Timothy Snyder, The Making of Modern Ukraine, Lecture #22: Ukrainian Ideas in the 21st Century
I’ve just finished watching Yale professor Timothy Snyder’s 22nd lecture for his course, The Making of Modern Ukraine. This lecture was titled, “Ukrainian Ideas in the 21st Century”, but it mostly concerned Russian ideas about Ukraine, and specifically how those ideas relate to culture, which Snyder defines as “a set of mutually enforcing notions of what a people might be.”
One of Snyder’s recurring themes in this course has been the importance of Ukraine to Russia, not just in terms of its resources, but as Ukraine relates to Russia’s identity. Ivan Rudnytsky, an eminent scholar of Ukrainian intellectual history, writes in his essay “The Fourth Universal” that “The emergence of the modern Russian Empire was based on the absorption of Ukraine in the course of the second half of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” This close association with Russia’s position in the world made the independence of Ukraine “unpalatable” to Russian public opinion.
Snyder takes this idea one step further. Not only was Ukraine essential to Russia’s identification as an empire, its history defined Russia, both positively and negatively. The early history of Kyiv as a center of culture and political influence, when Moscow was just an insignificant backwater, served to bolster Russia’s image once Ukraine was absorbed and declared “part” of Russia. But, by the same token, the very prestige now conferred on Russia by Kyiv’s pre-eminence compelled Russia to deny Ukraine’s existence.
Nowhere was this denial more startling than when the Ukrainian language was banned by Russia in the late 19th century. In 1863, Valuyev’s Circular, a policy deriving from the Kyiv Censorship Committee, stated that “the Ukrainian language never existed, does not exist, and shall never exist.” Professor Snyder pointed out that the phrase “shall never exist” implied the permanence of Ukraine’s absorption, as well as indicating the threat implied by Ukraine’s national aspirations. Following the Circular, in 1876, Emperor Alexander II, issued a decree banning the use of the Ukrainian language in print and forbidding the import of Ukrainian publications as well as the staging of plays and lectures in Ukrainian.
The irony is that Ukraine has been essential to the development of Russian culture. Russia’s most famous literary figure, Nicolai Gogol, was Ukrainian. (Several Russian presidents — Krushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev — have also been Ukrainian.) Russia not only absorbed Ukrainian territory, it tried to make Ukrainian culture its own. And for that reason, it was important to make sure Ukraine didn’t “exist.” However, as Professor Snyder stressed, to deny something’s existence requires a recognition of it.
This lecture helped make sense of the otherwise nonsensical claim that Ukraine is a “threat” to Russia. (I have heard that statement on Russian talk shows, and been puzzled by it.) Ukraine is obviously not a political or territorial threat to Russia. It has never invaded Russia or tried to take over its government. However, unlike Latvia and Lithuania, whose nationhood has been accepted by Russia, Ukraine’s nationhood undermines Russia’s political and cultural history, a history that depends heavily on genealogy for its legitimacy. That genealogy descends from Kyiv, not Moscow.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, starting in 2014, was a turning point for Ukrainians. At that juncture, and even more strongly in 2022 — which is now the definitive turning point — Ukraine stopped looking up to Russia. Ukrainians who had been first-language speakers of Russian began using Ukrainian exclusively for all their communications. (I want to point out that language has NEVER defined ethnicity. The fact that I speak English does not make me British.) “We don’t master language,” Snyder quoted, “Language masters us.”
During all of the centuries that Ukraine has struggled for its independence from one empire after another, it has, at long last, definitively achieved it. And it has achieved that independence in a distinctly Ukrainian, pluralistic fashion. As Snyder quipped, in a moment of levity, the fact that Ukraine has a Jewish president — the only one in the world aside from Israel — proves that “God exists, and He has a sense of humor.”
You can watch Timothy Snyder’s 22nd lecture here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz6MSiGZQCU
The syllabus for the course is here: https://snyder.substack.com/p/syllabus-of-my-ukraine-lecture-class
You can watch all of Timothy Snyder’s lectures for The Making of Modern Ukraine here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_
You can read my summaries of his lectures here: https://ericaverr.medium.com/
Erica Verrillo is the author of the Phoenix Rising Trilogy (Random House). Her short work has appeared in over a dozen publications. She is also the author of the definitive reference guide for treating myalgic encephalomyelitis, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Treatment Guide, now in its second edition (first edition, St. Martin’s). She holds degrees from Tufts University (BA — History) and Syracuse University (MA — Linguistics) as well as doctoral work in Linguistics, Anthropology, and Speech Communication. Her professional life includes: Spanish language editor for the journal Mesoamerica, linguistics instructor (Dartmouth), Spanish and ESL instructor (Syracuse University), classical musician (Oxford Symphony Orchestra), Mayan linguist (SUNY Albany), and director of a non-profit NGO for Mayan refugees. She is the president of the American Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Society, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to to serving the needs of patients and caregivers through support, advocacy, and education. Her writing blog, Publishing … and Other Forms of Insanity, has received nearly 8 million page views. You are welcome to visit.
