It's going to be Goldilocks. It's going to be just right. So there are going to be several questions and you will have medium-sized answers to those questions. You will be choosing among a group of questions. So, it'll probably be two or three or four groups and you'll answer like one from each group and that's it. That's all that's going to be. It's going to be really that. I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but it's going to be simple and if you study, you're not going to have any surprises. Okay. Anything else?
Okay. Great. So — excuse me. Excuse me. According to the — ignore that. Just listen to what I say. You're going to get another schedule. You're going to get — don't show up on February 24th. There will be an exam. Ignore that. You'll get another schedule. Thank you. Okay. Come next week. Don't come the two weeks after that if you're auditing. Okay? And if you're auditing, don't riot. All right? Also don't riot because this whole auditing thing is an experiment. And if you guys riot and rebel, then we won't be able to do it again. Okay.
All right. What is Ukraine? So I'm going to start from the present and then I'm going to start again from the past. This lecture is going to have two parts. In the first part, essentially what we're going to be doing is we're going to be looking at Ukraine as it seems from the outside from three points of view that are very relevant to this class: the point of view of the contemporary war, the point of view of Nazi Germany, and the point of view of the early Soviet Union. And then from there, we'll make a shift and go way back in time and consider Ukrainian history as history. Consider Ukrainian history in so far as it's possible outside of the narratives which seem to make it necessary to invade or exploit Ukraine, but inside the layers of experience of what we can know about Ukraine for the last actually several thousand years.
So a natural place to start, and I think really the mandatory place to start, is the contemporary war. So the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began almost exactly four years ago. So that is a very long period of time. It's a significant fraction of your lives. It's already a meaningful fraction of my life, which is saying something. The first Russian invasion of Ukraine began in the spring of 2014. So, in some way or another, Russia has been at war with Ukraine for the last 12 years. This is a very significant moment in the history of the present world. Of course, we don't know how historians will look back at things, but I think it's not at all an exaggeration to say that this is, in terms of simple scale, the most significant military conflict since 1945.
In terms of the scale of casualties, sadly, we're looking at something in the range of 2 million people killed and wounded over the course of this war. In terms of its geopolitics, it is very much, at the most superficial level, which I think is nevertheless true, a clash between an aspiring dictatorship and a flawed but nevertheless easily recognizable democracy. And the ideological difference applies to the scale of the world. It is also, I think, an ideological conflict between those who believe that empires are normal and those who believe that states and cooperating states are the way the world should look. So when I say it's an ideological conflict, I don't mean it just between Russians and Ukrainians. You can look around the world and you can find allies of Russia — countries, groups, individuals — who believe that empires are normal; allies of Ukraine — countries, groups, individuals — who believe that states or the rule of law or the European Union are normal.
This war though, to take a step back — this war though, in common with other conflicts that I'm going to talk about in this class, this war very much has to do with physical resources. The only way that the Russian Federation is able to fight this war is on the basis of the sale of hydrocarbons, natural gas and oil. And in that way, this war very much reflects the current state of ecological history of the early 21st century, in which we have a larger contest between traditional forms of energy, the kinds that became normal in the late 19th century — natural gas, oil — and new forms of energy such as wind or solar or nuclear. That is a major element of this war. If it weren't for the hydrocarbon power that the Russian Federation has, this war could not be fought. Which of course isn't just about the Russian Federation, it's about the rest of us as well. In so far as the Russian Federation can fight this war, it directly had to do with Germany deciding to purchase hydrocarbons from Russia in the years before. It directly had to do with Germany deciding it wasn't going to use nuclear energy, but instead import natural gas from Russia. And in so far as this war has been possible for four years, one of the major enabling factors of that has been the continuing purchases of Russian hydrocarbons. Were they to be stopped or even drastically reduced, the war would not be possible. So in this very broad way, the war reflects a resource structure or an energy resource structure of the world.
Hydrocarbons are also relevant to the shape of the Russian state. To put things in a very, very simple way, hydrocarbons are resources that are easy to monopolize. So if there is an oil gusher — I got to talk. I got to talk now. Oh, you want me to use your microphone? Okay, please. Yeah, if you just — on your lapel. Okay. Thank you, sir. Okay. Sure thing.
Okay. So hydrocarbons are resources that are fairly easy to monopolize because they come from a specific place. So if let's say there was an oil well — let's say that like one of these speakers, you know, gushed forth oil, and then the people in this part of the room were able to make a big circle around it, you know, that would essentially be the Russian state right there. Like these people make a big circle around the oil gusher, one of them dominates all the rest of them — that's the Russian — okay, it's a little bit more complicated than that, but hydrocarbons are very specifically by their nature a kind of resource which leads to this kind of rent-seeking, monopolizing behavior because you can physically dominate the area where they come from. So most of Russian hydrocarbons come from Siberia. Most of the wealth generated from those hydrocarbons ends up in Moscow, some of it in St. Petersburg, in a classic kind of imperial exploitative relationship. That's important though, because one of the reasons why Russia is a centralized state and one of the reasons why dictatorship is relatively easy in Russia is the presence of hydrocarbons. So again, this is a fact about Russia, but it's also a fact about the world. If the rest of us weren't dependent on hydrocarbons, that kind of structural politics would be harder to maintain, right? So wind and solar and nuclear are much more easily decentralized and therefore harder to monopolize and therefore harder to use as a basis for one person's power.
Okay, so that's taking a step back in a certain direction. Taking another step back, ideologically. There's a very specific way that Mr. Putin has talked about this war as a war over the past. So, I don't know how much attention you've been paying to this. Hopefully none, but you may have noticed that much of what the Kremlin says about the war in Ukraine, and as a result, much of the way the media covers the war, especially at the beginning, has to do with the view about the past. I'm trying hard now not to use the word history, because every view about the past is not the same thing as history, right? History — this will be the second half of the lecture — but history has to do with taking things in order, taking things as they come, using the available resources, sources, I mean, being ready for surprises, being open to contingency, accepting that there's a certain amount of human unpredictability. That's what history is like.
But so a view of the past in which I say something happened in the year 862, which is what Putin says — something happened in the year 862, therefore I know everything I need to know about how to govern the world now. So in particular, what happened in the year 862, according to a document which was produced several hundred years later, was that three Viking brothers — which is like, don't go off and found your punk band name right now, like wait till class is over — but the story is that three Viking brothers came and they established some kind of political system in Novgorod, and from Novgorod their descendants or their friends, it's not quite clear, conquered Kiev, and that was Russia. So that's the story, and since it happened in 862, it must be true forever, and that means that Russia and Ukraine and Belarus are all one country.
Now, there are a lot of problems with this story. One of the problems is that the three Viking brothers is a standard trope. It's like from Noah and the ark. Basically, it's always — you might have noticed this — but it's always three brothers. And of the three brothers, two of them always kind of vaguely fade into the background and one of them ends up dominating. But it's a standard trope. There are three brothers. If you don't know where your city came from, you just make up a story with three brothers, right? And so like no matter where you come from, all over the world, think about the founding myth of where you're from. It's quite possible that it involves three brothers. Three brothers is also a standard Viking imperial — oh, sorry. The other part of the story is that these three brothers were invited. Okay, so sometimes people do get invited to invade other countries. I'm not going to say that that never happens, but in general, the invitation story is an imperial trope. So I invade you and then after I've invaded you, I write a story about how you invited me to invade you. Right? And so the Vikings did that. Lots of other people do that. But that's another part of the story which is, although it's impossible to disprove, it's not very likely.
Another important issue here is that we're talking about Vikings who were called Rus in the 9th century. We're not talking about Slavs or Russians. There was no such thing as Russians in the 9th century. People figured out that they were Russians in the 19th century, which is — I realize this is not a math class, but that's a thousand years later. Russian became an identity for a large number of people in the 20th century, which is a hundred years later. So, there weren't any Russians running around in the 9th century. The people who were in charge called themselves Rus, which was the name of a Viking clan. And there was also no such thing as a nation or a state. So one can go on with these critiques, and it's important to know them, but in a way it's all secondary.
What's primary is to recognize the difference between this kind of a story and history as such. And this is a primary distinction not just for understanding Russia and Ukraine but for understanding the way that memory politics works in general. If a dictator can say I know what happened a long time ago, then that dictator also has the power to say things today should be exactly like they were back then. Right? And all that stuff that happened between way back then and the present, that's messy and uncomfortable and unnecessary and wrong. And whatever it was that happened — and it doesn't matter what happened — whatever it was that happened, we now have to have a very powerful state under my personal command to get rid of all that messy detail, to clear up all those troublesome facts, to eliminate the people who remind us of those facts and that detail, to eliminate or at least to bring to heel the people who themselves are complicated and unpredictable. Right?
So, it's not so much that the story is wrong. Obviously, the story is wrong. It's not even wrong. It's rather that telling the story itself is a certain kind of exercise of power. Whenever anyone says things were ideal in the past and everything that happened between that moment and this moment is the result of troublesome outsiders, then you know that you're in the presence of a dictatorial myth. Now that dictatorial myth works in — it seems to — so now we seem like we're in the realm of nostalgia. But are we really in the realm of nostalgia? There's a funny way in which what appears to be nostalgic or reactionary merges with what is postmodern and contemporary.
Because this idea that I, the one with the power, am the one who can tell you what happened in history, reactionary though it might seem, also works very well with a world in which nothing is really true. Facts are all a matter of perspective. Opinions are as good as facts. Right? Because in that world, he who controls the media, he who controls the education system, is able to say, well, the only myth that's going to have any kind of currency is my myth. And if there are no facts, if there are no truths, if there's no basis on which to resist this, then the dictator is always right. And so what we have in contemporary Russia and 21st century Russia is this odd combination of the radically reactionary but also the radically postmodern. And I think this is quite important to understand the structure of the Russian state.
So in the Russian state you have hundreds of thousands of men, mostly men, who are fighting a war which is supposedly about bringing the 9th century back to the present. Okay, that is a wild, weird idea, bringing the 9th century back to the present, right? So, on the one side, it seems very reactionary and that these men are fighting for this reactionary goal. On the other hand, how can they possibly believe it? What are the specific 21st century conditions under which you can get people to believe that kind of thing? Right? Those are postmodern conditions in which you have a monopoly over information and in which you have a monopoly over other things. So you have a monopoly over resources.
So it is true, in so far as we can tell from prisoners of war and so on, that Russians who invade Ukraine believe some version of the story about how Ukraine and Russia were always together. But it is also true that in the Russian Federation today it's very difficult to make a decent salary. And one of the ways to make a decent salary is to go off and get yourself killed fighting Ukraine, for which you are paid a good salary. And also after you are killed, as you very likely will be, your family will then be rewarded.
So if you — I hate to make the point too obvious, but this is a bit where this lecture makes contact with the Marxism lecture, because you can understand, if you were so predisposed, this situation as a situation of alienation in which people are radically alienated both from the resources of their own country, and the alienation is so radical that it proceeds right down to the body, which becomes the only meaningful commodity. And the most meaningful thing you can do with that commodity is actually to sell it, in the sense of allowing yourself to be killed in the service of a wild idea going back to the 9th century. Right? That's a very wild idea. The kind of idea which is only possible in a world in which there are oligarchs who have huge information control. Right? So if one were inclined to try to imply a sort of Marxist idea to Russia, that is the way that the thing might unfold. Okay.
So now what I'm doing here is I'm asking about how does Ukraine look from the important perspective of the Russian invasion, Russian invaders, those who planned the Russian invasion. And this is very significant. What I want to make sure that you note though is that this is a perspective, like the other two that I'm going to discuss, in which the Ukrainians themselves don't really figure, right? They are a problem. They are the thing that is to be removed. They are those unpredictable humans. They are the sources of facts. They are the thing which must not exist. And so the story from beginning to end is about how they don't exist.
But in so far as you understand the negative side of this, it also at least implicitly suggests the positive side. If a modern dictatorship is about denying subjectivity and a modern war is about denying the specificities of a neighboring people, then that can help you to imagine what the opposite might be. Right? So a democracy, a rule of law state, and so on might be conditions under which people could be unpredictable. They might be conditions under which people would be able to think about their own history. Okay.
Second example of how Ukraine can be seen — and again, in what I'm doing now, I'm anticipating the subject on which there will be a whole lecture later on. So some of these themes will keep repeating and hopefully they'll clarify with lecture and then reading and then more lecture. But a very significant second example of how Ukraine is seen is the war of 1941 to 1945. So the conflict that we call the Second World War has a number of different end points and beginning points depending on where you are. If you are in China, the Second World War begins in the early 1930s. If you are in Poland, the Second World War certainly begins in 1939. If you are the United States, then the Second World War begins in 1941. If you're the Soviet Union, it also begins in 1941. So when I say the war of 1941 to 1945, what I mean is the central conflict of the Second World War, which was between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Now, and again, this will be in the reading and we'll rehearse it again in lecture. I just want to get across a central point here, that we have another very basic example of how Ukraine is seen and how the way that Ukraine is seen is crucial to our theme, right? Like by the end of this — so I mean there's an overarching question in all of this, right? Which is why is Ukraine so important in the world right now? If we're doing a class about modern forms of tyranny, why is Ukraine so important? Not that it's the only important place. Iran is important, China's important, Palestine is important, the United States are important. There are a lot of important places, but there's an odd way in which Ukraine seems to be at the axis of many other things in the 2020s. And it's also a bit odd, or at least it's interesting, it solicits our interest that Ukraine is at the middle of the Second World War. And likewise, it's also odd or interesting, or it solicits our interest, that Ukraine is crucial to the foundation of the Soviet Union and to the establishment of the Soviet state. There must be some reason why Ukraine is at the middle of all of this. So that's the overarching question, if you like, of this lecture.
So I'm starting to give examples, or I'm going through the examples in reverse chronological order, and then when we're done with that we'll do something else, which is the actual history of Ukraine. Okay. So the war of 1941 to 1945, in a very broad way, we can see a similar structure here: a structure where on the one side there's definitely a resource question, and on the other side there's a very powerful ideology which tends to explain why the people who actually live where those resources are are not human beings or not equal human beings. So in the war of 1941 to 1945, what are the Nazis after in a very simple way? They're after resources.
So, I am ignorant of — my kids' Canadian history class has only gotten up to the 1920s. So I don't — in a couple of weeks I'll know how you were taught about the Second World War, but I don't know yet. Sorry. But so I like to start with like, here's what you think you know, right? But I don't know what you think you know because I haven't read my kids' Canadian history textbook yet. We're only up to the 1920s. I did learn some interesting things about the First World War. Okay.
But the essential — from the point of view of Nazi Germany and Hitler personally, the Second World War was essentially about Ukraine. And the reason why no one is taught that it's essentially about Ukraine is that Ukraine hasn't had a state for a very long time and so on and so forth. But — and this is by the way a larger point which I'm going to say now if I don't get to it at the end — the things that are most important are the things that you don't see, right? So the things that are most essential in history are very often the things that are hardest to see, right? Like mass murder or enslavement. And it's the things that are most comfortable in one way or another are often the easiest things to see. The things that make it to history textbooks, right? The things that make it into familiar stories about your family or your clan or your tribe or your people or your nation. The things that are easy are the things that tend to rise to the surface. The things that are important are often the things that are hardest to see. And that's a general principle which applies very well to Ukraine in the 20th century.
Okay. So the reason why Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union was Ukraine. And the reason why Ukraine was the resources. Secondarily, in order to get to the oil of Azerbaijan, you had to go through Ukraine, and at the time the oil in the Caucasus was extremely important in world oil supply. So the secondary goal was getting through the south of Ukraine to the Caucasus and controlling the Caucasian oil fields. The primary goal was the black earth of Ukraine. So the soil of Ukraine, which was the most fertile in the world or among the most fertile in the world, the Nazi idea was that if we control this soil, then we become a global superpower, we are able to feed ourselves, we'll have huge surpluses. So this is at one level very clearly a resource war, but at another level this is a war also of ideology.
In which Hitler also has a very clear idea why he's going to be able to control Ukraine. And the reason he thinks he's going to be able to control Ukraine is a certain worldview which has to do with the Jews. So Hitler has a kind of global anti-Semitic view, which again this is going to be in the reading. I'm going to come back to it if it's not clear. But the essence of this view is something like this.
The normal condition of the world is extreme Darwinian competition. Again, this is not me. This is Hitler, okay? So like don't be splicing this out of context and putting me on TikTok or whatever you kids use these days. The normal condition of the world, says Hitler, is unlimited ruthless competition among species for resources, for habitat, with the German word for which is Lebensraum. And for Hitler, a human race is just like a species. So we are divided up into races. We're as different from one another as baboons are from butterflies. He didn't use that example, but he used other colorful examples. We are very different from each other. We should be struggling for resources. So in Hitler's view, as I look out at you, what we should definitely not be doing is all be together at one university learning things together. We should be dividing up into various racial groups and we should be killing each other in order to have food. That's Hitler's basic view of how the world is supposed to work.
Doesn't the world always work like that? Wouldn't that be beautiful, says Hitler. That would be natural, says Hitler. These are the first couple of chapters of Mein Kampf. This is the way things are supposed to work. Why do they not work that way? Why do we observe other kinds of human behavior? Why are people not necessarily aware that they belong to one race and they should be exterminating other races? That is because we have ideas. We have ideas like, I don't know, class solidarity or the rule of law or the state or Christianity. We have various ideas which allow us to see other humans as human. And that's terrible, says Hitler. That is unnatural. That is perverse. That should not be happening. And there's only one way that such a terrible thing could be happening, says Hitler. Again, this is the beginning of Mein Kampf. And the way that it happens is the Jews.
So what the Jews do is they behave in a — not in a subhuman way, people say that but it's a misunderstanding. It's more that they behave in a kind of supernatural way. What the Jews do is — again, this is Hitler — what the Jews do is they renounce claims to territory, which is unnatural. We should all just care about territory. They renounce claims to territory and instead they try to control everyone else through their minds. So the Jews put into circulation all these ideas about Christianity and loving thy neighbor, or capitalism and having contracts, or working-class revolution and proletarians of the world uniting, the rule of law, me being a subject and you being a subject of the rule of law. All of these things are Jewish ideas, says Hitler.
And these ideas might seem different to you. You might think Christianity and capitalism and Marxism are different ideas. Hitler thinks they're all the same idea because all of them fundamentally have at their root the notion that you and I are human beings as opposed to members of races. That there's some form of mutual recognition, right? Respect, empathy, whatever it might be, rather than animal competition for resources. Okay? So the Jews have this magical power to get these ideas in circulation, right? And that explains — oh, and so the important thing is Jews give up territory, says Hitler, on a limited scale, but what they're after is control of the entire world. So they use these ideas, they apply these ideas in different times and places. In America, it's capitalism. In Britain, it's capitalism. In the Soviet Union, it's communism. Doesn't really matter. It all comes out to the same thing. Okay?
And that, by the way, is how Hitler explains the disastrous situation that Great Britain and the United States of America and the Soviet Union are all fighting against Germany at one time, because it's the Jews in all three places. But the fundamental ideological conclusion of all this is that if the Jews control things mentally, you can undo all of this physically. So if the Soviet Union — and this is what Hitler says — is constructed on the basis of Jewish mind control, then it's not going to be physically very difficult to resist. And so then he goes through various metaphors like a giant with feet of clay or a house of cards or whatever. But the idea is that as soon as he hits the Soviet Union in 1941, it's going to collapse because it's all based on Jewish mind control. And the Jews won't fight, they'll run away. And as soon as they run away, the barbarians who inhabit Ukraine will very —
happily accept Nazi imperial rule because, horrible and exploitative and murderous though it's going to be, it will still be better than Jewish mind control. Again, this is — I'm just paraphrasing what they say.
So, okay, so you see what I'm coming to. This is the basic theory of the invasion of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is a result of a certain kind of Jewish spell which persuades people that they belong to a working class or something. As soon as you apply physical force, that magic spell will break down and people will go back to being the races that they naturally were before.
And, says Hitler, the Ukrainians — so this is where the subhuman bit comes in — the Ukrainians are subhumans. They will be very happy to accept the mastery of Germans. If these are actual examples, we will put a radio on a pole in the middle of a village and then the Ukrainians will dance around the pole and that will make them very happy. Also, we will bring glass beads and we will show them glass beads and they'll be very impressed by the glass beads and they'll be enchanted by the glass beads and they will serve us. And meanwhile we will starve and disperse tens of millions of them, but they'll still essentially be our slaves. That was the plan.
Okay, you may see some weaknesses in the plan, but that was the plan for invading the Soviet Union. And we'll go into more detail about this in the reading. I just want to get it across now at a very general level because it helps us to see a couple of very basic resemblances with the first example.
And the basic resemblances are this: there's a resource component, right? Somebody wants something out of Ukraine. And there's a very drastic ideology which leads you to the view that you can control Ukraine and that the people who are in Ukraine are not really people. Right? So, I'm not saying that Putin's view and Hitler's view are exactly the same, although certainly there's some overlap. What I am saying is that they have these two basic fundamental similarities.
And you'll notice that again, there's a question from the point of view of the invader: what's wrong with Ukraine? Right? And in the case of Putin, the answer is: what's wrong with Ukraine is that there's all this history. There are all these people who have done unpredictable things. There's all this stuff that happened between 862 and 2026 and it shouldn't have happened. It all has to be wiped out.
For Hitler, it's, you know, roughly speaking, similar. What's wrong with Ukraine is that Ukraine shows — again, this is Hitler — Ukraine shows how terrible it is if people believe in any ideas, right? They shouldn't believe in ideas. There shouldn't be ideas. We have to wipe out the ideas. And in particular, we have to wipe out the people who bring those ideas into the minds of others, and those are the Jews. And the connection between Ukraine and the Holocaust is something that I'm going to talk about in a few lectures down the line.
Okay, so that's the second example. And again, I'm going to repeat the proviso: this is fundamentally an argument about how Ukraine is seen from the outside. All right. Third example is the foundation of the Soviet Union. And here again, we're going to be dealing with the same two basic forces that we were dealing with before, namely resources and narrative.
The Soviet Union was essentially connected to Ukraine because of Ukraine's special resources. The Soviet Union was a project of transforming what was a country of nomads and peasants — or peasants and nomads when it started — into a country of a working class. And in order to do that, it was very important. So, we'll talk more about this, we'll develop it further, it'll be in the next lecture, it'll be in Bloodlands.
But in order for this to happen, the rich black earth, the soil of Ukraine, has to supply a surplus which we can sell for hard currency, but which we can also use in order to invest in the mines and the factories and all the things we need to have a modern economy. So there's a resource story, but as in the other cases, the resource story is connected to an ideological story.
It's connected to a deep idea of how the world actually works, which we discussed last time. The way the world actually works is this: changes in the means of production bring about different classes. Those different classes — again, this is not me telling you how the world actually works, okay? This is me paraphrasing Marx and then Lenin. The way the world works is that there are changes in technology.
The changes in technology lead to different sorts of social arrangements and different dominating classes. At a certain point, modern industrial technology throws up a very small capitalist ruling class which alienates the workers, both in the sense of immiserating them but also in the sense of estranging them from their own bodies, estranging them from the kinds of creatures they actually are.
And what's special about capitalism is that it does that everywhere, almost all at the same time. Which leads, says Lenin, to the conditions for a world revolution. Even, says Lenin, if this industrial capitalism isn't present everywhere in exactly the same way, we can just test it by having a revolution. If the revolution works, then we can go forward. And, says Lenin, if this succeeds, it proves that the basic analysis is correct.
For a number of reasons, many of them contingent and interesting, Lenin and his comrades do succeed in 1917. They do carry out what they call a revolution, and then they find themselves facing a very tricky problem, which is that if you know how history works... Okay. So, I'm just going to — I'm not going to push this point too far, but there is a kind of mirror-image resemblance here between Lenin and Putin.
Where Putin knows how the past worked — he doesn't have to investigate it too closely, he knows how it worked, right? — Lenin knows how the future is going to be. Putin knows what the last thousand years were. Lenin knows what the next thousand years are going to be. And in each case — like, I assume you didn't wake up this morning with a thought of what the next thousand years are going to be like, or what the last thousand years were, because there wasn't time to have enough coffee to get yourself to that level probably before class started. But...
That was just a pause — you could laugh. You don't have to laugh. If you want to laugh, that's fine. It was just a pause, like it was an empty pause and you filled it. That was nice. Okay. But so there's a kind of family resemblance here, and it's just a rough way of thinking about this.
But if I know what's going to happen in a thousand years — or let's just say a hundred — if I know what's going to happen in 100 years, and that thing in 100 years is a beautiful, perfect end of history in which everyone returns to their own essence and we're all joyful and happy and every realm of our lives is perfect in every way, then naturally I might have to do some terrible things right now because we're going to get there, right?
Very roughly similarly, if I know that in the past there was a perfect zone of innocence before anything actually went wrong, it's not surprising that I would do terrible things right now in order to restore that sense of the past. Okay. Parenthesis concluded.
So Lenin faces a problem, which is that he's had his revolution — we talked about this last time. He's had his revolution, but the world doesn't come along. And Professor Shore will talk about this in the next lecture as well. So he's had his revolution, but the world doesn't come along, which means that you have to create what they end up calling socialism in one country.
And the only obvious way to do that is to take Ukrainian resources and distribute them among the rest of the country, and also take Ukrainian resources and sell them over the Black Sea around the world. We'll talk about this in a full lecture, but that particular idea leads to the starvation of about four million human beings in Ukraine in 1932 and in 1933.
So what we have here, though, is a third example of roughly the same issue, right? A third example in which Ukraine is seen from abroad — or in this case, not from abroad but from the Moscow center. It's seen as a place which is crucial for the fulfillment of some kind of big world story, and somehow controlling the resources of Ukraine is also an element of making that world story happen. There's a story which should be happening and it's not, because the wrong people have hold of Ukraine.
Okay. So then I just want to repeat now the three underlying issues here, which I hope I've gotten across, but which I think are worth emphasizing. The first is — it's really simple — but the sheer presence of Ukraine in these larger histories. The things I've just talked about: the war between Russia and Ukraine, the Second World War and Nazi Germany and Nazi crimes, the Bolshevik Revolution, the foundation of the Soviet Union.
These are all very, very large-scale historical events. For any understanding of the modern world, including one of totalitarianism, which is our goal in all of these, Ukraine is very present, right? That's the very simple point: Ukraine is present. But in all of these, if you're not careful, Ukraine might not seem to be present.
It takes a little bit of effort sometimes to find Ukraine, because the very reasons which are given — the big world story, which is attractive even if you dispute it, right? Even if you engage with it in a hostile way — the big world story is all about making Ukraine invisible, explaining why Ukraine shouldn't have been there in the first place, explaining why even though there might seem to be Ukraine or Ukrainian people or Ukrainian individuals, they're not really there, or there's something else.
And so the first thing I want to get clear is that Ukraine is present in these historical events. And the second is that Ukraine very often can seem to be absent, because the big stories that are told around these various projects are all about making Ukraine seem smaller or less important than it actually is.
And the third thing that I wanted to get across — and this is just a very simple thing — is the crucial difference between object and subject, which is implicit in what I just said. The way that many big stories work is that they allow the person who's telling the story to be the only subject. So the person who's telling the story is the only one who has any agency, any power, any discretion over what matters and what doesn't matter. Everyone else...
becomes objects in the story like rocks in the field. And a story which is like that is not history. It may be powerful. Um, it may work in politics. It may be very persuasive. It may even fill up history books, but it's not history in the normal sense of history. History contains those stories and it has to contain those stories because those stories are part of what makes the world move. Um, stories about the past or in the case of Lenin, the Soviet Union, stories which are about the past and how it leads to the future. These big stories are factors in history. They are things that matter in history. Just like the flow of a river matters, they matter, but they're not the same thing as history. In history, in actual history, there would be many, many different focal points, as many as possible, many, many different subjects. And not just the subject of the person who is able to tell the story, whether that's Putin or whether that's Hitler or whether that's Lenin or Stalin.
So what I want to do in roughly the second half of this, um, is to start again and do everything in a different way. Not starting from the present but starting from the deep past. Not starting from how we know things are going to turn out, um, but rather from how things actually did turn out, which is wildly different always. It's a good thing about the human condition that whether, like, this is a big reveal coming up, whether you're looking at the past or the future, things don't turn out the way you expect.
Um, and it is literally just as true of the past as the future because we all think we know things about the past and upon more serious investigation, things almost always turn out to be very different than what we thought, which is one of the reasons why history, if you do it seriously, is enjoyable. Um, okay. So, what I'm going to do here now is switch gears and move into the second part of the lecture where we're just going to talk about stuff that actually happened in Ukraine. All right? So, if this is like, if this is not your thing, like, then you can, you can like tune out at this point. Um, I should have given you that warning in the first part of the lecture, too. These are long lectures, you know, like, I, if you can't do it for all two hours, I understand, like, you have to pick an hour. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. You have to pay attention the whole time. That was a joke. I was like, I was getting a little uncomfortable because people are like leaning forward like, 'Oh, is that true? Can I just like pay attention for half?' No, you can't just pay attention for half. That was a joke. You got to pay attention the whole time.
Um, what I'm trying to signal here is that we're shifting modes now and we're going to do something very different, which is we're going to go way back and we're just going to talk about some things that happened. And these things that happened, this is important, they don't necessarily point in any direction, right? So, if I talk, as I'm about to talk, like, if I talk about a mammoth tusk that was decorated in a labyrinth pattern by people on the territory of what's now Ukraine in the Ice Age, and you know, 22,000 years after that, Ukrainian modernist artists were inspired by this sort of pattern, which maybe they were, the mammoth thing is true. We're changing gears now. Mammoth tusk. Mammoth tusk. Um, got to write down mammoth tusk. It's going to be on the test. Mammoth tusk.
Okay. It's not necessarily, mammoth tusk is probably not going to be on the test. I answered your question wrong. There going to be a bunch of, there going to be a bunch of essays, but before that, you're going to have to like do a multiple choice. Which one is the Ukrainian mammoth tusk? We're going to do that. The Ukrainian one will be the one that has the beautiful art on it. And the other ones will just be incredibly boring. All right. So, it's going to be, we're going to start off really easy. We're get like free five points and then we're going to move.
Um, okay. So, all right. So, where were we? So, what we're going to do, so although the point is that, okay, it's true that there were mammoth tusks and it's true that they were decorated and it's true that there is prehistoric art in Ukraine from 22,000 years ago. That's all true. Um, what the little point I was just trying to make is that the fact that that was true doesn't determine that I'm here talking about it right now or that 20th century artists might have been inspired by it. Right? The thing when you go through history one thing after another, you're not saying that these things had to lead to where we are now, right? So this is an important difference between how history is done and the kinds of stories I was telling, which all in their various ways have a strong element of what we call determinism, where you think you can be pretty confident about what's going to happen. When we start from the deep history, it helps us to understand a basic point, which is that although there are forces and we can sometimes chronicle those forces and there are trends and there are patterns, things aren't predetermined. There's an awful lot of room for chance, for the unobserved, and even for the downright unpredictability.
Okay. So, one thing which doesn't change much in the period of history and accessible prehistory is the shape of the country. And the shape of the country, this territory north of the Black Sea, is very important. And this is like, we should probably include this in the materials for the class, but if we didn't or if we haven't yet, have a look at a map. Um, the very old-fashioned thing to say, I know, have a look at a map, because the zone north of the Black Sea is unlike pretty much any other territory in the world in ways that are politically relevant. So the zone north of the Black Sea has the following features, and this is after the Ice Age recedes. Okay, I'm going to stop it with the Ice Age now. Like, I've done enough Ice Age, but okay, there were only, and maybe I have it, there were only five zones in Europe where people could live during the Ice Age, and Ukraine was one of them. And in Ukraine, I love how the auditors are writing this down. Like, it's like, that's the spirit. People write down the stuff about the Ice Age.
And in those, in the Ukrainian zones where people did live during the Ice Age, we do actually have interesting relics of people building shelters which may be the oldest, as far as we know. Whenever you say something's the oldest, then somebody discovers something else the next day, but which may be the oldest human-constructed dwellings that we know about. So, you know, interesting stuff. When the Ice Age recedes, the geography that presents itself is something which is more or less constant. There are big changes in the 20th century, but more or less constant. And there are just some features which I want you to grasp in a rough way because they'll help.
The first is that Ukraine is open to the east. Okay? Open in the sense that the steppe... I had a very discouraging conversation with, I'm not even sure I should say this, with a very high-placed person at the beginning of the Ukrainian war and I was talking about the steppe and they were like, 'What's the steppe?' Oh no, this is going to turn out worse than I thought. Um, but so the steppe means the open pasture with tall grass which extends from southern Ukraine deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep into Asia. That's one feature of Ukraine, that it's open to the east, and that means that nomads, pastoralists, people who move fast with the help of animals, periodically appear. That's one feature.
Um, another feature of Ukraine is rivers that flow from north to south, a bunch of them. Um, starting with the Danube going all the way to, let's say, the Don, which is now in Russia, and the Dnipro is the most important, running down through the middle, where, um, which, where, where Kyiv is placed. The rivers running north to south is really important for a couple of reasons. One is that it means that Ukraine is also open from the north. Not as open as it is from the east, but open enough if you're a Viking and you don't mind portaging your boats for a while. Right? So, a very important development in the formation of Ukraine is going to be people coming from the north, especially the Vikings, who we're going to talk about a little bit more.
But the rivers are also crucial because the rivers all take you to the Black Sea, which is a deep body of salt water in which almost nothing can live. Um, but on the surface, it's interesting, on the surface, it's a pool of fresh water because you have all these freshwater rivers flowing into it, north to south from Ukraine. And that means that if you, as soon as you have ships and ports, you can export from Ukraine to all over the world because the Black Sea empties into the Mediterranean. So in the classical world, that's the whole world, but the Mediterranean empties into the Atlantic, right? So things from Ukraine can reach the entire world and they do. So that's another reason why the rivers are important.
Okay. Third thing which is important about Ukraine is the structure of the land from north to south, where you start with forest steppe and then you have steppe and then you have sea. So if you can just imagine those three zones north to south, that will also help you a lot. The steppe part, um, especially after it's been irrigated in the 20th century, is incredibly fertile. And this is the last point which is important to know, and again, this is one of these longue durée factors, like it's not like the kind of thing which was constructed by a press release, you know, last week. It has just, it is just the case that the soil of Ukraine is incredibly fertile. Um, and that it's not that difficult to produce a surplus from this soil.
And you can, we've already seen how that surplus tends to fire the political imagination of people from the outside because you think, okay, I could build a world empire from Berlin on the basis of this, or I could build, um, a world transformative project from Moscow on the basis of this, right? So that fertility of the soil is just a brute fact which also has these political or even ideological implications. So that's the first point, geography, and, uh, it's an old-fashioned point, but if you can get it in mind, it will help you with a lot of the rest of the stuff.
Second point is origins of civilization, and by civilization I mean something very specific, which is the creation of cities. So I don't mean like some of us are civilized and some of us are barbarians. Um, what I mean is something very specific, which is the creation of cities. So, um, large gathering points with structures where humans live.
The normal story of where cities come from, as you might know, is Mesopotamia. So roughly Iraq today, the area between the Tigris and the Euphrates. That's where we start, we have started our story of civilization. It turns out that it's much more interesting than that. It turns out that the technologies, the Bronze Age technologies having to do with agriculture and pastoralism. Pastoralism is when you... does everybody know what pastoralism is? You have some goats, right? You take them with you. They move around, right?
No? Is anybody a pastoralist? Okay, fine. You don't have to be a pastoralist, but it's the domestication of animals and the development of seed crops are the big technologies that I'm talking about. These technologies spread from the Near East around the Black Sea into the Balkans and into what is now Ukraine. And those technologies in the Balkans and in what is now western Ukraine up to the Dnipro generate a different sort of... I'm going to call it civilization because of the cities in Mesopotamia. So Mesopotamia is famous. So like if you've read the Bible, Mesopotamia has kind of a bad name. If you're more of a Greek classic orientation, the Mesopotamians are the ones who were very repressive and they had the walled cities, and we as the Greeks have gone way beyond all of that. But the Mesopotamians provide a powerful image of what a city is like. It has walls. It has central concentrations of power. It has a temple where possibly very terrible things happen inside. There are a pantheon of gods that are associated with the various competing cities.
But contemporary to that, and actually a little bit earlier, in what is now central Ukraine, about halfway between Kiev and the Black Sea, around, not far from the town of Ochakiv, there were also very big cities, tens of thousands of people, which by the scale we're talking about 6,000 years ago. So by the scale of 6,000 years ago, tens of thousands of people is a lot of people. I mean, for comparison, Rome at its peak was about half a million. So tens of thousands of people 6,000 years ago is a lot. But these cities were of a different nature. There were no... they were built of dirt and wood, not of stone. There were no walls on the outside. There were no visible temples or centers of power. And this is sort of the charming part. Around a broad avenue in the middle, the houses were built in semi-circular rows, which allowed neighbors to visit neighbors and people to be in contact. Okay. So we can't say we know what this all means, right? Especially because unlike the Mesopotamians, the peoples of Ukraine from 6,000 years ago didn't have writing. Or 4,000, 3,000, 2,000, 1,000, didn't have writing. And so we don't have written traces of any of this, but it was clearly something different. And the reason why I mention this is that there are a lot of reasons. Like it's just interesting to know that the oldest cities in the world were from Ukraine. Almost nobody knows that. And again, when you say something's the oldest, like three weeks from now, somebody will use lidar and discover some wooden city in Amazonia. But no, it's interesting. I mean, that's an interesting thing about high-tech. So, like I know I've been hard on tech in this class, but tech is really useful for things that happened like 7,000 years ago. I mean, with respect to the present, unclear, but with respect to 7,000 years ago, absolutely tech is extremely useful. Not least because, and now this is actually true, because in traditional archaeology, it basically has to be built of stone. But in contemporary archaeology, with advanced carbon dating and with lidar and other things, you can find cities which had been invisible before. And it turns out, and this is really interesting, that there are prehistoric cities all over Latin America and all over Africa which we didn't know about, and we're literally discovering them like every few months, which is very cool. But so far the oldest ones are still in Ukraine. Okay, that may change, but so far the... so but what's interesting about this is that in a western... okay, in a western civilization paradigm, this is one thing which is interesting. The story is that Mesopotamia had cities, but they were very repressive, and then the Greeks also had cities, but they were less repressive. Look, there were citizens, and then in the Renaissance we discovered all the good things about the Greeks and we made them even better, right? And then we moved on to democracy, and that story is called the story of progress. Okay. And on that unilinear story of progress, and what I'm saying now, I'm basically stealing from a book called The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow, which has some interesting ideas. But on that, and this is one of the ideas that I think they have absolutely right, on that story of progress, you think, hey, the present isn't that bad, right? Like it's way better than ancient Mesopotamia.
Right, so like, and so like, if on the story of progress, which goes like this, right, there's just one line: Mesopotamia, Greece, Renaissance, Industrial Revolution, you know, whatever it is we have now, and you think, okay, well, there's only one line and the line's going up. So, you know, this is as good as it gets. Like, this is fine, right? But what if history wasn't like that at all? What if there wasn't just one line? Like, what if there wasn't just ancient Mesopotamia like this, but what if there were towns in Ukraine which didn't have a whole lot of human sacrifice and just, you know, which didn't have massive inequality? What if there were towns in Ukraine where instead of an increasingly patriarchal cult of gods, you had hundreds of little apparently female, although the gender was very fluid, I've got to say, apparently female deities, right? What if there are all kinds of different patterns? What if there's not one line, but there's all kinds of different stuff happening at every point? If that's true, then the story of progress is suddenly less convincing. And you think, well, wait a minute. Maybe this isn't just okay because it's better than all that bad stuff in the past. You think, well, maybe there was some good stuff in the past that we could have in the present, right? Okay. Is that clear? Because it's a really important point. Like that's what having... and I understand that like if this were a class about other places in the world, I could play the same trick. But it's interesting that the cities in Ukraine are contemporary with the ones in Mesopotamia or even a little bit older. And that gives you a first step to this idea that, hm, maybe there are various kinds of origins of civilization. And therefore various kinds of things are possible in history and therefore in the present, therefore in the future. Okay, that was point number two, civilization.
Point number three, language. Language. So, I am speaking. What am I speaking? All right. Everybody gets one point on the midterm for that. It's now like 99 free points. Everybody gets one point. I'm talking to the TFS right now. Everybody gets one point for that. And we're going to do the mammoth thing. That's another five points. Okay. And then the rest is going to be those questions.
Okay. So, language. Yeah, I'm speaking English. What kind of language is English?
