Timothy Snyder: The Making of Modern Ukraine. Class 3: Geography and Ancient History

(solemn music) - Okay, greetings everybody. Welcome to lecture three. I knew when I was gonna give this lecture that it would be after I had gone to Ukraine and back in-between. So the nice people who are filming this asked me not to wear the same shirt as I wore last week, both times, which I'm sure you guys noticed. I didn't notice. It was very tactful for you guys not to mention that. (class laughs) 'Cause I could've just worn the same shirt all semester, and you guys would've been cool. You wouldn't have said a thing. I

am wearing the same shirt that I wore on the train, because the train is 30- It's like, from here to, in case you were thinking about doing this next weekend, it's a solid 35 hours from here to the center of Kyiv. And there's no way to make it shorter. That's like in the best case. So I knew when I was gonna give this lecture that I was gonna be going there and back again. And so I thought I would make this subject of this lecture, what I'm calling Geography and Deep History, or maybe just Deep

Geography for short. That is, the way that we think about places and how the way we think about places then has to do with how we apprehend what happens in the world. So the subject today is going to be naming and placing and how the names and the places then affect how we understand events before our eyes. Which may seem a little misty and abstract, but hopefully as I get into the geography and then a little bit into the war, it will come clear how the deep notions that we have of place tend to suggest,

trigger, push us in certain directions when we're confronted with events. So what is the place I was going to? So in the reading, this is kind of ambiguous. So the place that I was going to, maybe it was Ukraine, or maybe it was the Ukraine? What's the difference? I have already told some of you what the difference is, so don't cheat. But what is the difference between going to "Ukraine" and going to "the Ukraine"? I mean, you probably know that if you say "the Ukraine", you'll get disapproving looks from the Ukrainians. But beyond that, what's

the difference? Yeah. - [Student] Saying, going to the Ukraine implies that Ukraine is a region, a sub-region of something like Russia or the Soviet Union. - Exactly. So if you say "the Ukraine", it already, it means, in Polish you can actually say "going to the Lithuania", which you can't say in English, but that suggests where this all comes from. It's important to remember that English is not the master language for everything. And that very often, the way we say things in English actually comes from somewhere else. So we say "the Ukraine" because in Russian and

in Polish, you can say, "na Ukraina". Yeah, I even have this on the sheet this time, you can say "na Ukraina", which is something like more like "at". So you're going to someplace which is not quite defined. As opposed to "v", "v Ukraina" or "v Ukraini," which means "in Ukraine". It's a place that's like, if it's a "v", that means it can be contained. So it has a border. It's a defined place. Maybe a state, because a state has borders and a state is defined. So if you say "na", you're not really talking about a

state. And you may be talking about something which is kind of misty and undefined and maybe a little bit poetic. So in your reading, up to now, like the article from Rudnyts'kyi, who cannot be accused of being anything but a Ukrainian, it was still okay in the '60s for him to be saying, or maybe it was required of him, I'm not sure, to say "the Ukraine". And while we're on the subject of- Okay, so is that clear, the "v" and the "na"? So it's very important, if you're speaking Polish or Ukrainian or Russian. And so,

the Poles, it's interesting, the Poles all switched over in the early '90s. They switched over. When I learned to speak Polish, you were supposed to say, "na Litvia", but now people say- that means sort of "at Lithuania", but now people say "v Litvia", meaning "in the state of Lithuania". And "na Ukraina" was how I was taught to say it in Polish. But now I would say "v Ukraina" because it's a state. And Ukrainians have very clear ideas about this, too. So while we're on the subject, though, you might have noticed that the capital of Ukraine

is spelled a couple of different ways in your readings as well. What's the difference there? Anybody wanna take a stab at that? Yeah. - [Student] One is the Ukrainian spelling and the other is the Russian spelling and pronunciation. - Yeah. One is a transliteration. Exactly. So you guys know what transliteration is? There are many alphabets, and when you render from one alphabet to another alphabet, that's called transliteration or transcription, technically. So in the standard English spelling of the capital of Ukraine, for a very long time, until very, very recently, in fact, was Kiev, K-I-E-V. And

that was a transliteration from Russian. In Ukrainian, it's Kyiv, hence the English transliteration, K-Y-I-V. Which is a little bit awkward, because there just aren't that many words that don't involve '90s punk bands, which have Ys and Is in front of them. The Y-I is not a normal combination in English. And this was an evolution. So in my early books, I wrote Kiev, K-I-E-V, just because I thought, "This has been standard in English for so long. It's not really such a big difference between Kiev and Kyiv. People reading English are just gonna be distracted by this

Y and the I together. Why should I do it?" But then at a certain point, I changed. The last few books, I spelled it with the Ukrainian transliteration. And if you want, you can check and see when the New York Times changes. Because the New York Times always does everything right. (class laughs) And, (laughs) thank you, that was good. The New York Times always does everything right, but even the New York Times has to change from time to time, how they're gonna do certain things. And so you can check and see when they changed from

spelling it one way to another way, 'cause that represents a certain kind of cultural consensus. And so, these things change. And the reason why it's interesting that they change is that these things that might seem to be superficial, like language, are actually very deep, because they're the things that you read and you take in, you don't call them into question. And then they may form how you see the world when you're confronted with something surprising. So, the "v" and "na" or the "the": Is it a region or a country? Kiev or Kyiv: Is it Russian

or is it Ukrainian? It's a pretty big- And what is actually normal in English? This is really interesting, because you might think, let's say, you're, I'm assuming many of you are native English speakers. All of you know English, or you wouldn't be in this class. Or you're in this class doing some kind of weird meditation that involves listening to a language you don't understand, which is cool. You'll probably pass, anyway. (class laughs) I'm assuming if you're doing that, you're taking it pass/fail. But you might think, "Well in English, we all have a certain distance from

all this. There's a certain objectivity, whatever it is in English is somehow just neutral." But it's not. What it is in English has effects too, very much so. And what it is in English is also subject to change, as we've seen in both of these examples. Just in the little span of time between when your readings start and now, the basic uses in English for both the country and its capital have changed. And you're presumably, if you have kids, which I know that none of you are thinking about now, because when you signed to go

to Yale, you promised not to get married and not have kids, I know. But when you have kids, presumably, they will think K-Y-I-V is totally normal. Maybe you already think it's totally normal. And they'll think, it will not occur to them that it might have been some other way. But these things change all the time. Now this notion of deep geography also has to do, so I've talked just about of words and letters. It also has to do with narratives. So a story can tell you where you are. A story can tell you where you

are before you get there. And this occurred to me during this trip, because I was talking to a bunch of American diplomats, and we were pondering, I mean, just to put it very briefly and brutally, we were pondering why every American gets everything wrong about Ukraine all the time. Like that basic question, which you can't help dealing, you can't help asking with respect to the war, because even the people who were supposed to know what they're talking about were totally wrong. It's a luxury for me to say this because I wasn't, but in general, everybody

was totally wrong about everything with respect to the war. Ukrainians are gonna lose after three days. They can't possibly fight back. They're gonna lose, it's a stalemate, blah, blah, blah. Everything that the consensus has said in the US has been wrong the whole time. And you can't kind of say, "Well, this is just a matter of lack of military analysis," or whatever. No, there's something else deeper going on. And we were sort of trying to ponder that together. And I think it has to do with the deep narrative that everyone is taught. Because the deep

narrative that everyone is taught, all these diplomats were taught it too, everybody who studied East Europe, almost everybody, not in this class, but almost everyone who studied East European history in the US has the narrative, which says: There was Kyiv. And then, from Kyiv, somehow there was Moscow, there was some kind of transfer. And the thing in Moscow was the same state as the thing in Kyiv, even though that, I'm not gonna say "even thoughs", I'm just gonna try to tell the narrative. The thing in Moscow somehow inherited the traditions of the thing in Kyiv.

And therefore the thing in Moscow fulfilled itself, when it actually incorporated Kyiv in the late 17th century. That was somehow natural. That's part of the destiny of this place. And it's normal that Moscow and Kyiv will be together forever. And in some way, it's all Russia. It's all Russia. So I didn't do a good job with that narrative, because frankly, that's not what I'm being, that's not my job here to do a good job with that narrative. But that's the basic narrative. But the point is that everybody who has ever studied this has that narrative.

And if you have that narrative, then it makes you think that Russia's a real place. And what is Ukraine? Because in that narrative, nothing called Ukraine ever appears. So there must be something suspicious about Ukraine. It must be somehow invented or somehow marginal or somehow provincial or in some way questionable. Whereas nobody ever questions Russia. No one ever- I mean, is that wrong? No one ever questions that Russia is a real place. No one ever questioned the Soviet Union was a real place either. And then, one day it ceased to exist. No one ever questions

that Russia is a real place. There's a non-zero chance that the Russian Federation, as we know it, will cease to exist. In fact, there's a 100% chance that every place, I mean, that's, that shouldn't... Know there's a 100% chance the Russian Federation will cease to exist. All states that have ever existed have ceased to exist. There's also a 100% chance the United States of America will cease to exist. Probably not before you graduate, don't worry. (class laughs) Unless you're freshmen, in which case, eh, I'm not so sure. (class laughs) But all states cease to exist.

So any narrative about how something's gonna be around forever is obviously going to be wrong. But my point here is that as I was sitting with my fellow Americans and thinking this over, it kind of seemed clear that the reason why they, Americans, people generally, have trouble imagining that Russia could lose this war to Ukraine has something to do with the fact that Ukraine isn't quite real in their minds and Russia is real. And they wouldn't say that directly, but the narrative which you're taught when you're younger is gonna be there for you always. We

live in time in one direction. Our history education happens in only one direction. And the things that get in first tend to stay. Now, we don't have to spend a lot of time challenging that narrative. That's not really the point here. The point though, is that, just if you believe, if this is your deep geography, that this was always Russia, and then if it wasn't Russia, that was some kind of divergence. If that's the way you see it, then naturally your brain, when you get to thinking about the war, of course, you're gonna think Russia's

gonna win. Because this was always Russia, and Ukraine is some kind of exception. Yeah, do you have a question? Oh, sorry. Okay. And, "always" is a very powerful word, but it's also a very comfortable word. We really like "always". We really like for things to have a kind of durability, continuity. We like for there to be something in the world where we know its shape, and we know its shape is permanent. And it is a little disturbing when it turns out that none of these things that we think are permanent actually are. That's a little

disturbing. And so Russia has made it into the level, I think it's fair to say, you can correct me, I mean, I realize you guys are young, you're from a different century and all that, but Russia has made it into the realm of the kind of calmly permanent. It's up there with, I don't know what, Star Trek, hydrogen, it's like things that have always been there. Whereas Ukraine has not. Whether that's fair or not, it's probably unfair. But I think that's the case. And we just don't like it when something which is "always" is called

into question. So, "always" is very comforting. And of course, Russia itself, that word "Russia", in a deep geography, it's not clear where the borders of that Russia are. I mean during this war, there's been a lot of really, quite, let's call it ambitious Russian propaganda. There are now placate, what do we call placate? - [Student] Posters. - No, wrong. Billboards. (snaps fingers) There are now billboards. I mean, that's true, but like billboards. You get points for speed though, both of you. And it wasn't wrong, I was just thinking of a different- Like billboards in Russia,

which say Russia has no borders. Which is one way to think about it. No borders at all. But my point is that, when we think of Russia, we could be thinking of the Soviet Union, we could be thinking of the Russian Empire, we could be thinking of a lot of different things with very different borders. And since the borders change, it's a big place, we're not surprised to learn that a lot of things are Russia. A lot of things turn out to be Russia. So you get my point. There is a reason why basically everybody

except the military historians kept saying Ukraine is gonna lose. And one of the puzzles of this class, if you want, is to think about why that is. Why would everyone be wrong? And the suggestion that I'm making is that this thing that I'm calling deep geography has something to do with it, with the words, the spellings, the narratives that indicate to us what is real and what is not real, before we get into the empirical world. Because as I suggested before, if you read, there aren't that many military historians left, but if you read them

and their boring threads about logistics and all this stuff, they don't know anything about Russia or Ukraine, but they know where the rivers are, and they know where the bridges are and so on. And they've done a much, much better job than the people who are supposed to be Russia specialists. Why is that? Why is it that not knowing anything about Russia seems to be an advantage in predicting who's gonna win this war? And so you see what I'm trying to suggest, that if what you know about Russia has this kind of metaphysical underlay, which

is actually, then, pushing the empirical evidence around, that's going to be a problem for you. So basically what I've done so far- Yeah, go for it. - [Student] Is there something distinctive about America that makes our narrative wrong? Like, is there a different European, because of the proximity to the area, that the predictor- - Well, in Poland, there is, yeah. (laughs) In Poland, there is. All of this sort of stuff that I'm calling anti-colonial and so on, like the Poles and the Ukrainians have been making these arguments for a long time. But as soon as

you get west of Poland, no, it's the basic, it's the same story dominates. That Kievan Rus' somehow becomes Moscow, somehow all the same place. When Moscow takes over Ukraine in the 17th century or in the 18th century, that's somehow a fulfillment, even though Kyiv and Moscow have been apart for 500 years, even though Kyiv has never been ruled by Moscow before, somehow that's a natural fulfillment of history. 500 years is a long time, by the way. But that basic story is dominant in Germany and France, and in England, it's not just us. It's a story,

I'll get to why it's an ironic story. So, what I've been doing so far, is I've been making a case for how important literary history actually is. Like how important culture actually is, and how important cultural critique can be, like being aware of the narratives and the words and so on can help you to understand the politics, or being aware of the culture can help you understand political judgements. What I want to move on to now, is just a word about how you then address this. How you begin to talk about it. And one way

that we'll be talking about it in this course is the very broad approach of colonial history. Where one of the first things that you do, if you're doing colonial history, is you question the neutral claims of knowledge. You question, whether the things that have been laid down might in some way have been laid down with an imperial spin, which has to then be queried. So if you're doing colonial history, you're taking for granted that there's, that the libraries have been organized the wrong way. Or at least they've been, I won't say wrong, but they've been

organized a certain way, that even the language has been organized a certain way, so that you don't see some things that you might otherwise see. Now, these are arguments that many of you might be more familiar with in an American context. Where you would say that in American history, one has to be very careful, because American history has been laid down in such a way that you might not see, for example, the history of enslaved people. That's probably a very familiar argument. But that's a generic anti-colonial argument that can be applied in lots of other

settings around the world, including in Russia and in Ukraine. So in colonial history, you're asking yourself to question the apparent neutrality of knowledge, including the instruments of knowledge: languages, spellings, maps, library organizations. And you're also asking yourself, "Can people change halfway?" So if these concepts have been laid down into us and we've accepted them as neutral, are we actually capable of catching ourselves halfway? Which is a very important history question. Because if it's not possible, then we might as well give up on history, because we all have a lot of legends laid into us, imperial

and otherwise. And getting to history is a matter of being able to say, "Huh, well, maybe some of the things I'm committed to maybe might not be correct." So I want one of you to figure out how many lecture classes there are on Ukraine, on Ukrainian history right now in the US. 'Cause I'm gonna say one, and I want you guys to prove that there's another lecture class going on on Ukraine in the United States right now. I'm gonna guess that, despite the fact that it's in the news and so on, I'm gonna guess there's

only one. And that's sort of, that would be weird, wouldn't it? I mean, would you go that far with me? I'm gonna say one, maybe two. Like full-on lecture classes that are just about Ukraine. Not classes where somebody mentions Ukraine, or a Ukrainian poem is assigned, but a full-on class about Ukraine. In our country with 300 million people, in our fantastic higher educational system, I'm gonna go with one, and I'm gonna be surprised if it's more than two. So somebody figure that out by next class. Because it's an example of what I'm talking about with

the institutions. Because no one would disagree now with the proposition that something important is going on in Ukraine. If something important is going on in Ukraine, that means something important could go on in Ukraine. If something important could go on in Ukraine, why are we so woefully unprepared for that? There has to be an answer to that question. It has to go somewhere, it has to go somewhere deep. So if you're doing colonial history, you question the neutrality of knowledge, you look for ways, and one of your methods is you look for ways for the

colonized to talk back. Not that they're right, by the way. It's not about how one is right and the other is wrong. That would be oh, too simple, right? But rather, when you hear how the colonized talk back, then it shakes you a little bit and gets you thinking about how you might do things another way. So I was in Kyiv for several days and I stayed up late watching, 'cause I didn't anything else to do, actually, I had a lot of other stuff to do, (laughs) but I stayed up late watching Ukrainian television because

I find it just really ethnographically interesting to soak in the news in a country where something's going on. And they have ways of talking back. Later in the semester, you're assigned an article about "ruscism," that I wrote. Ruscism, to make it very simple, is a kind of merger of the words "Russian" and "fascism". And ruscism, or with the personal noun, Ruscisti, has become a pretty standard way of referring to Russians who are invading Ukraine. So standard in the sense that the newscasters use it. They don't say "Russia". They rarely say "Russians". They almost never say

"Russia". They occasionally say "the Russian Federation". But usually they talk about the Ruscisti, and they talk about ruscism. And when they refer the country, they're calling it "Moscovia". Why would you call it Moscovia? Besides the fact that sounds sort of cool. Why would you call it Moscovia? Go for it. - [Student] You're breaking the link between Russia and Kievan Rus'. - Yes. You're taking the Rus'. So, Russia is called Rus', which is a name that Russia took in 1721 when the Russian- when the Russian Empire was founded. If you call it Moscovia, you're taking away

the historical reference to Rus' and you're also kind of naming it as a smaller country than it is. And you're suggesting that its boundaries might have a certain flexibility. (chuckles) You're also kind of suggesting that when you say Moscovia. The other phrase they use a lot as a euphemism for Russia is "aggressor state". They say aggressor state. Which is like neutral. "It's the aggressor state." But it's also not neutral because you're suggesting that that state might always be an aggressor, and so on. So the next thing that I want to talk about in this notion

of geography and deep geography and deep history is I want us to think a little bit about this late 20th century, early 21st century notion, that of globalization, and the idea that globalization has made all this kind of careful work that we've done in the first few lectures of this class irrelevant. Because what globalization does- this is the argument. What globalization has done is that, to use Thomas Friedman's phrase, it's flattened the world. It's kind of made everything the same everywhere. I mean, his example, one of his examples, was airport lounges, which frankly, I don't

think is a great example, not least because they're really different. I mean, the ones in America are terrible, for example. Okay. But I give it as a joke in a different way, because of course, airport lounges is not a representative experience. So the fact that airport lounges might be similar, or McDonald's might be similar, doesn't really take you very far. But what I'm really going for here is the overall argument that since the end of communism, something like that, since the rise of global trade, the second globalization, things are basically interchangeable. Places are basically becoming

more like other places. And people are also becoming interchangeable. Because there are only so many ideas in the world and we share them all instantly through the Internet, goes the idea, therefore we're interchangeable. Maximus and I are interchangeable. Zhenya and Maximus are interchangeable. So it doesn't matter what TF you have, actually. (students chuckle) We're all basically interchangeable because we're all sharing ideas all the time. And there are only so many ideas, and we're sharing them instantaneously. So maybe you don't have the idea I have right now, but you can have it instantaneously. So this is

the notion. So in this utopian view, space doesn't really matter. Traveling distances doesn't really matter. 'Cause we're all really kind of all in the same place in the same time. Now the objections to this are pretty clear. One of them is, does information really travel? In the world where we are, well over 90% of the supporters of Viktor Orbán and Hungary believe that Ukraine is at fault for this war. And why do they think that? They think it because that is their information space. What Russians and Ukrainians think about this war is obviously very different.

And it's not just because they're Russians and Ukrainians, it's because they're in different information spaces. What you and your cousin Harry may think about Donald Trump might be very different. And that might not just be because you and your cousin Harry have other differences. It might be because you are in different media spaces. One could argue that what's happened, actually, is that information space has created more differences or it's created even firmer boundaries than existed before, because the Internet, arguably, actually travels less well than a newspaper does. If I can print the same newspaper all

over the world, as used to be the case, then I may be actually doing better than I'm doing if I'm the Washington Post and I can't get my stuff out in China today. So, information maybe doesn't really travel, and it may- And can we really go everywhere. I mean, this is obviously on my mind, 'cause it took me 35 hours to get back from Kyiv. But there is a certain cost in going places. And when you take your body certain places, it does have an effect on how you see things. There's a difference between being

in a place and seeing it on a screen. If you go somewhere and it involves passports and changing the gauge of a railway, or it involves going through checkpoints, that is different from just clicking on a picture, to another picture, to another picture. It changes the person. By the way, one of the things I found really interesting on the checkpoints, and it has to do with this overall question of language and where you are and how language suggests where you are, the Ukrainian soldiers generally still speak Russian. That's not really a big secret. But at

the checkpoints, if you're at a checkpoint, the way they greet you is they hit you with a really flowery, friendly Ukrainian. And as long as you can hit them back with a really flowery, friendly Ukrainian, you're basically through the checkpoint. Because there just aren't that many Russians who can do that. So you make sure you show your document, but the language itself is the first checkpoint, which is kind of interesting. But where I want to really go with this is that, in historical terms, it really does seem to matter how far people get at certain

times. There really do seem to be historical turning points where non-interchangeable people get, or don't get, to very special places, and that it seems to matter. A big classic example that we'll get to in about a week, in our part of the world, is the Mongol invasion of Europe. The Mongol invasion of Europe. Well, when did the Mongols reach Paris? I see, yes? - [Student] They haven't yet. - Yeah, good! Good answer. I like that. I like the "yet", I like the way you're holding the future open for good things. (class laughs) That's awesome. That's

really good. Yeah, so in the late 1230s, early 1240s, the Mongols aren't defeated by anybody. The Batu Khan is not defeated by anybody. We'll talk about this. They have the stirrups, they have the encirclement maneuvers, they have the calls. They're not defeated by anybody in Europe. They destroy every army, European army, they touch. And that includes Kyiv, but it doesn't include France. Not because they couldn't have done it, but because at a certain point, the Batu Khan has to go back for a succession issue. 'Cause the main Khan has died. But if the Batu Khan

gets to Paris, I mean, arguably no Renaissance, no Age of Exploration. Probably some other part of the world carries out the Age of Exploration, not the Europeans. And it's a very, very, very different world. And that's just a matter of one person dying. If one person had died a year later, we're probably looking at an extremely different world. Not to say that the moment we're in is quite comparable to that. But it does strike me as being significant that, and of course you can't help but think about this when you're standing in the middle of

Kyiv, but it seems quite significant that Russian soldiers do or don't get to Kyiv in February of 2022. And it's really close. It's really close. The Russians land in the Hostomel Airfield, and their plan is to land there, drop the paratroopers, drop the special forces, go in, gather up the elite, kidnap them, probably exterminate them. And that's part of the plan to take over the city. And they get to Hostomel, which is only about 35 kilometers, 20 miles, from the center of Kyiv. They get that far on the first day of the war. They get

that far, but the Ukrainians stop them. There's a terrible battle around Hostomel and it goes on, but the Ukrainians stop them. Bucha, which you probably heard of because of the atrocities, And, I saw Bucha very briefly too. It was also very, that was also kind of interesting because the air raid sirens went off in Bucha, and I was with the Ukrainian general and he was like, "Well, we can always go to the basement of the church, if anything actually happens." Bucha is basically a bedroom community. It's like 28 kilometers from Kyiv. It's a suburb. Irpin,

where so many buildings are destroyed, it's like a beautiful parked, it's a really nice place. You might wanna, if you were like going up in the world and you wanna have a nice place and drive, commute, the American dream. If you wanted to do that, Irpin would be a wonderful place to go. Now it's all shot up, and there's a huge pile of burned cars, and there building after building was destroyed by Russian tanks as they were retreating. That's like 20 kilometers from Kyiv. And the same is true going the other direction across the Dnieper

towards Chernihiv. The Russians got very, very, very close to Kyiv. But they didn't get to Kyiv. They didn't get that little difference, those last 15 miles of physical geography would seem to make a huge difference. And the way people react to the war also has a great deal to do with how they understand the geography around them. So for example, time after time after time, people who lived in Kyiv or other cities would say, when the war started, "i should go to the villages, I should go to the suburbs." That's a natural thought. Like, "They're

gonna get to Kyiv, I should go to my dacha, I should go to my grandmother's, I should go to my second house." But it was the villages actually that took the punishment, time and time again. People from Kyiv went to Bucha and Irpin, because they thought Bucha and Irpin would be safer than Kyiv, which turned out not to be true. A friend of mine who lives close to the Dnieper, the Dnieper runs through Kyiv. And so, a friend of mine assumed that the Russians would get as far as the river, and the Ukrainians would then

blow the bridges, and then you only have one direction to flee. So in moments like this, you're thinking in terms of space. I wanted to go someplace besides Kyiv and Bucha and Irpin and Hostomel. I wanted to get outside of Kyiv Oblast. And so I went with a friend to Chernihiv, the Chernihiv Oblast, which is just basically due north, a little bit east. Chernihiv is a fascinating city. We're gonna return to it. It might have been on one of your maps. The reason it was on one of your maps is that it's an old city.

It's 500 years or so older than Moscow. It's been there for a very long time. It's ancient. And it is an ancient center also of scholarship, of theology and of scholarship. Along with Kyiv, it was one of the two great centers of religious, and intellectual in general, disputation in what's now Ukraine. And one reason why I have Chernihiv in mind is that this whole story about the Kyiv and the Moscow and how it's all one place, that was actually invented by a guy in Chernihiv. It was invented by one person. Like now, we all believe

it. It has this incredible effect on- And the reason he invented it had everything to do with geography. Oh, I forgot to put his name on the sheet. Okay. (chalk tapping) So in the war, in the Cossack wars of the 17th century, which don't worry, we'll get to, in the Cossack wars of the 17th century, at the end of it, there's basically a stalemate between Poland, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Moscow. And the stalemate is codified at the Treaty of Andrusovo in 1667. And according to that treaty, the territory on the east of the Dnieper was

going to be Russia, and west of the Dnieper was going to be Poland. It was a little unclear what that meant for Kyiv, because Kyiv was on both sides, but eventually Kyiv ended up being part of, being under control of, Moscow. And that meant Chernihiv was as well. So Kyiv and Chernihiv, which are these major centers of European scholarship and thought, are now suddenly under the control of Moscow, which has no centers of scholarship and thought. And no, that's just a statement of fact. I mean, there aren't any universities, there aren't any academies in Moscow

at that time. So Lazar Baranovych was a very intelligent guy, one of the great theologians of his time, and used to enjoying a certain amount of personal influence, it should be said. And when Chernihiv and Kyiv fall under Moscow, he makes a play. And see if you could think of a play which is as good as this play. He says, to the fellow Orthodox clergy in Moscow, he says, "You know what? We're actually all one country. And the history of your country, that one in Moscow, it actually begins in Kyiv." And this was news to

the people in Moscow. This had not occurred to them. This was not their story of themselves at the time. But Baranovych said, "Your history actually starts with Kyiv." And of course, why does he say that? Because that makes Kyiv really important. Because, so suddenly Ukraine and Kyiv and Chernihiv are not just places that got conquered by Moscow. It turns out they're the beginning of the history of Moscow. And that dignifies him, and it dignifies his collegium, his school, it dignifies Chernihiv, it dignifies Kyiv. That seems like a pretty good play. And it worked. For a

while, it worked. But you can then imagine what happens next. What happens next is that eventually, the Russian clerics say, take over the story on their own. And they say, "Yes, okay, that's true." But, after a couple generations, they pick up all the tricks that the Ukrainians use to argue. They learn the languages, too. They start reading the Western religious literature themselves. They learn about theology and disputation. And so they take the argument and they make it their own. And then by the 18th century, it becomes a secular argument, no longer a religious argument, but

a secular argument. When the Russian Empire is formed to 1721, it's called the Russian Empire for this reason. And then when Russia invents a secular history of itself in the 19th century, it's this story. But this story happened because of this guy, who, if he drowned under his horse, as people tended to do at the time. If something had happened to him on the way to writing that letter, maybe that story would never have arisen. And then maybe we would all analyze this war a little bit better than we did. And so, again, I'm just

trying to make the point that where a certain person is at a certain time and place may matter, actually, a lot. Like you couldn't actually trade Lazar Baranovych off for anybody else. He wasn't interchangeable. And those circumstances, that Chernihiv fell under Russia at that particular time, were very specific. So Chernihiv itself was bombed in early March. I was told by the locals, I haven't checked this yet myself, but the guy who was actually doing the bombing runs was himself born in Chernihiv, which raises the question of how you can believe different stories about the place

where you're from. When I was in the rubble, I was in- There was one really terrible bombing run which destroyed, or partially destroyed, four major apartment buildings in one neighborhood. And when I was there talking to people, I was struck by a few things. Like how, I mean, just like this place for young people, like there was a kid there who was collecting books. He had a book collection. And he found an iPhone in the rubble. Like he had all these books and he had an iPhone, and as he walked out, he said to me,

"I found an iPhone!" Like, this is his childhood. But also one thing that struck me is that in these apartment buildings, people don't necessarily know each other or know who they are. But then after the bombing, people did know who one another were, because they had to help each other with things. And then it turns out when a building is destroyed, that it has a history. One of the reasons you know that is that the same kind of bombing will destroy different kinds of buildings in different ways. So Soviet-era kommunalka, or Soviet-era buildings that were

put together from modules, are very vulnerable to bombing, it turns out, whereas post-1990s buildings are generally less so. And you can literally see that worked out before your eyes. Or another thing, in this complex of buildings that was destroyed, one of them, it turns out, like this is something you would never have to know, but it turns out that one of them was built for survivors of the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl. And so they all came down and they got this building as a way of moving away from where they were. But that history would

never have come out without this other event. When I went to the suburbs of Chernihiv, I mean, the villages around, I talked to a woman who had five Russian soldiers in her house, in her basement. And I said, "Okay, they're Russian soldiers, but where were they actually from?" Were they Russian, or were they some- And she's, "Oh, they were from Bashkiria and Tatarstan," and I think maybe one of them was Russian from Russia, he was from Siberia. And they had a geography. They had a notion that Ukraine was Russia. But it's a funny kind of

geography because they're from so far away, they're from thousands of miles away, in some cases. And there she is, and they're all speaking Russian together. And she's a native Russian speaker. She was talking to me in Russian. And they're telling her what Russia is and that she's in Russia. And there's something very strange about that, but that's their deep geography, and there's something about it which seems to really matter. I'm gonna leave you with the last example, which I'm sure you probably already thought of, which is Kyiv itself. So the way we think about cities

often has to do with particular things that happen in those cities or in those neighborhoods. Like Wannsee might not mean anything to you, but Wannsee is where a famous plan was made for the extermination of the remaining Jews of Europe. It's a part of Berlin. And so you, you cannot, once you know that, you can't hear Wannsee and not think about that. Or Vichy. So Vichy in France is, I mean, there's nice soda water and everything, but it's a spa town, but it's also where the collaborationist government had its capital during the Second World War.

And so Vichy means that. It's very hard to take that away from Vichy. I would suggest that there's going to be a little something around Kyiv like that, but in a positive sense, because Zelensky stayed. If Zelensky had left, many things, I think, would be different, in the world and in our minds and in this class, probably. But he stayed, and I think that makes Kyiv mean something different than it would've otherwise been. In other words, I'm trying to suggest that this deep geography, although it's real, is also fungible, it's changeable. It can be altered

by human action. I'm thinking in particular about the night, a couple of nights into the war, where he made the selfie video, where he said, "President tut." "I'm here." And then he goes on, "My advisors are here. We're all here. We're all right here." And he was countering Russian propaganda, which had said he had fled. That's part of it. But also, he was saying, "I'm here, I'm going to stay. I'm reassuring people." And this is just my last example of the point that maybe places and people aren't so interchangeable. That it matters a great deal

that when he said, "I am here," the buildings behind him were Kyiv, and not Lvov and not Warsaw. That everyone in Kyiv, when he said, "I am here," could recognize where he was in Kyiv. And that "I'm here" was also the counter to a different kind of deep geography. Because at the moment when he said that, there still were bombs falling in Kyiv which were meant for him. And there were still groups of assassins moving towards Kyiv, or actually inside the city of Kyiv, who were meant to kill him. And they were operating under a

different deep geography, deep geography which goes something like this. And I'm not, I don't have to invent this because it's what Putin said in in 2021, 2022, that Russia and Ukraine have always been one place, and the people who say that Ukraine is a different place, they are somehow exotic. They somehow come from the outside. They're Hapsburgs, they're Poles, they're Europeans, they're Americans. And therefore anyone who says that there's a Ukraine, there's something flawed about that person. They don't belong there. They simply need to be removed. And we'll remove them lexically, by calling them Nazis

or whatever it takes. But we're also going remove them physically. Because if we remove them physically, then the rest of the Ukrainian people will go along with us, and the war will be over. That is a kind of deep geography. And that deep geography animated the attempt to take Kyiv and to kill this person. So I had a lot of time to think about that, because if you're visiting the President, it takes a long time to get there, obviously. Because like, they lead you here and they lead you there, and then you're never gonna find

your way out. They lead you here, it's all dark and confusing, and there are lots of checkpoints, and there're lots of barriers and things. And so it gets you to think, how important is it actually that this person is right here, as opposed to another person right here, or this person being somewhere else? So, the deep geography is important. That was the point of this. But also the deep geography can be changed. The deep geography can be changed by action and by experience and by renaming. And I was thinking about that, I think about that

as well. I was there during this last, this Kharkiv counteroffensive, when the Ukrainians took back almost all of Kharkiv. And of course, that means that Kharkiv Oblast now means something different than it did a few days ago. And for the men and women who were involved in that offensive, it's gonna mean something different to them as well. And that the fact that so many Ukrainians have had to move during this war, for bad reasons, 4 million deported to Russia, well over 10 million crossed a Western border and come back, people inside the country, well over

half the population has moved in one way or another. And that moving is associated with the changing of meanings. And sometimes it's associated with a change in meanings in a positive sense. This is just the very last thought. But I was really struck, I mean, I'm not trying to make a happy story of this, because of course it's not a happy story, but I was really struck by how, when people talked about all of this movement, whether it was the President himself, or whether it was some of the soldiers I talked to, or whether it

was some of the people in villages that I talked to, when they talked about all this movement, they had interpretations of it, that like this in some way shows who we are. The fact that we went away and came back, The fact that we were able, or have already- a lot of people have already rebuilt their houses, the fact that we rebuilt, the fact that we got back to Kharkiv, the fact that Zelensky stayed, that these things say something about us, about who we are. We can be pushed, we can be pulled, but then where

we choose to be in the end, says something about us. That we choose to fight this war, that we choose to help the people fighting this war, that we choose to make it through somehow, says something about us. And so in that sense, like this thing that people are talking about as the formation of a nation, I think, is not quite right. The nation was already there. But how people think about their nation, and particularly what they think it means to be free, and what it's worth sacrificing about, you can also connect that to space.

In fact, I guess my point would be, you almost have to connect it to space. It's hard to imagine people having a story about themselves which involves risk and values, which doesn't also in some way involve space. And that's where I'm gonna leave it. Thank you. (gentle chimes)