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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to the situation in which we are today, where there are not just three East Slavic nations, but there are also three East Slavic states, Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian. So this is the focus of my book. I end, admittedly, in that particular book, I end on the 18th century, before the era of nationalism.
But then there are other books like Lost Kingdom, where I bring the story all the way up to today.
Well, the most important one is that the existence of the state of Kievan Rus'. back during the medieval period, created foundations for historical mythology, common historical mythology, and there are just wars and battles over who has the right or more right for Kievan Rus'. The legal code that was created at that time existed for a long period of time.
The acceptance of Christianity from Byzantium, that became a big issue that separated then Eastern Slavs from their Western neighbors, including Czechs and Poles, but united in that way to, let's say, Bulgarians or Serbs, and the beginning of the written literature. beginning in Kyiv. So all of that is considered to be part of heritage. All of that is being contested.
And these debates that were academic for a long period of time What we see now, tragically, are being continued on the battlefield.
Kyiv became a capital or the outpost of the Vikings who were trying to establish control over the trade route between what is today's Western Russia and Belarus and Northern Ukraine, so the forest areas. And the biggest and the richest market in the world that existed at that time, which was in Constantinople, in Byzantium.
So the idea was to get whatever goods you can get in that part of Eastern Europe. And most of those goods were slaves. local population, put them on the ships in Kyiv, because Kyiv was on the border with the steppe zones. Steppe zones were controlled by other groups, Scythians, Sarmatians, Polovtians, Pechenegs, and so on, you name it. And then
staying on the river, being protected from attacks of the nomads to come to the Black Sea and sell these products in Constantinople. That was the idea. That was the model. Vikings tried to practice that sort of business model also in other parts of Europe. And like in other parts of Europe, they turned out to be, by default, creators of new polities, of new states.
That was the story of the first Kievan dynasty. Kiev, as the capital of that huge empire that was going from the Baltics to today's central Ukraine, and then was trying to get through the southern Ukraine to the Black Sea, that was a major, major European state, kingdom, if you want to call it, of medieval Europe.
with creating a lot of tradition in terms of dynasty, in terms of language, in terms of religion, in terms of, again, historical mythology. Kyiv is central for the nation-building myth of a number of groups in the region.
Well, the Russian Empire is a term and really creation of the 18th century. What we have for the Kievan, we call it Kievan Rus'. Again, this is a term of the 19th century. They call themselves Rus'. And there was metropolitanate of Rus', and there was Rus' principalities.
So, very important to keep in mind that Rus' is not Russia, because that was a self-name for all multiple groups on that territory. And Moscow doesn't exist at the time when Kiev emerges as the capital. The first reference to Moscow comes from the 12th century when it was founded by one of the Kievan princes.
Moscow comes to prominence really in a very different context and with a very different empire running the show in the region. The story of Moscow and the rise of Moscow, this is the story of the Mongol rule over former Rus lands and former Rus territories. The part of the former Rus eventually overthrows the Mongol control with the help of the small group of people called Lithuanians.
which had a young state and young dynasty and united these lands, which were mostly in today's terms Ukrainian and Belarusian. So they separate early. And what is today's Russia, mostly Western Russia, Central Russia, stays under the Mongol control up until late 15th century. That was the story when Moscow rises as the new capital of that realm, replacing the city of Vladimir as that capital.
For those who ever went to Russia, they're familiar with Vladimir as the place of the oldest architectural monuments. the so-called the Golden Ring of Russia and so on and so forth. Vladimir is central, and there are so many architectural monuments there because before there was Moscow, there was Vladimir.
Eventually, in this struggle over control of the territory, struggle for favors from the Mongols and the Tatar horde, Moscow emerges as the center of that particular realm under Mongols. after the Mongol rule is removed, Moscow embarks on the project that Russian historians of the 19th century called the Gathering of the Russian Lands.
Using Russian now for Rus', and trying to bring back the lands of former Kievan Rus', but also the lands of the former Mongol Empire. the Russians get to the Pacific before they get to Kiev, historically. And really, the quote-unquote gathering of the quote-unquote, Russian lands.
And it's only 1945 when the Soviet Union bullies the Czechoslovak government into turning what is today's Transcarpathian Ukraine to the Soviet Union. It is included in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. So that's the moment when that destiny, the way how it was imagined, by the 19th century Russian historian was eventually fulfilled. Moscow was in control of all this lands.
Well, a number of ways to look at that. One, the most obvious, the most clear is language. And there is no question that Poles speak a separate language and they're Slavs. There is no question for anyone going to Ukraine and hearing Ukrainian, realizing that this is not Russian. The level of comprehension can be different. You can understand certain words, and you don't understand others.
The same would be with Polish, and the same would be with Czech. There is this linguistic history that is in common, but languages very clearly indicate that you're dealing with different peoples. We know that language is not everything. Americans speak a particular way of English.
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