So, good afternoon everyone. We have a really special panel here today at the Munk School. Two of the world's best-known historians, one a historian of Ukraine, Serhy Plokhy, and Tim Snyder, who has written about Ukraine although he has also focused more broadly on Eastern Europe. Both of them are prize-winning historians. Sarah, you won the Lionel Gelber Prize here. Timothy, I can't begin to name the number of prizes that you've won. We only have an hour and 10 minutes, so I'm actually going to skip the biographies because the biographies would take me 15 minutes to describe, except to tell you that I can't begin to say how fortunate we are to have this conversation happening here at the school. Tim, I'm going to start with you because Tim by all rights should be exhausted. He has spent the week with a group of scholars that he has brought from around the world to do one of the most original projects. It is a history of Ukraine from prehistoric times until the present. And he has put specialists from different disciplines in the room who have different perspectives. And there has been a rich and deep conversation going all week. Tim, tell us about the project and what made you approach it from this perspective.
Okay, let me first of all, it's great to be here. It's great to be with you, Janice. It's great to have a chance to talk in public with Serhy. And I'm going to answer the second part because the project really begins from the history of the lands and peoples of what's now Ukraine. We're in an age of irony. We're in an age of self-correction. We're at a time when people don't like to say bold things. But I will say without irony and with the hope of no correction, self or otherwise, that the history of the lands and peoples of Ukraine is just extraordinarily interesting. It's a place where 40,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans, more or less like us, encountered Neanderthals, which we know because everyone in this room has Neanderthal DNA.
Just waiting for that to drop.
And there are two places where this encounter happened that we know about. And one of them you won't be surprised to hear is France, because France is the kind of place where that sort of thing happens. But the other that we know about is precisely Ukraine. And 20,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was not just surviving in the Ice Age in Ukraine, but generating some of the first art and architecture that we know about. Seven, eight thousand years ago, people in Ukraine were building cities, the earliest cities that we know of in the world. People akin to those people, who crossed paths with those people, who somehow mixed with those people, it seems, spread the Indo-European languages around the world. So that means includes the language that we're speaking now. Many of the most important things that we think we know about the history of the world or the history of the West, be they the Greeks or the Romans or even the Vikings, have to do essentially with the lands and peoples of Ukraine. The more one learns about Ukraine, the more central Ukraine becomes. And it's that realization, a realization that is based not only on the history of history based in documents, the kind of history that Serhy and I do, but also history which is based in new technologies, in ancient DNA, in carbon dating, in lidar. The new technology has reshaped what we know about the oldest periods. So it really starts from there. It starts from this project which is called Ukrainian History Global Initiative. It starts from that. It starts from the realization that there is a world history to be discovered in the lands north of the Black Sea in Ukraine. And we're doing it in this wonderful old-fashioned Victorian or Enlightenment way. We have 120 colleagues writing from half a dozen disciplines: biology, history, zoology, paleontology, archaeology, literary criticism, journalism, political science. We are taking all the big topics that we could possibly do and we're taking them very broadly from the origin of life in this territory all the way through the present war. We're having three big meetings in Kyiv with around 80 to 100 people in Kyiv in Ukraine, in addition to dozens of little workshops, like two actually, two pretty big workshops this week in Munk, where we bring together colleagues from different fields who work on different subjects. And this, by the way, is not so common. In an age of specialization and compartmentalization, we have a conversation, had conversations today with people who work on ancient Mesopotamia or who work on the archaeogenetics of the peoples of Ukraine, together with historians of the 20th century and people working on literature. And these kinds of conversations are really fruitful. They're always really fruitful. So I'm very glad to be at the end of that. And not because I'm tired, but because we just achieved so much and it's so wonderful to watch it happen.
Tim, just before I go to Serhy to talk a little more about the different disciplines that you encountered, Tim, what surprised you? I know you read all, but what surprised you? What did you not expect to find? What jumped out at you out of these conversations?
Huh? I like to laugh with diaspora Ukrainians because they all had to go to Saturday school. And in Saturday school, I'm just seeing how many diaspora Ukrainians I've got because they're the ones who nod at Saturday school. Okay, it's about 31. But in Saturday school here in Canada, Ukrainians are taught that Ukraine is the center of everything. And I just want to say that that's basically been confirmed by science. So I will tell you one little thing, one little pet idea of mine, which is that I mentioned a moment ago that it looks like the source of the Indo-European languages is the Ukrainian steppe. But one of the things that I've noticed, which I find very interesting, is that speakers of those Indo-European languages over the course of the intervening five or so thousand years keep finding ways to go back to Ukraine. Whether it's the Scythians, Iranian speakers, whether it's the Greeks, whether it's the Romans, speakers of Latin, whether it's Germanic-speaking Goths or Scandinavians, even the Celts find their way back to the territory of what's now Ukraine.
Why? Why does that happen?
Yeah. Well, it's a very, I mean, it's a very attractive place. It's a geographic... I'm doing too much talking. You've got to ask Serhy a question. But what's now Ukraine sits at the end of a sea corridor, the Mediterranean plus the Black Sea, which is the most navigable long sea corridor of its kind in the world and which of course opens out into the Atlantic. And it also sits at one end of that, the eastern end of that, and it sits at the western end of the Eurasian steppe, which is the longest land corridor. And in addition to that, it has five, from the Danube through the Dnipro, rivers flowing north to south which provide ways of living and ways of moving, and much of the territory is incredibly fertile. So I mean, as a first glance, if you think of those geographic circumstances, it's not surprising that many kinds of life have emerged there and that many kinds of life have returned there. I'm going to come back to this, but Serhy, pick up the story because over the last three days, you've been in the room with paleontologists and people who study fossils at the same time as experts on contemporary Ukrainian history. What happened in that conversation?
Well, people were talking to each other and discovering, at least when it comes to me, things that we didn't know about. And again, the historians, and I belong to historians, we were trained that history really starts with written text. And a lot of history that Tim was talking about, about Ukrainian history in particular, that predates Herodotus, that predates the Primary Chronicle that was written in Kyiv. And at least my reaction as a historian was, oh my gosh, I didn't know even half of Ukrainian history. So I think there was less, maybe, for people who do pre-written sources history to discover in our own presentations, especially on the 20th century, given that we all have sort of experience living in today. But certainly for me, going deeper into that history meant really a lot. And also that part of the world, the steppe, the Ukrainian steppe in particular, now it's the battleground, that's the front line, that's the contested area in this war. And that is giving at least me a special, maybe, emotional meaning to these discussions that are taking place. And you think about, of course, generations and generations of people who lived there, passed through that area, spoke different languages. But then the question is whether they left anything apart from fossils, and whether the raw forms of life, whether raw forms of social organization, political culture, political life, this is one of the essays that Tim in particular works in. So that's the sort of question that you start asking, but really you discover for yourself the worlds that you sort of knew that they existed, but you didn't know where they were and how they looked like.
So when you listen to this over the last two or three days as a contemporary historian, what did tracing that picture for you in this kind of, you know, visual, literally, how did that change your understanding of contemporary Ukraine?
Well, it certainly, for me, I again, I started in 16th, 17th century, so relatively recent, yeah, and now work also in the 20th century. And I knew that Ukraine was a meeting place of cultures and religions and empires. And I knew that Ukraine was a battleground. In two world wars, Ukraine was one of the main battlegrounds, and now the largest war of the 21st century, we have the same. What's much more interesting and surprising for me is that Ukraine was also a birthplace not only of people who in the 19th and 20th century moved to Canada, to the United States, or to other parts in Europe, that sort of we knew, I suspected that that was happening, but also of the ideas, concepts, and languages. So that centrality of Ukraine, not just as a place where different forces meet and potentially crush and collaborate, but also as the place where they create something new, that is very important, not just for Ukrainian territory, not just for the region, globally. That's a big discovery. And then, frankly, that's what related maybe to what Tim was saying about the Saturday school. I grew up in Soviet Ukraine. We didn't go to Saturday school. But we thought that something important about Ukraine was stolen from us, taken away from us. We're not supposed to talk about that. And if you're not supposed to talk about that, you imagine it was even more central than it is. And so I'm in the same category that people went to Saturday schools, that, wow, really? And someone like Tim and people coming from outside of Ukraine saying that, you just almost pinch yourself. Is it real?
Can I say something? Because there's a relationship, I think, between these two things. The 20th century was so terrible in Ukraine that the people who would have been doing this research and telling these stories never got to do so, either because they weren't allowed to study, or because they died in wars, or because they died in a famine, or because they died in terror, or because they were purged, or because they were sent to the gulag instead, or just more banally because they weren't allowed to carry out certain kinds of research and they weren't allowed to draw certain kinds of conclusions. So there's a way in which the 20th century, the century in which we grew up, is a barrier to everything that came before. And now we're in a different situation where, you know, it's an important part about this project, more than half of the colleagues are Ukrainian and they're now able to do the sorts of things that they want to do, and the project is meant to help them do that. And we have new generations of Ukrainians who have learned different kinds of scholarly methods around the world. And then we have specialists from outside Ukraine, and this is notable, who have nothing to do with Ukraine, who are working on subjects that they might not necessarily have thought of as Ukrainian, but you bring them together and they realize, oh, this all happened in the same place. So many layers of human achievement and human variety and human encounter all happened in the same place.
You know, it's very interesting because there are so many interesting parallels to the Middle East as I listen to the two of you talk, right? Geographic centrality, a place where rivers and pathways, crossroads as we know, and so much was created, and cultures and languages, but fought over again and again and again. So I find it absolutely fascinating story that you're both telling, really.
Can I interrupt you? Sorry. But it's like, okay, it is a bit the same story. The story of the Middle East and the story of Ukraine. It is in some ways the same story. There's, I mean, there is an agricultural revolution which happens once and it happens in Mesopotamia, but the technology of that agricultural revolution travels clockwise around the Black Sea into the Balkans and into what's now Ukraine. And incredibly, there's a kind of synchronicity where that agricultural technology leads to the creation of cities north of the Black Sea in Ukraine and also, well, south of the Black Sea in Mesopotamia at pretty much exactly the same time. And so there are in fact two, you know, if you'll forgive these cliches, two cradles of civilization, as Professor Plokhy put it in his paper today. And they arise from one moment, which is a Middle Eastern moment. And then, of course, the Mesopotamian civilization is associated with writing, but it's from the Ukrainian steppe that we actually get the earlier cities, slightly, they're slightly earlier, and the languages that we speak. And so you can actually, I mean, you're making a comparison, but you can also see a lot of things that happened as one process.
Talk a little bit, just before we leave this subject because it's so unique to this project, talk a little bit about text which Sarah brought up, because that's what historians, as we think of them, do, right? They go into the archives, they find text, and cultures in a sense depend on how text is read, understood, interpreted, and created. But you talked about something else this afternoon, Sarah, pretext, pretext and the creation of culture, language, place. How does that change your view of yourself as a historian?
Well, that showed limitations, right, of the limitations, because I relied on the text, continue to rely on the text, but the physical artifacts are really so important. The way how the cities or the villages are being built is extremely important. The entire history of Ukraine, we're not doing that, but history of Ukraine and the Pontic steppe and maybe a good part of the region as a whole can be written just on the basis or focusing on the Dnipro rapids, which now because of the war they're actually back, you can see them, you couldn't see them since early 1930s, and you start to realize physically, you see things that you read about or imagined, now you see them physically and suddenly they're still there. So you also realize that despite the fact that you believe that you write about something that really passed away almost forever, you are still writing about something that is with us today, that reminds you that this is for real, this is serious. And so that really the way how you interrogate something other than the text is becoming more and more important, especially given that the pre-text history, that's now where the revolution is happening. That's where genetics, that's where linguistics, they come together, they meet, and they tell the story that we thought was lost forever. So in that sense it's much more revolutionary, much more exciting than what is happening in, let's say, traditional history, despite the fact that traditional history is changing as well. Working on very contemporary topics, I discovered a lack of sources on so many things. There are no archives. There is no historiography against which you can build your argument, no previous generation to criticize and establish your grandeur. But there is a sort of a source that probably the historians of the past would kill for, it's called social media. Something that people react in real time and react very often much faster than they think and regret that. But this is a goldmine for historians, right? We never had that source before. Even if someone, if you tweet something today, now, in the moment, that reflects your reaction today, what you're hearing here, whether you like it, you don't like it, it can change by the end of this conversation. And by the time you got to your laptop at the end of the day, or maybe two weeks from now, you would have a very different perception which would be not about what happens right now, right at that moment in this room. So, yeah, I envy my colleagues who have skills and education working on this earlier period, but I'm not ready yet completely to give up also on my text-based type of history.
Yeah, thank you. No, I mean, I think Serhy and I are having similar experiences where we're modern historians, or in Serhy's case, an early modern historian and a modern historian, and we are, you know, at a certain point in our careers coming to realize what can be done with other sorts of sources. And I just want to mention that in Ukraine we're dealing with different levels of textuality depending on the vector of history. So if it's the Mesopotamian vector, there's a fair amount of text, and it's agriculture which comes from the Near East, but also textual traditions come from the Middle East. Biblical traditions, Jewish traditions, and interestingly, and this is something that I've been obsessed with and we're going to write about it, there are old Jewish and old Greek texts that are preserved only in Slavonic and survive for hundreds of years in Slavonic in and around Kyiv after the Jews lost them, and which contain some of the seeds of the very specific forms of Ukrainian Christianity. And we have those texts, and there are projects to decode them, and that's one of the things that one can write about. And there are texts that one doesn't think of as Ukrainian, but that are. So, for example, the baptism of Ukraine, unlike what you learned in Saturday school, didn't happen in the 10th century with Volodymyr. It happened in the 4th century with the Goths. And there was a Gothic Bible in which more text of the Bible was translated than anything that was translated into Slavonic for a good thousand years or more. And we still have a copy of it, and it's in Uppsala, where Professor Neil Price has come to visit us for this workshop. And then to make a point that Serhy made in a slightly different way, it's amazing how you can think of these new sources as a kind of text. So when the Russians destroyed a dam in Nova Kakhovka, when that dam was built, I think it's the same dam. Mykyta's going to correct me if I got this wrong. No? Okay, whatever. So I got it wrong. So in any event, in a time of hydroelectric construction, Ukrainian scientists, archaeologists, were able to have access to some remains which allow us to help date some of the earliest people who we think might have been the bearers of the Indo-European languages. And the point here is that from these human remains, we get a kind of text because we can take human remains, teeth and skulls, above all, we can take human remains and now extract the DNA. And we can learn things about people, where they were, with whom they were related, what they ate, where they traveled. And so this is a kind of language if you learn to read it. So we have people like archaeogeneticists like Alex Nikitin, who's here, who are doing this work and who are learning extraordinary things on the basis of this new kind of text. And I'm imagining a future, like if we can, I'm crossing my fingers, but like if there still is history, you know, as a discipline, in a couple of decades, one can imagine that students would be trained in a modern language and an ancient language and in, say, archaeogenetics, right? That those would be the methods that would become standard so that you could cover the sorts of periods that we're talking about.
Let me ask you one last question. So, I'm going to indulge myself and ask one last question.
So, just so that no one would be confused, whatever we take, whether this building's remains or something like that, at the end we create text. We are not building a building. So whatever materials we get, we return them into text and discussion of those texts and how it would look like took a lot of time and one of the key purposes of this meeting. So wherever we start as of today, this project, we eventually had to text.
Okay. So that leads to the question I was going to ask you both, because it is really unusual to have the kinds of expertise and skill that you've assembled all together. So when you actually touch an artifact, you're able to feel it. Somebody 2,000, 3,000 years ago held it in their hands, right? It survived and somebody held that in their hands, and then you use all the skills that you've assembled in this project to talk about what it is and when it was made and what kind of group made it and what it meant to that group. Does that have an impact on bringing history alive to the present day?
Yeah, I should full disclosure, they don't allow us historians to touch any artifacts, but there are people who do. The closest I got to that was in Alexei Khitro's wonderful AI-generated images. So that's the limitation. I will be honest with you, but I touched some artifacts coming from different eras and you really have this experience of kind of touching, being part of eternity.
I love that question, though, because it privileges our archaeologist colleagues. And I think the archaeologists tend to get overlooked, and we've been working very hard in this project to try to make prehistory and history speak together. And so they're the ones who do that work. They're the ones who go on site, who go on digs, who spend summers and years actually finding things. And if I ever did touch something, which maybe I did when people weren't looking, it would have only been because, of course I did, it would only have been because archaeologists did the work. Like, we had in Kyiv, we've had the last two years when we had our big conferences, we had exhibitions for the reasons that you're giving, showing the wealth of objects that we have in Ukraine from the last literally 20,000 years. So I did actually handle a Rus' sword. A beautiful Rus' sword. A Rus' as in Viking sword. I did handle it and I was allowed to. Okay, don't get me in trouble.
So I'm going to ask you, how did you feel?
Well, I felt it was one of the more manly moments. But that said, one of the really interesting trends in the history of these lands is the burial of biological females with armor and arms. It's a trend, or in contexts that suggest military roles. It's a trend which we find from thousands of years ago regularly up into the present. I mean, sadly, including the present war, roughly 10% of the casualties in this war are Ukrainian women. That 10% figure uncannily works its way back through to Goths and Scythians and other peoples who have inhabited this land. And it's hard to know what to make of that or what conclusion to draw, but it's certainly very interesting.
Again, with reference to my own experiences, because there are artifacts, right? And you touch a jug, a small water jug, and you're taken back, but it's so real. You trace this thread of connection. So touch artifacts in this project. You have to all make sure that you get the chance to do it because what you're doing is so unique.
Tim, you led us right to this, the conversation with the manly sword to war. All right. Which Serhy, you have written about and Timothy has written about. Take us to the present, where the longest war of the 21st century is being fought. And let me just say, as somebody who studies military history, if I can take just a moment, what Ukraine has been able to do in the last, it's not even four full years because we're in the fourth year, is absolutely astonishing. It's astonishing and it's astonishing a whole community of scholars. It's astonishing for military historians. It's astonishing for people who study technology. It's astonishing for people who study innovation, and it's astonishing for people who study society and how society enables us. Knowing what you both know about 20th century Ukraine and you earlier, where does that capacity grow?
Can I make a little segue from the project? So we've just had these two workshops, as Janice kindly mentions, here in Toronto. The last workshop that I went to for this project was in Uzhhorod in Ukraine, and several of the colleagues who are taking part in this project are in the Ukrainian armed forces, some of them on active duty. And so there's an interesting experience of people trying to bring together various kinds of activity at the same time. And one of the moments which was really striking in Uzhhorod was when a colleague, Viktor Humentyy, was presenting his paper on Romans and Sarmatians. There's been a very interesting archaeological find on the territory of what's now the far west of Ukraine of people with military kit which seems mixed Roman and local, and the strong suggestion is it has something to do with the wars that Marcus Aurelius was fighting against Iranian-speaking people coming out of what is now Ukraine at the time. These could have been contract soldiers or mercenaries or people who were paid off in armor. But the evidence suggests it's that period. And the moment I just wanted to recall was this: when Dr. Humentyy mentioned Marcus Aurelius, there was a kind of hush. And the reason why there was a hush is that in Ukraine now the Roman Stoics are very much in fashion. Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Epictetus are very much in fashion because of the war. And around the table, it was mostly a Ukrainian conference. Around the table, Marcus Aurelius didn't mean necessarily the Roman general. It meant the philosopher who left behind his Meditations about how to confront the difficulties of life and how to keep things in perspective. And for me that was an incredibly striking moment because at the same time you have the fact that Ukrainian history, as we learn it from Marcus Aurelius on the one side and the archaeology on the other side, is so present that it's actually inside the mentality of the war, that the Stoic thinking that was generated by a Roman emperor in the borderlands of what's now Ukraine, that thinking is now popular or very well known, very present among soldiers and civilians in Ukraine today. That was a very striking moment for me before we even get to the technology and anything else. Like, the mentality is also part of what allows people to go on, and the Stoicism, like, it's not something that people talk about or mention. It was just this chance thing that Marcus Aurelius came into the conversation and then there was just this like exhalation.
It's all these, that's fascinating me because all these cultural strands weave their way through and get recreated and reimagined in each new situation, frankly. So what enables this astonishment?
The history is of course very important, and as a historian, again, you have this temptation to...
explain almost everything through history, and I think that the phenomenon of Ukraine today and Ukrainian resistance is the place where history meets new realities.
And we talked about Ukraine as a meeting place, but also a battleground. Two world wars. And if this is happening on your territory, you can't be not involved in the warfare one way or another. So the warfare, and for that matter suffering and destruction, is not unfortunately new for Ukraine. The Ukrainian resistance in different forms is also not new, and we can probably look for all sorts of roots of different developments.
What is new, and something that no one expected, was that Ukrainians are fighting now in formations of their own. Rather than partisan warfare of different sorts, the Ukrainians discovered the state as something that can protect them rather than an outside force that is there to go after them. And that is new. That is the phenomenon already of independence after 1991.
What were they at that time in Washington? How Biden and his administration were trying to stop Putin from starting the war — the threat was, if you do that, we are going to support the partisan warfare, the guerrilla warfare. So looking back to World War II, looking back to the revolutionary times, and no one could imagine that Ukrainians would fight in formations.
And this Ukrainian war happening there — not new. Ukrainians fighting — not new. Ukrainians fighting in formations is new, and I guess that's where the power, but also the limits, of historical explanation can be found.
It's a very interesting argument because effectively you're arguing, Serhy, that it's the state that creates this capacity to bridge those partisan differences and...
