Timothy Snyder: “Ukrainians have rejected Soviet heroism and the need to suffer”

Ukraine has always had both its own historians and historical science. But for centuries, and even in the last few decades of independence, we have remained a “people without history” for the rest of the world. Not because we did not have it or did not write it. We did, of course. But our knowledge about ourselves was included in the “big picture” of world history in fragments, by overcoming enormous resistance. Until recently, representatives of Russian historical science and propaganda had the exclusive right to have the “last word” on events in our corner of the universe.

The Ukrainian History Global Initiative project, which brings together more than 90 scholars from around the world, including Ukraine, the United States, the United Kingdom, Poland, Germany and other countries, aims to change this situation. The goal of the project is not only to integrate Ukrainian history into the global context but also to reassess many events in world history from a new perspective. According to the project’s frontman, Professor Timothy Snyder, Ukraine will enable historians to take a fresh look at a number of significant global processes.

The project was initiated and funded by Ukrainian businessman Viktor Pinchuk, who declared a principled refusal to interfere with the work of scientists. Finally, the names of the supervisory board and project participants, including Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, Carl Bild, Borys Gudziak, Yaroslav Hrytsak, Serhii Plokhii and many others, indicate that this is a global initiative implemented by leaders of both Ukrainian and Western historical science.

Our conversation with the leader of the Ukrainian History Global Initiative project, Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University, explains how the project can change the world’s perception of Ukraine and Ukrainians’ perception of themselves.

- Professor, in the concept note of your project Ukrainian History Global Initiative there is a phrase: “A properly created national history.” In the time of populism and propaganda, with the ongoing anti-imperial war, is it possible to create a proper history with no excessive national romanticism and propaganda? And what does “a properly created national history” mean?

TS: I think it's always a challenge, whether there's a war going on or not. The United States is not at war. And yet, we have a terrible time teaching our history to our children. We keep teaching very nationalistic and essentially false stories to them.

The same is true of most countries in the world, whether they're war or not. There's always a temptation to justify the present in terms of the past. My experience in Ukraine has been that the war has pushed people in various directions, sometimes making them more thoughtful about the past. It hasn't necessarily made people more nationalistic, although, of course, there is that tendency. So I think it's certainly possible. And I've been reassured by contacts with Ukrainian colleagues thus far. Now, what does it mean? Let me start with what I think are the two wrong ways to do things. I believe it's wrong to do national history retrospectively, trying to define the present in terms of the past or trying to project the present back onto the past, which is always meant to justify the present. It's wrong to imagine that there were Ukrainians 5,000 years ago or 500 years ago. It's wrong to imagine that Ukrainians were always the people doing the right thing. But it's also wrong to imagine a global history in which everything is flat and everybody is about the same, and there are no really interesting differences, and everything happened the same way at the same time. That's also wrong. So what we're after in this project has to do with the Ukrainian nation, but as it emerged over a very long period of time, as a result of processes most of which are invisible to us now in the 21st century. Who you are now is not the same thing as what you know now. There's always so much to learn. It's in that spirit of investigating and trying to use technology and multidisciplinarity to get to things that most Ukrainians – and most other people – are not aware of.

It's also in the spirit of being ready for surprises. You can tell the bad global historians and the bad national historians because they already know everything. They already have an answer to every question. If you're a bad global historian, you always know that the same things happened everywhere. And if you're a bad national historian, you always know that it was your people who were on the right side and they were there forever. So the bad national historians and the bad global historians kind of have the same mood. In contrast, the mood that we're after in this project is one of investigation, curiosity and surprise.

- Do you anticipate some contradictions to arise in the course of this project, some large-scale clash of views regarding some episodes of Ukrainian history or between Ukrainian historians and Western historians?

TS: I thought I was going to say yes. But then after you finished your question, the answer is no. I certainly expect to see disagreements among historians, archaeologists and scholars in general. It would be very weird if there were no disagreements.

We're doing a collective project not because everybody thinks the same thing, but because I believe that if we work collectively, we can find ways to fit things together. Not to remove all the differences but to put all the important pieces in the right place and in some kind of relationship to each other. So I expect there to be differences, but I also expect there to be dialogue and an attempt in good faith to try to make the pieces fit. I don't expect – and I haven't seen – disagreements between Ukrainians and Westerners as such. There are plenty of disagreements among Ukrainians and there are plenty of disagreements among Westerners, but there are not two camps like Ukrainians and Westerners. That simply does not exist.

- In your opinion, what episodes, what periods of Ukrainian history will cause the most heated discussions among historians? Not between Ukrainian and Western but inside the Western and Ukrainian communities as separate groups.

TS: I'm going to start with what I think rightly arouses emotion, which is novelty. And then if you want, I can talk about what I think is controversial. But here's the thing: controversies arise when people are a little too sure of themselves. I'm not really interested in controversies. I'm much more interested in what people don't know and what they will find out.

I don't think that many people are aware that there has been human life on the territory of Ukraine for a million years. I'm not sure that many people know that after the last episode of global warming, humans re-arrived in Europe through Crimea 40,000 years ago. I'm not sure that many people know that the earliest human cities, in the sense of very large settlements, were in the territory of what's now south-central Ukraine. I'm not sure that many people know that the probable homeland of the Indo-European languages was Ukraine. I'm not sure that many people know how important the Scythians were to Greek civilization. And I'm not sure how many people understand that the Vikings who founded Kyiv were part of a much larger civilizational space and that the east, the Slavic east, the Baltic east, the Finnic east, the Turkic east had a lot to do with that overall Viking culture. I think that history up to 1,000 years ago is much fuller of surprises and new knowledge.

And that's where I think much of the interest is going to be. The controversies, the difficulties are where people have too much certainty and not enough knowledge. And there are controversies, of course, around state building in 1918 to 1921, the Holodomor in 1932–1933 and the Holocaust. I mean, those are areas of controversy in general, but they're not necessarily areas of controversy within the project. So if you imagine that the things that people fight about in public are going to be the things people fight about in the project, that’s not necessarily the case. In fact, there's been pretty minimal controversy within the project so far, to be honest. I mean, it's not like a reality show where if you had a camera on the workshops, you would find people doing a lot of embarrassing things. It's really much more civil and constructive than that.

- By saying that people don't know what Ukraine history is, you seem to be speaking of some great geographical discovery. As if the discovery of Ukraine is similar to the discovery of America in the 15^th century.

TS: Honestly, that's how I feel. That's how I feel about Ukrainian history. I mean, it's true that Ukrainians will know that there were Scythians. Many Ukrainians will know about Trypillia and you learned about them in school. But in general, I think a lot of very big global stories have to do with Ukraine, but no one knows they do.

For example, the big global story of cities, the big global story of languages, the big global story of Western civilization. I believe all of those have a lot to do with Ukraine, but that like you say, those things are undiscovered and unknown, at least beyond Ukraine. And even within Ukraine, they're not necessarily seen as part of a larger global story, which goes back to your first question about what a proper national history is. A proper national history is one where the pieces that make up the national history are also part of bigger global histories. Ukraine is part of bigger stories, but it's not the same as everything around it. In my view, the territories of Ukraine are extremely important, unusually important, dense with history. And when you discover that, so to speak, national history of Ukraine, if you do it right, you're also really changing global history.

- That’s a strange thing. We in Ukraine have a joke about “a globe of Ukraine.” It is a bit sad joke, which means that we don’t need the whole world and the whole world doesn’t need us. And now you say that Ukraine is like an unknown planet.

TS: I'm not Ukrainian and I can't claim that I feel how it feels from the inside. But I would say that we're trying to address that in the project in the sense that roughly two-thirds of the participants are Ukrainians and roughly one-third of the participants are not Ukrainians. And we're doing something together, which is not just a Ukrainian project, but also involves outsiders coming to Ukraine. It's something which involves a lot of collaboration. And it involves three very big conferences. As you know, we already had one in September, there'll be two more. And it also involves several dozen little workshops all over the world. So in a small way, we are trying to address that sense of solitude or loneliness. We're trying to give Ukrainians a voice but a voice together with other people.

That's really all I can say about that, I think. My basic sense as someone from the West is that we don't really understand ourselves without Ukraine. We want Ukraine to be far away. We want it to be different. We want it to be the Orient.

We want it to be on another planet, like you say. But in fact, it's very central to the things that we claim are important. It's very central to the history of our civilization. It's very central to the dark parts too, like the slave trade. Ukraine is very central to the slave trade. Ukraine is very central to the Second World War, but the Germans don't want to accept this. So my feeling as a Western person would be that we understand ourselves better when we include Ukraine in the story and, hopefully, in a small way, the project will help with that.

- We have discussed Western people and Western history. But what about the Global South? Are there any representatives of the Global South in this project? Is it planned to promote this project in the countries that belong to this group?

TS: It's a wonderful question. Of course, Ukraine, this war, colonialism and the Global South raise all kinds of really vexing and difficult questions. I'm among the people who tend to think that Ukrainian history can be understood in a colonial way. Therefore, you would think that it would be easy to establish connections with other colonial histories. But in practice, in the third decade of the 21st century, it's not that easy because there are relatively few people in the Global south who are willing to make that leap themselves.

They tend to look at Ukraine and see Europe and not a colonial history. So the answer to your question is yes, we have colleagues from the Global South on the advisory board. And I would really like to have some workshops held in the Global South.

In this theme of colonialism, I want to make sure that we have colleagues from Latin America and colleagues from Africa who comment on papers as we go along. That's very important. But I'm not going to say that it's been easy. It's not necessarily easy. I think at the end of the day, it's going to be easier to communicate with the so-called Global South because some of these themes, such as slavery, meaningfully connect with the history of what we think of as the Third World or the Global South. But it's not easy because the Global South is a political term before it's anything else. And the politics of it is much more powerful, at least in my experience, than the history of it. Nataliia Humeniuk, who's one of the people on our board, is someone who's been working hard to try to make connections with journalists in the Global South. It's an effort which is worth making, but it hasn't been easy.

- Coming back to the concept of the project, you draw a clear distinction between Russian and Ukrainian political culture. While there is a difference, we have also some things in common, our Soviet past, that impacts our political culture even now. In your opinion, in this war against Russia, is there a chance to rid ourselves of the remnants of Soviet political culture? Or, on the contrary, do prolonged hostilities contribute to the growth of Soviet-style patriotism or some other anti-democratic manifestations?

TS: That's a really interesting question. To keep things in perspective, the Soviet Union lasted for 69 years, and Ukraine and Russia have been independent and separate states for 33 years. Another year or two, and Ukraine will have existed for half as long as the Soviet Union ever existed.

That 33 years is a long time for the difference between Russia and Ukraine. It's not that Ukraine is post-Soviet, and Russia isn't, or Russia is post-Soviet, and Ukraine is not. They're both post-Soviet, but in quite different ways. The ways that people choose to address the Soviet past are quite different.

I think in Ukraine they are much more self-conscious. In Russia, at least in Putin's Russia, the Soviet past is selectively used for an organized politics of memory, which is meant to support the present regime. And in that organized politics of memory, suffering and sacrifice is always good. In Ukraine, of course, there's also an official politics of memory, and there have been moments in Ukrainian politics of memory that I certainly personally haven't liked, including official selections of heroes or overstating the number of victims of the Holodomor. But in Ukraine, there's been much more self-consciousness, pluralism and disagreement. Different governments have taken different positions about the past. Beyond that, and perhaps most fundamentally, in the Ukrainian understanding of the Soviet past, suffering is not always good.

Suffering is usually, or often, bad. Practically no in Ukraine says that the Holodomor made sense because it was necessary for progress. In contrast, in Russia, one of the fundamental notions is that there may have been famine, but it was part of this five-year plan; there may have been administrative errors, but it was part of a larger story of progress.

And that's how we should see it. Nobody says that in Ukraine. So the Soviet past is there for both places, but I think the ways that it's been addressed over the last 30 years are quite different. I also believe that where you are geographically has always mattered. It's always mattered that Russia was roughly half the population and most of the area of the Soviet Union. But now that Ukraine and Russia are separate states, I think it matters even more because Russia can only exist as a kind of agglomeration of different peoples, whereas Ukraine can exist as the project allowing different kinds of peoples to exist together. And the third thing which is quite different is natural resources: here Russia can be a centralized hydrocarbon dictatorship, whereas Ukraine really can't because it doesn't have the same kinds of resources.

Answering your question, I think the war is going to turn out to be as significant as the Soviet experience. And I think it's very important while the war is going on to consider, as many Ukrainians have done, what was wrong with the Soviet experience, particularly the idea that suffering is in the service of some goal. In Maksym Kryvtsov’s words, war is about names, war is about people you know, war is about individual lives, war is about families – that's one approach and I think it's a healthy approach, that each person is different and each life that is lost is special. That's very different from the Soviet notion of an unknown soldier or the Soviet notion of millions of people dying for the Fatherland. It's where all the death comes together and has one purpose.

That seems really unhealthy and dangerous. And I think Ukrainians in this war are not seeing things that way. I think it's much more individual and much more pluralistic.

Correct me if you think I'm wrong here, but I think the war came to Ukrainians. Ukrainians had no choice about this war, but they do have some choice about how they evaluate it and whether they treat it as a kind of collective martyrdom, which I think is dangerous, or whether they treat it as people choosing to come together to do the kinds of things they can, messy, complicated and difficult as it may be.

- Yes, but we also have some dangerous gaps in our society: we have those who fight and those who avoid fighting, those who have fled abroad, those using hate speech and so on. Will all of us be able to come together like the people of one country with one goal in mind?

TS: Well, war always does this. War always leads to refugees and different choices. But wars can also become moments where people have something to look back upon, which is their own. Ukraine didn't choose this war. This war came to Ukraine. For a lot of people, albeit not for everybody, it was a moment of realization that Ukraine is different not only from Russia but also from other countries; that Ukraine is different from and maybe in some ways better than the West; that Ukrainians may care about freedom more than other people do.

I think there have been a lot of realizations along those lines. As far as people coming together after the war is concerned, that will be very messy, just like people coming apart during the war has been with all the physical movement and all the broken marriages and all of the children being raised abroad. It's going to be very messy. For it to work, Ukrainians are going to need help from the European Union to get Ukrainians back physically into Ukraine. I believe part of the tragedy of this war that nobody really likes to talk about is that Poland and Germany are very happy to have Ukrainians stay forever and absorb them as labor. That is how the post-war Western European nations were reconstructed: they had a lot of help from the United States.

Economic support makes some of these social and cultural questions easier to address. A lot will depend on how much we in the West help with reconstruction. The last thing I want to say is that I don't think unity is ever going to be achieved. Honestly, I don’t think that striving for unity is a good goal. I believe it will be normal for Ukrainians to have different experiences of the war and have different ideas about the war, just like they do now.

Ukrainians have different ideas about the war and some of them are quite reasonable. So I don't think you have to have unity to have a nation. In my view, to have a nation, you have to have cooperation, tolerance and prosperity.

- How do you think the war will end? Two answers – ideal and realistic. The ideal ending of war and the realistic ending of the war.

TS: I'm going to put it slightly differently. I'm going to answer it in terms of a maximum and a minimum. A maximum is realistic, because what is realistic after all? What is realistic partly depends upon what people think is realistic. And if you look at America and the choices we've made in the last three years, we've been held back so much because our imagination was limited. We've been held back by something we think is realism. But it wasn't a true realism.

It was a lack of imagination. We had Americans that had a really hard time imagining that Ukraine could win. And there was certainly a moment in summer or fall 2022 when Ukraine could have won. What was holding Ukraine back was us. And what was holding us back was a lack of imagination.

I'm just saying that part of realism always has to include your ability to see possibilities. The maximum version is that Russia is defeated. And I think Russia can be defeated. Maybe not next week or next month, but within a year or so, Russia could be defeated. I think the Russian economy can probably make it for about another year but not much longer. But for Russia to be defeated, the Europeans and the North Americans have to supply Ukraine with more than they're doing now. The minimum – and I mean minimum in terms of Ukraine continuing to exist –would be an agreement which preserves Ukrainian sovereignty. That is, for Ukraine to exist, it doesn't have to control all of its legal territory.

But for it to exist, it does have to control its domestic and foreign policy. So a minimum for Ukrainian existence means that the Ukrainian army can be as big as Ukrainians want it to be. That the Ukrainian army can take weapons from anybody it wants to take weapons from. That the Ukrainians can join any alliance they want to join. And along with that will come Ukraine’s EU accession within, let's say, five years. That's the minimum, I think, for Ukraine to get through the war: sovereignty plus the prospect of joining Europe. I hate to end this on such a sad note, but I think anything less than that is defeat in the sense of Ukraine ceasing to exist. My take is that for Ukraine to exist, it has to have that minimum.

- What ideas or models would make sense as the basis of Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction?

TS: The reconstruction is not going to be all idealistic. North Americans and Europeans have to understand that there's a lot of money to be made. They have to see that in Ukrainian agriculture and in other Ukrainian resources, there are things where they're going to want to cooperate in the long run. North Americans and Europeans have to work within a framework like that of the Marshall Plan, with the notion being that after war, major investments will pay economically and politically. I can't tell Ukrainians how to think or how to act or how to react, but I think this war will turn out to be a nation-defining moment for Ukrainians, where there are so many people who think of this war as not just terrible in itself but as having blocked the better future that was coming.

That better future is the key. It’s important that Ukrainians who are still there, who are still alive, who are in Ukraine or who return to Ukraine see reconstruction not as rebuilding the old but as creating this new better future.