Timothy Synder, The Making of Modern Ukraine, Lecture #6: The Grand Duchy of Lithuania
For those who are not familiar with Timothy Snyder, he 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, including both Ukrainian and Russian.
His book, “Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin,” which I highly recommend, is not only meticulously researched, it is essential reading for a complete understanding of WWII as well as Europe today.
I have undertaken to summarize all of Snyder’s lectures. I am also following along in the reading (see syllabus link below), which has not only been enlightening, but enjoyable. (I’m not ashamed to say I love reading history.) As always, my summaries are meant to be a guide, rather than a substitution for Snyder’s lectures.
Timothy Snyder’s sixth lecture for his course, The Making of Modern Ukraine, focused on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which at its height was the largest country in Europe.
While I was listening to Snyder’s lecture, my daughter called. She asked what I was doing, and I replied that I was listening to a lecture on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. “WHY??” she asked. (My daughter reserves that deeply incredulous tone of voice for her mother.) That is a good question. Why, indeed?
The answer could easily be arrived at by looking at a map at the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (13th century to 1795), which shows that it encompasses Lithuania, Belarus, a chunk of Poland, and most of Ukraine, as well as the western part of Russia. But there is more to the Grand Duchy than mere territorial expanse.
Faced with the Mongol invasion from the east, and the encroachment of the Teutonic Knights from the west — who were destroying everything in their path like a plague of locusts — the rulers of Lithuania had to think fast. It was one thing to rule through enslavement, which had been the norm, but quite another to organize a defense against simultaneous threats from both east and west.
The solution was to form a state. A state, Snyder points out, has to last beyond a single charismatic leader. It needs a set of laws, and an entirely different relationship between rulers and subjects. Lithuania not only codified its set of laws in the Russkaya Pravda — laws which outlawed capital punishment and established a court system as early as the 13th century — but did so in a Slavic language, Old Church Slavonic, rather than the Greek used by the Byzantines.
This identifies the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as distinctly Slavic, and helps trace Ukraine’s evolution from the Nordic Kievan Rus to a Slavic state (albeit with Nordic underpinnings). It also establishes an early date for the development of a legal system, which lends some background to the fact that Ukraine had a Constitution in 1710, with three branches of government. (To put this in perspective, the American Constitution was ratified in 1788.)
Sometimes, in an age that is centered on information technology, we forget the influence of terrain, and of physical movement across fields, hills, and water. I was reminded daily of those forces as I pondered maps of where Russian forces were advancing last March, and when I examine those same maps where Russian forces are now retreating. So much of our history is based on sweeping movements across terrain, simply because so much of our history is shaped by wars, by death and destruction, and by the bottomless ambition of rulers who can’t be satisfied, but want more, more, more.
You can watch the sixth lecture of The Making of Modern Ukraine here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlvE6tgPEf8
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 all of my summaries 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 blog for writers, Publishing … and Other Forms of Insanity, has received nearly 8 million page views. You are welcome to visit.
