Serhii Plokhy
speaker
375 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Serhii Plokhy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So in historical terms and intellectual terms, what is happening today in the war between Russia and Ukraine is the division on one level or another level that was formulated by the Nobel laureate, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, half Russian, half Ukrainian.
The Ukrainian question is very simple. Now it's not any more acquisition of the nation state, but actually a sovereign state. But it's maintenance. So the Ukrainian question is like dozens of other questions in the 20th and 21st century. the rise of the new state.
And that's what is the Ukrainian question, whether Ukraine will continue to its existence as a nation, as an independent state, because that existence is being questioned by stating that Russians and Ukrainians are one and the same people, which de facto saying, your guy is Russian, and also trying to destroy the state.
Everything is possible, and the longer the war continues, the more likely a scenario like that becomes. But realization of that scenario would go against the grain of the largest part of Ukrainian history, where Ukraine really emerged as a pluralistic state in which the elements of democracy
were built in the last 30 years would go against the grain of the Ukrainian society where, as one author formulated in the 1990s, he wrote a book, Ukrainian Nationalism and Minority Faith, where the nationalism was a minority faith, and radical nationalism continues to be, or at least continued to be in 2019, a minority faith during the last elections.
So, possible but unlikely given the historical realities of the last 30-plus years.
Holodomor is a massive famine in Ukraine between the years 1932 and 1934. And it happened as the result of forceful collectivization of the agriculture. And a tamp on the part of Stalin also really rolled Ukraine into the Soviet Union with basically no potential opposition from Ukraine, now national communists.
So two things came together in December of 1932, when in the same decree, Stalin and Molotov signed a decree on the requisition of the grain, which led eventually to the mass starvation, and on the banning of Ukrainian language publications and education in other countries.
republics outside of Ukraine and introducing limitations on the so-called Ukrainianization policies, so on the use of Ukrainian language in Ukraine itself. The numbers are debated. The numbers that most of the scholars work today are 4 million, but again, there are larger numbers as well that circulate. And the famine of 1932-1933 was not an exclusive Ukrainian phenomenon.
But most of Ukraine in the Soviet Union died in Ukraine. And Ukraine was the only place where the policy on collecting grain was coming together with the policy of the cleansing of the political leadership, sending people from Moscow to take over Ukraine. the leadership and attack on Ukrainian culture. So in terms of what I learn about human nature, it's more me learning about the ideologies
of the 20th century because it's not the only famine in the communist lands. The famine in China, which was, in terms of the numbers, much more devastating than that. It's in a different category and for a good reason, but you have Holocaust. What unites these things is the time. This is 20th century.
What unites them are the dominance in the societies that are doing that, really ideologies that not just devalued human life, but considered that actually the way forward is by destroying a large group of populations defined ethnically, religiously, socially, or otherwise. which tells about the time, but tells also about humanity, because for centuries before that, human life was valued.
There were enemies, but the idea was that human life can put, and you can At the end of the day, they can be slaves. You can use them for productive force. Countries in the 18th century with Southern Ukraine, they were looking for settlers, for people to bring and live on land.
You move into the 20th century, and there is mass destruction of the population in the name of ideologies, which basically are, by definition, destroy human lives. And that's what's really so shocking and striking because that's the break with, not just with issues of morale, not just with issues of humanity, with any common sense, what is happening.
And I am absolutely convinced that we didn't learn the lesson. I am absolutely convinced that we didn't learn the lesson. With turning our page on fascism and communism, we somehow decided that we are free of that. That at least in those terms, history came to an end. That what is ahead is the future and nothing of that sort would
would take place to a degree that people would get in trouble for comparing any statements or events that are happening today with either communism or fascism. And so I feel responsibility of myself and as a historian in particular for not doing a better job about about telling people that, well, we are who we are, and we have as humans our dark side, and we have to be very careful.
Yes, and in the name of a particular nation or race, like it was the Third Reich, or in the name of the humanity of the future. So not just devalue human life, destroy human life.
There is. And there is a number of factors of political and social character that produce Chernobyl. And one of them is generally the atmosphere of secrecy in the Soviet Union. in the conditions of the Cold War. Chernobyl reactor was a dual-purpose reactor. It could boil water today and produce enriched uranium tomorrow. It was top secret.
If there were problems with that reactor, those problems were kept secret even at people who operated the reactor. That's what happened in Chernobyl. Another big, big part of the story, which is specifically Soviet, that's the nature of the managerial culture and administrative culture in which people had no right to make their own decisions in their place, in their position.
A few years before that, Three Mile Island happened, which was a big, big nuclear disaster, but in terms of consequences, nothing like Chernobyl. And there, in the context of the American legal culture and managerial culture, people who were operators, who were in managerial positions, that was their responsibility to take decisions.
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