Thank you very much.
One of my favorite things in public speaking is when someone else chooses the title.
If you choose the title yourself, it says though you already know what you're going
to say.
When someone else chooses the title, it gives you a moment to reflect and sometimes reflect
deeply.
In this case, the title Ukraine from propaganda to reality has indeed caused me to reflect
deeply.
And what I'd like to do in the next 40 or 45 minutes is share some of these reflections
with you.
Now, these will be reflections about Ukraine.
They will be reflections about Russia, about Europe, about the state of contemporary politics.
But in the end, and I hope a bit throughout, they will also be reflections about us, about
what it means for us that we would start with propaganda and only then struggle our way
towards reality.
What it is about the present moment when a title like this could attract a crowd like
you to listen to this lecture.
So as Paul was kind enough to say, I am a historian and in many ways a very traditional
and conservative and old fashioned one.
So before I get to the propaganda, which there is going to be plenty, I'm going to start
with a tiny bit of historical reality, a tiny bit of centering of our attention on Ukraine.
Now all European nations, if they're respectable, have thousand year histories.
That's a nice round number.
If you can't make it to 2000, like the Greeks or 6,000, like the Jews, it settled for 1,000.
A thousand year history sounds very nice.
All European nations have a story about this.
Ukraine has a story as well.
It's a story of the capital city, which is Kiev.
I'm going to try to bring across to you some of the central dates, some of the central
events, just not because we can really do a thousand years of history in three minutes,
but because we might be able to convey a sense of what's familiar, what's unfamiliar, what
we know, what we don't know, the ways that we can get into this history and the ways
that it might remain a little bit opaque.
So the city of Kiev, the rulers of Kiev, converted the Christianity in 988, which is a conventional
date for the beginning of history, because in general Christians wrote things down.
We're losing the habit now, admittedly, but for a long time we wrote things down, one
of our hallmarks.
What was this Kiev?
It's a controversial and important question because many people have strong opinions about
this all the way to the present day, so let me tell you what it was historically.
The Vikings, who generally have a hand in anything interesting in medieval and European,
were trying at this time to establish a trade route from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea,
along the way, if you can remember, European geography.
There is the Nipro River in the city of Kiev.
For the Vikings working their way from north to south, this was a trading post.
The Vikings have a bad name, of course, when we think of Vikings, we think of rape and
pillage and other things that are preoccupations, but let's remember that the Vikings had other
preoccupations.
They were trying to reestablish European trade, very sensible thing to be doing.
What they found in Kiev was a decaying Hanat, known as Hazaria, run by people called the
Hazars, who were doing something very interesting at the time.
I recommend it as a parlor game if you have time this afternoon.
They were trying to, you're laughing, you don't even know what the game's going to be.
You must be really hard up for games, which is not how I remember this town.
I spent a lot of my teenage years here.
Again, you don't even know what you're laughing at, and you're laughing at something so nice.
What the Hazars did at around this time was try to decide which monotheistic religion
they were going to convert to.
They invited in scholars from the Judaic tradition, the Christian tradition, the Muslim tradition.
They had debates.
In the end, they decided to convert to Judaism, which means, despite what we learn in school,
or Hebrew school, or whatever it might be, there actually was a Jewish state between
the fall of the temple and Israel.
You can draw conclusions you like from this, but as soon as they converted to Judaism,
they disappeared from history, and were immediately swallowed up by this new Viking entity, which
came to be known by the name of Urus.
Now, why am I stressing all this colorful detail?
It's because I want you to see that this word Urus, which you all know because you live
in a world where there's a country called Russia, that this word Urus is a very old
word in the beginning that had nothing to do with Russia or Ukraine because there was
no Russia in Ukraine.
There were no Russians or Ukrainians.
People like that weren't going to exist for almost another thousand years.
Urus was initially this very interesting amalgamation of Vikings and Hazars and surrounding Slavic-speaking
peoples to whose culture the Vikings' leaders slowly assimilated after they converted to
Christianity.
Okay, so that's where Urus begins in an interesting sort of way.
Another date that I would call to your attention is 1241.
1241 is the year that Europe almost ceased to exist.
1241 is the year when the Mongol horde, horde is such an unpleasant word, right?
Again, the Mongols have a bad name, like the Vikings.
We imagine them destroying things, wiping out armies, okay, it's all true.
But like the Vikings, they were doing something which is historically very sensible and not
so foreign to the way many of us live our lives, especially those of you who are asked
to give money to this festival.
What they were doing was they were trying to establish a trade route.
They were trying to establish a trade route from Mongolia to Europe.
Admittedly along the way, you know, there were certain regimes which they found to be
problematic and they destroyed them all.
But what they were really trying to do was to establish a trade route.
And they got as far, as those of you who have read, you know, the big classic histories
of Europe, remember, they got as far as Eastern Europe.
They defeated Polish armies, Hungarian armies, and they also wiped out Urus.
The reason why we don't all remember the Batuhan, who was the commander of these armies, or
worship him for that matter, that's also possible.
The reason we don't all remember him is because of an accident of succession, which caused
he and his armies to go back to Mongolia for a funeral.
If they hadn't done that, no doubt those little horses would have been watering themselves
in the Sen and European history would never exist and the Chicago Humanities Festival would
have entirely different foci than it does now.
So 1241 is a turning point in the history of Europe, but also in the history of Kiev,
of this Kievan Rus' state.
The next state that I'll draw your attention to is 1569.
Now 1569 is an interesting moment.
It is the time of the creation of what was then the largest state in Europe, something
called the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a big state which includes what's now the
Baltic states, most of them Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, a bit of Russia, a very large state.
And the reason I mention this entity is because it helps us to see a kind of continuity, right?
So Rus' falls to pieces in 1241, and when things fall to pieces in the past, often you
just sort of jump forward a few centuries until things get better, right?
I mentioned the temple, I just take that as an example, okay, so the temple falls, you
jump forward a couple thousand years until things get better, you call the middle part
the diaspora, you kind of bracket it, you forget about it, right, didn't really happen.
That is often how we think about history, and I'm trying to stress there's a certain
amount of continuity.
And Rus' falls apart, not everything disintegrates, the culture remains, they had a very interesting
language of law which was called chancery-slavonic, it came from something called church-slavonic
which was invented by Cyril and Methodius for religious purposes of conversion, the
Rus' had law, which is no small thing, right, Rus' had law, it had law codes, and these
things went to where?
They went to Lithuania, they went to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Grand Dukes of Lithuania
who were fur-clad pagans, took on all of this for themselves as they took on the lands
of what had been Rus', the Grand Duchy of Lithuania expanded southwards towards the
Black Sea and itself became the inheritor of Rus', territorially and intellectually,
right, of most of the territory of Rus', of the western part, the more eastern part
remained under Mongol control, and that more eastern part where the main town was something
called Moscow becomes the origins of a state called Muscovy and later the Russian Empire.
So Rus' gets divided up and the western most parts fall into Lithuania, Lithuania it's
an intern, joins Poland, and in 1569 you have this grand, this grand European state.
So I mention that because also within this European state Kiev takes part in all of the
major European traditions, all of the things that we think about as being the hallmarks
of European intellectual or cultural or social history, the Gothic even a little bit, but
the renaissance, the reformation, the counter reformation, the enlightenment, all of these
things whether it's architecturally, intellectually, theologically, the territories of now Ukraine
pass through them.
So another date then, just as I'm not quite doing this in three minutes, but I'm trying,
another date that I would ask you to keep in mind is 1863.
Now by the middle of the 19th century, the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth has ceased
to exist, which means that all of its territories have been divided among more modern empires,
an Austrian one, a German one, a Russian one.
1863 is around the time that a Ukrainian national movement has begun to assert itself.
First in the Russian Empire, then in the Austrian Empire, that people who speak Ukrainian are
divided.
First in a city which you might hear up in the news called Kharkiv, later moving west
towards Kiev, which is now the capital, and finally moving further west towards Lviv,
and what's now western Ukraine.
This national movement was very typical of European national movements in the 19th century.
I will say something very typical of historians when I say that all of these national movements
are essentially new.
A trademark of national histories is that you say that you're old because you're new.
There's only one exception to this, or one major exception, which is us.
Nations are actually an old nation, but we claim to be new.
We are the midlife crisis of nations.
We are the nation that drives the convertible with a two-pace sort of flopping in the wind.
That is us, because in fact we are old.
I mean, America as a mass-produced community at over two centuries old is actually rather
old.
The European nations, interestingly, except for the British and maybe the French, are
new compared to us, but we don't like to admit that, do we?
Either do they, so it's a kind of interesting agreement that we have to kind of lie.
But then a lot of relationships work like that, especially long-distance ones, and
our relationship with Europe is a long-distance relationship, so it could go on for a while.
Anyway, the point of this is that Ukraine in the 19th century was rather typical.
There were intellectuals who were trying to consolidate a language, use it as an instrument
for gathering the masses around them, hoping for an opportunity in politics.
This opportunity in politics was also in a way typical for Ukraine as for Eastern Europe.
The opportunity seemed to be the First World War.
The First World War was the great Caesura, the great turning point, the great moment
where things were possible that suddenly weren't possible before.
The result of the defeat of the Habsburg, the Austrian monarchy, the defeat of Germany,
the collapse of the Russian Empire, meant that new nation-states could be formed.
This was American policy, remember Woodrow Wilson and his 14 points.
This was everybody's policy.
At the time, it seemed that national self-determination was both politically and morally the natural
response to the end of empire.
So we had a Czechoslovakia, we had a Poland, right?
Nation-states like Romania were enlarged.
Europe becomes this new scatter plot of nation-states, but not Ukraine.
Not Ukraine, and this is where things become a bit interesting, because it's not the case
that Ukrainians didn't suffer and die in wars of independence.
On the contrary, they suffered and died in rather large numbers, in extremely complicated
wars.
So the city of Kiev, for example, was occupied 12 times, 12 times, maybe 13, over the course
of the Civil Wars that followed the First World War.
Very complicated stuff involving Russian conservatives, involving the Red Army, involving
a couple of brands of Ukrainian patriots, involving the Polish Army, which actually
got as far in May 1920 as Kiev.
They did something very beautiful, by the way, when they got to.
The Poles, as you know, were excellent horsemen, and when they got to Kiev, they staged something
which was sort of typical of Polish foreign policy then, now, and forever, which is that
they marched their horses down the main avenue of Kiev, which if you've ever been there,
is called the Hresztatik.
They marched the horses all the way down, right, as beautiful, fantastic, and seemingly
endless.
And the reason why it was seemingly endless was that they made a circle, and they came
back around, right?
So it appeared that there was this massive Polish Army, but in fact, it was like a film
going in a loop over and over again.
They were quickly driven out.
My Polish friends, I love you all, I know you're out here, okay.
So the larger point is that Ukraine was in a complicated position after the First War.
There are many claimants upon it, Polish as well as Ukrainian, as well as communist, as
well as imperial Russian.
And at the end of it all, and let's pick as a date here, 1922, when the Soviet Union
was formed, at the end of it all, most of what is now Ukraine became part of the Soviet
Union.
So here, Ukrainian history tilts off a little bit, you know, in a certain Easterly direction,
away, say, from Polish history, towards a point which I would define in the year 1933.
Now this is the darkest point, and maybe the most important one, and maybe the most significant
if we're trying to understand the politics of myth now.
In 1933, two things are happening that are very relevant for the lands that are now Ukraine.
The first is that we are at the height of Stalin's attempt to make a revolution inside
the Soviet Union, to make what Stalin called a second revolution, a social revolution.
Not the political revolution of 1917, but the social revolution, the economic revolution,
which would actually push the Soviet Union and its peoples ahead onto the right track
of history, turn the Soviet Union from a backward country, as they saw it, into a progressive
industrial country, which meant taking the peasants who were the majority of the population
off the land, getting them into the factories, getting them or their children into the factories,
if not into the gulag, and turning what had been productive very often as in Ukraine,
privately owned farmland, into state-owned cooperatives.
This was a very difficult process, because as Midwesterners don't have to be told, people
who own private lands tend to want to keep it and don't look too kindly upon it being
taken away.
So there was a certain amount of resistance to this.
The resistance was met with overwhelming force, and indeed a campaign of starvation.
Collectivization brought about food shortages all over the Soviet Union, but those food
shortages, that hunger was channeled politically into certain places, and Ukraine was the place
towards which it was most obviously channeled.
As a result of this, more than 3 million people starved to death in Ukraine in the course
of 1932 and 1933.
Now this is part of – there's a policy here.
I mean there's a punishment, but there's a policy, and the policy is something that
Stalin called internal colonization, that you exploit what you have inside your own country
in order to move the entire country in the direction you want.
At the same time that Stalin was thinking of internal colonization, someone else is
also thinking of colonizing Ukraine in a slightly different way, and that is Adolf
Hitler.
So 1933 is also the year that Hitler comes to power.
And Hitler comes to power with a program of, I mean precisely, Lebensraum, right?
Living space.
What does living space mean?
Geographically, it means above all Ukraine.
Ukraine from Hitler's point of view, as interestingly from Stalin's, is the very
rich, very fertile bit of Ukrainian territory, European territory, which is important to
be controlled, because if you control it, you can be self-sufficient.
And if you can be self-sufficient, then you can become a great power.
It's about breaking out of just being a German nation state and to becoming some kind
of grand new German empire.
And along the way, German planners imagine that when they move east, when they invade
the Soviet Union, when they destroy it, in the first winter after the war, they are going
to starve tens of millions, tens of millions of Soviet citizens to death.
So the year 1933, I mentioned symbolically, as a way to emphasize that Ukraine is in the
middle of not one, but two inter-European or intra-European colonization projects.
I can't tell the whole story here.
It's in the book Bloodlands, which Paul was kind enough to mention.
But the result of this overlap is that Ukraine was the most dangerous place in the world
to be between 1933 and 1945.
More people were deliberately killed in Ukraine than in any other country during that period.
In the famine, in Soviet terror, in the German Holocaust, the Ukraine, of course, is the
homeland of actually most of the Jews who are alive in North America or Israel today,
are descended from territories that are now Ukraine.
So the Holocaust, the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war, and of course military
casualties themselves.
This was the most dangerous place in the world to be.
Now, 1991, I'm getting towards the present, is another moment where Ukraine is at the
center of history.
The Soviet Union was created largely because of Ukraine.
The Soviet Union, if we remember, we called it Russia, but it wasn't Russia.
It was a union of a number of nominally federal units.
Russia was one of them.
Ukraine was the second most important.
Then there was Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Central Asian Republics, Azerbaijan, the Caucasian
Republics, the Baltics.
So when the Soviet Union was assembled, it was assembled because there was a Ukrainian
national question.
The reason it wasn't just some vague social thing with no internal boundaries was because
the people who created it, landed above all, understood after the First World War, after
the Civil War, that there really was a Ukrainian national question and you had to do something
about it.
So what they did was they established this Ukrainian Republic, which meant that in 1991,
when the Soviet Union fell apart, there were lines on the map which defined what the new
states could be, and one of those new states was going to be Ukraine.
The Soviet Union was created by a kind of union between Russia and Ukraine.
It also was dissolved when the leaders of Russia and Ukraine and also Belarus agreed
in December 1991 that it was going to be dissolved.
The next moment when Ukraine is at the center of European history is today, but before we
get to today, I want to just point out a couple of things that I hope, very general things
that we can see from my 17-minute introduction to Ukrainian history.
The first is that Ukraine is very much at the center of European history, and if it
has a problem, it's not that it's not in European history, that there's a bit too much European
history.
So take the case of both Hitler and Stalin.
It's a typical European experience to have some contact with German occupation.
It's another typical European experience to have some contact with Soviet rule.
Ukraine is characteristic in that it has both, or take colonization.
That's very typical of European history.
That's what Europeans did for a couple of centuries.
But to be colonized inside Europe is a bit more.
That's a bit more intense.
That's something new, different, but it's not less European history.
In a way, it's more.
So that's the first thing that I would want to stress here.
The second thing that I want to stress here is that the way that all these things that
I have been telling you about can accumulate in a certain kind of myth.
So we all have myths.
I'm not going to bore you with what I think America's myths are.
I'm not a historian of America, so I'm pretty ruthless with them.
But we all have myths about, right, I'm not paid to reproduce them or challenge them,
so I can just say whatever I want.
But we all have historical myths.
And this particular story, notice that everything I talked about was based, or more or less,
on territory.
I was talking about the territory around the city of Kiev.
And that is the way the historical imagination of Ukrainians basically works, that there
is a territory, and we were here the whole time.
Now that might not seem so conceptually interesting or worth pointing out.
I note it, though, because that's not how all nations think.
In fact, there's a particular contrast between the Ukrainians, the way they see their history,
that we were always here in this place with the way that Russian history is organized.
So the way that Russian history, or the Russian myth is organized, goes like this.
We started in Kiev, but then our whole history somehow jumped to Moscow.
But nevertheless, it still somehow incorporates Kiev, and Kiev is a Russian city, right?
So it's abstract.
It's not about how we were always here.
It's abstract.
It requires a certain kind of narrative, which jumps around over thousands of miles in space,
right?
But it's a very successful narrative.
I'm sure many of you studied it in college, not realizing that it's a myth, which is just
as goofy as other myths are.
So there's a difference in the way that Russia and Ukraine see a common history, and that's
very important to the present.
And this brings us up to 2014.
Where the revolution, where the crisis in Ukraine started in 2013 was not in the streets
of Kiev, and it was not in the Kremlin.
It started with a different understanding of Europe.
If you are a student or a small businessman or something like this in Ukraine, in Kiev,
you understand Europe in the following way.
Europe has somehow been part of our history.
This is not disputable, right?
And Europe today means the European Union, which means in turn bureaucratic predictability
and the rule of law, which are the things which Ukrainians do not have.
And that is why the association agreement, which from our distant perspective might just
seem like some boring trade pact.
But that is why the association agreement with the European Union meant so much to so
many Ukrainians last year.
Because they saw it as a pathway out of the problems they have, which have to do chiefly
with corruption, into a rule of law.
I'm simplifying a lot, but from a contemporary Russian point of view, Europe can look very
different.
Europe can look like something where you can ask the question, are we European or not?
And we have polling data on this, by the way.
This is not just me being like historically mythical.
Right now the number of Russians who say they are European when asked is down to 8%, whereas
in Ukraine it's edging towards 80%, which is a big difference, right?
It's a substantial difference.
So you can ask, but regardless of that, in Russia you can always ask the question, like
are we European or are we Asian?
This goes back to the 19th century or even before.
And Ukraine, that's not really a question.
And from a Russian point of view, where you're a great power, you can look at Europe and
you can say, you can.
I don't think it's right, and certainly I don't think it's smart, but you can look
at Europe and say, we're a great power, they're a great power, they're our rival, they're
our adversary.
In Ukraine you simply can't do that.
You're too small, you need Europe, you need something.
But if you're Russia, you can decide that Europe is a rival and you can decide that
you can overcome this rival and you can criticize this rival, which is what starts to happen
in 2013 as being decadent.
Inside Russia there's a campaign which begins in 2013, which characterizes the European
civilization of the European Union as decadent.
And this is tied into the Russian campaign against homosexuality, by the way, because
Europe is characterized as being decadent, which means homosexual, or homosexual, which
means decadent.
So this plays into domestic politics, right-wing domestic politics in Russia as well.
So you can see that I just note this to point out some divergences which actually precede
the crisis and in some sense explain it.
So the crisis as one watched it unfold was a protest in Kiev.
The Ukrainian government was going to sign this association agreement at the last minute
it changed its mind after the president spoke with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
Probably there was a threat involved.
I think I know what that threat was, but in any event there was a radical shift in position.
Ukrainian students began to protest, students because they're the ones who have the most
to gain from predictability in the future.
They actually came out because, I mean, this is a very sort of nice modern moment, they
came out because of a Facebook post by a young journalist who happens to be of Muslim Afghan
origin, but is one of the leading Ukrainian investigative journalists in the country.
He posted a Facebook post which said, more or less, if you don't like this, don't just
click like, but go out to the independent square.
And then people came, and that's how it started.
And a couple of days after that, those students were beaten by the police, which led to the
expansion of the protest.
Interestingly enough, this protest, which was started by this young man of, I shouldn't
be calling people in their 30s students anymore, this young man of Afghan origin, the people
who joined the protest after that, many of them were veterans of the Afghan war, which
is an interesting sort of irony, along with other adults.
The protest then became multi-generational, and the idea was to protect our children.
But the use of violence actually meant that the protest spread across not only generations
but across regions, across political affiliations, the gathering on an independent square, which
is known in Ukrainian, interestingly from an Arabic or Persian word, as the Maidan.
The gathering on an independent square soon became thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds
of thousands.
This, the Russian policy engaged here, tried to get Ukrainian authorities to stop the protest,
promise loans, and so on, if the protest would stop.
This led to repressive laws, which banned freedom of expression.
It led to a horrible series of shootings in February of 2013.
And finally, it led to a revolution.
Now, I want to explain what I think this revolution really means.
I want to explain what I think is happening, and also what this war that we see before
our eyes in Ukraine means.
Before I do this, I want to explain to you what I think the revolution meant for Ukrainians.
Because that's the most important thing.
They're the ones who suffered, and in many cases, sadly, died, or are still suffering,
and will still die.
There's, of course, a war going on right now.
Shots are being fired, and shells are being exchanged right now.
As I speak to you, people are dying as I speak to you.
There's a humanitarian crisis involving millions of people, which is unfolding in southeastern
Ukraine right now, as I speak to you.
So how Ukrainians saw it is the most important thing, and I want to make sure we get that
clear before we move on to the more conceptual stuff.
From the point of view of Ukrainian politics, the most important issue, the central issue,
the issue, is getting from what I call oligarchical pluralism to real pluralism.
So Ukraine is an oligarchical country, not just in the sense that we're becoming one.
This way, Ukraine is our future.
It really is.
That's not a joke, actually.
If you want to see what America could look like, read Ukrainian and Russian fiction,
and then close your eyes a tiny bit, and you're almost there.
It really is a country where there are a half dozen oligarchical clans who control a huge
proportion of the national wealth.
The real question there, and this is a question that America faced, of course, 130 years ago,
how you get from that to real pluralism, not just competition among clans, but actual
democratic competition among larger pluralist groups.
And that's what this revolution was actually about.
That's what the rule of law means.
It means that if you're a little guy, if you're the little person, and you have a small business,
and you get stopped because the oligarchs are stronger than the law, then you're upset.
So this was a middle-class revolution.
It was a kind of revolution that many of you people, in fact, some of you actually did
take part in.
It's the kind of revolution where corporate lawyers literally threw Molokov cocktails,
and not one corporate lawyer, but multiple corporate lawyers, throwing multiple Molokov
cocktails on multiple nights over and over again.
It was a middle-class revolution about something like the rule of law and predictability against
oligarchy and unpredictability.
Now, I stress this also because it's a difference with Russia.
In Russia, the current regime, for better or for worse, and there are ups and downs to
each side, succeeded in crushing post-communist oligarchy and bringing it to heel and in creating
a centralized state in which there are clans, but all the clans are beholden, at least the
time being, to the presidency, that is, to the regime of President Putin.
This means that civil society in Ukraine, or a revolution in Ukraine, or a protest in
Ukraine, was a threat not only to the Ukrainian order, but a threat in a different way to
the Russian order, because if you're trying to centralize power, then you don't like civil
society.
In fact, you might like it even less, and that's the simplest connection, the simplest reason
why Russia intervened or had intervened in Ukrainian revolution.
But what I want to try to suggest is that the issues are much deeper and much more interesting
than this.
What I want to try to suggest is that following the track of events, we also have a track,
we can call it vaguely propaganda, but we have a track of a Russian response to those
events, which is in itself interesting and important, and ultimately may be more important,
for us as we try to define ourselves.
Okay, so let me try to be more specific about all of this.
It's certainly true that one can continue the story of the revolution on the Maidan.
After the revolution, that president who refused to sign the association agreement, that president
under whose auspices several dozen people were shot, he flees to Russia.
There were then free and fair democratic presidential elections in Ukraine in May.
Then a couple of weeks ago, there were free and fair parliamentary elections in Ukraine.
Ukraine is moving towards a kind of much more clearly Western normality, at least on the
political level, the three leading parties in the parliamentary elections, all pro-Western.
So that has been resolved at some level of normality.
But at the same time, as they were holding these democratic elections, which is no mean
trick, they're also fighting a war.
Russia intervened in Ukraine in a double way.
It invaded, occupied, and annexed the Crimean Peninsula, which is the southernmost territory
of Ukraine, and it is currently fighting a proxy and real war in the southeastern Ukraine,
in regions or oblasts known as Donetsk and Lugansk.
That is the war which is going on today.
Russian troops are on the roads as we speak, along with Russian tanks, armor, and heavy
weapons.
So that is the story, as it were.
But what is the story about the story?
And now we're getting to the real subject, and now we're getting to the thoughts, which
I want to try to share with you in the next 15 or 20 minutes.
What can we say about what's happening?
What is interesting about what's happening?
I want to say a word about tactics.
I want to say a word about strategy.
I want to say a word about philosophy.
And what I want to try to convince you of in all this is that the stakes of what is
happening are not just some minor struggle in a faraway country of which we know little.
The stakes are intellectually and morally and politically much, much greater than that.
Okay, let me try to convince you of that.
I want to start at the bottom.
I want to start by talking about tactics.
Tactics in the military sense of the word.
Because what Russia has done in its war in Ukraine is tactically innovative and interesting,
and it's proven thus far to be rather effectively, rather effective.
What I would call it is reverse asymmetrical warfare.
So asymmetrical warfare means the weapons of the weak.
If you are a partisan army, or if you are civilians, if you are on the weaker side,
if you are terrorists, and you're facing some big conventional army, asymmetrical warfare
is what you do.
You do things which are not so kosher.
You do things which break the laws of war.
You disguise yourself as civilians.
You hide amongst civilians.
You break the rules on the battlefield.
You fight quick engagements and you run.
That's asymmetrical warfare.
Not agreeing you're going to play by the rules.
And you have an argument why that's okay, which is that you're small and weak and your
opponent is big and strong.
What Russia has done is it's reversed this.
Russia is big and strong, at least compared to Ukraine.
The Russian army compared to Ukraine, the Ukrainian army, is overwhelmingly strong.
And yet the Russians have chosen to fight, as it were, an asymmetrical war inside Ukraine.
Rather than declaring war and just overwhelming the opponent, which presumably they could
do, they have chosen to fight, and they've clearly planned to fight, this odd, reverse
asymmetrical war.
So let me give you some examples.
How do they invade Crimea?
They sent troops in unmarked uniforms, which is both asymmetrical warfare.
When you send troops and you say that they're not yours and they're from the civilians or
from the local population, there's no invasion going on, which is, of course, what they said.
But also it's, I mean, the kind of thing only a state could do.
Only a state can produce thousands of identical unmarked uniforms, right, and thousands of
identical unmarked camouflage, personnel carriers, and tanks, right?
So it's this reverse asymmetry.
We're not going to take responsibility, but clearly a state is behind it.
The way the war has been prosecuted in the Southeast or is being prosecuted is very similar.
Russia is present.
They've intervened massively with their own troops when necessary.
But generally what they do is they train people in tactics of partisan warfare.
So the local separatists trained and accompanied by Russians are fighting wars from cities,
right, which is the classic partisan tactic, because then you draw the fire of your opponent
into the cities, which alienates the civilian population, brings them towards your side.
That's what partisans have to do.
But the interesting thing is, presumably Russia doesn't have to do that.
It's just doing it, right?
It's choosing to present itself as the weaker side.
It's choosing to pretend that there's no war on, right?
Right now, literally everyone knows that there are, I mean, literally everyone knows, even
the people who deny it know, in fact they know it best of all, that there are Russian troops
inside Ukraine, that there's Russian armor in Ukraine, that there's more now than there
was when I started my lecture.
Everybody, literally everybody knows that.
And yet they will not, they will not only not say it, they will go to extraordinarily
convoluted links to deny it, which is interesting.
What does it all mean?
I mean, I think what it means is that Russia is attaching itself to the story that they
are on the, they are the small guy against the weak guy, that really what's going on
here is not a war of Russia against Ukraine, right?
Which could seem like something unfair and illegal, not to mention brutal, unnecessary
and counterproductive.
But what's really going on is a Russian defensive struggle against the overwhelming might of
the United States, which is a theme to which I'm going to return.
So I think their tactics are related to that overall way of presenting things.
Now, as they do this, they have an interesting way of talking about their strategic goal.
The way they talk about their strategic goal is to describe it as though it's already happened,
which is the end of the Ukrainian state.
In five or six different ways, Russian authorities have talked about the non-existence of the
Ukrainian state.
They've said that Russia and Ukraine are really one nation, a point of which there's
a lot of evidence to the contrary, that there never has been a Ukrainian state, that there
was a Ukrainian state, but that it ceased to exist, which is how they explain why they're
not obeying treaties, right?
We signed it with Ukraine, but Ukraine no longer exists, therefore the treaty no longer
binds us.
All this business about, you may have heard it, about Novorossiya, that is a historical
claim to someone else's territory.
When you make a historical claim, you're denying the reality of statehood.
The idea of a Russian world, Uruskimir, is an ethnic or cultural claim to someone else's
territory.
If you say there's a Russian world where Russia gets to rule, that's like saying there's
an English world, right?
So we would then be part of England, which in some respects might be better, in some
respects might be worse, but you see how absurd it is when I put it that way, right?
We know that culture doesn't actually match up with political boundaries.
Once you say that it does, you're denying the reality of political boundaries, you're
denying the existence of states.
The goal as it's announced in all these ways is a destruction of the Ukrainian state.
Now, this itself is really interesting because I think it suggests, or it's an element of,
a much larger strategy, which has to do precisely with disintegration.
A strategy.
You want to be taken seriously, even though it's unconventional and new, and therefore
easy to dismiss.
I would call this strategy strategic relativism, and its principle is this.
If you are absolutely not that strong, which Russia is not on a world scale, if you have
real demographic and technological limits, if a lot of your financial power is based
on fossil fuels, necessarily finite, you are limited compared to let's say the United States
or the European Union or most terrifyingly China, you have real limits.
How do you overcome those limits?
You can't make yourself absolutely stronger, but you can make other people relatively weaker.
I think it's that insight, which is at the root of the new Russian strategy of strategic
relativism.
What you do, since other people's power is based upon various kinds of connections, and
you are alone, you're a tyranny operating alone, you're flexible, you're fast, you can
do what you want, what you do is you try to break down those connections.
Once one sees this as an overall strategy, an approach to the world, then a lot of the
pieces begin to line up and make sense.
At the biggest level, the strategic relativism is about the transatlantic relationship.
It's about the relationship with the United States and the European Union.
Something which can be attacked, for example, by leaking telephone conversations of high
American officials, where they talk out of context about the European Union.
It's something which can be weakened by the propaganda of a geopolitical struggle, which
I mentioned before, where America is put behind everything which happens in Ukraine, which
infuses some Europeans in good faith, usually in bad, because if we're behind it all, therefore,
it's not their responsibility.
They don't have to do anything, and maybe we should be blamed for all of our imperialism.
The highest level of this disintegration is the US-EU relationship.
The next level is the European Union itself, which, as I already mentioned, has been characterized
for more than a year now as decadent.
That's a serious word.
I mean, when I say decadent, you're probably thinking of fat Roman emperors surrounded
by their harems eating grapes.
I know you are.
I know you are.
And it's sort of pleasant, but what decadence actually means is decay.
It means destruction from within.
It means rot.
It's a story with an end.
So when you say that something else, something is decadent, you mean that it's coming to
an end.
And that's exactly what is meant by this Russian description of Europe, that it can't go on.
And Russian policy is designed to bring that end about as quickly as possible.
The destruction of the Ukrainian state is a destruction of Europe in and of itself, because
the whole European order is based upon territorial integrity, and also because the project of
European integration is based upon the project of integrating not peoples, but states.
So if you can break states up, then you can also break up the project of a larger union.
But it goes a little bit deeper than that.
The Russian campaign against Ukraine has been accompanied, and this is no coincidence
whatsoever, by a very interesting Russian recruitment of the European far right.
Now, on the surface, you could say, well, this is because Putin has an anti-homosexual
campaign, and they don't like gays and so on.
There are some ideological overlaps.
But the real substantial overlap is that the European far right, by which I mean the populists
and the people to the right of the populists, the fascists, and the Nazis, are all against
the European Union project, as is Putin.
And so they now have a very substantial relationship, very substantial, which involves, for example,
members of the European far right going to monitor the elections, which were just held
in the occupied parts of Ukraine.
And of course, what all of this is ultimately about with Europe, and I'm going to say the
magic word now, is energy.
Russian power depends upon the sale of hydrocarbons.
The European Union is aware of this, and as the European Union will eventually get it
together and have some kind of long-term energy policy.
As Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, and so on, they will not.
Well, Norway will, because they've got tons of hydrocarbons.
But the individual European countries will always be very weak compared to Russia.
They will always be dependent on Russia natural gas, whereas the European Union will not,
which is why it has to go.
Now from this point of view, the destruction of Ukraine, which I've already mentioned,
becomes part of a much larger view of things, which I'm going to edge towards calling a
philosophy.
The attempt to break up the Maidan, the attempt to break up the revolution, begins to seem
not just like an attempt to break up something which might be threatened if it were exported
and copied in Russia, which of course, it is a threat for that reason, but also as a
deeper kind of threat, representing something which I would call civil society.
The underlying philosophy, and I'm going to edge towards talking about this philosophy
more explicitly, but the underlying philosophy of the strategic relativism is that there
aren't any real connections.
They don't really exist.
They might seem to exist, but they don't really exist.
There's some hidden hand behind it all.
In fact, if you listen to Putin carefully or not so carefully, it's an American hidden
hand behind it all.
There aren't really people who would go out and take risks and suffer and spend the night
on cold pavement in December.
There aren't really such people.
They're only paid henchmen of the CIA, right?
They're only paid henchmen of the CIA.
There are not, and there isn't really a European Union either.
There's just an American hegemon who likes things to be this way, right?
No one is ever acting according to their own view of the world.
There are larger plots in the background.
Where this comes from, whether it has to do with Putin's CIA training, sorry, not CIA
training, as far as I know, KGB training, where there comes from Soviet experience,
I don't know, but I think it is a way of seeing the world.
The terrifying thing about seeing the world this way is that even though it's not true,
it is enforceable.
It can be made to be true, right?
It's not true that there are no free associations.
It's not true that you're all here because you were paid by ExxonMobil or whatever.
It's not true that I'm here because I'm part of some lurching American conspiracy.
We're all here for our own individual reasons, and together we make up a group in that civil
society, and it's something rather wonderful and beautiful.
It's not true that there's no such thing, but you can make a world in which there's
no such thing.
You can break these things up from the inside or from the outside.
That can be done.
That's what Soviet history basically shows.
Even if you're wrong in your diagnosis, you can still be, as it were, correct in your prognosis.
You can break up civil society, and that is a way of understanding, I think, at the deepest
level, what is actually happening, because I think what is actually happening is based
upon a difference in fundamentally in philosophy, and I want to close by trying to define what
I think that difference in philosophy really is.
I would call it, and you can just like all of my fancy words, like the strategic relativism
and the reverse asymmetry and so on, you can just forget all of those, but they're just
labels of arguments which I'm trying to make clear.
I would call this a kind of applied postmodernism.
What do I mean by postmodernism, aside from the dominant trend of my education in the
1980s?
What do I mean by postmodernism?
I mean certain ways of seeing reality as being fragmented, where words and things don't have
any necessary connection to each other, and that's all fine and good.
Let me give you an example you all know.
Let's say you're looking at an advertisement for a display at a grocery store, and there
are beautiful pears and olive oil and wines, and there's a Sancerre there that you really
like and so on, and then at the bottom of that beautiful picture of food, you see a
little thing which says, for illustration purposes only.
Think about what that really means.
It doesn't mean for illustration purposes.
It's not actually an illustration.
What for illustration purposes means is that this stuff is not in the store, not that it
is in the store.
Okay, so let's say you like to watch ads for BMW convertibles and they go up mountains
and they go up buildings, they go up all kinds of possible stuff.
The first thing it says is a professional driver on closed course.
Come on.
And then the second thing it says is something like for illustration purposes only, or demonstration
purposes only, which means precisely the opposite.
It's not illustrating anything.
This can't actually happen.
It's not demonstrating anything.
Either it can't actually happen, right?
This is the postmodern world we live in that we take for granted, that these words mean
the opposite of what they seem to.
Okay, now, a couple of weeks ago, there was a mass propaganda campaign which most likely
came from Russia, in which thousands of people around the world received emails with atrocity
photos having to do with the supposed Ukrainian mistreatment of prisoners of war.
And the flyer came with a photo.
And the photo was of a Second World War era, German concentration camp, right?
Okay, so that's propaganda, very bad.
When the people who sent out that flyer were queried about it, their official response was,
yes, that picture has nothing to do with the subject.
It is for illustration purposes only, okay?
So this is what I mean by applied postmodernism.
We should think, I'm getting this towards thinking about how far away we are from all
this, right?
A second example of this postmodernism is marketing, politics as marketing, right?
Which we're all familiar with.
So the two kinds of Russian propaganda, which I've already mentioned, each has a market.
When the Russians say it's all, the Ukrainian revolution is all a geopolitical struggle,
their market is the European left and parts of the American left, who really do kind of
tend to think that America's behind everything.
And therefore, if it's a geopolitical struggle, then maybe we should be against America rather
than Russia.
And most insidiously, if it's a geopolitical struggle, that just removes all of the Ukrainians
from the picture entirely, right?
If it's all about some chessboard between America and Russia, where it's just guys in
ties in the Kremlin or in the Pentagon thinking about things, then there are no real Ukrainians.
There are no real human beings.
There are no people who suffer.
There's no one who takes risks.
There's no one who votes in higher numbers than we do, right?
There's no one fighting a war.
Even though they have no army, the people are evacuated from the scene completely in
this geopolitical struggle.
That's the market.
It reaches us that way.
Likewise, the idea which they started out with, that the Ukrainians are all fascists,
that had a market, right?
The market was all of us who were concerned that the greatest danger comes from renewal
of fascism or from anti-Semitism.
If you just say your enemy is a Nazi and a fascist over and over and over again, which
some of them still do, I mean the deputy prime minister of Russia, who himself is no friend
of the left, actually had his party banned because of racist advertising in an earlier
better era in Russian history.
He refers to the Ukrainians still as the, what is it, the fascist Nazi junta.
Fascist Nazi junta.
And someone has taught him that every time he refers to them, instead of saying Ukraine,
he should say fascist Nazi junta.
And if you say it over and over again, people might start to think it's plausible.
If you say it enough times, it starts to sound ridiculous, right?
Nazi fascist junta, Nazi fascist junta, Nazi fascist junta, Nazi fascist junta, Nazi fascist
junta, Nazi fascist junta.
But clearly he's aiming for a market, and the point about all this is that it works.
You may not be convinced in the end, but it slows you down.
It certainly slows you down at the very minimum.
It creates a slippery world.
Let me give you the third example of postmodernism, which we do, okay, which Fox News does, and
this is where it came from actually, and they perfected it.
There's a Russian television broadcaster called Russian Today, which is I think the second
largest English language broadcaster now in the world.
The way they present news, and this will be familiar, is they bring on five experts, each
of whom present five different versions of what happened.
One of which might even be true, but it doesn't matter, because when you hear the five different
versions, at the end of it, A, you have no idea what actually happened, B, the event
itself has been trivialized by this ridiculous discussion, and C, you've maybe lost a little
bit more of whatever faith you might have had in journalism, right?
And that is intentional, okay?
So in Russia Today, or other Russian media outlets discuss, for example, the shooting
down of the Malaysian airline flight over Ukraine, which was a real event in which 289 real people
lost their lives, but the theories are thrown out about it, like this Malaysian airliner
was the same one that disappeared over the Pacific, or this Malaysian airliner was launched
from its runway with dead bodies who were put in there by the CIA, or this Ukrainian
airliner was actually shot down by Ukrainian fighter jet, or maybe an American fighter
jet, or this Malaysian airliner was shot down by Ukrainian artillery, which is actually
aiming for President Putin's plane.
If you put enough of this stuff out there, right, then people might, I've probably just
done it, you're gonna go home and say, you know, the strangest thing, you know, I just
heard Professor Snyder say that UFOs carrying Elvis' baby shot down that plane, right?
And this is how it works, right, that you give these multiple views and at the end something
which really matters, right, that the tragic death of children and women and men, something
which really matters, at the end of it, it becomes nothing, and you don't really believe
in journalism anymore, and that's what's intended.
That's the final way this postmodern stuff works.
Now, I'm already sort of testing you to see how deep this has gotten into us, and of course
it does come from us in some considerable measure, and I'm getting back towards our
title, which is from Propaganda to Reality, where the question is where are we really
in all of this, and how much of this comes from us, and how much of it reaches us.
Now, where this ultimately heads, I think, is in, to the dispensation, the dispensing
of truth itself, or dispensing of truth itself, that there is no such thing of truth.
Truth has been dispensed with.
And if you no longer believe in it, right, if you no longer believe in it, it's no longer
there, and the hardest test of this would be the old Aristotelian test of, I'm in Chicago,
I always like to say Aristotle when I'm in Chicago.
The old Aristotelian, there's like, there's one University of Chicago graduate here who
laughed at that.
There's the old Aristotelian test of non-contradiction.
So you might think, no, that's ridiculous, Professor Schneider, of course we follow the
principle of non-contradiction.
We don't allow ourselves to contradict ourselves on a daily basis, and if somebody else did,
we'd catch it immediately.
Okay, so let's see, let's see.
Let me recite some things from Russian propaganda about this war, which you will have all heard
probably in one way or another, because the American media happily picks up most of this
stuff.
Let me just cite a couple of things, and then let's see how we've been doing.
You have heard, there's no Ukrainian state.
You've also heard the Ukrainian state is very repressive.
You have heard there is no Ukrainian nation.
You've also heard that all Ukrainians are nationalists.
You have heard that there is no Ukrainian language.
You've also heard that Russians are being forced to speak the Ukrainian language.
Most disturbingly, you have heard that Russia is fighting a war to save the world from fascism,
and you've also heard that maybe fascism isn't such a bad thing after all.
Honestly how much of that did you pick up?
How much of the fact that the entire propaganda campaign from beginning to end was not just
wrong, but self-contradictory, honestly, how much of that was clear to all of us at the
time?
I think surprisingly and depressingly little, and this is the place where I want to try to
bring this to an end.
We are at a point where I really think we are at a point of to be or not to be for the
West, whatever you might think of as the West.
This policy of strategic relativism of bringing down the various kinds of connections that
exist, the transatlantic one, the European one, the integrity of states themselves, civil
society, is ultimately about us as well.
The policies against civil society, interestingly, are not just being pursued on the Maidan or
in Russia, where NGOs are banned or are forced to advertise themselves as being foreign agents.
They're also pursued here.
Russian money is used to fund non-governmental organizations here, and then the Russians
reveal that they're doing this, and then we all become skeptical about non-governmental
organizations in general.
Journalists are paid to admit that they were working for the CIA by Russian money, and
then we become a little more skeptical about journalism.
All of this is not just about Ukraine.
It's about something much, much, much bigger, and in that sense, I think it's best understood
as a challenge.
We can say what might sensible policy be, and I think their answer to that with sensible
policy should be, if we really believe in these unities, if we believe in civil society
or the integrity of states, or if we believe in European integration or if we believe in
the transatlantic relationship, it's probably a good time to say so, probably a good time
to try to support those things.
There are sensible policies.
I think the best Russia policy is a good Ukraine policy.
The thing that the United States government should be doing, in addition to sanctions
against Russia, which are important because they force a conversation in Russia eventually,
is to support the Ukrainian state as an example.
If the Ukrainian state holds together, that's the best rebuff to this kind of policy.
But fundamentally, I mean, and I can talk more about that, but fundamentally this is
about concepts.
I think fundamentally this is a kind of Orwellian moment.
This is a moment where we decide whether we have concepts, whether we know who we really
are, because let me put it a different way.
I described all this as tactics, the asymmetry, strategy, the relativism, and then philosophy,
the postmodernism, but really the philosophy is also the tactics.
The philosophy comes first.
If you buy into this version of postmodernism, then you are going to also buy into the strategic
relativism, and then you're going to lose a whole lot of asymmetric battles, which is
a description of what has happened in the last year in large measure.
Not a description of Ukraine and Russia.
The Ukrainians are actually much more savvy about these things than we are, of course,
because I haven't had much more experience with them.
It's not a description of Ukraine and Russia.
It's a description of us.
It's a description of us.
If we buy into this kind of way of seeing the world, which is in part our way of seeing
the world, we had a good hand in generating it, then there are certain consequences, like
that there will be wars, there will be broken orders, there will be chaos.
I think really that's where we come to an end here.
The title from propaganda to reality is not about Ukraine.
You can talk about Ukraine without talking about propaganda and reality.
From a Ukrainian point of view, the things that have happened are actually fairly straightforward,
and the way that we describe it from the outside can also be fairly straightforward.
An authoritarian state has invaded a democratic state, destroying a European order.
It's really not that complicated.
It's happened that way.
The reasons why we find it complicated are largely reasons which have to do with us,
with our vulnerability to certain kinds of propaganda, and not really with reality.
Ultimately, I see all this as a challenge.
I mean, if you want to be optimistic, an interesting challenge, but I think a serious
moral and intellectual challenge in which the people who come up with these ideas know
us much better than we know them.
These are serious intelligent people who have to be taken seriously, which we're not, I
think, at the moment doing very well.
What concerns me is the extent to which this event in Ukraine, which is important in all
kinds of ways, has given way precisely to this yielding moment in our own culture.
Because, after all, if we see what's happened in Ukraine as nothing more than just some
little conflict in some faraway country, if we see this as just a kind of politics as
usual, well, then propaganda has already won and reality has already lost and the story
is already over.
Thank you.
