia is a place where the free press doesn't exist already for a long period of time. Russia is the place where there is

Speaker 2 an echo chamber to a degree. And as war started first in 2014 and then all-out war in 2022,

Speaker 2 I came across a lot of people on the personal level, but also in the media reporting that they really can't find common language with their close relatives in Russia.

Speaker 2 People who visited Ukraine who know that it is not taken over by nationalists and is not taken over by Nazis.

Speaker 2 But the media around them, the neighbors around them, the people at their work basically say one and the same thing.

Speaker 2 And we as humans in general, whatever our background, we are very, very,

Speaker 2 our mind is really

Speaker 2 relatively easy to manipulate it.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 to a degree that even family connections and even family ties don't sometimes help

Speaker 2 to maintain that

Speaker 2 ability to think and to analyze on your own, to look at the facts.

Speaker 1 So Putin has alluded to the Yaroslav Hanka incident in the Canadian Parliament, September 2023.

Speaker 1 This man is a veteran of World War II on the Ukrainian side, and he got two standing ovations in the Canadian Parliament.

Speaker 1 But they later found out that he was part of the SS.

Speaker 1 So can you explain on this? What are your thoughts on this? This had a very big effect on the narrative, I guess, propagated throughout the region.

Speaker 2 Yes,

Speaker 2 what happened during World War II

Speaker 2 was that once the Germans started to run out of manpower,

Speaker 2 they created

Speaker 2 sort of foreign legion groups. But because those people were not Aryans,

Speaker 2 they were created for fighting on the battleground. Because they were not Aryans, they couldn't be trusted.

Speaker 2 So they were put under the command of Henry Himmler, under command of SS, and became known as SS Waffen units.

Speaker 2 And one of such units was created in Ukraine

Speaker 2 with great difficulties because Nazis didn't consider Slavs to be generally

Speaker 2 worthy of even that sort of foreign legion formations.

Speaker 2 But they made an exception because those people were coming from Galicia, which was part of Austria-Hungary, which means part of Austria, which means somehow were open to the benevolent influence of

Speaker 2 the Germanic race, and called the division Galicin, or Galicia.

Speaker 2 Part of Ukrainian youth joined

Speaker 2 the division.

Speaker 2 One of the explanations was that they were looking at the experience of World War I

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 seeing that the units, the Ukrainian units in the Austrian army then played a very important role in the fight for independence. So that is one of the explanations.

Speaker 2 You can't just use one explanation to describe motivations of everyone and every single person who was joining there. So they were sent to the front,

Speaker 2 they were defeated within a

Speaker 2 few short days.

Speaker 2 by the Red Army, and then were retreating through

Speaker 2 Slovakia, where they were used to fight with the partisan movement there and eventually surrendered to the British. So

Speaker 2 that's the story.

Speaker 2 You can

Speaker 2 personally maybe understand

Speaker 2 what the good motivations were of this person or that person.

Speaker 2 But that is one of the, at the best, one of the very tragic and unfortunate pages

Speaker 2 in Ukrainian history.

Speaker 2 You can't justify that

Speaker 2 as a phenomenon. So from that point of view,

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 celebration of that experience, as opposed to looking at that, okay,

Speaker 2 that happened and

Speaker 2 we wish that those young men who were idealistic or joined the division for idealistic purposes had

Speaker 2 better understanding of things or made other choices. But you can't certainly celebrate that.
And once that happened, that of course became a big

Speaker 2 propaganda item

Speaker 2 in the current war.

Speaker 2 We are talking about

Speaker 2 10,000 to 20,000 people in the division.

Speaker 2 And we are talking about 2 to 3 million Ukrainians fighting in the Red Army.

Speaker 2 And again, it's not like the Red Army

Speaker 2 is completely blameless in the way how it behaved in Prussia or in Germany and so on and so forth. But it's basically, it's again, we are going back to the story of Bandera.

Speaker 2 So there is a period of collaboration and that's what propaganda tries to define him by.

Speaker 2 Or there is a division Galitzin by 20,000 people and somehow it makes it relevant the experience of two to three million people.

Speaker 1 I mean, just to clarify, I think there is just a blunder on the Canadian parliament side, the Canadian side, of not doing research.

Speaker 1 Maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but from my understanding, they were just doing stupid, shallow political stuff.

Speaker 1 Let's applaud, you know, when Zelensky shows up, let's have a Ukrainian veteran, let's applaud a veteran of World War II.

Speaker 1 And then all of a sudden you realize, well, there's actually complexities to wars. We can talk about...

Speaker 1 for example, a lot of dark aspects on all sides of World War II, the mass rape at the end of World War II by the Red Army when they say martial arts Germany.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of really dark complexity on all sides. So, you know, that could be an opportunity to explore the dark complexity that some of the Ukrainians were in the SS

Speaker 1 or Bandera, the complexities there. But I think they were doing not a complex thing.
They were doing a very shallow applaud.

Speaker 1 And we should applaud veterans, of course, but in that case, they were doing it for show, for Zelensky, and so on. So we should clarify that the applause wasn't

Speaker 1 knowing, it wasn't for the SS.

Speaker 1 It was for a Ukrainian, it was for World War II veterans, but the propaganda or at least

Speaker 1 an interpretation from the Russian side,

Speaker 1 from whatever side, is that they were applauding the full person standing before them, which wasn't just a Ukrainian veteran, but a Ukrainian veteran that fought for the SS.

Speaker 2 I don't have any particular insights, but I would be very much surprised if even one person in the parliament, I mean the members of the parliament, actually knew the whole story.

Speaker 2 I would be very surprised. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The whole story of this person and frankly the whole story of

Speaker 1 Ukraine and Russia in World War II, period. Yes, yes.

Speaker 1 Nevertheless, it had a lot of power and really reverberated in support of the narrative that there is a neo-Nazi, a Nazi Nazi problem in Ukraine.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, this is the narrative that is out there.

Speaker 2 And it's especially powerful in Russia. It's especially powerful in Russia, given that there are

Speaker 2 really

Speaker 2 the atmosphere that is created really is not conducive to any independent analysis.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, well, I wonder what is the most effective way to respond to that particular

Speaker 1 claim.

Speaker 1 because there could be a discussion about nationalism and extreme nationalism and the fight for independence and whether it isn't like putin wrote one people but the question of are there nazis in ukraine seems to be a question that could be uh

Speaker 1 analyzed

Speaker 2 rigorously with data that has been done on the academic level but uh in terms of the of the public response and public discourse,

Speaker 2 the only response that I see is

Speaker 2 not to focus on the questions raised and put by the propaganda, because you already become victim of that propaganda by definition,

Speaker 2 but talk about that much broadly.

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 talk about

Speaker 2 different aspects of, or if it is World War II, about different aspects of World War II.

Speaker 2 If it's about the issue of the far right in Ukraine, let's talk about the US, let's talk about Russia, let's talk about France, let's compare.

Speaker 2 That's the only way how you deal with propaganda, because propaganda is not necessarily something that

Speaker 2 is an outright lie.

Speaker 2 It can be

Speaker 2 just one factor that's taken out of the context and

Speaker 2 is blown out of proportion. And

Speaker 2 that is good enough.

Speaker 1 And the way to defend against that is to bring in the context.

Speaker 1 Let us move gracefully throughout, back and forth through history.

Speaker 1 Back to Bandera. You wrote a book on the KGB spy, Bogdan Stashinsky.

Speaker 1 Can you tell his story?

Speaker 2 This is a story of the history of the organization of Ukrainian nationalists and Bandera as well, already after the end of the Second World War.

Speaker 2 Because what you got

Speaker 2 after the Second World War. So imagine

Speaker 2 May of 1945, the Red Banner is all over Riksdag.

Speaker 2 The Red Army is in control of half of Europe, but the units of the Red Army are still fighting the war, and not

Speaker 2 just behind the Soviet lines, but within the borders of the Soviet Union. And this war continues all the way into the early 1950s,

Speaker 2 almost up to Stalin's death.

Speaker 2 The war is conducted by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which have a Ukrainian insurgent army, and the government tries to crush that resistance.

Speaker 2 So what it does is basically recruits local people

Speaker 2 to spy on the partisans on the underground. And Bodan Stashinsky is one of those people.
His family is supporting the resistance. They provide food.

Speaker 2 His sister is engaged with one of the local commanders of this underground unit.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 they know everything about Stashinsky's family and they know everything about him because he is also collecting funds for the underground.

Speaker 2 So they have a conversation with him saying that, okay, that's what we got.

Speaker 2 And you and your family can go to to prison or you help us a little bit

Speaker 2 we we're interested in the fiancé of your sister and we want to get him

Speaker 2 and Stashinski says yes

Speaker 2 and once once they round up the the fiancé he basically betrayed a member or almost member of his family

Speaker 2 he's done. He can't go back to his village.
He can't go back to his study. He was studying in Viva at that time.
So he becomes,

Speaker 2 as I write in my book, the secret police becomes his family. And he is sent to Kyiv, he is trained for two years, sent to East Germany, into Berlin, and

Speaker 2 becomes an assassin.

Speaker 2 So they sent him

Speaker 2 across the

Speaker 2 border to Western Germany, to Munich, which was the headquarter of

Speaker 2 different

Speaker 2 organizations, anti-Soviet organizations, Ukrainian and Russian and Georgian and so on and so forth. And

Speaker 2 he kills two leaders of

Speaker 2 the organization of Ukrainian nationalists, one editor of the newspaper, and eventually he kills Bandera. He does that with the

Speaker 2 new weapon, a spray pistol, that eventually makes it into the Bond novel, The Man with the Golden Gun.

Speaker 2 And that whole episode is a little bit reshaped, but

Speaker 2 it is not in the film, but it is

Speaker 2 in the novel itself.

Speaker 2 And then later has a change of mind under the influence of his

Speaker 2 German fiancée and then wife.

Speaker 2 they decide to escape to the West.

Speaker 2 And while they're doing that, they discover that their apartment was bugged and probably the kgb knows all of that so

Speaker 2 a long story short

Speaker 2 his son dies in in berlin

Speaker 2 uh the kgb doesn't allow him to go there but his wife has a nervous breakdown so they allow him to go there to just calm her so that there would be no scandal and two of them

Speaker 2 one day before their son's burial

Speaker 2 because that's after after that they would be sent to Moscow they jump the ship and go to West Berlin two hours before the Berlin wall was being built so they did they if they would stay for the funeral probably they would the KGB would not let them go but also if they would stay the the the the border would be there and he goes he goes to the american intelligence and says, okay, that's who I am, and that's what I did.

Speaker 2 And they look at him and they say, we don't trust you. We don't know who you are.
You have documents and five names.

Speaker 2 You say you killed Bandera. Well, we have a different information.

Speaker 2 He was

Speaker 2 poisoned and probably by someone

Speaker 2 in his close circle. A spray pistol?

Speaker 2 Did you reach too much Ian Fleming? Where does this come from?

Speaker 2 He insists. They say, okay, you insist.
If you committed all those crimes, we're giving you to the German police and German police

Speaker 2 will be investigating you.

Speaker 2 And then the trial comes and

Speaker 2 if he says, if he takes back his testimony,

Speaker 2 the whole case against him collapses. He can go free.
But but he knows that if he goes free, he is a target of his colleagues

Speaker 2 from the same department. So his task at the trial is to prove that he is guilty,

Speaker 2 that he did that.

Speaker 2 And then he disappears,

Speaker 2 and nobody knows where he goes, and there are all sorts of cover stories. And I was lucky to interview a commander, former chief of the South African police,

Speaker 2 who confirmed to me that Stashinsky was in South Africa. He fled.
The West German intelligence thought that it was too dangerous for him to stay in Germany.

Speaker 2 They sent him under a different name to South Africa. So

Speaker 2 that's the story of Stashinsky himself. But going back to Bandera, of course, the fact that

Speaker 2 he confessed and it became known that KGB assassinated Bandera, that added to

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 image and to general mythology about Bandera.

Speaker 1 What a fascinating story of a village boy becoming an assassin who killed one of the most influential revolutionaries of the region in the 20th century.

Speaker 1 So what, just zooming out broadly on the KGB,

Speaker 1 how powerful was the KGB? What role did it play? in this whole story of the Soviet Union?

Speaker 2 It depends on the period. At the time that we just described, late 50s and early 60s,

Speaker 2 they were not powerful at all.

Speaker 2 And the reasons for that was that people like Khrushchev

Speaker 2 were really concerned about the secret police becoming too powerful. It became too powerful in their mind under Stalin, under Berye.

Speaker 2 And it was concern about Berya's power as a secret police chief that led led to the coup against Berea and Khrushchev coming to power and Berea was arrested and executed and what Khrushchev was trying to do after that was trying to put

Speaker 2 since 54 the name was already KGB KGB under his control so he was appointing the former Komsomol leaders

Speaker 2 as the heads of the KGB so the people who really

Speaker 2 owned everything to him,

Speaker 2 that sort of position. And the heads of the KGB were not members of Politburo.

Speaker 2 It changed in the 70s with Andropo, where KGB

Speaker 2 started to play again a very important role in the Soviet history.

Speaker 2 And let's say decisions on Afghanistan and the Soviet troops marching into Afghanistan were made by the,

Speaker 2 apart from Brezhnev, by the trio of the people who would be called today Silviki, maybe, or not all of them were Silviki, but one, of course, was Andropov, the head of the KGB, another was

Speaker 2 the Minister of Defense, and then there was Secretary in Charge of the Military Industrial Complex, the

Speaker 2 Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Speaker 2 But the head of the KGB became really not just the member of Politburo, but

Speaker 2 the member of that inner circle. And then the fact that Andropov succeeds Brezhnev is also a manifestation of the power that KGB acquired really after Khrushchev

Speaker 2 in the 1970s and then going into the 1980s.

Speaker 1 Who was more powerful, the KGB or the CIA

Speaker 1 during the Soviet Union?

Speaker 2 The CIA, it's

Speaker 2 the organization that is charged with the

Speaker 2 information gathering and all sorts of operations, including assassinations in the 50s and 60s abroad.

Speaker 2 The KGB was the organization that really

Speaker 2 had both the surveillance over the population within the Soviet Union and also the operations abroad and its members

Speaker 2 its leaders were members of the inner circle for for making decisions.

Speaker 2 Again, from what I understand about the way how

Speaker 2 politics and decision work and decisions are made in the United States, the CIA, the chief of the CIA,

Speaker 2 is not one of the decision-making group

Speaker 2 providing information.

Speaker 2 So I would say it's not day and night, but their power, political influence, political significance, very different.

Speaker 1 Is it understood how big the KGB was?

Speaker 1 how widespread it was, given its secretive and distributed nature?

Speaker 2 Certain things we know, others we don't, because the Stasi archives are open and

Speaker 2 most of the KGB, especially in Moscow, they're not.

Speaker 2 But we know that the KGB combined not only the internal

Speaker 2 sort of secret police functions at home and

Speaker 2 counter intelligence branch and intelligence branch abroad, but also the border troops, for example.

Speaker 2 So really institutionally

Speaker 2 it was a huge, huge mammoth.

Speaker 2 And another thing that we know we can sort of extrapolate from what we know from

Speaker 2 the Stasi archives, that the surveillance at home, the surveillance was really massive.

Speaker 2 The guess is

Speaker 2 the Soviets were not as effective and as

Speaker 2 meticulous and as scrupulous and as methodical as probably as Germans were. But

Speaker 2 that gives you a basic idea of how penetrated the entire society was.

Speaker 1 What do you think is important to understand about the KGB if we want to also understand Vladimir Putin, since he was a KGB foreign intelligence officer for 16 years?

Speaker 2 From my research, including

Speaker 2 on the Stashinsky,

Speaker 2 what I understand is that

Speaker 2 in KGB, and it was a powerful organization, again less powerful in 50s and 60s, but still very powerful organization,

Speaker 2 there was on the one hand the understanding of the situation in the country and abroad that probably other

Speaker 2 organizations didn't have.

Speaker 2 They had also first peak in terms of

Speaker 2 selecting cadres.

Speaker 2 The The work in the KGB was well paid and considered to be very prestigious.

Speaker 2 So that was part to a degree of the Soviet elite in terms of

Speaker 2 whom they recruited.

Speaker 2 And they had a resentment toward the party leadership. They didn't allow them to do James Bond kind of things that they would want to do because there were political risks.
After this

Speaker 2 scandal with Stashinsky,

Speaker 2 At least on many levels, the KGB stopped the practice of the assassinations, political assassinations abroad, because it was considered politically to be

Speaker 2 extremely dangerous. The person who was in charge of the KGB at the time of Bandera's assassination, Shlepin, was one of the candidates to replace Khrushchev.

Speaker 2 and Brezhnev used against him that scandal abroad, eventually to remove him from Politburo.

Speaker 2 So the KGB

Speaker 2 was really looking at the party leadership as to a degree ineffective, corrupt, and who was on their way.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 from what I understand, that's exactly

Speaker 2 the attitudes that

Speaker 2 people like

Speaker 2 Putin and people of his circle

Speaker 2 brought to

Speaker 2 to power in Kremlin. So the methods that KGB used, they can use now and there is no party or no other institution actually stopping them from doing that.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 they think about my understanding,

Speaker 2 the operations abroad, about foreign policy in general in terms of the KGB mindset of planning operations and executing particular operations, and so on and so forth. So, I think

Speaker 2 a lot of culture that

Speaker 2 came into existence in the Soviet KGB now became part of the culture of of the Russian Russian establishment.

Speaker 1 You wrote the book, The Russo-Ukrainian War, The Return of History, that

Speaker 1 gives the full context leading up to the

Speaker 1 invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022.

Speaker 1 So can you

Speaker 1 take me through the key moments in history that led up to this war? So we'll mention mentioned the collapse of the Soviet Union. We could probably go

Speaker 1 much farther back, but the collapse of the Soviet Union, mentioned 2014.

Speaker 1 Maybe you can highlight key moments that led up to 2022.

Speaker 2 The key moments would be first the year 204,

Speaker 2 known for Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and then the year 2013, known as the Revolution of Dignity.

Speaker 2 Both were the revolts against

Speaker 2 something that by significant part of Ukrainian population was considered to be

Speaker 2 completely, completely unacceptable actions on the part of the government and people in the government at that time.

Speaker 2 So the Orange Revolution of 204 was a protest against falsified presidential elections

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 rejection of a candidate that was supported by Russia, publicly supported by Russia.

Speaker 2 I remember being in Moscow at that time and couldn't believe my eyes when in the center of Russia I saw a billboard with Yanukovych.

Speaker 2 The trick was that there were a lot of Ukrainians in Russia and in Moscow in particular, and they had the right to vote.

Speaker 2 So, and

Speaker 2 it led to the election of

Speaker 2 Ukraine as Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko,

Speaker 2 who put

Speaker 2 on the agenda the issue of Ukraine's membership in NATO. So it was very clear pro-Western orientation.

Speaker 2 And the second case was the Revolutionary Dignity 2013 with some of the same characters,

Speaker 2 including Dianukovic, who at that time was already president. of Ukraine.

Speaker 2 And there the question was of the government promising the people for

Speaker 2 one year at least to sign association agreement with the European Union and then turning over almost overnight and saying that they were not going to do that.

Speaker 2 And that's how things started. But then when they became really massive and why something that was called revolution,

Speaker 2 Euro revolution became revolution of dignity was when the government police

Speaker 2 beat up students in downtown Kiev,

Speaker 2 who, judging by the reports, were basically already almost ready to disperse, almost ready to go home. And that's when roughly half of Kiev showed up on the streets.

Speaker 2 That sort of the police behavior, that sort of the was absolutely unacceptable in Ukraine.

Speaker 2 The still in elections and falsification of elections was unacceptable.

Speaker 2 That's where around that time and around 204, the president of Ukraine at that time, Lenit Kuchma, writes a book called Ukraine is Not Russia.

Speaker 2 And apparently the term comes from his

Speaker 2 his discussion with Putin when Putin was suggesting to him quite strongly to use force against people on the Maidan on the square in Kyiv.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 Kuchma allegedly said to him,

Speaker 2 you don't understand. Ukraine is not Russia.

Speaker 2 You can't do things like that.

Speaker 2 You get pushback. And

Speaker 2 that's these two events, 204 and then

Speaker 2 2013 became really crucial point in terms of the Ukraine direction, the survival survival of Ukrainian democracy, which is one of very few countries in the post-Soviet space where democracy survived the original flirt

Speaker 2 between the government leaders and democracy of the 1990s. It was the whole Soviet story

Speaker 2 in Russia, everywhere else. There was high democratic expectations, but they came pretty much to an end by the end of the decade.

Speaker 2 Ukraine preserved the democracy. And

Speaker 2 the orientation of Ukraine

Speaker 2 toward integration into, in some form, into Western and European structures, that

Speaker 2 Ukrainian democracy plus Western orientation was something. And

Speaker 2 in Russia we see the strengthening of the autocratic regime under Vladimir Putin. That

Speaker 2 if you look deeper,

Speaker 2 these are the processes that put the two countries on the collision course.

Speaker 1 So there's a division, a push and pull inside Ukraine on identity of whether they're part of Russia or part of Europe.

Speaker 1 And you highlighted two moments in Ukrainian history that there's a big flare-up where

Speaker 1 the statement was first, Ukraine is not Russia, and essentially Ukraine is... part of Europe.
But there's other moments.

Speaker 1 What were the defining moments that began an actual war?

Speaker 2 The war started in February of 2014 with the Russian takeover of

Speaker 2 Crimea by military force, right? The so-called green man.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the big question is

Speaker 2 why?

Speaker 2 And it's very important to go back to the year 2013.

Speaker 2 and the start of the protests and the story of of the Ukraine signing association agreement with the European Union.

Speaker 2 So from what we understand today, the Ukrainian government under President Yanukovych

Speaker 2 did this suicidal sharp turn after one year of promise and association agreement saying that, okay, we changed our mind under pressure from Moscow.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 Moscow applied that pressure for one reason, at least in my opinion.

Speaker 2 The Ukraine signing association agreement with European Union

Speaker 2 would mean that Ukraine would not be able to sign association agreement with any Eurasian Union in any shape or form

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 was at that time in the process of making. And for Vladimir Putin, that was the beginning of his or part of his third term.
One of his

Speaker 2 agenda items for the third term was really consolidation of the post-Soviet space and Eurasian space,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 not membership in NATO, not membership in the European Union. But association agreement with the European Union meant that that post-Soviet space

Speaker 2 would have to exist under Moscow's control, but without Ukraine, the second largest post-Soviet republic.

Speaker 2 The republic on whose vote depended the continuing existence of the Soviet Union and whose vote ended in many ways the existence of the Soviet Union. So

Speaker 2 that is broadly background, but also there are of course personalities, there are also their beliefs,

Speaker 2 their readings of history and

Speaker 2 all of that became part of the story. But if you look at that geopolitically,

Speaker 2 the Association Agreement is

Speaker 2 putting Ukraine outside of the Russian sphere of influence.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the response was an attempt to

Speaker 2 topple the government in Kyiv that clearly was going to sign that agreement

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 2 take over Crimea and to help to deal with a lot of issues within Russia itself and boost

Speaker 2 the popularity of

Speaker 2 the president. And it certainly worked

Speaker 2 in that way as well.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 once Ukraine still after Crimea continued on its path, then the next step started the so-called hybrid warfare in Donbas.

Speaker 2 But again,

Speaker 2 unlike Crimea,

Speaker 2 from what I understand, Russia was not really looking forward to taking possession of Donbass. Donbass was viewed as the way how to influence Ukraine, to stop it from drift toward the West.

Speaker 1 Maybe you can tell me about the region of Donbass.

Speaker 2 I mentioned that nationalism and principle of nationalism is the principle of

Speaker 2 making the political borders to coincide with ethnic and cultural borders.

Speaker 2 And that's how the maps of

Speaker 2 many East European countries had been drawn in the 19th and 20th century.

Speaker 2 On that principle, Donbas, where the majority constituted by the beginning of the 20th century, were Ukrainians,

Speaker 2 was considered to be Ukrainian and was claimed

Speaker 2 in the middle of this revolution and revolutionary wars and civil wars by Ukrainian government.

Speaker 2 But Donbass became a site, one of the key sites in the Russian Empire of early industrialization

Speaker 2 with its mining industry, with its mythological industry. So what that meant was that people from other parts of, not Ukraine, but other parts of the Russian Empire congregated there.

Speaker 2 That's where jobs were. That's how Khrushchev and his family came.
came to Donbass. The family of Brezhnev overshoot a little bit.
They got to the industrial enterprises

Speaker 2 in the city of Kaminskaya near Dnipro,

Speaker 2 the city that was called Dnipropetrovsk. So those were Russian peasants moving into the area

Speaker 2 looking

Speaker 2 for the job.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the population became quite mixed. Ukrainians still constituted the majority of the population, but not necessarily in the towns and in the cities.

Speaker 2 And culturally, the place was becoming more and more Russian as the result of

Speaker 2 that movement.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 apart from the Crimea, Donbas was the part of Ukraine where the ethnic Russians were

Speaker 2 the biggest group. They were not the majority, but they were very, very big and significant group.
For example, in the city of Mariupol, that was all but destroyed in the course of the last two years,

Speaker 2 The ethnic Russians constituted over 40% of the population, right?

Speaker 2 So that's not exactly part of Donbas, but

Speaker 2 that gives you a general idea.

Speaker 2 Now, the story of Donbas and what happened now is multi-dimensional, and this ethnic composition is just one part of the story. Another very important part of the story is

Speaker 2 economy.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 Donbass is a classical rust belt.

Speaker 2 And we know what happens with the cities that were part of the first or second wave of industrialization in the United States and globally. We know about social problems that exist in those places.

Speaker 2 So Donbass is probably the most dramatic and tragic case of implosion of the rust belt.

Speaker 2 with the mines not anymore producing the sort of the and at the acceptable price the coal that they used to produce, with people look uh losing jobs,

Speaker 2 with the politicians looking for subsidies as opposed to trying very

Speaker 2 unpopular measures of uh m dealing something and and bring bringing new money and new investment into the region. So all of that

Speaker 2 become part uh of the story that made made it easy for

Speaker 2 Russia, for the Russian Federation to destabilize the situation.

Speaker 2 We have interviews with Mr. Gherkin, who is saying that he was the first who pulled the trigger and fired the shot.
In that war, he became the Minister of Defense in the Donetsk People's Republic.

Speaker 2 You look at the prime minister, he is another person with

Speaker 2 Moscow residency permit.

Speaker 2 So you see key figures in those positions at the start and the beginning, not being

Speaker 2 Russians from Ukraine, but being Russians from Russia and Russians from Moscow, closely connected to the government structure and intelligence structure and so on.

Speaker 2 So that is the start and the beginning, but

Speaker 2 the way how it exploded, the way it did, was also a combination of the economic and ethnocultural and linguistic factors.

Speaker 1 So, for Putin, the war in Donbass and even in 2022 is a defensive war against what the Ukrainian government is doing against ethnically Russian people of Donbass.

Speaker 1 Is that fair to say how he describes it?

Speaker 2 What we see,

Speaker 2 this is certainly the argument, right? This is certainly the argument and a pretext

Speaker 2 because

Speaker 2 what

Speaker 2 we see there is that there would be no and there was no independent mobilization in Crimea either, in Crimea or in Donbas,

Speaker 2 without Russian presence.

Speaker 2 Without Russian occupation de facto of the Crimea, there would be no and there was no before

Speaker 2 at least in the previous five to six years, any mass mobilizations of Russians. There was none of such mobilizations in Donbas before Gherkin and other people with military

Speaker 2 with

Speaker 2 parts of military units showed up there. So

Speaker 2 it is an excuse. You've been to Ukraine.

Speaker 2 You know that Russian language is not persecuted in Ukraine.

Speaker 2 And if you've not been to Donbass, it

Speaker 2 to the Crimea, it would be difficult to find one single Ukrainian school. Not that they didn't exist at all, but it would take quite an effort for you to find it.

Speaker 2 Or sometimes even to hear Ukrainian language outside either of the institutions or

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 farmers' market.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 that's the reality. That's the reality that is clear, that is visible.
So imagine under those conditions and contexts that someone

Speaker 2 is persecuting ethnic Russians or Russian speakers,

Speaker 2 one to believe in something like that.

Speaker 2 One important precondition is never to

Speaker 2 step your foot in Ukraine.

Speaker 1 I should mention, maybe this is a good moment to mention, when I traveled to Ukraine, This is after the start of the war,

Speaker 1 you mentioned farmers market, which is funny. Basically, every single person I talked to, including the leadership, we spoke in Russian.

Speaker 1 For many of them, Russian is the more comfortable language even.

Speaker 1 And the people who spoke Ukrainian are more on the

Speaker 1 western side of Ukraine.

Speaker 1 And you know, young people that are kind of want to show that

Speaker 1 in an activist way that they want to fight for the independence of their country. So I take your point.

Speaker 1 I wonder if you want to comment about language and maybe about the future of language in Ukraine.

Speaker 1 Is the future of language going to st stabilize on Ukrainian

Speaker 1 or is it going to return to its traditional base of Russian language?

Speaker 2 Very roughly, before the start of the war in 2014, we can talk about parity between Russian and Ukrainian and also

Speaker 2 with, as you said, clearly Ukraine being a dominant language in the West and Russian being a dominant language on the streets, certainly in the east of the country.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 then in between of that, to pause a number of these transitional areas. And

Speaker 2 Ukraine,

Speaker 2 in my experience, and I visited a lot of countries, not all of them, and probably

Speaker 2 I will be still surprised, but in my

Speaker 2 experience, this is the only truly bilingual country that I ever visited. I lived in Canada for a long period of time.
There is Quebec and the rest.

Speaker 2 In Ukraine, you can talk in either Russian or Ukrainian in any part of

Speaker 2 the country, and you would be understood, and you would be responded to in a different language with the expectation that you would understand.

Speaker 2 And if you don't understand, that means you don't come from Ukraine. That's the reality.
The war and loss of the Crimea and

Speaker 2 partial loss of Donbass,

Speaker 2 if it's

Speaker 2 major

Speaker 2 industrial areas, really shifted the balance toward mostly Ukrainian-speaking

Speaker 2 regions.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 also,

Speaker 2 what you see and you clearly pointed to that starting with 2014 even a little bit early the younger generation chooses chooses Ukrainian as as a marker of its identity and that started in 2014 but we we have a dramatic dramatic shift after 2022

Speaker 2 and on the anecdotal anecdotal level I can tell you that I

Speaker 2 speak to people who

Speaker 2 be in in Cherniev at the time this is east of Crimea at the time of the Russian aggression and bombardment and so on and so forth who had passive knowledge of Ukrainian but spoke all their life Russian and they would speak Ukrainian to me and when I say okay why are you doing that we we know each other for for decades and you used Russian and he said well I don't want to have anything in common common with people who did that to us.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 there is a big, big push, of course, with

Speaker 2 this current war. Now, the question is whether this change is something that will stay or not, what is the future.
Linguistic practices are very, very conservative ones.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 we at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute have a

Speaker 2 project called Mapa Digital Atlas of Ukraine, and we were

Speaker 2 documenting and mapping different data in time.

Speaker 2 And what we noticed is a spike in the people self-reporting of use of Ukrainian in 2014 and 2015, at the time of the start of the war, when

Speaker 2 the threat was the most clear one.

Speaker 2 This is self-reporting. That doesn't mean that people exactly do what,

Speaker 2 but they believe that that's what they are supposed to do. And then return back to where it was by the year 2016 and 2017.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 this dynamic can repeat itself. But,

Speaker 2 given how long the war is going on, how big the impact is, how big the stress is, and that

Speaker 2 the wave of the future is probably associated with younger people who are switching to Ukrainian. So,

Speaker 2 I would

Speaker 2 my bet would be on

Speaker 2 Ukrainian language rising in prominence.

Speaker 1 So as we get closer to February of 2022,

Speaker 1 there's a few other key moments. Maybe let's talk about in July 2021 Putin publishing an essay titled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.

Speaker 1 Can you describe the ideas expressed in this essay?

Speaker 2 The idea is very conveniently presented already in the first paragraph, in the first sentences really of the article,

Speaker 2 where Putin says that for a long time I was saying that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people, and here is the proof.

Speaker 2 This is

Speaker 2 the historical...

Speaker 2 He develops his historical argumentation, apparently with the help of

Speaker 2 a lot of people around him.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 he started to talk about Russians and Ukrainians being one and the same people one year before the start of the war in 2014.

Speaker 2 So in 2013, he was together with Patriarch Kirill on visit to Kiev, and there was a conference specifically organized for him in the Kievan Kiev's monastery, and that's where he stated that.

Speaker 2 The fact that he was with Patriarch Kirill

Speaker 2 is very important

Speaker 2 factor for understanding where the idea is coming from.

Speaker 2 This is the idea that was dominant in the Russian Empire of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, that Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians are really Russian, great Russians, little Russians and white Russians,

Speaker 2 and that they constitute one

Speaker 2 people.

Speaker 2 Yes,

Speaker 2 there are some dialectical differences. Yes, Ukrainians sing well.
Yes,

Speaker 2 they dance funny. But overall,

Speaker 2 that doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that idea actually was

Speaker 2 really destroyed, mostly destroyed by the revolution of 1917.

Speaker 2 Because it wasn't just social revolution. That's how it is understood

Speaker 2 in US, in a good part of the world. It was also a national revolution.
It was an empire. It was a revolution in the Russian Empire.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 to bring this pieces of empire back within the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks had to make concessions.

Speaker 2 And one of those concessions was to recognition of the existence of Ukrainians as a separate nation.

Speaker 2 Belarusians as a separate nation, Russians as a separate nation, endowing them with their own territorial

Speaker 2 borders, with institutions, and so on and so forth. But

Speaker 2 there was one institution that was not reformed.

Speaker 2 That institution was called the Russian Orthodox Church. Because one of the ways that Bolsheviks dealt with it, they couldn't eradicate religion completely, but they arrested the development of

Speaker 2 the religion and thinking and

Speaker 2 theology

Speaker 2 on the level as it existed before the revolution of 1917.

Speaker 2 So the Russian Orthodox Church of 1917 continued to be the Russian Orthodox Church

Speaker 2 in 1991 and in 2013,

Speaker 2 continuing the same imperial mantra of the existence of one big Russian nation, one unified

Speaker 2 people.

Speaker 2 And when you see the formation of the ideas about nations, about foreign policy in the Russian Empire after 1991, they're going back to the

Speaker 2 pre-Bolshevik times. Ukrainians do that as well.
Estonians do that as well. The difference is that when Ukrainians go back,

Speaker 2 they go back to the pre-1917, their intellectual fathers and writings of basically liberal nationalism. Or sometimes they go to the radical nationalism of Pandara,

Speaker 2 which would be not pre-1917, but pre-1945.

Speaker 2 When the Russians go to pre-Bolshevik past,

Speaker 2 looking for the ideas, looking for inspiration, looking for the narratives, what they find there is empire.

Speaker 2 What they find there are imperial projects.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that's certainly the story of

Speaker 2 Putin's claim. That's the story of the argument.
And

Speaker 2 to conclude, the argument argument that he lays out there historical argument comes also almost directly from the narratives of the late 19th and the beginning of the 20th century so it's not only the argument is coming from that era but also the argumentation is is coming from that era as well but that those arguments are all in in the flavor of empire

Speaker 2 it's empire on the one hand but also there is imperial understanding of what russian nation is that doesn't allow for independence of its little Russian and white Russian branches, alleged branches, right?

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 what you see with the concept of the big Russian nation, that's late 19th, begin 20th century.

Speaker 2 Empire sees the writing on the wall that nationalism is on the rise and it tries to survive by mobilizing the nationalism of the largest group in the empire, which happens to be Russian.

Speaker 2 Stalin is a big promoter of some form of Russian nationalism, especially during the war and after war. And he started his career as a very promising Georgian writer, writing in Georgian.

Speaker 2 So he's not doing that for some personal, personal affinity or cultural intellectual roots

Speaker 2 within Russian nation or Russian people. He is doing that

Speaker 2 for the sake of the success of

Speaker 2 his Soviet and communist project.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 he has to get the largest ethnic group on board, which are Russians.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 Stalin and Putin have different understanding who Russians are.

Speaker 2 Stalin already accepted Ukrainians and Belarusians, their existence.

Speaker 2 Putin goes back to pre-Stalin and pre-Leninian times.

Speaker 1 So if we step back from

Speaker 1 historical context of this and maybe the geopolitical purpose of writing such an essay and forget about the essay altogether. You know, I have family in Ukraine and Russia.

Speaker 1 I know a lot of people in Ukraine and Russia.

Speaker 1 Forget the war, forget all of this. There's a kind of

Speaker 1 they all kind of sound the same.

Speaker 1 Like, if I go to France, they sound different

Speaker 1 than in ukraine russia like if you lay out this the cultural map of the world there's just a different beat and music and flavor to a people

Speaker 1 i guess what i'm trying to say is there seems to be a closeness between the cultures of ukraine or russia like how do we describe that

Speaker 1 do we acknowledge that and how does that

Speaker 1 uh add tension with the national independence

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 first of all especially when it comes to eastern Ukraine or to big cities,

Speaker 2 many people in Ukraine spoke Russian, right? Generally, it's the same language. On the top of that, we started our discussion with talking about the Slavs, right?

Speaker 2 So both Ukrainian and Russian language are Slavic languages. So

Speaker 2 there is proximity there as well. On the top of that, there is a history of existence in the Soviet Union and before that in one empire for a long period of time.

Speaker 2 So you see a lot of before the war, a lot of Ukrainian singers and entertainers performing in Russia and vice versa. And biography of President Zelensky is certainly one of the

Speaker 2 fits

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 particular model as well. That all talks about

Speaker 2 similarities. But these similarities also very often obscure

Speaker 2 things

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 became so important in the course of this war. And I already mentioned the book

Speaker 2 titled

Speaker 2 by President Kushmo of Ukraine, Ukraine is Not Russia. So that's the argument, despite the fact that you think that we are the same, we behave differently.

Speaker 2 And it turned out that they behave differently. You have Bolotne in Moscow and police violence, and that's the end of it.
You have the

Speaker 2 Maidan in Ukraine, and you have police violence, and that's the beginning. That's not the end.
History really

Speaker 2 matters in the way

Speaker 2 why

Speaker 2 sometimes people speaking the same language with different accents behave very differently.

Speaker 2 Russia and Russian identity was formed around the state and has difficulty imagining itself outside of the state. And that state happened to be imperial for most of Russian history.

Speaker 2 Ukrainian project came into existence in revolt against the state.

Speaker 2 Ukraine came into existence out of the parts of different empires, which means they left different cultural impact on them. And for Ukrainians to stay together, autocratic regime so far didn't work.

Speaker 2 It's like the colonies of the United States.

Speaker 2 You have to find common language. You have to talk to each other.

Speaker 2 And that became part of the Ukrainian political DNA.

Speaker 2 And that became a huge factor in the war. And

Speaker 2 very few people in Ukraine believed what Vladimir Putin was saying, that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people. But the majority believed

Speaker 2 that they are certainly close culturally and historically nations. And from that point of view, the bombardment of the Ukrainian cities became such a shock to the Ukrainians.
Because deep down,

Speaker 2 they maybe looked at Syria, they looked at Chechnya and were

Speaker 2 explaining that through the fact that there was basically such a big cultural gap and difference between Russians and

Speaker 2 those countries and those nations. But

Speaker 2 my understanding, at least, most of them had difficulty imagining the war of that proportion and that sort of ferocity and that sort of war crimes,

Speaker 2 bringing that sort of war crimes on that level.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell,

Speaker 1 it's interesting that you say that in the DNA of Ukraine versus Russia, so

Speaker 1 maybe Russia is more conducive to authoritarian regimes and Ukraine is more conducive to defining itself by rebelling against authoritarian regimes?

Speaker 2 By rebellion, absolutely. And that was the story pretty much before 1991.
So what you see since 1991 and what you see today

Speaker 2 is

Speaker 2 I would say new factor certainly in Ukrainian modern history. Because Ukrainians traditionally were very successful rebels.

Speaker 2 The largest peasant army in the civil war, in the Russian Empire, was the Mahmo army in southern Ukraine.

Speaker 2 And one revolt, Cossack revolts and other revolts, one after another.

Speaker 2 But Ukrainians had historically difficulty actually maintaining the sort of freedom that they acquired. had difficulty associating themselves with the state.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 what we see, especially in the last two years, it's a quite phenomenal development in Ukraine when Ukrainians associate themselves with the state, where Ukrainians see a state not just as a foreigner, as historically it was in Ukrainian history, not just someone who came to

Speaker 2 take,

Speaker 2 but the state that is continuation of them, that helps to provide security for them, that

Speaker 2 the Ukrainian armed forces even before the start of this war had the

Speaker 2 highest

Speaker 2 support and popularity in Ukraine.

Speaker 2 The state today functions unbelievably effectively under attacks and missile attacks and against city government and local government.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 we are witnessing when it comes to Ukraine, we are witnessing a very important historical development where Ukrainians found their state for the first time

Speaker 2 through most of their history and try

Speaker 2 to make a transition from successful rebels to successful managers and state builders.

Speaker 1 I talked to John Mearsheimer recently.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of people that believe NATO had a big contribution to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. So what what role did NATO play in this full history from Bucharest

Speaker 1 in 2008 to

Speaker 1 today?

Speaker 2 NATO

Speaker 2 was

Speaker 2 a big part, certainly, of the Russian justification for the war.

Speaker 2 That was the theme that was

Speaker 2 up there in the months leading to the aggression.

Speaker 2 The truth is that,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 Vladimir Putin went on record saying that, that the Western leaders were telling him again and again that there is no chance for Ukraine to become a member of NATO anytime soon.

Speaker 2 Russia was very effective back in the year 208.

Speaker 2 in stopping Ukraine and Georgia on the path of joining NATO. There was a Bucharest summit

Speaker 2 at which the U.S. president at that time, George W.
Bush, was pushing for the membership and Putin convinced leaders of France and Germany to block that membership.

Speaker 2 And after that, membership for

Speaker 2 Ukraine and for Georgia was really removed from the from the realistic agenda for NATO.

Speaker 2 And that's what the leaders of the Western world in the month leading to the February 2022 aggression were trying to convey to Vladimir Putin. What he wanted there was an ultimatum that really was

Speaker 2 there to not to start negotiations, but really to stop negotiations. He demanded the withdrawal of NATO to the borders of the 1997, if I'm not mistaken.

Speaker 2 So completely something that neither leaders would accept nor the countries members of NATO would accept. But for me, it's very clear that

Speaker 2 that was an excuse, that that was a justification.

Speaker 2 And what happened later in the year 2022 and 2023 certainly confirms me in

Speaker 2 that belief.

Speaker 2 Finland

Speaker 2 joined NATO and Sweden is on the way to joining NATO.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 Finland joining NATO increased

Speaker 2 border between Russia and NATO twofold and probably more than that.

Speaker 2 So if NATO is the real concern,

Speaker 2 it would be probably not completely unreasonable to expect that, if not every single soldier, but at least half of the Russian army fighting in Ukraine, would be moved to protect the new border with NATO in Finland.

Speaker 2 So I have no doubt that no one in Kremlin, either in the past or today, looks favorably or is excited about

Speaker 2 NATO moving or the countries of Eastern Europe joining NATO.

Speaker 2 But I have very difficult time imagining that that was the primary cause of the war. And what we see also, we talked about Tucker's interview.

Speaker 2 He was surprised, but he believed that Putin was completely honest when the first 25 minutes of interview, he was talking about relations between Russia and Ukraine, was talking about history.

Speaker 2 And that was also the main focus of his essay. Essay was not on NATO and Russia.

Speaker 2 Essay was on Russia and Ukraine. So that is where

Speaker 2 the real causes are. The broader context is the fall of empire and process of disintegration of empire, not the story of NATO.

Speaker 1 What was,

Speaker 1 to clarify the reason Putin, Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022?

Speaker 2 The immediate goal in 2014, when the war started, was to stop the drift of Ukraine toward the West and outside of the Russian sphere of influence. The invasion of 2022

Speaker 2 perceived

Speaker 2 the same goals,

Speaker 2 keeping Ukraine in the Russian sphere of influence. Once we have the resistance,

Speaker 2 quite effective resistance on the part of Ukraine, the

Speaker 2 Ramstein and coalition, international coalition in support of Ukraine, then we see the realization of Plan B, where parts of Ukrainian territory are being annexed and included in the Constitution of the Russian Federation.

Speaker 2 So the two scenarios don't exclude each other, but if scenario number one doesn't work, then scenario number two

Speaker 2 goes into play.

Speaker 1 In the Gates of Kiev chapter,

Speaker 1 you write about Volon Mrs Lensky in the early days of the war.

Speaker 1 What are

Speaker 1 most important moments to you about this time?

Speaker 1 The first hours and days of the invasion?

Speaker 2 The first hours and the first days were the most difficult psychologically.

Speaker 2 The rest of the world really didn't expect Kiev to last for more than a few days, didn't expect Ukraine to last for more than a few weeks.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 all the data suggested that that's what would happen. Ukraine would collapse, would be taken over.

Speaker 2 Putin called

Speaker 2 his

Speaker 2 war a special military operation, which suggests you also expectations about the scope, expectations about the time. So a semi-military, semi-police operation.

Speaker 2 So every reasonable person in the world believed that that would

Speaker 2 happen.

Speaker 2 And it's the heroism of quote-unquote unreasonable people

Speaker 2 like Zelensky, like the commander of Ukrainian armed forces Zoluzhny, like mayors of the cities Klichko and others. I'm just naming names that are familiar to almost all of us now.

Speaker 2 But there are thousands of those people, unreasonable people, who decided that it was unreasonable to attack their country.

Speaker 2 That was the most difficult times and days. And speaking about Zelensky, every,

Speaker 2 I understand, reasonable leader in the West was trying to convince him to leave Ukraine and to set a government in exile in Poland or in London.

Speaker 2 And it was reasonable to accept his one of his predecessors, Mr. Yanukovych flat cave.

Speaker 2 A few months before that in Afghanistan, the President of Afghanistan fled Afghanistan.

Speaker 2 That was a reasonable thing to expect.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 he turned out to be very, very unreasonable in that sense.

Speaker 2 That comes with the guts, his guts and guts people

Speaker 2 around him and Ukrainians in general.

Speaker 1 Why do you think he stayed in Kiev? This former comedian

Speaker 1 who

Speaker 1 played a president on TV

Speaker 1 when Kiev is being invaded by the second most powerful military in the world.

Speaker 2 Because I think he believes in things.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 one of those things was that if he a president and he is in the presidential office,

Speaker 2 he is there to play his role to the end.

Speaker 2 And another thing, my personal, again, I never met Lev Mazelinski.

Speaker 2 My personal understanding of him is that that

Speaker 2 he

Speaker 2 has talent that helped him in his career before the presidency and then helps now. He feels the audience

Speaker 2 and then channels the attitude of the audience and

Speaker 2 amplifies it.

Speaker 2 And I think that

Speaker 2 another reason why he didn't leave Kyiv was that he felt the audience. The audience

Speaker 2 in that particular context were the Ukrainians.

Speaker 1 So he had a sense that the Ukrainians would unify? Because he was quite, if you look at the polls before the war, quite unpopular.

Speaker 1 And there was still divisions and

Speaker 1 factions and the government is divided. I mean, there's the East and the West and all this kind of stuff.
You think he had a sense that this could unite people?

Speaker 2 The East and the West was not already such an issue after

Speaker 2 Crimea and part of Donbass being gone. So Ukraine was much more united than it was before.

Speaker 2 He

Speaker 2 brought to power his, before that, really non-existent party of regions on his personal popularity.

Speaker 2 But the important thing is that he created a majority in the parliament, which really reflected the unity that existed among Ukrainians that was not there before.

Speaker 2 He won with 73% of the population,

Speaker 2 of those who

Speaker 2 took part in the elections. His predecessor, Petro Poroshenko,

Speaker 2 also carried 90% of the precincts. And the same happened with Zelensky.
So the country unified after 2014 to a degree it was impossible to imagine before, and Zelensky felt that. Zelensky knew that.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that's where the talent of politician really matters.

Speaker 2 That's something that you can see

Speaker 2 beyond just data and you can feel that. Apparently, Yeltsin had that ability.

Speaker 1 Why did the peace talks fail? There was a lot of peace talks.

Speaker 2 The main reason is is that the conditions that Russia was trying to impose on Ukraine were basically unacceptable for Ukraine.

Speaker 2 Because one of the conditions, apart from this strange thing called denization,

Speaker 2 was, of course, de facto loss of the territory and for the future.

Speaker 2 really

Speaker 2 staying outside either of NATO or

Speaker 2 any Western support, which was very clear, you can buy a couple of weeks, you can buy a couple of months, but in the conditions like that, Russia will come back tomorrow and will take over everything.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 once Ukrainians realize that they can win on the battlefield,

Speaker 2 once the Russians were defeated and withdrew from Kiev,

Speaker 2 the opportunity emerged to get out of the negotiations, which was very clear were leading, if not today, then tomorrow, to the complete destruction of Ukraine.

Speaker 2 And then, of course, once the territory started to be liberated, things like butcher and massacres of the civilian population came to the fore, which made also very difficult, if not impossible, to conduct negotiations from this moral and emotional point of view.

Speaker 1 What about the claims that Boris Johnson in the West

Speaker 1 compromised the ability of these peace talks to be successful? Basically, you kind of manipulated the talks.

Speaker 2 I asked

Speaker 2 people who accompanied Bris Johnson to Kyiv that question.

Speaker 2 The answer was no.

Speaker 2 And I believe this answer, and I'll tell you why.

Speaker 2 Because it is very difficult for me to imagine

Speaker 2 President Zelensky

Speaker 2 to take orders from anybody in the world, either as Joel Johnson or Joe Biden or anybody else, and basically doing things that

Speaker 2 Zelensky believes are not in his interest or in the interest of his country. I just can't imagine that anybody in the world

Speaker 2 telling Zelensky what to do and Zelensky actually following it against

Speaker 2 his own wishes and desires, at least if that is possible, what is in the public sphere doesn't allow us to suggest that it is.

Speaker 1 That said, Zelensky is a smart man and he knows that the war can only continue with the West's support.

Speaker 2 That is a different supposition to

Speaker 2 know that it can continue with the West's support. but if we are talking about withdrawing from the negotiations,

Speaker 2 that's not about the continuation of the war, that you don't need Western support.

Speaker 1 Well, what I mean is

Speaker 1 if he started to sense that the West will support no matter what, then maybe the space of decisions you're making is different.

Speaker 2 We can interpret that that way.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 Boris Johnson represented

Speaker 2 at that point Britain, not the United States.

Speaker 2 And really

Speaker 2 what the war showed, and it was clear already at that time,

Speaker 2 that what was needed was massive support from the West as a whole. And the promise of that support came only after the West realized that Ukraine can win.
and came only in late

Speaker 2 April with the Ramstein, so at least a few weeks later. So I don't know how much Britis Johnson could promise.
He probably could promise to try to help and try to convince and try to work on that.

Speaker 2 If Zelensky acted on that promise, he certainly was taking a risk. But the key issue, again, I'm going back where I started, it's principle

Speaker 2 an acceptance for Ukraine, the conditions that were offered.

Speaker 2 And Ukraine was

Speaker 2 the moment they saw the possibility that they could fight back with Johnson's support without Johnson's support they they took the chance so what are the ways this war can end do you think

Speaker 1 what are the different possible trajectories whether it's peace talks

Speaker 1 what does winning look like for the side what is the role of us what what trajectories do you see that are possible

Speaker 2 it's it's a

Speaker 2 question on the one level very easy to answer on the other other, very difficult. The level on which it is very easy,

Speaker 2 it's a broad historical perspective.

Speaker 2 If you really believe, and I believe in that, that this is the war of the Soviet succession, that this is the war of the disintegration of empire, we know how this story ends.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 they end with

Speaker 2 disintegration of empire. They end with the rise of the new states and appearance appearance of the new colored spots on the map.

Speaker 2 That's the story that started with the American Revolution. So that's long-term perspective.
The difficult part is of course what will happen tomorrow. The difficult part is

Speaker 2 what they will be

Speaker 2 in two days,

Speaker 2 or even in two years.

Speaker 2 And in very broad terms, the war can end in one of three scenarios. The victory of one side, the the victory of another side, and a sort of a stalemate and compromise, especially

Speaker 2 when it comes to the territories.

Speaker 2 This war

Speaker 2 is already approaching the end of the second year.

Speaker 2 I follow the news and look analysis. I don't remember one single piece suggesting that the next year

Speaker 2 will bring peace, so will bring peace for sure.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 we are in a situation where

Speaker 2 both sides still believe that they can achieve something or improve their position on the battlefield. Certainly that was the expectations of Ukrainian side back

Speaker 2 in the summer and early fall of 2023.

Speaker 2 And from what I understand now, this is certainly the expectations of the Russian side today.

Speaker 2 This is the largest war in Europe since World War II. The largest war in the world since Korean War.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 we know that

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 Korean War ended in this

Speaker 2 division of Korea, but the negotiations were going on for more than two years. While those negotiations were going on, both sides were trying to improve their position there.

Speaker 2 And until there was a political change, death of Stalin, arrival of Eisenhower in the United States, and the realization that

Speaker 2 the chances of succeeding on the battlefield are huge, the peace talks didn't come. So

Speaker 2 at this point, all three scenarios are possible.

Speaker 2 I don't really discount any of them. It's early to say what will happen.

Speaker 1 So without any political change, let's try to imagine what are the possibilities that the war ends this year.

Speaker 1 Is it possible that it can end with compromise basically at the place it started?

Speaker 2 Meaning back to the borders of 2022?

Speaker 1 Yeah, back to the borders of 22

Speaker 1 with some security guarantees that aren't really guarantees, but are hopeful guarantees.

Speaker 2 No,

Speaker 2 it is not just virtual impossibility. It is impossible without political change in Moscow.
The reason is that

Speaker 2 back in the fall of 2022,

Speaker 2 Vladimir Putin included five of Ukrainian region soblists, even those that he didn't control or didn't control fully into the Russian constitution.

Speaker 2 which basically, in simple language, is that the hands are tied up not only for Putin himself, but also for his possible successors.

Speaker 2 So that means that no return return to the borders of 2022 without change, political change in Moscow are possible.

Speaker 2 A few days after

Speaker 2 that decision in Moscow, Zelensky issued a decree

Speaker 2 saying that no negotiations with Russia.

Speaker 2 What that really meant in plain language is that basically we are not prepared to negotiate a stable agreement with five of our oblists,

Speaker 2 not just annexed but also included into the russian constitution so that's where we are so the the the the that that scenario is is uh again everything is possible of course but it's highly highly unlikely so the russian constitution is uh is a thing that's very that makes this all very difficult yes and not only as a negotiation tactic for putin or whoever would would negotiate on the russian side but also as as a legal issue so like the the practical aspect of it, even it's definitely you really have to change the constitution before the peace agreement takes hold or immediately after that.

Speaker 2 And with the Minsk agreements, that was one of things that Russia wanted from Ukraine, change of the constitution. And it turned out to be really impossible.
So that's

Speaker 2 one of the backstories of the Minsk and collapse of the Minsk agreements.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Is there something like Minsk agreements that are possible now to maybe this is a legal question, but to override the Constitution to sort of shake everything up?

Speaker 1 So see the constitutional amendment as

Speaker 1 just a negotiation tactic to come to the table to something like Minsk agreement.

Speaker 2 Given

Speaker 2 how fast

Speaker 2 those amendments to the constitution were adopted,

Speaker 2 that suggests that really executive power in Russia has enormous power over the legislative branch. So it's again difficult to imagine, but technically this is possible again,

Speaker 2 but possible if there is a political change in Moscow.

Speaker 1 I don't understand why assuming political change in Moscow is not possible this year. So I'm trying to see if there's a way to end this war this year, right?

Speaker 2 There is a possibility of armistice, right? But armistice more along the, like any armistice, along the lines of the current front lines

Speaker 2 but withdrawal of the russian troops to the borders of 2022 at this point

Speaker 2 whether it's reasonable or unreasonable can be achieved all only as the result of the uh defeat of the russian army like it happened near kiev is it possible possible is it

Speaker 1 likely especially given what is happening with the western support military support for for for ukraine probably not but if putin the the executive branch, has a lot of power, why can't the United States President, the Russian President, the Ukrainian President come to the table and draw up something like the Minsk agreements, where, and then rapid constitutional change is made, and you go back to the borders in 2022, before 2022, like through agreements, through compromise.

Speaker 2 Impossible for you? Certainly not this year. I look at this year as the time when at least one side, Russian side, will try to get as much as it can through

Speaker 2 military means.

Speaker 1 But that's been happening last year, too. There's been a counteroffensive, there's been attempts, there's been...

Speaker 2 It doesn't mean that every

Speaker 2 that new year somehow is supposed to bring new tactics.

Speaker 2 The last year was pretty much a lot of fighting, a lot of suffering, very little movement of

Speaker 2 the front line. The biggest change of the last year was Ukraine victory on the Black Sea, where they pushed the Russian Navy into the western part of the pond

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 2 restored the

Speaker 2 grain corridor and export from Odessa, apparently up to 75% of what it used to be before the war. So

Speaker 2 that's the only major change. But again,

Speaker 2 the price is enormous in terms of wealth,

Speaker 2 especially in terms of lives.

Speaker 1 So thinking about what 2024 brings, Zelensky just fired Ukraine's head of the army,

Speaker 1 a man you've mentioned, General Valeri Zelushny. What do you make of this development?

Speaker 2 This is a very, very dangerous moment

Speaker 2 in the war.

Speaker 2 The reason for that is that Zaluzhny is someone who is very popular with the army

Speaker 2 and with people in general.

Speaker 2 So if you look at that through American prism,

Speaker 2 that would be something analogous to President Truman

Speaker 2 firing General McCarthy.

Speaker 2 given that

Speaker 2 stakes for U.S. at that time were very high, but probably not as high as they are for

Speaker 2 Ukraine today.

Speaker 2 In both cases, what is at stake is certainly the idea that the political leadership and military leadership have to be on the same page.

Speaker 2 And the question is whether, on the part of Zelensky, this is just the change of the leadership. or this is also the change of his approach to the war.
And then can mean many things.

Speaker 2 One can mean him taking more active part in planning operations.

Speaker 2 It can mean also possible change of the tactic in the war, given that counter-offensive

Speaker 2 didn't work out.

Speaker 2 We don't know yet. I don't know whether President Zelensky at this point knows exactly

Speaker 2 what will come next. But this is the time when the change of the leadership in the country and in the army that is at war,

Speaker 2 it's one of the most

Speaker 2 trying, most dangerous moments.

Speaker 1 So the thing that President Zelensky expressed is that this is going to be a change of tactics, making the approach more technologically advanced, this kind of things.

Speaker 1 But as you said,

Speaker 1 I believe he is less popular than the chief of the army, Zelushny, 80% to 60%, depending on the polls. Do you think it's possible that Zelensky's days are numbered as the president?

Speaker 1 And that somebody like Zelushny comes to power?

Speaker 2 What we know is that

Speaker 2 in this war,

Speaker 2 Ukrainian people really united

Speaker 2 around

Speaker 2 their president.

Speaker 2 And the armed forces were always, even before the start of the war, more popular than was the presidential office. So

Speaker 2 the change,

Speaker 2 if happened in that realm, was not so dramatic. And from what I can see from social media in Ukraine, there is a lot of unhappiness, a lot of questions,

Speaker 2 but there is also

Speaker 2 realization and very strong realization that the country has to stay united.

Speaker 2 And certainly the behavior of Zeluzhny himself

Speaker 2 is there

Speaker 2 basically not suggesting any sort of a pregausion type of scenario. That gives me some hope,

Speaker 2 actually a lot of hope.

Speaker 2 And in terms of whether Zelensky's days are numbered or not, I don't think they're numbered.

Speaker 2 But if Ukraine stays a democracy, and I believe it will stay,

Speaker 2 what comes to my mind

Speaker 2 is the story of Churchill,

Speaker 2 the story of de Gaulle,

Speaker 2 in Poland the story of Piłsutski. So once the war is over, really

Speaker 2 the electorate in the democratic elections, they want to change the political leadership. They want to move forward.
But

Speaker 2 Piłsutski came back to power and de Gaulle came back to power and Churchill came back to power. So no,

Speaker 2 whatever happens in the

Speaker 2 short run or medium term run, I think that

Speaker 2 Zelensky days in politics are not numbered.

Speaker 1 So what to you is interesting, for example, if I get a chance to interview Zelensky, what to you is interesting about the person that

Speaker 1 would be good to ask about, to explore about the state of his mind, his thinking, his view of the world as it stands today.

Speaker 2 Next month we're supposed to take place Ukrainian elections. They're not taking place

Speaker 2 because the majority of Ukrainians don't think this is the right thing to do, to change the president, to have the elections, to have a political struggle in the middle of the war.

Speaker 2 So Zelensky refused to call those elections despite the fact that he

Speaker 2 he

Speaker 2 is and continues to be the most popular politician in Ukraine. So it would be to his benefit, but that's clearly not what the Ukrainians want.

Speaker 2 But the question of continuing as the president beyond five years also,

Speaker 2 one way or another, would raise questions about the legitimacy.

Speaker 2 And certainly, certainly, Russia will be playing this card, like there is no tomorrow. And what I would be interested in asking Delensky about,

Speaker 2 whether he sees that his second term, which comes on those conditions, would suggest a

Speaker 2 different attitude toward the opposition, maybe some form of

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 coalition government, like it was the case in Britain with Churchill, under different circumstances, of course.

Speaker 2 Or this is basically, in his opinion, something that would be destructive and something that would really be an impediment

Speaker 2 for the question of unity and war effort. And I would ask this question not

Speaker 2 to basically suggest that that's the way to go,

Speaker 2 but I would be very much interested to hear what is his thinking about that.

Speaker 1 Do you think there's a degree during wartime

Speaker 1 that the power that comes with being a war president can corrupt a person, sort of

Speaker 1 push you away from

Speaker 1 the democratic mindset

Speaker 1 towards an authoritarian one?

Speaker 2 I think that there is a possibility of that, right?

Speaker 2 In the conditions of any

Speaker 2 emergency, a war, in the case of the Soviet Union, there was a Chernobyl disaster and so on and so forth. You make decisions much faster.

Speaker 2 You create this vertical, and

Speaker 2 then it's very easy to get to get uh really used

Speaker 2 to that way dealing with the issues in in the conditions of emergency, right? And then either continue emergency

Speaker 2 or or with no emergency, they continue in the emergency mode. I I think

Speaker 2 again, that that would be a very very natural thing for any human being to to do to make it easier.

Speaker 2 W should I do that easier and in a more effective way, or should I do the right way?

Speaker 2 That's a challenge.

Speaker 2 Sometimes it's difficult to answer this question.

Speaker 1 Let me stay in power for just a little longer to do it the efficient way.

Speaker 1 And then time flies away and all of a sudden

Speaker 1 you're going for the third term.

Speaker 2 And the fourth term. And suddenly it's easy to realize that actually you can't roll in any other way.
You just

Speaker 2 whatever skills you had of people around that can help is that already gone exactly the people that surround you are not

Speaker 1 providing the kind of uh critical feedback necessary for a democratic system one of the things that tucker said after his interview with putin he was just in his hotel just chatting on on video and he said that

Speaker 1 he felt like putin was not very good at explaining himself like a coherent whole

Speaker 1 narrative of why the invasion happened. It's just this big picture.
And he said, that's not because

Speaker 1 he doesn't have one, but it's been a long time since he's had somebody around him where he has to explain himself to. So he's out of practice, which is very interesting.
It's a very interesting point.

Speaker 1 And that's what war and being in power for a prolonged period of time can do.

Speaker 1 So on that topic, if you had a chance to talk to Putin, what kind of questions would you ask him? What would you like to find out about the man as he stands today?

Speaker 2 As a historian, I have a lot of questions, and I have questions about

Speaker 2 when

Speaker 2 the decision was made to attack Ukraine

Speaker 2 and what went into this decision, because we are thinking about that.

Speaker 2 So, as a historian, I have this,

Speaker 2 this big question. I have a question about the Crimea when those decisions were made.

Speaker 2 So that sort of questions that interest me. But the rest either I think that I understand what is going on with him or I don't expect the answer that can help.
For example, a good question,

Speaker 2 whether you regret or not the start of the war in 2022,

Speaker 2 given the enormous, enormous casualties on both sides.

Speaker 2 But you can't expect from a politician an honest answer to this question.

Speaker 2 So there are questions to which I know he can't answer honestly. And then there are other questions to which I think he already provided all answers that he could.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 what for me

Speaker 2 is of interest are basically questions for a historian about the

Speaker 2 timing

Speaker 2 and the logic of particular decisions.

Speaker 1 Well, I do wonder how different what he says publicly is from what he thinks privately. So a question about when

Speaker 1 the decision to invade Ukraine happens is a very good question to give insight to

Speaker 1 the difference between how he thinks about the world privately versus what he says publicly.

Speaker 1 And same about other, you know, about empire. Because if you ask Putin, he will say he has no interest in empire and he finds the notion silly.

Speaker 1 But at the same time,

Speaker 1 perhaps privately there's a sense in which he does seek the

Speaker 1 the reunification

Speaker 1 of the Russian Empire.

Speaker 2 Not in the form of the Russian Empire, not in the form of the Soviet Union, but certainly in some form of the Russian control. That's that's

Speaker 2 that's

Speaker 2 for me at least, it's it's quite clear. Otherwise, there would be no

Speaker 2 bursts to the

Speaker 2 burst

Speaker 2 to the Russian emperors and Catherine and

Speaker 2 Peter and others.

Speaker 1 You wrote in your book titled The Frontline, Essays on Ukraine's Past and Present, about the Russian question,

Speaker 1 I guess articulated by Solzhenitsyn first in 1994. Solzhenitsyn, of course, is the author of Gulag Archipelago.
He's half-Ukrainian.

Speaker 1 What is the Russian question?

Speaker 2 Solzhenitsyn clearly identifies himself as Russian.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 his opposition to the communist regime was opposition of a Russian nationalist.

Speaker 2 So his argument was that

Speaker 2 communism was bad for Russia.

Speaker 2 And for him, Russian question is about the Russians, ethnic Russians, but also he was thinking

Speaker 2 about Russians in Putin's terms, or Putin thinks in Solzhenitsyn's terms,

Speaker 2 about Ukrainians and Belarusians constituting part of that.

Speaker 2 So the Russian question is the biggest tragedy of the 20th century, the division of the Russians, the loss of the statehood and division of the Russians between different

Speaker 2 states.

Speaker 2 This is for Solzhenitsyn,

Speaker 2 Russian question.

Speaker 2 And his

Speaker 2 original idea and plan was presented in the essay that he published in 1990, which was called How We Should Restructure Russia.

Speaker 2 And restructure Russia meant getting rid of the Baltics, Central Asia and Caucasus, and have Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians,

Speaker 2 including those who live in northern Kazakhstan, to create one nation nation-state.

Speaker 2 So he was a Russian nationalist, but he was thinking about Russian nation-state as the state of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians.

Speaker 2 And once the Soviet Union collapsed and his idea was not implemented, in the 1990s he formulated Plan B,

Speaker 2 taking over by Russia of Donbas, Crimea, and southern Ukraine, the areas that now are included in the Russian Constitution.

Speaker 2 So in terms, in historical terms and intellectual terms, what is happening today in the war between Russia and Ukraine is

Speaker 2 the vision

Speaker 2 on one level or another level that was formulated by the Nobel laureate, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, half-Russian, half-Ukraine.

Speaker 1 If there is such a thing, what would you say is the Ukrainian question

Speaker 1 as we stand today?

Speaker 2 The Ukrainian question is very simple. It's now not anymore acquisition of the nation state, but actually a sovereign state.
But

Speaker 2 it's maintenance. So Ukrainian question is like dozens of other questions in the 20th and 21st century.

Speaker 2 the rise of the new state. And

Speaker 2 that's what is the Ukrainian question, whether Ukraine will continue to its existence as a nation, as an independent state, because that existence is being questioned by stating that Russians and Ukrainians are one and the same people, which de facto saying Yoga is Russian,

Speaker 2 and also trying to destroy the state.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, is it possible that if the war in Ukraine continues for many more years

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 the next leader that follows Zelensky would

Speaker 1 take Ukraine away from a sort of democratic Western style nation towards a more authoritarian one, maybe even with a far-right influence, this kind of direction, because of the war, the influence of war.

Speaker 2 Everything is possible, and the longer the war continues, the more likely scenario like that becomes.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 realization of that scenario would go against the grain of

Speaker 2 largest part of Ukrainian history,

Speaker 2 where Ukraine

Speaker 2 really emerged as a pluralistic state on which the elements of democracy

Speaker 2 were built in the last thirty years, would go against the grain of the Ukrainian society where, as one author formulated in the nineteen nineties, he wrote a book, Ukrainian Nationalism, Nationalism, a Minority Faith, where the nationalism was a minority faith and radical nationalism continues to be, or at least continued to be in 2019, a minority faith during the last elections.

Speaker 2 So possible but unlikely given the historical realities of the last 30 plus years.

Speaker 1 I could talk to you for many more hours

Speaker 1 on Chernobyl alone, since you've written a book on Chernobyl and nuclear disaster. There's just a million possible conversations here.
But let me just jump around history a little bit.

Speaker 1 Back to World War II, back before World War II. My grandmother lived through Holodomor and World War II, Nazi-occupied Ukraine.

Speaker 1 Holodomor,

Speaker 1 what do you learn,

Speaker 1 let's say, about human nature and about

Speaker 1 governments and nations from the fact that Holodomor happened? And maybe you could say what it is and why it happened.

Speaker 2 Holodomor is a massive famine in Ukraine between the years 1932 and 1934.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it happened as the result of

Speaker 2 forceful collectivization of the agriculture.

Speaker 2 and attempt on the part of Stalin also

Speaker 2 really roll Ukraine into the Soviet Union with

Speaker 2 basically no potential opposition from Ukraine,

Speaker 2 now national communists.

Speaker 2 So two things came together in December of 1932 when in the same decree Stalin and Molotov signed a decree on the requisition of the grain,

Speaker 2 which lead eventually to the mass starvation and on the banning of Ukrainian language publications and education out in other

Speaker 2 Soviet republics outside of Ukraine, and introducing limitations on the

Speaker 2 so-called Ukrainization policies, so on the

Speaker 2 use of Ukrainian language in Ukraine itself.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the numbers are debated.

Speaker 2 The numbers that

Speaker 2 most of the scholars work today are four million, but again, there are larger numbers as well that that circulate

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 this is the the the the famine of 32 33 was not exclusive ukrainian phenomenon but most of ukraine far in the soviet union died in ukraine and ukraine was the only place where the policy on collecting grain were coming together with the policy of the cleansing of the political leadership, sending people from Moscow to take over the leadership and attack on Ukrainian culture.

Speaker 2 So in terms of what I learn about human nature, it's more me learning about the

Speaker 2 ideologies of the 20th century, because it's not the only famine. in the communist lands, the famine in China, which was in terms of the numbers, much more devastating than that.

Speaker 2 It's in a different category and for a good reason, but you have Holocaust.

Speaker 2 What unites these things

Speaker 2 is the time, this is 20th century,

Speaker 2 what unites them are the dominance in the societies that are doing that, really

Speaker 2 ideologies

Speaker 2 that not just devalued human life.

Speaker 2 but considered that actually the way forward is by destroying large group of populations defined ethnically, religiously, socially, or otherwise.

Speaker 2 Which tells about the time, but tells also about humanity, because for centuries before that, human life was valued. There were enemies, but the idea was that human life can put and you can

Speaker 2 at the end of the day, they can be slaves,

Speaker 2 you can use them for productive force.

Speaker 2 Countries in the the 18th century, we southern Ukraine, they were looking for settlers, for people to bring and live on land.

Speaker 2 You move into the 20th century and there is mass destruction of the population

Speaker 2 in the name of ideologies, which basically are, by definition, destroy human lives.

Speaker 2 And that's what's really so shocking and striking because that's that break with

Speaker 2 not just with issues of morale,

Speaker 2 not just with with issues of humanity,

Speaker 2 with any common sense

Speaker 2 what is happening. And

Speaker 2 I am absolutely convinced that we didn't learn the lesson. I am absolutely convinced that we didn't learn the lesson.

Speaker 2 With turning our page on fascism and communism, we somehow decided that we are free of that. that at least in those terms history came to an end.

Speaker 2 That what is ahead is the future, and nothing of that sort

Speaker 2 would happen, would take place to a degree that people would get in trouble for comparing any statements or events that are happening today

Speaker 2 with

Speaker 2 either communism or fascism.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so I feel responsibility of myself and as a historian in particular

Speaker 2 for

Speaker 2 doing a better job about

Speaker 2 telling people that, well,

Speaker 2 we are who we are and we have as humans our dark side and

Speaker 2 we have to be very careful.

Speaker 1 So there is a human capacity

Speaker 1 to be captured by an idea, an ideology that claims to bring up a better world as the Nazis did, as Soviet Union did,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 on the path of doing that, devaluing human life. That we will bring a better world and and if millions of people have to be tortured on the way to that

Speaker 1 all right, but at least we have a better world and human beings are able to, if not accept that, look the other way.

Speaker 2 Yes, yes. Or i and in the name of a particular nation or race, like like with the third Reich or in the name of the humanity of the future.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 not just the value of human life, destroy human life.

Speaker 1 Is there something fundamental about communism and centralized planning that's part of the problem here? Maybe this also connects the story of Chernobyl,

Speaker 1 where the Chernobyl disaster is not just a story of failure of a nuclear power plant, but it's an entire institution

Speaker 2 of the scientific and nuclear institution but the entirety of the government there is and there is a number of factors of political and social character that that produced chernobyl

Speaker 2 and uh one of them is generally the um atmosphere of secrecy in the soviet union

Speaker 2 uh in the conditions of the cold war

Speaker 2 um Chernobyl reactor was a dual-purpose reactor. It could boil water today and produce enriched uranium tomorrow, right? So it was top secret.
And if there were problems with

Speaker 2 that reactor, those problems were kept secret even at people who operated that reactor.

Speaker 2 That's what happened in Chernobyl.

Speaker 2 Another big, big part of the story, which is

Speaker 2 specifically Soviet,

Speaker 2 that's the nature of the managerial culture and administrative culture, in which people had no right to make their own decisions in their place, in their position.

Speaker 2 A few years before that, Three Mile Island happened, which was a big, big nuclear disaster, but in terms of consequences,

Speaker 2 nothing like Chernobyl.

Speaker 2 And there, in the context of the American legal culture and managerial culture, people who were operators, who were

Speaker 2 in managerial positions, that was their responsibility to take decisions. President Carter came there, but he was not calling shots on none of those issues.

Speaker 2 What you see with Chernobyl, and people who saw HBO Sirius know that very well, the moment the high official arrives, everyone actually falls in line, it's the official who calls the shot.

Speaker 2 And to move population from the city of Pripet, you needed the okay coming from Moscow from the from the very top so that is Soviet story and then there is a global story of cutting corners to to meet either deadlines like it was with that test that they were running at that time

Speaker 2 or to meet production quotas this is not just socialist thing you can replace production quarters with with

Speaker 2 profit

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 you get the same story. So some parts in that story are generally

Speaker 2 reflective

Speaker 2 of

Speaker 2 today's world in general. Others are very specific, very specific for Soviet Union, for Soviet experience.
And then

Speaker 2 the biggest probably Soviet

Speaker 2 part of that story is that on the one hand, the government in Moscow and Kiev, they mobilize all resources to deal with that.

Speaker 2 But they keep information about what is happening and the radiation clouds secret

Speaker 2 from the rest of the population, something that completely would be impossible and was impossible in US and UK, where other accidents happened.

Speaker 2 And then guess what? A few years later,

Speaker 2 the Soviet Union collapses very much also thanks to the mobilization of people over the issue of Chernobyl and nuclear energy. In

Speaker 2 people writing about that subject call it eco-nationalism, ecological nationalism,

Speaker 2 which comes at least in part from

Speaker 2 withholding information from people. And in Ukraine, mobilization didn't start over the issues

Speaker 2 that led to independence, didn't start over the issue of language, or didn't start over the issue of

Speaker 2 national autonomy. It started under the slogans, tell us the truth about Chernobyl.
We want to know whether we live in contaminated areas or not. And that was a very, very

Speaker 2 strong factor that crossed the not just ethnic, religious, linguistic lines.

Speaker 2 lines between members of the party and not members of the party of the top leadership and not in military and civilian because it turned out that the party card didn't protect you from

Speaker 2 being affected by radiation.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 all national mobilization happens,

Speaker 2 the first mass manifestations are about Chernobyl, not about anything else.

Speaker 1 That's fascinating. I mean, for people who might not know, Chernobyl is located in Ukraine.

Speaker 1 It would be, it's a fascinating view that Chernobyl might be one of the critical sort of threshold catalysts for the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's very interesting.

Speaker 1 Just as a small aside,

Speaker 1 I guess this is a good moment to give some love to the HBO series.

Speaker 1 It made me, even though it's British accents and so on, it made me realize that some of these stories in Eastern Europe could be told very effectively

Speaker 1 through film, through series. It was quite a, it's, I mean, it was so incredibly well done.
And maybe I can ask you, historically speaking,

Speaker 1 were you impressed?

Speaker 2 I was. I was.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I think that the

Speaker 2 mini-series are

Speaker 2 very truthful on a number of levels and very untruthful on some others.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 they got excellent.

Speaker 2 very well the the macro and micro levels.

Speaker 2 So the macro level is the issue of the big truth and and the the the story there is very much built around the theme that i just discussed now it's about the the the cost of lies right and the the soviet union lying

Speaker 2 to the people and and and that's that's what the film explores so that that that's i call it a big truth about chernobu and they got a lot of

Speaker 2 minor things really, really, very well, like the curtains on the windows, like how the houses looked from inside and outside.

Speaker 2 I didn't see any post-Soviet film or any Western film that would be so good at capturing those everyday details. But then there is a huge gray area in between big truth and small truth

Speaker 2 of the recreating the environment. And that's how you get from one to another.

Speaker 2 And then you see the KGB officers coming and taking someone out of the meeting and arresting which was not necessary you see the soviet boss threatening someone to throw the person from the helicopter so

Speaker 2 you get this hollywood sort of things despite the fact that it's hb or hb or serious and

Speaker 2 they're the best really in terms as a film in the fourth uh episode where they can completely decided just to hell with the reality and let's let's make a film.

Speaker 2 So they bring Lygasov to the one of the key characters to the

Speaker 2 this court meetings that they bring the key Soviet party boss Sherbina. He wasn't there.
They create a drama there.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 they got

Speaker 2 the main thing, the big truth, right? And that's why I like this

Speaker 2 production.

Speaker 1 Sometimes you have to

Speaker 1 show what something felt like, you have to go bigger than it actually was. I mean, if you, I don't know,

Speaker 1 if you experience heartbreak and

Speaker 1 you see a film about it, you want there to be explosions.

Speaker 2 You want to see this in images,

Speaker 2 visible, right?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 by the question, again, I just mentioned KGB marching in and

Speaker 2 some party leader giving a speech.

Speaker 2 They were not given that speech, but the sense was there and it was in the air. And I, as people of my generation who were there,

Speaker 2 knew that and recognized that. But for new generation, whether they are in Ukraine, in Russia, in the US, in Britain,

Speaker 2 in Zimbabwe, anywhere, yeah,

Speaker 2 you have to

Speaker 2 do this

Speaker 2 little

Speaker 2 untruths and introduce them. And I had a very interesting

Speaker 2 on-air conversation with

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 author of the script, Amazing. And I asked him the question of: okay, the film declared really the importance of the truth, but how do you square that with

Speaker 2 the need in the film to

Speaker 2 really,

Speaker 2 put it mildly, to go

Speaker 2 beyond the measures of truth, what our understanding of that term is.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, well, I suppose it is a bit terrifying that some of the most dramatic moments in history are probably quite mundane. The decisions to begin wars, invasions.

Speaker 1 They're probably

Speaker 1 something like a Zoom meeting

Speaker 1 on a random Tuesday. in today's workplace.
So it's not like there's dramatic music playing. These are just human decisions, decisions, and they command armies, and they command destruction.

Speaker 1 I personally,

Speaker 1 because of that, believe in the power of individuals to be able to stop wars, not just start wars, individual leaders.

Speaker 1 So let me just ask you about nuclear safety, because there's an interesting point you make. You wrote in the book in Atoms and Ashes, a global history of nuclear disaster.

Speaker 1 So technically, nuclear energy is extremely safe. In terms of the number of people died per energy generated, it's much safer than coal and oil, for example, as far as I understand.

Speaker 1 But the case you also make is, you write, quote, many of the political, economic, social, and cultural factors that led to the accidents of the past are still with us today,

Speaker 1 making the nuclear industry vulnerable to repeating old mistakes in new and unexpected ways. And any new accidents are certain to create new anti-nuclear mobilization.

Speaker 1 And then you continue with, this makes the nuclear industry not only risky to operate, but also impossible to count on as a long-term solution to an overwhelming problem.

Speaker 1 So can you explain that perspective? It's an interesting, it's an interesting one. So speaking to the psychology of when an accident does happen, it has a dramatic effect.
And

Speaker 1 also speaking to the fact that accidents can happen not because of the safety of the nuclear power plant, but of the underlying structure of government that oversees it.

Speaker 2 Yes, I wrote a book on Chernobyl and then tried to

Speaker 2 understand Chernobyl better, but placing it in the context of other disasters as a historian and was looking at the political factors and social factors and cultural factors, not the physics

Speaker 2 or engineering

Speaker 2 part of the story. And

Speaker 2 the factors that are still with us

Speaker 2 are the,

Speaker 2 like it was the case in Chernobyl, the authoritarian regimes, right? And high centralization of the decision making and

Speaker 2 desire to cut corners and also the issues associated with secrecy. So

Speaker 2 that is with us. If you look at the

Speaker 2 where the

Speaker 2 future of the nuclear industry is at now at this point, it's the regimes and parts in the Middle East. That's a big new frontier.

Speaker 2 The countries that are not particularly known for the history of democratic existence,

Speaker 2 where we also have the situation that we had at Three Mile Island, that we had at

Speaker 2 Chernobyl. This is the first generation engineers, nuclear engineers, right? So people

Speaker 2 where the

Speaker 2 country doesn't have a lot of experience in generations after generations working in that particular industry, where it's all new.

Speaker 2 That is certainly

Speaker 2 additional risk. And what we got now is this current war, is something that

Speaker 2 not that people completely didn't expect, but didn't happen in the past.

Speaker 2 You see the war coming to the nuclear sites. Chernobyl was taken over by the Russian army or National Guard rather

Speaker 2 on the first day of the invasion. Then there was Zaporizhia, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, where the battle was waged on the territory of the nuclear power plant,

Speaker 2 the missiles being fired, buildings catching fire.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the situation

Speaker 2 that brought the Fukushima disaster was there at Zaporizhia more than once.

Speaker 2 And Fukushima came because the reactors were shut down, as they are at Zaporizhia, but they still needed electricity to bring water and to cool them down.

Speaker 2 And in Fukushima case, it was the tsunami that cut off the supply of electricity.

Speaker 2 In the case of Zaporizhia, there was the warfare that was happening in the area around Zaporizhia that did the same effect. So we have 440 reactors in the world today, plus minus.

Speaker 2 None of them was designed to withstand the direct missile attack or to function in the conditions of the warfare.

Speaker 2 If operators, they're human, they make mistakes like they did at Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, but think also if the war is happening around them, if they're not sure what is happening with

Speaker 2 their families, if they don't know whether there will be next missile, whether it will hit their room,

Speaker 2 the control room or not,

Speaker 2 that multiplies also. So

Speaker 2 we are in a situation where

Speaker 2 we are not done yet with the nuclear accidents.

Speaker 2 Each time, it's not like we don't pay attention or we don't learn.

Speaker 2 Smart people work on that and after every accident try to figure the way how not

Speaker 2 to step

Speaker 2 into the same trap, but

Speaker 2 next accident would actually expose a new vulnerability. You deal with Chernobyl and then tsunami comes.
You deal with tsunami and then war comes. And

Speaker 2 we really,

Speaker 2 in that sense,

Speaker 2 we have sometimes wild imagination, but sometimes it's difficult to imagine what can happen next. So we are not done.

Speaker 2 There will be nuclear accidents, unfortunately, in the future. And

Speaker 2 that makes nuclear energy so problematic when you count on it to fight climate change. I'll explain why.
You gave the figures how many people die from burning coal, from how many people die from

Speaker 2 radiation.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it's a good argument. Some people would question them because it's it's also the issue of not just dying, but

Speaker 2 impact of radiation on cancer, on our health, which is not completely understood yet. So it's still there is a lot of question marks.
But let's assume what you are saying. That's the figures.

Speaker 2 That's how it is.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 we as people, we, for whatever reason, are not afraid of coal.

Speaker 2 But we are very much afraid of radiation. It's invisible.

Speaker 2 It's COVID. It's everywhere.

Speaker 2 And you can't see it.

Speaker 2 And then you start having issues. And then you have stamina

Speaker 2 problems.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 during the COVID, the governments closed the borders.

Speaker 2 Maybe a good idea, maybe not so good ideas.

Speaker 2 Isolation. So that was the way.

Speaker 2 Government started to fight for access to Pfizer, to Moderna,

Speaker 2 to Sputnik, to whatever it is, to vaccine.

Speaker 2 So now back to the radiation. What is happening

Speaker 2 once Chernobyl happens?

Speaker 2 That's the highest point in the development of the nuclear industry so far in terms of

Speaker 2 how many new reactors were commissioned or the licenses were issued.

Speaker 2 The next

Speaker 2 reactor after

Speaker 2 Three Mile Island in the US, go ahead, was given, it seems to me, 10 years ago or something like that. The Fukushima happens, the reaction is in China to that as well.
They're very much concerned.

Speaker 2 So there is a saying in the field, Chernobyl anywhere is Chernobyl everywhere. After Fukushima, Germany decides to go nuclear-free and gets there at the expense of

Speaker 2 burning coal. So that's how we react.
And each major accident, that means global freeze

Speaker 2 on the nuclear reactor production for at least another 10 years. So that's what I mean that nuclear industry is

Speaker 2 not just

Speaker 2 in terms of

Speaker 2 technology, not just in terms of radiation impact on health, but also politically a very, very unreliable option. option.

Speaker 1 And to you,

Speaker 1 you suspect that that's an irreparable aspect of human nature and the human mind, that there are certain things that just create a kind of panic, invisible threats of this kind, whether it's a virus

Speaker 1 or radiation.

Speaker 1 There's something about the mind, if I get a stomachache in the United States after Fukushima, I kind of think it's probably radiation, this kind of irrational type of thinking.

Speaker 1 And that's not possible to repair?

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 2 we can be trained, right?

Speaker 2 We can be pretty smart, aren't we?

Speaker 2 But generally,

Speaker 2 we are afraid of things that we see.

Speaker 2 But even more, we are afraid of things that we don't see. And radiation is one of those.

Speaker 1 Let's zoom out on the world. We talked about the war in Ukraine.

Speaker 1 How does the war in Ukraine change the world order? When you just look at everything that's going on, zoom out a bit. China,

Speaker 1 the Israel-Gaza war, the Middle East,

Speaker 1 India.

Speaker 1 What is interesting to you, important to think about in the coming years and decades?

Speaker 2 As a historian, and I'm trained that way,

Speaker 2 I have a feeling of deja vu.

Speaker 2 I see

Speaker 2 the Cold War is coming back

Speaker 2 in many of its features.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the war started, and we discussed that

Speaker 2 in 2014, at least in my interpretation, with

Speaker 2 Russia trying to

Speaker 2 really re-establish its control over the post-Soviet space and Ukraine was crucial for

Speaker 2 that project.

Speaker 2 And the more globally Russian vision since 1990s was that

Speaker 2 they didn't like the American monopolar world.

Speaker 2 They knew and realized that they couldn't go back to the bipolar world of

Speaker 2 the Cold War era. So the vision was multipolar world,

Speaker 2 in which, again, it wasn't just academic exercise, it was a political exercise in which Russia would be one of the centers, one of the poles,

Speaker 2 on par with China, on par with the European Union, on par with the United States.

Speaker 2 That's very broadly speaking the context in which in which the war starts

Speaker 2 in 2014.

Speaker 2 Where we are now?

Speaker 2 Well, we are now in Russia certainly trying to regain its military strength.

Speaker 2 But no one actually believes that Russia is the sort of a superpower it was imagined before 2022.

Speaker 2 We see certainly Russia

Speaker 2 finding the way to deal with the sanctions,

Speaker 2 but we don't see certainly Russia as

Speaker 2 an

Speaker 2 economic power with any sort of a future. So it is not an implosion of the Russian military, economic and political power, but it's significantly actually, it is diminished.
So

Speaker 2 today very difficult to imagine Russia emerging as another pole of the multipolar world.

Speaker 2 Not impossible, but the war certainly made that

Speaker 2 very problematic and much more difficult.

Speaker 2 On the other hand, what the war did, it basically awakened the West.

Speaker 2 the old West,

Speaker 2 United States and Western Europe, transatlantic alliance.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 on the top of that, there are East European countries that are even much stronger proponents of assistance for Ukraine than is Germany

Speaker 2 or the United States of America. So it is the replay of the Cold War story, the return of the West, that one of the chapters in my book, The Russo-Ukrainian War, is called that way.

Speaker 2 We also can see the elements of the rebuilding of the Beijing-Moscow alliance of the 1950s, which was a very important part of the Cold War.

Speaker 2 It was extremely important part of the Korean War that in many ways

Speaker 2 launched also the the Cold War globally. So I see a lot of parallels of going back to the time of the Cold War.

Speaker 2 And the bipolar world that emerges, it's not anymore the world focused on Washington and Moscow, it's more like world focused on Washington and Beijing. And then there are countries in between.

Speaker 2 There are countries in between that

Speaker 2 join one block or another block that is emerging that is not

Speaker 2 fully formed.

Speaker 2 This is, in my opinion, makes the task of

Speaker 2 us historians to really go back to the Cold War and look

Speaker 2 through new perspective on the history of that conflict because there is a lot of things that we can learn.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 in some ways, history does repeat itself here. So, now it's a Cold War with China and the United States.
What's a hopeful trajectory for the 21st century, for the rest of it?

Speaker 2 The hopeful trajectory is

Speaker 2 really

Speaker 2 trying to be as wise and as lucky

Speaker 2 as

Speaker 2 our predecessors during the Cold War were.

Speaker 2 Because the dominant discourse so far about the Cold War was what a horrible thing that Cold War was.

Speaker 2 What did we do wrong? How did we end up in the Cold War?

Speaker 2 And I think, especially today, this is a wrong question to ask.

Speaker 2 The right question to ask is:

Speaker 1 How did it happen?

Speaker 2 What did we do so right?

Speaker 2 That

Speaker 2 for now more than 70 years we don't have a World War?

Speaker 2 How come that after World War I, World War II came within 20 years?

Speaker 2 How come that

Speaker 2 what helped us to keep the world on the brink but still away from the global war for such a long period of time? How to keep the Cold War cold?

Speaker 2 That's the biggest lesson that the history of the Cold War can give us. And I don't think we ask the question quite often enough, ask the question that way.

Speaker 2 And if you don't ask right questions, we don't get right answers.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you've written a book, a great book on the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Speaker 1 We came

Speaker 1 very close, not to just another world war, but to

Speaker 1 a nuclear war

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 the destruction of

Speaker 1 human civilization as we know it

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 i i guess it's a good question to ask uh what do we do so right and maybe one of the answers could be that we just got lucky

Speaker 1 and and the question is how do we how do we keep getting lucky

Speaker 2 um luck luck is clearly clearly one of the factors in in the in um

Speaker 2 Cuban missile crisis because what happened there and there is one of the lessons is that

Speaker 2 eventually the commanders at the top they believe that they have all the cards they negotiate with each other they try to to see who who blinks first in in the game of nuclear brinkmanship The trick is

Speaker 2 that they don't control fully people on the ground.

Speaker 2 The most dangerous moment, or one of the most dangerous moments of the Cuban missile crisis was the Soviet missile shooting down the American airplane, killing the pilot. An act of war, right?

Speaker 2 So technically we're already in war.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the order to shoot the missile was given with Moscow having no clue what was going on the ground. Moscow never gave gave approval for that.

Speaker 2 And again, I described that in book many times about Kennedy bringing back his wisdom from World War II years. There always will be SOB who didn't get the order or

Speaker 2 missed things. And that was happening on the American side as well.

Speaker 2 People who believe that they're in control really are not in control. And that can escalate

Speaker 2 whether they were

Speaker 2 very often against against the issue so that is one lesson but going back to what

Speaker 2 why we are still here and why why the world didn't didn't end up in 1962 is that the leadership and and that's that's i i come to the issue that you strongly believe in that

Speaker 1 people

Speaker 2 personalities matter leaders matter

Speaker 2 they were they were very different right

Speaker 2 Age, education, political careers, understanding what politics are, and so on and so forth.

Speaker 1 You mean Khrushchev?

Speaker 2 Khrushchev and Kennedy, yes. But they had one thing in common, that in one way they belonged to the same generation.

Speaker 2 That was the generation of the Bikini Atoll.

Speaker 2 That was the generation of the hydrogen bomb. The bomb that, unlike the atomic bomb, they knew could destroy the world.

Speaker 2 And they were scared.

Speaker 2 They were scared of

Speaker 2 the nuclear weapons.

Speaker 2 And they tried to do whatever they could, pushing against their advisors

Speaker 2 or

Speaker 2 trying to deal with

Speaker 2 their anxieties.

Speaker 2 The first is true for Kennedy,

Speaker 2 later maybe for Khrushchev, to make sure that that the war between the United States and

Speaker 2 the Soviet Union doesn't start because they knew that that war

Speaker 2 would be a nuclear war. So

Speaker 2 we have a very, very

Speaker 2 paradoxical sort of situation. The crisis occurred because of the nuclear weapons, because Khrushchev put them on Cuba.

Speaker 2 But the crisis was resolved and we didn't end in the Third World War because of the nuclear weapons, because

Speaker 2 people,

Speaker 2 leaders, were afraid of them.

Speaker 2 And that's where I want to put emphasis. It's not that the nuclear weapons created crisis or solved the crisis.
It's basically our perception of them.

Speaker 2 And we are now in the age after the Cold War era, with the new generation of voters, with the new generation of politicians. We don't belong to the generation of Bikini at all.

Speaker 2 We maybe know what Bikini is, but we think that this is something

Speaker 1 different,

Speaker 2 that this is something else. And

Speaker 2 it's very important.

Speaker 1 It's so fascinating how that fades into memory. That the power and the respect and fear of the power of nuclear weapons just fades into memory.
And that we may very well make the same mistakes again.

Speaker 2 Yes, we can.

Speaker 1 Another leader said that, I believe, but about a totally different topic. Well, like you said, I'm also also glad that we're here more as a civilization, that we still seem to be going on.

Speaker 1 There's several billion of us, and I'm also glad that the two of us are here. I've read a lot of your books.
I've been recommending it. Please keep writing.
Thank you for talking today.

Speaker 1 This is an honor.

Speaker 2 Thank you very much, Alex. It was a pleasure.

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Serhip Lohi. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, let me leave you with some words from Ernest Hemingway.

Speaker 1 Never think that war, no matter how necessary nor how justified, is not a crime.

Speaker 1 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.