The History of Ukraine

Ukraine must have existed as a society and polity on 23 February 2022, else Ukrainians would not have collectively resisted Russian invasion the next day.  What does it mean for a nation to exist?  Timothy Snyder explores these and other questions in a very timely course.

Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He speaks five and reads ten European languages.

Ukraine must have existed as a society and polity on 23 February 2022, else Ukrainians would not have collectively resisted Russian invasion the next day.  What does it mean for a nation to exist?  Is this a matter of structures, actions, or both?  Why has the existence of Ukraine occasioned such controversy?  In what ways are Polish, Russian, and Jewish self-understanding dependent upon experiences in Ukraine?  Just how and when did a modern Ukrainian nation emerge?  For that matter, how does any modern nation emerge?  Why some and not others?  Can nations be chosen, and can choices be decisive?  If so, whose, and how?  Ukraine was the country most touched by Soviet and Nazi terror: what can we learn about those systems, then, from Ukraine?  Is the post-colonial, multilingual Ukrainian nation a holdover from the past, or does it hold some promise for the future?

Pushing Pushkin: the imperialism and decolonization of Russian culture

The primacy of “high” Russian culture in foreign eyes creates a near-hegemonic control of narratives and discourses involving non-Russians living within the Russian Federation, and impinges on the languages, cultures and even sovereignty of neighbouring countries. The “low” or backward nature of these other cultures is exemplified by the annihilationist approach to Ukraine taken by Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin and it also extends to Russia's declared superiority over “the rotten West” and its culture. “Paradoxically, while being anti-European and contemptuous of Western ideas at its core, Russian culture is perceived as part of a common European heritage by many Western countries,” argues Dr Kristina Sabaliauskaitė, a leading Lithuanian cultural critic.

In discussion with the British writer Edward Lucas, Dr Sabaliauskaitė, the most internationally read contemporary Lithuanian author, will scrutinise the tacit and sometimes overt imperialist message of Russian cultural “greats”, citing examples from cinema and art and literature. These include Pushkin’s venomously polonophobic poem “To the Slanderers of Russia” and Joseph Brodsky’s “On the Independence of Ukraine”. Deconstructing the origins, subtexts and signifiers in Tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet Russian cultural production highlights the links between imperialist statecraft and supposedly innocent visual and literary works. What are the next steps? Can or should Russian culture face the same “decolonisation” currently promoted in western countries? If so, is this a task for the Putin regime’s foreign critics, or must it be done by Russians themselves?

The event took place on 7 March 2023 in the European Parliament in Brussels.

The event was co-organized by MEPs Rasa Juknevičienė, Raphaël Glucksmann, and the Permanent Representation of Lithuania to the EU.

How Russia REWRITES history in its favor

The first episode of the "Big Russian Lies" series shows how Russia has been using history as a propagandistic tool to advance its political interests for centuries. Russia employs the historical myth of direct descent from Kievan Rus to claim a millennia-long history and justify territorial claims on neighboring states.

Russia asserts special geopolitical rights in Europe by exploiting the historical theme of victory in World War II, creating a myth of a unified, Russian, victorious people. Russia has already printed thousands of textbooks where historical facts are manipulated to fit political expediency.

Why can you still find the term "Kievan Russia" in Western encyclopedias as of 2023? Why does the study of Eastern European history in the world remain so Russia-centric?

Professor Jason Stanley of Yale University, Professor of History and Political Science at the University of Western Ontario Marta Dyczok, Deputy Chairman of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory Volodymyr Viatrovych, PhD in History, Public History Researcher Anton Liagusha, Senior Associate of the Russia Studies Department at the Center for Eastern Studies (Poland) Maria Domanska discuss how historical manipulations work and how destructive their consequences can be.

"The Big Russian Lies" is a series of films about a country living in an atmosphere of informational sanitation, in which the narratives of Russian propaganda are debunked.

For centuries, Russia has used history, literature, cinema, art, sports, and media as instruments of propaganda to advance political interests. It calls itself the heir of Kievan Rus and justifies claims to the lands of neighboring states.