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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Appearances
Australians speak a particular variant of English, but for reasons of geography, history, we pretty much believe that despite linguistic unity, these are different nations and different peoples. Some parts of political tradition are in common, others are quite different.
So the same when it comes to language, the same when it comes to political tradition, to the loyalty to the political institution applies to Slavic nations. So that's, again, there is nothing particularly unique about the Slavs in that regard.
In the first decades of the 19th century, after Napoleonic Wars, a mysterious text emerged that was attributed to an Orthodox archbishop that was long dead, which was claiming that the Cossacks of Ukraine were, in fact, the original Rus' people. and that they had the right for a particular place, for a central place in the Russian Empire. And it tells the history of the Cossacks.
It's the era of romanticism, full of all sorts of drama. There are heroes, there are villains. And the text captivates the attention of some key figures in the Russian intellectual elite in St. Petersburg. people like Kondratiy Ryleyev, who was executed for his participation in the 1825 uprising, writes poetry on the basis of this text. Pushkin pays attention to it as well.
And then comes along the key figure in Ukrainian national revival of the 19th century, Ukrainian a national project, Taras Shevchenko, and reads it as well, and they all read it very differently. Eventually, by the beginning of the mid-20th century, some of the Russian mostly nationalist writers called this text the Koran of Ukrainian nationalism. So what is there?
The story, it's very important in a sense that what the authors, and that's what I claim in the book, what the authors of the text were trying to say, they were trying to say that the Kazakh elite should have the same rights as the Russian nobility. and brings the long historical record to prove how cool the Cossacks were over the period of time.
But at the beginning of the 19th century, they put this claim already, they used new arguments. And these arguments are about nation and nationalism. And they're saying that the Cossacks are a separate nation. And that's a big, big, big claim.
The Russian Empire, and this is a very, very good argument in historiography, that Russian Empire grew and acquired this one-sixth of the Earth by using one very specific way of integrating those lands. It integrated elites. was making deals with the elites, whether the elites were Muslim or the elites were Roman Catholic, as the case with the Poles.
The elites would be integrated, and the empire was based on the state loyalty and the state integration. But once you bring in the factor of nation and nationalism and language, then once in a sudden, the whole model of the integration of the elites, irrespective of their language, religion, and culture, starts falling apart.
And the Poles were the first who really produced this sort of a challenge to the Russian Empire by two uprisings in the 19th century. And Ukrainians then followed in their footsteps. So the importance of the text is that it was making claim on the part of a particular state, the Kazakh officer class, which was that empire could survive.
But it turned it, given the conditions of the time, into the claim for the special role of... Cossacks as a nation, creating that this is a separate nation, a Rus' nation. That is the challenge of nationalism that no empire really survived, and the Russian Empire was not an exception.
There's a turning point when the discourse switches from loyalty based on the integration of the elites to the loyalty based on attachment to your nation, to your language, and to your culture, and to your history.
That was the beginning and the beginning that was building a bridge between the existence of the Kazakh state in the 17th and 18th century that was used as a foundation for the Kazakh mythology, Ukrainian national mythology, went into the Ukrainian national anthem.
And the new age and the new stage where the Cossacks were not there anymore, where there were professors, intellectuals, students, members of the national organizations. And it started, of course, with romantic poetry. It was started with collecting folklore and then later goes to the political stage and eventually the stage of mass politics.
There were five attempts for Ukraine to declare its independence and to maintain it in the 20th century. Only one succeeded in 1991, but there were four different attempts before. And you see the Ukrainian national identity manifesting itself in two different ways. In the form of national communism,
after the Bolshevik victory in Bolshevik-controlled Ukraine and in the form of radical nationalism in the parts of Ukraine that were controlled by Poland and Romania, and part of that was also controlled by Czechoslovakia and later Hungary. So in those parts outside of the Soviet Union, The key form of national mobilization became radical nationalism.
In Soviet Ukraine, it was national communism that came back in the 1960s and 1970s. And then in 1991, the majority of the members of the Ukrainian parliament who voted for independence were members of the Communist Party. So that spirit on a certain level never died.
There are at least two Stepan Banderas. One is the real person, and another is mythology that really comes with this name. The real person was a young student, a journalistically-oriented student in the late 1920s and early 1930s in the part of Ukraine that was controlled by Poland.
who belonged to the generation who regretted that they were not born in time for the big struggles of the World War I and revolution at that time. They believed that their fathers lost opportunity for Ukraine to become independent and that a new ideology was needed. And that ideology was radical nationalism. And new tactics were needed.
So Bandera becomes the leader of the organization of Ukrainian nationalists in Ukraine at the young age and organizes a number of assassinations of the Polish officials or members of the Ukrainian community who these young people in their 17, 18, 19 considered to be collaborators.
Showing 61–80 of 375 · page 4 of 19
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