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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The meaning that I was putting in the term the Soviet Union as the last empire was that the Soviet collapse was the collapse of the last major European empires, traditional empires. That was in the 18th century, 19th century, and through most of the 20th century. The Austria-Hungary died in the midst of World War I. The Ottoman Empire disintegrated. The Brits were gone and left India.
The successor to the Russian Empire, called the Soviet Union, was still hanging on there. Then came 1991, and what we see even with today's Russia, it's a very different sort of policies. The Russian leadership tried to learn a lesson from 1991, so there is no national republics in the Russian Federation that would have more rights than the Russian administrative units.
So the structure is different. The nationality policies are different. The level of Russification is much higher. So it is, in many ways, already a post-imperial formation.
History is many things, but it started in a very simple way of making notes on the yearly basis, what happened this year or that. So it's about chronology. Chronology in the history of the collapse of the Soviet Union is very important. You have Ukrainian referendum on December 1st, 1991, and you have dissolution of the Soviet Union by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus one week later.
Mm-hmm. And the question is why. Ukrainian referendum is the answer, but Ukrainians didn't answer their referendum question of whether they want the Soviet Union to be dissolved or not. They answered very limited in terms of, it's been in question whether you support the decision of Verkhovna Rada, of your parliament. for Ukraine to go independent. The rest was not on the ballot.
So why then, one week later, the Soviet Union is gone? President Yeltsin explained to President Bush around that time the reason why Ukraine was so important. He said that, well, if Ukraine is gone, Russia is not interested in this Soviet project because Russia would be outnumbered and outvoted by the Muslim republics. So there was a cultural element. But there was also another one.
Ukraine happened to be the second largest Soviet republic and then post-Soviet state. in terms of population, in terms of the economy, economic potential, and so on and so forth. And, as Yeltsin suggested, close culturally, linguistically, and otherwise to Russia. So, with the second largest republic gone, Russia didn't think that it was in Russia's interest to continue with the Soviet Union.
Around that time, Yegor Gaidar, who was the chief economic advisor of Yeltsin, was telling him, well, we just don't have money anymore to support other republics. We have to focus on Russia. We have to use oil and gas money within the Russian Federation. The state was bankrupt. Imperial projects, at least in the context of the late 20th century, they costed money.
It wasn't a money-making machine as it was back in the 18th or 19th century. And the combination of all these factors led to the processes in which Ukraine's decision to go independent spelled the end to the Soviet Union.
And if today anybody wants to restore not the Soviet Union, but some form of Russian control over the post-Soviet space, Ukraine is as important today as it was back in December of 1991.
His formulation was that this is the greatest geopolitical catastrophe or tragedy of the 20th century. I specifically went and looked at the text and put it in specific time when it was happening. It was interesting that the statement was made a few weeks before the May 9 parade and celebrations of the victory. a key part of the mythology of the current Russian state.
So why say things about the Soviet collapse being the largest geopolitical strategy, and not in that particular context, the Second World War? My explanation, at least, is that the World War II, the price was enormous, but the Soviet Union emerged as a great victor and captured half of Europe. 1991. in terms of the lives lost at that point, the price was actually very, very low.
But for Putin, what was important that the state was lost, and he in particular was concerned about the division of the Russian people, which he understood back then, like he understands now, in very, very broad terms. So for him, the biggest tragedy is not the loss of life. the biggest tragedy is the loss of the great power status or the unity of those whom he considered to be Russian nations.
So at least this is my reading, this is my understanding of what is there, what is on the paper and what is between the lines.
That's how I read it.
We can look at that from different perspectives. And we are now making major breakthroughs in answering this question with the very interesting innovative linguistic analysis, the study of DNA. So that's really the new frontier. We are getting into... pre-historical period where there was no historical sources.
From what we can understand today, and that can, of course, change tomorrow with all these breakthroughs in sciences, is that the Slavs came into existence somewhere in the area of Pripyat marshes, northwestern part of Ukraine. southwestern part of Belarus, eastern part of Poland, and that is considered to be a historical homeland of Slavs, and then they spread.
And they spread all the way to the Adriatic, so we have Croats, we have Russians spreading all the way to the Pacific, we have Ukrainians, we have Belarusians, Poles, Once we had Czechoslovaks, now we have Czechs and Slovaks. So that's the story of starting with the 8th and 9th century.
Even a little bit earlier, we can already follow that story with the help of the written sources, mostly from Byzantine, then later from Western Europe. But what I was trying to do, not being a scientist, not being an expert in linguistics, an expert in DNA analysis, I was trying to see what was happening in the minds of those people and the elites in particular.
whom we call today not Slavs, but Eastern Slavs, which means Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, how they imagined themselves, how they imagined their world, and eventually I look at the so-called nation-building projects. So trying to answer the question of how we arrived
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