Lesson 1

Very important the military history

The war is an occasion to go back and understand history

Greeks and Jews are the oldest documented inhabitants of Ukraine, they have been there for the
longest.

Early history of Ukraine has to go from North-South Axis. It has to do with Vikings (8th century), and
the continuation of the Roman Empire (Byzantium). Later it has evolved to west-east history (like
nowadays)

The whole south of Ukraine (where the whole fighting is taking place nowadays) was not part of
Kyivan Rus (which is the most ancient polity similar to Ukraine nowadays). It was part of the Ancient
Greek world and the ottoman world. Southern Ukraine has a different history.

Ancient Ukraine was a center of Muslim, Jewish and Christian civilisation.

History is not predictable, is not predetermined. History does not repeat, it helps you to see certain
things, and act according. The element of human agency is fundamental. What humans can or
cannot do in the structures history presents us.

If you pretend things are static, you are excluding all the diversity, all the innovation, and all the
things which came from the outside.

The central thesis of this class is that Ukraine actually embodies most of the major themes of
European and world history. As a result of Ukraine geography (north-south axis at the beginning and
east-west axis later on), all the themes of European history appear on Ukrainian history in a most
interesting form.
 For example the history of Vikings, Kyiv is the most durable legacy of the Viking age
 During the reformation, in Ukraine you do not have only Catholics vs. Protestants, but also
Orthodox vs. Greek Catholics
 It is in the center of the WWI and the WWII
 It is in the center of Stalinist terror
 It is the center of the holocausts and the collapse of the Soviet Union

The main question: How you get to a nation/How does Ukraine nation exist? It is not
predetermined, things are not as they are because they had to be like that. Putin stated that
because as there was a baptism in Kyiv in 988, the rest is predetermined, and anything which does
not go the way it is supposed to go is somehow exotic or foreign and has to be suppressed. This is
called myth of eternity, not history, and it is wrong.

The concept of nation: In the medieval, ancient word, neither Russia nor Ukraine existed. As nations
are a modern historical construction. Characterised by the notion that you feel a certain type of
solidarity with the people that you do not know. And it also involved a certain degree of equality “I
am not more Spanish than you are”. This did not exist in the medieval or ancient world, it star
existing with the creation of the concept of a nation.

The concept of genocide: is a 20th century theme, 1948 definition of genocide by Raphael Lemkim,
assumes there is such thing as “people”. As it is the intentional destruction of people. Genocide as
the antipode of the creation of a nation. The creation of a nation is modern, and therefore, the
attempt to destroy that nation is also modern. There is a genocidal aspect to this war, one that has
been openly announced (as the objective is to “destroy” Ukraine), and as it has been executed (by
killing and rapping millions of Ukrainians, deporting numerous citizens, and force them to assimilate
into Russian culture, and also the destruction of libraries and national archives, which are they way
people will remember the essence of the nation).

What are the deeper forces that lead to nation creation, and which ones lead to nation destruction
(=genocide)?

Lesson 2: the genesis of nations

At some point there was not an Ukrainian nation, and another day, there is an Ukrainian nations.
How did this happen? Same happen with social classes
The nation did not always exist, but once it comes into existence, it tells you a history about the past.
And the story that the nation tells about the past is wrong. It tells a story that clears out the past,
and that story calls itself history, even though it is not history. So this new social form (nation) has a
story about how it is every old.

Once nations emerge, they make very hard for the people to process the past

The nation is modern but it lays claim to the past. The nation gives you an answer, it comes
equipped with an answer. This happens through
 the institutional way: the nation takes over the state, the state takes over the education,
the education takes over the kids, and then the kids believe the things which are
commonsensical, and you believe what you are told
 Form of the story:

For imperialist nations: A good starting point is that there was innocence until it got lost. For
example in the US, in 1776 everyone and everything was great, so there was innocence. Somebody
got everything right at one point in time. This is a general imperial nation problem of wanting to go
back to a moment where somehow we got everything right.
Ivan Llyin: The world is flawed, but Russia has for it mission to restorer the innocence of the world.

The anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial nations: have a different structure of the story, which is about
a people which had a state, but then mistakes were made, or bad people came and they lost their
state, but at some point they will take back their state. 3 part story.

A national rebirth (national renaissance) is that you go back to that point of time when everything
was right, back to the golden age.
Nation means a form of politics in which the subject of politics is supposed to be the people. This is a
world-agreed concept. But this idea is very new. So in the 19th century it comes the necessity in
which you have to handle a form of politics in which people now matter, and so you need some
version of the past that can help you, and the version of the past you can give is “way back when the
people were virtuous and now they will be virtuous again”. The challenge now is what do you do as
the people enter politics? So the people are entering politics, there is some sort of transformation.
So what is changing? Is it capitalism economy, a functional state that is able to collect taxes…
Something is changing, that makes a king to be in government a non plausible idea. How do you
handle this? with a “national story” that challenges the story established at that moment (that a
kings had to have the power because of divine right, or because his father was king, or because they
had lands…), which represent different kinds of political systems (absolute monarchy, polish-
Lithuanian commonwealth).

So this new story brings people to the centre and bring attention to why people should participate in
politics.

The idea of nation and Marxism emerge around the same age. And they are very much in dialogue
with one another. The main difference is that Marxist story is about the class (non national class),
whereas the national story is about particular nations. The Marxist thought about the nation is that
it is associated with a period of history that is passing. Marxism has a tremendous problem with
nationalism, and as a result of this some of their first people that theorised about the nation where
Marxists who were trying to deal with this problem around 1900. Around this year, there were
several Marxist who Said essentially modernisation is not doing away with the national question, on
the contrary, modernisation is bringing about the nation, so we have to deal with that. The nation is
not part of the feudal past but of the modern future. So modernisation creates the nations (1980s).

Kelles-Krauz in 1904 (respecting the theory that nations emerge because of modernization)
supported the radical idea that jews and Ukrainians were a nation because even though they lacked
the “objective elements” of a nation (such as territory for jews, and an historical political class for
Ukraine), if you looked at them at that moment and you payed attention to what modernisation
could do, it could generate a process of alienation, and create new ways of solidarity between the
members of those communities, leading them to be actual nations.

The people that made nations, they knew what they were doing. It did not happened randomly.
There are factors that contributed such as: urbanization, capitalism, literacy.. that made likely that
some new form of solidarity emerged, but where and for whom? Why these nations and not other
nations?

Once nations emerge, they make very hard for the people to process the past. And one of the ways
they mess with the past is that they convince everyone that their own existence is self evident, BUT
it is not!!

So how did the Ukrainians think about themselves?

In the 19th century, populism was a not a it is understood today, it was actually a science to know
who were the people that lived in your territory, knowing them better.. “going to the people”. So in
this century, in Russia, due to this populism, they discovered that there was this sector of the
population that “were different” than the Russians (they spoke different languages…). Authors such
as Hrushevski argue that you can locate the nation in its own customs, songs, Lenguage… so you
then say, the nation has been there for a very long time but it has not been politically represented
and that is the problem.This will however also raise the problem of ethnicity, as if you identify the
nation with people that share the same customs, languages.. what happens with the people that do
not. Ethnic notion of the nation.

The other position is hold by Lypynskyi, he says hey Hrushevski, how are you going to create a state
out of a Russian territory full of people that are “Russian”, you need in order to create a state,
taxpayers, cities… and what are you going to do with people that have specific traditional histories
(ethnics)?. Lypynskyi is answered by dontsov (1920s-30s). He is very fascist, and he says that people
should be homogeneous. And he is answered by Ivan Rudnytsky, and he argues that the nation is a
political act, political commitment, so modernization matters… but the nation is a political act
directed towards the future. So anyone can take part in it. And he wins the argument about what
Ukraine should be like. And this has very serious implications on what it actually is.

Lesson 3 “Geography and ancient history”

There is a difference between going to Ukraine and going to “the Ukraine”: if you say the latter it
implies that it is a part of something else. And therefore, you are not talking about a state. Na
Ukraine vs. v Ukraine (the former does not implies a state whereas the latter does).

The capital of Ukraine has also been spelled differently throughout time. One is a transcription or
transliteration from Russian (KIEV), and the other is how you call it in Ukraine (KYIV). So changing the
spelling from one way to another definetly has implications and represents a cultural consensus (i.e.
The NY Times does change the spelling from one way to another at a certain point because there is a
cultural consensus). These differences are very deep.

People (specially Americans) due to the education that they have been received, they have a
narrative that Russia does exists, it has always been Russia and it is not questionable ¡, but Ukraine is
not there, it is questionable, what is it? That is why everyone thought Russia was going to win. Russia
has always been there, and Ukraine has not, and naturally, people do not like when something that
is permanent “always” is called into question.

And it is very blurry where the boundaries of Russia are, because when we think of Russia, we might
be thinking of the Russian empire, of the Soviet Union… all with very different borders that have
been changing.

So why was everyone wrong when it came to know who was going to lose the war? It has a Lot to do
with the spelling of the words and how they have been used. Indeed, the people that have been
more right when it comes to the outcome of the war, have been the people that knew less about
Russia, but more about military history.

In Ukraine, in the national televisions they use a specific language to refer to what is going on there,
and they use the term “Rusicsm” (Russia + fascism) to refer to the Russians invading Ukraine. They
also use the world Moscovia (you are taking away the historical reference to Russia and you are also
naming it as smaller country than it is, and you are suggesting that its borders might have certain
flexibility). They also refer to Russia as the aggressor state

What globalisation has done is that I has made everything the same everywhere. After communism
people and places are becoming interchangeable. But in the world we live currently? Does
information actually travels? NO because 90% of the supporters of Victor Orbán and Hungary believe
that Ukraine is the responsible of the war. Why? Because you are in different medias spaces. Which
create significant differences.
Baranovych actually stated that your history starts with Kyiv, to the Russians. Because in saying that,
it makes Kyiv very important. It dignifies them.

The deep geography can be changed, by action, by renaming…

It is hard to imagine people having a story about themselves which involves risks and values which
does not also in some way involve space

Lesson 4 “before Europe”

The world before Europe, because Ukraine Kyivan Rus is coming into being at a Time when the
notion of Europe does not exist yet.

The trajectory of European history begins with Ancient Greece, but it needed the area of southern
Ukraine to get wheat for food, because Athens had only olive trees.

Herodotus maps what is Ukraine exactly, it is: sea, coast, steppe and forest, moving from south to
north. The further north you go the more exotic it is. The Scythians did a fantastic job in gold.

The Greeks are already looking at the territory we call Ukraine, and they have a view south to north.

From the western point of view: the history goes as follows: there was Greece, there was Rome, and
then Rome fell, overrun by barbarians, nothing happened for a while, then dark ages, and then
there was renaissance. And then that renaissance miraculously the clever Europeans discovered all
those things that were lost. After the renaissance it comes nations (the French, British, Italians..).

The other point of view: the Roman Empire Neves falls, part of it lowly falls into the influence of
others, the capital moves to Instabul, known for a long time as Constantinople. And the Roman
Empire continues as Byzantium. It continues for another thousand years. And this that is called
renaissance, exists sort of.

For western story, Byzantium is like ok there is huge thing over there, they call themselves Rome and
they speak Greek but it is not really Europe. But if you are trying to figure out Ukraine, Russia or
Belarus, the fact that Byzantium is there all the time is important, it is not that confusing thing, it is
not marginal, it is part of an unbroken traditions.