When I was teaching a Ukrainian history class last semester, I got a taste of the surreal. A war in Ukraine It was half a year in the works when I started. A nuclear power had attacked a country that had given up nuclear weapons. An empire tried to stop European integration. A tyranny tried to crush a neighboring democracy. In the occupied territories Russia committed genocidal atrocities, with clear statements of genocidal intent.
And still, the Ukraine reacted. Ukrainians resisted nuclear blackmail, despised audacious empire, and took risks in the name of their democracy. In Kyiv, Kharkiv and later, Khersonthey defeated the Russians and stopped torture, murder and deportation.
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We were at a historical turning point. But where was the story? TV screens constantly showed Ukraine, and the only thing a viewer could say for sure was that the commentators had never studied Ukraine. I’ve heard from former students who are currently employed in government or journalism how happy they were to have taken the Eastern European history course. They said they were a little less surprised by the war than others; said they had more sights.
The contrast between the historical importance of this war and the lack of homework in history reveals a larger problem. We know very little about history. We designed the lesson to include technical questions: how to do it. And solving everyday problems is very important.
But when you deprive yourself of history, everything is a surprise: 9/11, the financial crisis, the invasion of the Capitol, the invasion of Ukraine. When we are shocked every day but don’t have a story, we look for landmarks and become vulnerable to people who give us simple answers. Thus the past becomes the dimension of myth in which those in power generate the narratives they find most convenient.
the Russian President Wladimir Putin told a story about the past that has nothing to do with history. According to him, Russia and Ukraine were created together at the baptism of a ruler a thousand years ago. They share the same culture and therefore must be governed by the same person. If it seems like something else happened, it wouldn’t really be a chapter in this story. If Ukrainians think they are not Russians, it would be the result of the nefarious work of outsiders. Putin didn’t just say these things: he enacted memory laws to prevent history from questioning Russians and even erased the word “Ukraine” from textbooks.
In terms of logic, it’s a circular argument; and as politics it is tyrannical. If I could claim that Canadians are Americans because they speak the same language or because we share a common history, that would be a silly reason to launch an invasion. When a dictator claims the power to define the identity of another people, the question of that people’s freedom never arises. When identity is frozen forever by a ruler’s schemes, citizens soon have no choice.
When we look at where this logic has led the Russians, we begin to question the validity of these stories. But it shouldn’t be such an obvious atrocity as to make us doubt it. Until recently, far too many commentators were content with Putin’s version: Russia and Ukraine are somehow eternally alike, people who speak Russian are somehow Russians, and culture as defined by a dictator is his destiny.
It was surreal in a completely different way when millions of people came to my online course. Americans had sensed something was wrong with the Russian myth, but they didn’t know how to fill the void. It was heartening to hear from the thousands of emails I received that the story could fill that gap. It was a very exciting semester; The story got the students thinking. If we think historically, we see that political communities rise and fall, and that human choices—including the perverse choices of militaristic tyrants—are always part of history. We learn to absorb events better. We wake up to the experiences of others. For me personally, it was moving to hear reports from Ukrainians themselves, including frontline soldiers, who took part in the online course.
Ukrainian history gives more meaning to today’s world. The entire path of our western civilization, from the Greeks onwards, becomes clearer when we understand that Athens was fed by what is now southern Ukraine. The fantastic history of the Vikings becomes even more surprising when we understand that they founded a state in Kiev. The Age of Exploration takes on new dimensions when we realize that Polish and Russian powers built their empires by pushing east into the Eurasian landmass, where they eventually met Ukraine. The era of empires ends with the neoimperial projects of the Nazis and the Soviet Union, both of which had their focus on Ukraine. This horribly bloody conflict made Ukraine the most dangerous place in the world during the totalitarian era of 19331945. This chapter and the Russification that followed made it difficult even for Ukrainians to tell the story of Ukraine.
But that is changing now. Virtually everything I said in my classes came from the work of Ukrainian historians. Yaroslav Hritsak, one of the best among them, has been saying for decades that Ukraine will survive if a new generation matures. Now this has happened not only in my field, but also in journalism, in civil society, in business and in politics. Ukraine differs from Russia in its own history, including the history of the last 30 years since the end of Soviet Union. While Putin has pushed their country into the quicksands of myth, Ukrainians through their voices, their protests and their resistance have paved the way to a more confident selfconfidence.
By writing history, they remind us that we need history to better understand it, to better understand war—and also to better understand ourselves. Like Ukrainians, we live at a historical turning point. Like them, we will need to learn history and question myths to achieve a democratic future./ TRANSLATION BY AUGUSTO CALIL
* Timothy Snyder is a history professor at Yale University and the author of The Road to Unfreedom and Bloodlands. His updated audio edition of On Tyranny includes new lectures about Ukraine.