“They Didn’t Understand Anything, Just Spoiled People’s Lives”:
Brutality, Incompetence, and Historical Echoes in Russian-occupied Ukraine
In this lecture given in March 2023, Anne Applebaum, one of the leading scholars in the field of Eastern European studies, puts recent information about the behaviour of the Russian occupying forces in the occupied territories into a historical perspective.
Raw capture of the text follows – with only a few edits – I will chip away at cleaning up the text as I listen to more of it.
Thank you so much Serhii
One of the things he didn’t mention which perhaps he should have said was that my book Red Famine was really invented here. – Actually do you think we could turn it off, so that I don’t hear the echoes? – My book Red Famine was really invented here at Harvard. It was actually his idea that I write it. Sarah he’s idea that I write it and it was really was the resources of the of huri of the Harvard University, Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, that allowed me to do it. And so it’s really, I owe a debt of gratitude to you, to the people from The Institute who are in the room, who persuaded me to do it, and then and then helped me access material in Ukraine and outside of Ukraine that was relevant. And of course it was really that book which at the time seemed like a somewhat obscure research project, not maybe not not part of the of the mainstream story of European history. At least that’s how many people treated it and how people thought of it.
It turns out that the story of the history of Ukraine is much more is now understood correctly to be far more central to the story of Europe, than anybody thought at the time.
So thank you very much for inviting me and I’m happy to be here at really, what I think of as one of the great intellectual centers of the study of Europe, not just Ukraine, for exactly this reason. Because this is one of the institutions that understood why Ukraine is important and why it matters to bigger, larger geopolitical stories, before anybody else did.
Let me start my my talk today on the night of February the 24th, 2022.
On that night the sound of missiles jolted Victor Marunyak awake. He saw flashes in the sky and billowing black smoke. Then he got dressed and went to work. Marunyak is the mayor of staraburifka, a village just across the Dnipro River from Kherson, and he headed immediately to an emergency meeting with the leaders of other small towns from other nearby villages in the region to discuss their options. They very quickly realized that they were too late to connect with the Ukrainian Army. Their region was cut off and they were occupied.
Occupied is a word that conjures up a specific set of emotions. Here in America I think it makes us think of Nazi occupied Europe and maybe black and white photographs of Wehrmacht officers striding through Paris. Further east people remember two occupations, of course Nazi and Soviet. But in both cases the stories from these occupations have felt for at least two generations, as if they belong to the Past. In 2012 before Red Famine I published a book called Iron Curtain, which was about the Soviet occupation of Central Europe from 1944 to 1956. And at the time I wrote that book I was convinced that I was writing a book about the past. you know a story that was over, that could now be told, that was accessible through archives. I wasn’t writing a book about the present or the future. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in last February, it’s become pretty clear, that the past in the famous saying the past isn’t even past. And in the territories of the old Soviet Empire that’s true in a stunning and shocking way. So in many different ways the policies that are carried out, that are being carried out by Russian soldiers in Ukraine, strongly resemble the policies carried out by Soviet soldiers in occupied Central Europe in Poland and Hungary, in the Baltic states, in Czechoslovakia after 1945. There are some nuances and some differences and as I’m going to explain, but it’s pretty clear that the old NKVD playbook, which is now the FSB playbook, is still in use.
How to subjugate a population, how to change its habits, how to even change its identity. These are all things that have been tried before and they are being tried again now.
Let me just add that in this lecture, I’m going to draw on the work of a really extraordinary organization called the Reckoning Project. Over the past 10 months the Reckoning Project has deployed more than a dozen journalists and field researchers to record detailed testimonies of victims and of witnesses in areas of Ukraine, that are or were under Russian occupation. Lawyers and analysts then seek to verify these accounts.
One of their goals is to provide evidence that will be admissible in future Court proceedings, but the point is also to collect stories, that can be used by journalists and perhaps eventually historians like some of you in this room, in order to enhance our understanding of what’s happened in the last year. I worked with them to understand the nature of this contemporary occupation and its relationship to the behavior of Soviet forces in Soviet occupations in the past.
But let me now return to the mayor of staraburifka.
So he had been expecting the war to break out. Many people in Ukraine did, but he had no sense of what a Russian occupation of his village would mean. So like his colleagues Marunyak is an elected official. He’s genuinely genuinely elected. Since 2006 under Ukrainian laws that give real power to local governments, so he wasn’t appointed following a falsified plebiscite, as a similar official might have been in the Soviet era or might be in modern Russia. And so that meant that when the occupation began, he felt an enormous responsibility to stay in and to help his constituents cope with what was a Cascade of emergencies. So as he said, already within a few days there were families lacking food, he recalled there was no bread or flower, so I was trying to buy grain from the farmers. Many residents began contributing food they could share and so we created a fund providing assistance on demand. Very similar kinds of plans were made to locate and distribute medications. And because the Ukrainian police had ceased to function in that area, ordinary citizens also formed nighttime patrols, security patrols and they staffed them with local volunteers. And Marunyak prepared to negotiate with whoever the Russians were going to send to Statabarifka. And I told he said I told people, not to be afraid, saying that when the Russians would come, I’ll be the first to talk to them. And he was and he paid a really horrific price for it.
So the Russian soldiers who arrived in Kherson, like the Russian soldiers who arrived in Bucha and Irpin, in the Charkiv region, in Zaporisha, or anywhere else in Ukraine, were not prepared to meet people like Marunyak. Some initially had not known they were even invading a foreign country. Famously they were told they were going on maneuvers and they didn’t realize, when they had crossed the border, what they were doing. But many others believed that they were entering Russian you know they were entering a territory that was ruled by a small insecure and unpopular Ukrainian Elite, and their actions suggested that their immediate goal was to decapitate that Elite, to arrest them, to deport them or to kill them. And clearly they did not expect this to be difficult. It’s well known that they intended to murder the Ukrainian president, Volodymir Zelinskyy, but it seems that they also believed that other Ukrainian leaders lower down the political hierarchy, would then flee or simply be easily toppled as well.
As I’ve already said this theory of occupation was not new. So Soviet soldiers entering the territory of Eastern Poland or the Baltic States during World War II also arrived with lists of names, as well as the lists of the types of people, that they wanted to arrest. So in May 1941 Stalin himself provided such a list for occupied Poland and to the Soviet dictator anyone linked to the Polish state, meaning police army officers, leaders of political parties, civil servants, their families, was a counter-revolutionary or kulak or Bourgeois or, to put it more simply, an enemy to be eliminated.
Russia made similar lists before invading Ukraine a year ago, some of which have become known. Again Ukraine’s president, prime minister and other leaders featured on them, as did well-known journalists and activists. Some of these people received warnings from the U.S government in advance of the invasion, because U.S intelligence got hold of some of those lists.
So we know they existed, we know who is on them, but even though they had the names of famous or well-known people, Russian soldiers were not prepared to encounter widespread popular resistance and they certainly did not expect to find loyal conscientious popularly elected small town and Village mayors.
And so perhaps that explains why Marunyaku, who was age 60, was punished with such horrific cruelty, after the Russians arrested him on March 21st. So along with a few other local men, the mayor was kept blindfolded and handcuffed for three days. Russian soldiers beat him, they gave him nothing to eat or drink. One time he was stripped naked and forced to stay in the cold for several hours. A gun was held to his head and he was threatened with drowning. He was told that his wife and daughters would be captured. Once he said the soldiers choked him, until he lost consciousness and they kept demanding to know where he kept his weapons. And this of course is the important point, because Marunyak fit into no category, that the Russians could recognize. Perhaps even because his local patriotism and his civic-mindedness seemed strange to them, they decided that he must be a secret member of a Ukrainian sabotage group. But of course he was not. He had no weapons and no military skills at all.
Days into his detention Marunyak was briefly able to see his wife Katya, before he was transferred to Kherson. The soldiers told Katya, that she would not see her husband for 20 years. He was then sent right into another torture chamber, where a different set of Russian soldiers tied wires to his thumbs. In this form of torture wires are connected to a victim’s fingers or toes or sometimes genitals. Electric shocks are then delivered using the battery of a field telephone. According to one witness soldiers describe this as making a call to Putin.
The practice of electrocuting soldiers, electrocuting prisoners is not new. It was used during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and also in Russia’s Chechen Wars and it is now used once again very widely in occupied Ukraine. But here’s another important point that even when Marunyak was tortured and interrogated, he noticed that his captors never wrote anything down. Their questioning was sloppy. You know, he couldn’t work out, what it was they really wanted to learn. Possibly nothing. And eventually, after days of captivity, again with next to no food and with, you know, torture and cold and isolation, he was freed with nine broken ribs and pneumonia. He escaped the occupied zone and he is now living outside of Ukraine.
My colleagues at The Reckoning Project have found that these kinds of experiences are not unusual.
So another mayor, the mayor of Milova, Oleg Yakinyenko, mayor of another village in the Kherson region, was detained twice as well. Ole zapaschok was imprisoned for more than two months. Mykhailo Burak, the mayor of bacteria village, was detained and tortured. In the former occupied territory of Charkiv alone, police investigators have evidence of 25 torture chambers.
And the Ukrainian government believes that Mayors, Deputy Mayors, and other local leaders from a majority of the Kherson region’s 49 municipalities were arrested or kidnapped. Many have disappeared and we we simply don’t know where they are, whether they’re in Russia, whether they’re dead, whether they’re in another part of occupied Ukraine.
Many of their stories share not only gruesome details, but also an atmosphere of unreality.
So Ukrainian captives were told that the Ukrainian state had discriminated against them for speaking Russian, and now they were free. So this was a something repeatedly said by the Invaders. But when russian-speaking Mayors and other elected officials flatly explained that no one in Ukraine had harmed them for using their native language, which was Russian in that part of Ukraine for many people, or that Russian was widely spoken in the region, the soldiers didn’t have any response.
Dimitra vasilyev, who’s the Secretary of the city council of occupied novakachovka recalled that his Russian was more fluent and more grammatical than the Russian of the soldier interrogating him. The soldier was a kalmyk, one of Russia’s minority groups, and Vasilyev had been born in Moscow. He considered himself a Ukrainian of ethnic Russian extraction, which confused them. They couldn’t comprehend, he said, why I, Russian by ethnic origin, did not want to cooperate with them, Vasilyev recalled. I said: How can I look into the eyes of my son and my colleagues, if I become a traitor? They just didn’t get it.
Since his interview with the with the Reckoning Project Vasilyev has died, possibly as a result of the health consequences he suffered while under interrogation.
But even as they inflicted pain on the most civic-minded ukrainians, the ukrainians who considered themselves part of the political nation of Ukraine, whatever their ethnic background, even as they assaulted these local leaders, Russian soldiers also seemed not to know how to replace them. So in this case again, unlike their Soviet communist forebears, who could at least name the ideology that had driven them into Poland or Estonia or Romania, now the modern Russian army seems to have no coherent theory of government or administration, no concrete plans to run the region, not even any really clear idea of ruskimir – you know, the Russian World, this phrase that some of President Putin’s ideologues extol. They don’t know what it means, they don’t know how to bring it about, they don’t know who would create it, or how that would happen.
When the Red Army arrived in Poland for example in in 1944 and 1945, it had allies to work with, it worked with the tiny polish Communist Party, many of whose leaders had been trained in Moscow for that purpose. In this war, Russian forces do find collaborators to replace elected officials, but many of them appear to be completely random, unqualified people with no discernible ideology. Some have only recently emerged as as potential collaborators, and many had no previously known links to Russia. In some places the invaders have displayed Soviet symbols or flags, perhaps hoping that these older ideas will somehow create some feeling of brotherhood or some sense of shared history. But mostly they don’t offer anything. You know, there’s no explanation, there are no improvements to life, there’s not even a competent administration. They do this immense damage, but they don’t seem to know why.
But I should say that the Mayors and town counselors and and other elected officials are not the only ones who are targeted. So the occupiers are also disturbed by another category of Ukrainian and these are the volunteers. So the people who run charities, people who run civic organizations, people who spontaneously rush to help others and people who cooperated with the mayor, for example, in his early efforts to set up a food bank or to create a medical bank or to create local local patrols. Perhaps they seem suspicious to Russian officials because their own country crushes spontaneity, independent associations and grassroots movements. The Reckoning Project interviewed a man from skedafz, which is a part of Kherson Province still under Russian control, whom I’m going to call volunteer A, because he’s requested anonymity, because he fears for his family’s safety. He had been a member of one of the neighborhood watch groups, that stepped in to replace the police and he’d worked at exactly one of these things at a humanitarian aid distribution center, after his father was arrested in April 2022. A few weeks into the occupation, volunteer A went to find him and he was detained as well.
What’s interesting is that during his subsequent interrogation, he was asked about other local activists and about his connection to Ukrainian Security Services, which he didn’t have, to the CIA, which he had even fewer connections to, and even ludicrously to George Soros’s Open Society Foundation.
So like the Soviet officials, who once treated Boy Scout Troops in occupied Central Europe as if they were automatic members of conspiracy, the Russians seemed incredulous to discover that he was literally just a local volunteer working with other local volunteers, and their questions made it seem as if they’d never heard of such a thing. So he recalled being beaten simultaneously by four different men, struck by a baseball bat, tormented with those same kinds of electric shocks, hit with a hammer – in an effort to get him to admit that he was part of a larger conspiracy. And in his case at least one of his ribs was broken and after the interrogation he was told to make a video confession and to sign a statement declaring that he would not spread fake news about the Russian occupation. After a subsequent detention he too escaped the occupied territories in another town in the Kherson region.
Another another volunteer – volunteer B we’ll call him – had a similar experience. Before Russian forces detained him he’d been running a makeshift Pharmacy that collected Medical Supply donations. And he too was interrogated and he too was beaten and like volunteer A, he was asked repeatedly about the true purpose of this charitable work: who was organizing it, who was behind it, was there greater links, was he part of a bigger organization. And once again the Russian soldiers seemed unable to believe that no secret group was behind it, that ordinary people were spontaneously contributing to this common project, that information about it was simply spread by word of mouth on social media and on the radio, and that there was not a larger darker plot. He was even asked to jot down a description of how his group worked. So the way it worked – he recalled writing – was that most people brought, what they had and got what they needed, provided that we have it. And that was that’s how it worked. And the Russians kept pressing for more details of this non-existent conspiracy. Eventually they gave up, but they did confiscate the painkillers he’d accumulated, which had been destined for cancer patients. This man who was also forced to leave his region now believes that the interrogator’s real problem was that they feared that volunteers like him and others were outside their control, so it really pisses the Russians off. It annoys them, he said, that anyone can be independent of the state and of the political system, any political system.
And this helps explain why the list of arrested and tortured volunteers is so long and why their testimonies are so similar across the various zones of occupation so I’m I’m telling a lot of stories from the Kherson region, but you the very similar ones come out of the the area north of Kiev where that where the Russians were briefly in charge from Harkey even elsewhere Ruslan mashkov a Ukrainian Red Cross volunteer was detained by Russian Russian soldiers north of Kiev in March and interrogated a woman in the Kherson region who had helped sort humanitarian Aid packages told an interviewer that she had been arrested given electoral electrical shocks robbed of her money and beaten Ismail of another Kherson resident who had organized charity concerts and benefits before the war was also tortured with electric shocks so anybody who conducted any independent activity anyone who engages with anything that looks like what we would call Civil Society or who might be described as a social entrepreneur or an employee of a charity is at risk in an occupation Zone that is run by men who have never encountered a genuine charity or a genuine volunteer organization before at all but I would say the nihilism of this invasion is particularly notable in the incoherent approach to the Ukrainian educational system so in theory schools and universities are the focus of careful Russian thought and planning just as they were once the focus of careful Soviet thought in planning so in the aftermath of the second world war the Red Army in in an utterly devastated occupied East Germany took time away from food provision and Road reconstruction or whatever else they were doing to issue an edict Banning private kindergartens and to set up curricultraining sessions for new Preschool teachers that’s how important they thought this was so even when everything else was in chaos they focused on on this as well special Soviet commissars were later brought in to control cultural institutions in East Germany and actually in all of Soviet occupied Central Europe institutions of both lower and higher education were used as vectors for the propaganda of the local as well as the Soviet communist parties and this was planned and thought out from the very beginning though in the spring of 2022 Russian occupiers did initially signal their interest in transforming Ukrainian schools so in melatopo which is of course still occupied the Russian military abducted a handful of School principles as well as the head of the local Department of Education although later the principles were released in kahafka Victor pendlechuk who is the director of school number one was detained and interrogated for two weeks before escaping to ukrainian-held territory still a large number of schools in occupied areas did at first remain closed or else they operated online as they had done in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic the occupiers began pressuring some Educators to return in one case investigated by the Reckoning project Witnesses described a geography math and computer science teacher who is also will also stay Anonymous whose home was visited by Russian soldiers in late June they handcuffed his 18 year old son perhaps because he’d planned to go to university to study Ukrainian history they put a bag over the teenager’s head and they dragged him away the teacher received a message via an interlocutor telling him that his son was alive was being fed and would be returned home if the teacher returned to his job so the teacher complied the sun did come back and he too described being interrogated threatened at gunpoint and tortured with electric shocks but by Autumn the occupiers had intensified their efforts to rustify the schools causing a lot of distress among Ukrainian teachers who feared being accused of collaboration by their own compatriots if they showed up to work but even then the process has been pretty haphazard you know so differing from place to place so again some examples for in at least one town in the zephyriza region all Ukrainian language books were removed from schools including children’s books elsewhere only upper level Ukrainian books on Law and history were removed so there’s no clear pattern there you know the the orders seem to be confused in one zap region Village still under occupation soldiers have forced schools to open by threatening to take children away from their parents if they don’t show up but elsewhere low attendance has been tolerated so the policy seems to depend on who’s in charge and and what mood they’re in residents of some areas have said that the occupiers imposed a Russian language curriculbut many of the lessons were poorly designed so another example in one school district just four textbooks were assigned on the Russian language Russian history math and natural science and all others were discarded asked what she had been doing in school during the time Kherson was occupied a 14 year old named Alexandra recalled that students spent their time looking at their phones higher education suffers from the same kind of erratic policies Russian soldiers physically occupied Kherson State University Kherson State Maritime Academy and Kherson State agrarian Economic University but during the time they remained in charge of her son they only held a very small number of classes and so in June while the city was still occupied the Russians announced that dimitro cruelly had been one of the teachers at the Kherson State Maritime Academy would become Rector everyone else would be fired he had previously taught classes about global maritime distress and Safety Systems Hein announced that the first task of the new University was to build a shipyard but then no steps were taken in that direction in other words this was a kind of unserious decision on serious announcement taken by somebody who had no expertise in that area after the liberation of hair salon cruelly disappeared from the city probably retreating with the Russians quite a lot of evidence suggests that Moscow had bigger plans for Ukrainian schools but the soldiers on the ground could not Implement them so involved chance which is a small front-line town in the kharkiv region freed in September after six months of occupation the Reckoning project obtained a copy of a a kind of Five-Year Plan a five-year education plan for schools in the city document runs to 140 pages of bureaucratic language it appears to have been mostly copied and pasted from the educational plans given to schools in Russia as if no special thought went into the
needs or demands of newly occupied Ukraine so there was no special program being created for what were meant to be new Russian territories no you know no no no plan that reflected the realities of the situation and so for example The Plan called for an annual day of solidarity in the fight against terrorism which was to commemorate the infamous 2004 attack on a school in beslan in Northern acetia there were lessons about the Nazi blockade of Leningrad in World War II and of course of course on the basics of the spiritual moral culture of the peoples of Russia but the entire document contains only two lines about vov chance itself so mentioning visits to the towns institutions of culture and production sites so regardless of moscow’s intentions the Russians actually carrying out the occupation didn’t really seem to care what happened in the schools there was no policy equivalent to the systematic Soviet imposition of marxist language and history on Central Europe in the 1940s there was not even an equivalent at least not yet to the imposition of a pro-russian regime in chechnya after the second Chechen war and one example that I’ve I’ve heard described by several different people is that in one occupied town in the zepharetta region teachers were ordered to organize celebrations of May the 9th this of course is the day that Russia marks the anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany but the occupying authorities didn’t seem to mind very much about what actually happened at these organized celebrations so whether attendance was high whether anybody came whether they learned anything about the war you know or whether the celebration was even real they weren’t really bothered a couple of kids will be enough these teachers were told so in other words this ritual was for show the point was to tell somebody in Moscow that the event had happened not to teach any real lessons about World War II or anything else the truth is as lots of people in this room will know each region of Ukraine does have its own history and traditions and some of them are eerily relevant so in 1787 four years after Russia defeated the Ottoman Empire and annexed the territory of what is now Southern Ukraine and Crimea the Russian Empress Catherine the Great visited the region the trip was organized by Prince potemkin who was once her lover and remained her favorite Minister and is from this journey that we have inherited the expression potemkin Villages no so according to the legend which is sadly probably not true potemkin built facades along Catherine’s route and he populated them with actors and costumes pulling them down at the end of every day and then putting them up again at the next Village so that the Zarina would see only happy peasants and prosperous homes as I say historians doubt that this elaborate piece of theater really happened but potemkin’s connection to the region was real he was buried in a crypt in Kherson right beneath the name beneath the knave of Saint Catherine’s Cathedral which as I was just telling Sarah he I happened to have visited two weeks ago as many of you know the bones are gone the Russian army took them when they evacuated the city perhaps it means that they aren’t coming back still The potemkin Village Legend persists because it reflects a phenomenon that we recognize something that we we know is familiar and that’s the the quarter who creates a false reality to please the distant monarch and for ukrainians who have been living under Russian occupation the potemkin story helps explain what they’ve experienced so marunyak the mayor of stars briefka put it like this he said I am following their activities they are all done for a camera shot in Russia even people who live in the occupation don’t believe it’s for real it’s like a huge potemkin village it can’t function they try to glue it together but it doesn’t work and this sort of potemkin Village tradition might also be a part of the explanation for the really horrific violence that ordinary Russians have inflicted on ordinary ukrainians so over and over again victims told the Reckoning project journalists that this extreme Behavior seemed to come from nowhere so there was no provocation nothing that ukrainians have done to Russians either in the distant past or in recent memory could explain this you know they could explain the beatings and the electric shocks and the detention centers the torture chambers and garages and basements and this kind of utter disregard for Ukrainian life only the Russians frustration with their own incapacity their inability to make the ukrainians obey them indeed their inability to understand Ukraine at all might offer a kind of clue you know so they were told to transform the cities you know to transform the local governments but they didn’t know how you know they were told to transform the school systems but they don’t know how they were told to find the secret organ Ukrainian organizations you know identify the resistance but you know it’s kind of everywhere nowhere they don’t see it they don’t know what it is so instead they’ve identified small town Mayors and volunteers you know on the one hand they have to send a report back to Moscow proving that they are in control on the other hand they’re angry because they exercise so little real control but of course this incomprehension also fits into an older tradition well I was while I was working on the subject a friend of mine reminded me that back in 1928 the Ukrainian writer voladimir vinichenko wrote a letter famous letter to the Russian writer Maxim Gorky after Gorky had dismissed the Ukrainian language as a mere dialect well Ukraine vinachenko told him was real whether or not Gorky wanted it to be real so what he wrote was you can think that the denipro river flows into the Moscow River he said think it all you want but the nepra will not flow into the Moscow River just because you imagine it does and so reality has a way of re-emerging of exerting itself whatever you know whatever you know however you try to impose something else on top of it you know and I I think it’s the same today so wishing Ukraine away or wishing this Ukrainian identity to disappear will not make it disappear rewriting history will not alter the historical memories of millions of people Russia can try to alter the region but that will not alter the region no matter how many people are beaten or electric shocks are delivered I would also say that the modern Russian occupation belongs to an equally old and equally ugly tradition of both Russian imperialism and Soviet genocide this will be a familiar idea again to many of you here as so many of you know you know Moscow wants to obliterate Ukraine as a separate country and Ukrainian nests as a distinct identity and the occupiers thought that this task would be easy because like Putin they assumed that the Ukrainian State and Ukrainian Society are weak that’s what they’ve been told that’s what they read that’s what they tell one another even now I was in I was actually in Kherson a couple of weeks ago and talked to some soldiers who are on the other side of the river and who do a certain amount of listening into Russian conversations on the other side and they say you know it’s amazing to us but they still do believe the propaganda they still do believe that you know we’re a small Force that’s just going to go away they haven’t accepted that it’s the whole population who want them gone and not just a few soldiers so that clash between assumption and reality has also forced the occupiers occupiers to broaden their use of violence Wayne Jordan who’s a British Barrister documenting Russian war crimes in Ukraine has argued that the extraordinary number of detention centers in occupied Ukraine represent the Russian Army’s attempt to fulfill its original plan you know which was to capture and kill all the leaders of Ukraine but as the occupation has dragged on the idea of leaders got bigger you know you know it was originally zelenski in the government and it quite quickly and inevitably became local leaders which includes everyone from military to civil servants to journalists to teachers really anybody who had a connection to the Ukrainian state so one way of explaining and understanding the violence is that the Russians found something they didn’t expect to find and they continue trying to destroy it you know and that’s the cycle that we’re in now this kind of failure and incompetence leads to violence the violence of course creates more resistance and that resistance that’s so hard for the Invaders to comprehend creates wider and broader and ever more random destruction and suffering and this of course is familiar too this is the logic of genocide and it’s unfolding right now and you know in our time in the occupied Ukrainian territories that have not yet been liberated in the towns where Russian soldiers are still arresting people arbitrarily on the street and in The Villages where we haven’t yet had the possibility to go and count the torture chambers or interview the victims let alone shut them down the Stars barifka remains itself under occupation although it’s devoted mayor now lives in Exile in Latvia from there he tries to keep in touch with his former constituents to help if he can to advise them or to listen or to kind of keep together the threads of a society that the Russians are haphazardly trying to unravel they didn’t understand anything modern Yak says now but just spoiled people’s lives they discovered a world different from the one that they knew and so they tried to smash it to destroy it and they’re still trying to destroy it even as they fail to understand the nature of the civilization that they have encountered I will stop there thank you very much and I welcome
questions on this topic or others thank you thank you very much and and please start thinking about the questions this is the call to everyone who is on the audience but we also joined online by significant number of viewers and while you are thinking I will ask I will ask my first question first of all it’s it’s it it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s amazing on manual levels material that you you are dealing with and I I really I really found very productive this references to the research that you did before which is historical from the Iron Curtain to to Gulag and and red famine my question is about whether whether the sources that you looked at whether they allow us to also understand the the image that emerges in the in the mind of ukrainians about the Russians who are they why they’re doing that whether there is any revaluation rethink you know what what Russia is what Russians are what the Russian armies and I’m asking this question partially because of of working with some some interviews with people who are under occupation and the Russian aggression started of course with the idea that the the Ukraine was captured by Nazis and and and drug addicts and so on and so forth but from the Ukrainian side there was there was basically a lot of pushback in a way that people looked at the occupying Army as as true fascists to a degree that when the Army comes into the village what they what they want they want to appoint a so-called status so for those who survived survived World War II immediate immediately the references are there they want to put white white strips on the on the on on the hand on the arms of people the lists of people who live in this particular household so you read this this the the immediate the immediate reference historically that was for many of them either through the films or through the living experience was the the Nazi occupation of 41 4243 so the question is whether whether this this materials that you work with can can tell us how the ukrainians look look at that Army how they try to to understand that on their own terms I mean of course what you say is a points to an interesting you know we all we all and we all refer to the analogies that we know I mean of course there are many ways in which the Soviet occupation and the Nazi occupations had many much more in common than many understood at the time you know the idea that you first kill the leaders you know then you and then you try and change the place culturally is something that both the Nazis and the and and the Soviet Union did in different ways in the Second World War I mean I don’t know that this is a good moment to ask ukrainians for especially ukrainians who just survived analysis you know occupation for a kind of nuanced analysis of what’s happening I mean the you know the the response that you hear from people either you know Laura who have been fighting the Russians or who are living in a town like Kherson or previously mikolai which are constantly being shelled by Russians is to see them as as some kind of inhuman Force I mean they use the word Orcs you know we know or or they talk about rashes which is a which is a you know which is a combination of Russian and fascists and and and I think it’s and I think that’s you know the main impression people have is of a A dehumanized or dehumanized force that is that is attempting to dehumanize them so there’s a there’s a real lack of of any human contact and when they’re when when it does occasionally happen it’s it’s very strange and surreal you know so I I don’t know that they see them as as imitating Nazis or imitating anything just that they see them as you know they’re treating us like animals they don’t see us as people they see us as you know images in a game or they see as I said in my in in my in my short remarks they see that you know they have a responsibility to tell Moscow that they did X or Y and so they need to make it look like that’s what they’re doing but even the even the the gestures that they make as I as I said aren’t very deep so again there are collaborators but they don’t seem to be meaningful collaborators mostly I mean there may be some exceptions we don’t know about yet but they seem to be very random people they’re not very effective they don’t have links with Russia that go back very long necessarily and again there might be exceptions we’ll learn about later they you know they seem you know there doesn’t seem to be a deep plan or a or a scheme or or an idea for what to do and so it mostly fill you know it mostly feels to the ukrainians like they’re you know they lob missiles over you know they send a telegram back to Moscow and say you know we you know we struck a supermarket today and you know and a gas station is that enough for today and tomorrow we’ll do the same that that’s my impression thank you very much and I around we have we have okay so again let’s let’s start with student thank you so much for the brilliant lecture I saw the microphone was right next to me so I thought I’d just kick it off I’m Steve Hansen visiting scholar at the minute at gunsberg Center this year normally William and Mary I was wondering if you would go ahead and make the inference from what you have presented that there really are good opportunities for the Ukrainian offensive counter-offensive this summer with better Weaponry I mean one of the deductions would be with no real plan incompetence random violence difficulties finding collaboration this is not like the Soviet or Nazi occupations thankfully I mean not thankfully that’s the wrong word but the ability to hold territory and and create ideological power is nil so does that mean we’re going to see a bunch of people defecting you know more of the infighting we’ve seen with the Wagner group and the regular military can you deduce that from what you found or is that wishful thinking so what I’ve what the patient and it didn’t tell me anything about you know the morale of the Russian soldiers fighting at Bak mood however other people are working on that and have and have a lot of evidence and I mean as far as we can tell quite a number of the you know they’re well they’re different pieces of the Russian army some of it is still fairly well motivated they’re professional soldiers as I said they they still believe in the propaganda and they think they’re fighting you know they’re fighting there’s they still think they’re fighting a small force that can be easily toppled or will be eventually then there’s a now this new category of conscripts mobic’s many from Russian prisons as famously and they seem to be give me a friend of mine thinks they’re giving them some kind of drugs I mean they look like zombies they walk you know they walk forward into fire when a normal person would would run away what’s it’s not clear what’s motivating them except for fear or or you know it’s not it’s not an intellectual motivation and whether they can Revolt or where they can protest against these conditions is hard to say because they seem to be already so demoralized that that is maybe beyond their capacity but I don’t know I mean I I don’t think anybody has a great Insight you know we they the ukrainians see the Russian soldiers on the ground and they you know have captured some of them and speak to them I don’t think anybody has a great insight into the Russian the commanders generals Colonels and what what they think of this war but they can’t be happy about it I would say actually just a one pick up a point in your question I mean in terms of the of the the the the the offensive which is coming and which people are talking about the more interesting question is how organized is the Ukrainian resistance on those territories and can that make a difference and that I don’t know I mean obviously it’s very dangerous to be in the resistance but it does exist it does things like you know that the ukrainians have a have a this is not a secret so I can say it I mean they have a kind of web platform where anybody can upload photographs or information in a way that’s you know that’s it’s co it’s you know passport protected and a lot of the information that the Ukrainian Army has comes from ordinary you know little old ladies you know with their walking canes taking the surreptitious photographs when they walk by a brigade of Russian soldiers just to show them where they are so the so there is a way there’s a kind of electronic resistance that exists in the occupied territory people participate in that and actually when I was in hair salon I spoke to a woman who had been in there was a there were a few small resistant cells even in in occupied hair salon before November who were doing much you know what they were doing sounds much more like World War II you know they did sabotage they did a couple of car bombs that sort of thing so so that exists in you know throughout the region you know with you know lots of people who had have fled actually but it it exists and that could be a factor in in later this spring or the summer many thanks for an excellent lecture I’m I’m Tony give me trivia I’m from George I’m a fellow here at uhuri visiting for the semester I have two questions one question is about the the war tactics it seems to me at least coming from Georgia observing Russia’s foreign policy for the a few decades targeting civilians is some kind of award tactics what do you think of that is it kind of a war strategy chechnya Georgia twice Ukraine Syria this is kind of the pattern that kind of is replicated second thing you mentioned factors which are really interesting obsession with conspiracy theories in media Society or politics or threat
of Civil Society volunteerism charity this kind of factors are somewhat echoing protein’s personality and in a way Russian Society became a mirror of of Putin so I wonder what’s next for Russian Society after Ukraine well that’s an easy question to answer but no on the on the on the first question you know the the targeting of civilians it seems to me has the same function in Ukraine that as terrorism does in other words it’s a it’s not exactly a military tactic in the traditional sense it’s more of a political military tactic so it has the same goals as you know an Al-Qaeda blowing up a you know you know blowing up an American Embassy would have so the idea is to create anxiety in the Ukrainian Society to make people feel despair to make people not you know want to give up and move to make people not invest to make people leave the country to make it ungovernable in particular of course these target attacks on on civilian infrastructure on power plants and you know water treatment plants and so on you know that was directly designed to lower the morale of ukrainians society and to make it ungovernable or you know and and I I think in the hope that that will undermine the Ukrainian leadership and make it easier to win the war I mean I think that’s the that’s the director I mean the the sort of random lobbying of missiles at Kherson which was previously the random loving of missiles at nikolaev is harder to explain logically I mean actually this is you know when you ask ukrainians why are they doing it they’ll say oh they just do it because they’re Russians I mean which is not a not a not a sufficient explanation but that’s the that’s the you know that’s the you know you asked about the impression people have it’s it’s as if it was as if it was you know part of this dehumanized way of seeing the world or behaving but I think that too also has a kind of political military goal you know that you know these are these are areas that from which you know the offensive will come they want to make it more difficult to operate there they want to make difficult to live there and so on so I think that’s the goal of the of the targeting of civilians what’s next for Russian Society I mean none of you laughed when I said that that was an easy question but it’s it’s very hard to say because I think we don’t know very much about Russian Society you know I have a friend who does who’s part of the Russian opposition who does a certain amount of polling inside Russia I mean there are different ways to do polling there are sort of some online some with telephones different different tactics and you can argue about whether which ones work and which ones doesn’t but he says the main thing to know is that if you ask anybody on a telephone line or in any way that’s open would you you know I hello I’m calling from the lavada center in Moscow we’d like to do an opinion poll nine out of ten people hang up the phone so you know most polling or most opinion research that you see about Russia is based on the 10 of people who will actually talk to a pollster which is obviously not representative because that 10 is the 10 represents the 10 are willing to do it other kinds of ways of measuring public opinion indicate you know a lot of skepticism about the war and on the you know on the the polls that have been done repeatedly over the last year show that Rising you also have of course in Russian Society it kind of learned or trained apathy as we you know again many of you will know this you know the nature of modern Russian propaganda which is one of the ways it’s different from the stalinist era is that it it it it it it it it sort of persuades people to become apathetic so what you don’t have in Russia is you don’t have a kind of 1930s style mobs on the street bang for blood and saying we want to go to war you don’t have mass signups for mobilization you know people have to be tricked or persuaded or forced to fight and what you have instead is you know this kind of people staying out of politics I don’t want to know about it I don’t know it’s true or not true I don’t want to you know the the the the messages coming from the leadership change all the time and I don’t have any idea what’s really happening and so what you have is a is a society that’s kind of you know really does you know there isn’t really a public sphere there there isn’t a place where people are having debates or discussions and so it’s very hard to know what people really think and even if they I don’t want to say if they think at all because they do think I don’t that sounds that sounds more dismissive than I mean but you know the idea of thinking about politics is itself dangerous and so it’s better not to have an opinion and so we’re talking about a very large country where a lot of people have been persuaded not to have an opinion which could be you know could bode well in a certain sense which is that you know were there to be a different kind of leadership in Russia or were there to be a some kind of political change they certainly wouldn’t try to stop it so they there’s no you know there’s no there’s you know it’s not like there’s a deep well of you know nationalist imperialist sentiment inside the country that would try to block anybody who tried to end the war so we you know we don’t have that problem which you could have had in again in other countries and at other times and places you know what comes next this is a very irritating answer but what comes actually depends on what happens I think that the nature of the war how how it is fought in the next year How It Ends will shape Russia and will shape the Russian leadership so much that it’s very hard for me to make any any kind of prediction so I’ll stop there I think I will now go for the questions from from online audience and I will try to do my best in combining some of them at least bringing them together so the first question is can you comment on the importance and status of the Crimea and sort of related question I’m trying to do my best to is the following there were two recent articles in the Atlantic about the Ukraine War written from the perspective of international realism the authors argued that the West should push Ukraine into negotiation which ultimately means capitulation what is your response to the proponents of the IR and will you be responded in the Atlantic I I hope that I’m not putting you in in any sort of conflict of no no so I mean this was a this was a it was a tough issue for me but you know the Atlantic is likes to think of itself as a you know a as a magazine that presents a wide range of views this this is not just the case in in the war of Ukraine you know the coverage of Ukraine but also in all kinds of other areas we sometimes print authors who disagree with one another and that article as I understand it was it was it was just you know the an editor decided to print it as a way of showing you know a different View and so on I mean my difficulty with the article was that it was not it wasn’t just a matter of opinion it was factually incorrect in a lot of ways and it was wrong about made mistakes about Ukrainian history especially region history and there has been a response published today that corrects some of those mistakes but you know these are you know all I can say is I was out of the country when it was published I have nothing to do with it I’m not the editor you know I don’t have I don’t I should you know I I’m in the in the in the boat in the very nice position of genuinely being able to say to me to people who want to publish in the Atlantic I am not in control I cannot get your article in I can send it to someone else you know that’s all I can do so we certainly accept this answer but so I think Crimea is emerging as a very significant and important issue in the next part of the war and this is one of the things that I will be writing about in my article in the Atlantic that has yet to appear based on my recent trip to Ukraine with The Atlantics editor-in-chief so that will come later it’s pretty clear when you look at the map and when you look at what’s happened in Crimea over the last eight years you know if you look at the map we don’t have a map of Ukraine here it’s like an aircraft carrier you know stuck to the bottom of Ukraine it’s a it has been transformed by the Russians into a kind of it’s a place of you know military bases there are many thousands of soldiers there they’ve been digging trenches there you know for the last six months it’s where the prisons many of the prisons that contain the kinds of ukrainians who I were just spoke about in my remarks people who were arrested and occupied Ukraine are often in prison in Crimea you know so it’s a place of real political prisons I’m of course also there are political prisons that contain crimeans including over 100 Crimean tartars it’s it’s also the place where literally the passports and documents the new Russian passports that are meant to be handed out to the new citizens of Russia who live in occupied Ukraine are being printed and distributed from Crimea so Crimea has become the kind of place from which the occupation emanates I mean literally it was that at the beginning of the war when soldiers came came from Crimea that’s that’s one of the one of several reasons why Southern Ukraine fell so quickly because they you know the because cry me as I said it functioned as a as an aircraft carrier containing containing Russian troops and it’s becoming hard to see how whatever arguments you have about the borders of Ukraine and so on it’s very hard to see how a sovereign independent flourishing Ukraine you know
which is a place that people want to invest their money in and which can be integrated into the European Union and the international economy how it can exist if Crimea remains that kind of militarized project you know stuck to its southern coast given the importance of the ports you know not just Odessa but the other ports in the South given the important you know the economic significance of that region you know the grain producing regions it’s hard to imagine how the country functions if if Crimea remains as it is there is a lot of conversation about what to do about Crimea some of you will know there is actually a zelinski presidential project that he started before the war called the Crimean platform and there’s now a there’s a there’s a kind of zelinsky has an official representative to Crimea there’s a kind of permanent mission to Crimea that has an office in in Kiev and they have spent the last year more actually making plans for what a deoccupied Crimea would look like so there are plans on what to do about schools what to do about property rights you know there would be a lot of complications to do with things that were built or property that changed hands in the last eight eight nine years there would be there there’s there are projects to renew or rebuild Crimean tartar historical and architectural monuments that have been destroyed there’s a kind of concept for how you Crimea could be an independent sort of modern European Resort how to put the the tatars back at the center of that project how to make them you know the owners of Crimea in some sense again so there’s a lot of discussion of that there are working groups on each one of these subjects it sounds probably to people in this room and maybe people outside of Ukraine like a kind of fantasy you know can you imagine this happening on the other hand can you imagine any of this could you have imagined any of this happening you know in February 2022 we were just saying with Sarah he before this you know did you imagine that the Ukrainian Army would turn out to be a high-tech producer of its own drones you know did we know that you you know there would be this level of U.S support for Ukraine you know did we imagine almost anything that happened no we didn’t and so maybe it’s time to begin imagining what a different kind of Crimea would look like too I mean I don’t want to sound naive you know and so on but I should also say you know nobody’s talking about I don’t know crossing the you know the Straits with you know with boats and invading Crimea with tanks they’re talking about you know a Siege or or or or cutting it off or of a of a political change that will make change in Crimea possible but for you know from what I know but I I think it will in the next part of the war that it will become a very important and Central issue to what what a future as I said independent stable and secure Ukraine looks like so I’m always switching back to the audiences thanks so much Scott Yuri visiting from Tel Aviv University for the year I feel like with European studies history and Jewish studies is that a rich and difficult material I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about what the day-to-day looks like in these areas and these regions are occupied by the Russians or the day-to-day activities who’s running these towns how present are the troops in their towns if you just come in for a day and then go back again either there’s a permanent presence what looks what the day-to-day operation of occupation looks like and whether that tells us whether is any kind of plan what the next step is and the second question would be just I mean to tease it out a little bit more the extent to which the more recent invasions and chechnya Afghanistan are influencing activities now as opposed to older invasions in World War II and World War One so I can answer the second question more easily I think the answer is yes that experiences from what I understand experience in Afghanistan and in chechnya are you know are you know affect the behavior a lot I mean so so again there’s just this small piece of the story this use of electric shock as a form of torture is something that everybody says was used in chechnya it was used in Afghanistan it’s got a long history and and obviously that’s not you know that’s that you know you don’t have to go back to World War II to find some of these interrogation methods so so yes I and I think probably the the the brutality of the army is less to do with World War II and more to do with the way the Russian army has been trained and how it again how it fought in in chechnya and and in other more recent Wars it you know it’s clear that the you know you know this whole system of hazing in the Army and you know mistreatment of soldiers you know creates a has created this very brutal culture and that brutal culture is part of what we’re seeing and part of the explanation for the for the for the some of the horror of the occupation as I said you know for a lot of ukrainians it’s kind of mysterious what did we do to the Russians to deserve this you know what why this why this kind of brutality and one of the explanations is that these are soldiers who arrived there already brutalized for other reasons and by other by other things I mean in terms of the day-to-day nature of the occupation I don’t know I mean I don’t I haven’t been in occupied Ukraine but also I don’t know that we have enough you know I don’t know that we know yet really what it’s like as far as I as far as I know from her son you know one well one of the things that happened in that situation was a lot of people were able to leave so a certain number of people left a lot of people looked simply for ways to survive and get on which is of course what happens in any occupation I mean if you look at what happened in occupied Poland and you know during the second world war you know 90 of the public just tries to get on with their lives and tries to you know you know you know tries to continue a small percentage of people collaborate and a small percentage of people are partisans and you know in this case as I said the collaborators seem to be rather random and and the partisans are you know small but have have are able to work together with the Ukrainian Army and maybe even with other intelligent sources and are able to participate somehow in the war so so I think most of the time daily life looks fairly normal I mean I think that’s probably less true the closer you are to the front line I mean again I was I was on well I was I was on the river you know I I you know when you when you stand along the river you know you’re looking at Russian troops on the other side so the so the closer they are to the Border or to the front line the more it looks like a war zone and not like normal life and you know all along the all along the front line there’s nothing normal happening and no normal life further back as I said my impression is that most people are trying to get on with things that but I don’t I don’t you know we’ll have more granular knowledge and understanding later on so I think we can maybe switch side to on this side of the audience so you were discriminating against that side originally and and soon to be returning to caveman Hill Academy but at the moment a research fellow here at uhuri my question actually is going to reference two authors if you don’t mind one is Peter pomeranzev and the other is Alexa your Chuck and I’m really pleased by or not pleased but thank God grateful for your sort of characterization of the Russian occupiers as being completely de-ideologized in other words there is no there’s no reason for doing what they’re doing and that brings up this idea that that pomeranza in his book calls sort of nothing is true but everything is possible I teach a class with him at Hopkins so yeah so we’re co-teaching a seminar this semester yeah and I and and that sort of and the reason I asked us because your Chuck brings up this this this concept of everything is forever until it is no more and I think in the same ways that ukrainians are planning for a deoccupied Crimea perhaps we should be thinking about what ukrainians talk about when they talk about Victory and that is a post-russia space in other words in the same way as in 1991 we couldn’t invo we couldn’t imagine a post-soviet space the same way ukrainians are talking about a post-russia space in other words that the Russian Federation as a political entity does not have a future and in reality that is the way that this war ends in some sort of a a a reconstitution of the post-russia space I I’m wondering about your thoughts on that and secondly in a scenario where that is de-ideologized that that the population that lives there is completely de-ideologized and sort of everything is possible and and nothing is true what kind of post-russia space do we do we imagine it’s funny I mean I’m less interested in what happened you know and I and I feel not competent to predict what will happen in Russia in other words I don’t I don’t have a scenario that I’m sticking to that I you know and I I don’t have a I don’t have a reason to think the Russian Federation will fall apart nor do I have a reason to think that it you know it will always you know I you know when I think about it I can more imagine I can imagine a scenario by which you know a moment when orders are given in Moscow and they aren’t followed which is a little bit what happened in 1991 you know it wasn’t so much that there was a crash or some dramatic thing or there was like a war you know
it was just that people stopped doing what Moscow told them so you can imagine I don’t know some bits of Siberia saying we won’t pay taxes anymore or some other part of the country not wanting to cooperate you know you can you can I I can I imagine that more than some than some big dramatic change you know and for all kinds of administrative and and other reasons I can imagine the Russian Federation hanging around for quite a long time as you know even as it even as it becomes less functional so you know I what I would interest me more is the is the question of how of there’s one change in Russia that has to happen and what interests me more is how that happens and that that is the moment when the Russian Elites or the Russian leader or whoever is you know whoever you know is is calling the shots in Russia at a given moment at the moment when they understand you know themselves and are able to say that the war was a mistake and that Ukraine is an independent country and this is the this is the moment this is the change that the British went through in Ireland following the Irish Revolution you know the Easter rising and so on at the beginning of the 20th century when you know when they looked at Ireland which they had by the way talked about a little bit like the way the Russians used to talk about the ukrainians you know as a bunch of peasants who can’t rule themselves and of course they don’t have their own language they all speak English but there became a moment when they said right they’re not a part of Great Britain you know they can have their own country and then you know and then we had another many more Decades of conflict in Northern Ireland but that’s you know but they but the but the Irish Republic they let it go you know it’s okay they’re not us and we’re not going to try and make them us anymore and there was a similar moment that happened in France in the context of the of Algeria and the Algerian War Algeria was also was not okay it wasn’t it wasn’t a land Empire in the same way but it was it was meant to be Metropolitan France and there were many French people who had moved to Algeria and who lived in Algeria and thought of themselves as French algerians and there was a you know so there was a there were deep links between Algeria and France that to many people seemed you know we are all we are one country now and yet there also came a moment when the French Elite and this was a very tumultuous moment in French history there was a coup d’etat attempt in in Paris and there were you know you know all kinds of Rogue generals who were very angry and there was a you know there was a lot of conflict and drama that actually a collapse of the you know the French you know the French constitutional system at the time were to replace but Hazard had a lot of political impact inside France itself but nevertheless there was this moment when people said okay Algeria is a separate country and so that moment has to come in Russia and the question is what makes it come and I don’t there’s a formula you know there’s no I can’t tell you you know it will happen next Tuesday you know for these six reasons but but you know and there is a certain amount of thinking and again many you know if you know this in Kiev about how to make it happen What what is the what is the defeat what is the battle we have to win what is the thing that needs to happen to make that change and maybe it’s the maybe it’s even just the threatening of Crimea rather than the conquest maybe it’s taking maybe it’s taking back Mario Opel maybe there’s maybe there’s a there’s a there’s a battle that they can win and then you know once that has happened you know then I think that’s the most that’s the most important change in Russia and then a lot of different things could happen some positive and some negative I mean it’s my view and I’ve I’ve said this before that whoever comes after Putin is better whoever you know the worst person you can think of is still better because because that person will not have the same legitimacy and the same amount of power that he does because that person will immediately be the focus of infighting and conflict and it will take a long time to reassert that kind of power and control and because that person won’t be the one who’s directly responsible for the war so you know I can only hope that that happens and I don’t know that it will and I don’t even the change that I spoke of before I don’t know that it requires that or not maybe it does Sarah he thinks it does but I don’t know maybe he’ll wake up in the morning and he’ll just change his mind but anyway I mean not Sarah but but but these are you know these are this is just you know you know this is this this is just speculation I mean the you know I I don’t think it’s useful for anyone here to work towards a you know a particular outcome in Russia in that sense I mean you know regime change is not you know regime change it’s not going to happen because of something we do and the future state of Russia will be decided by the Russians you know we can discuss the various possibilities and outcomes and why some of them would be good or bad but I I don’t know that that’s that’s productive but thinking about how to achieve this one particular change of heart which would which would also affect Russia’s view of the region and of Europe is is is to me the most important thing okay yep yes hi my name is Catherine Katz I’m a writer and historian I’m also at Harvard Law School and I recall reading a passage by the Marquita coustine about traveling in Russia in the 1830s where he writes that Toleration has no guarantee neither in public opinion nor in the constitution of the state it’s a guarantee offered by one man and he may take away tomorrow what he’s granted today and of course that’s bizarre that was in the context of religious toleration but if you then fast forward to the Soviet era you have a consistent credible commitment problem where any agreement made is torn up as soon as it no longer suits the state’s interest to keep it so why do you think it’s been so difficult kind of from the Russian Empire to the Soviet period to today for Western leaders that don’t operate that way and don’t have that kind of interaction with other world leaders in making and keeping agreements why is it so hard for Western leaders especially in the United States or Britain to shift the frame of mind that it’s not like negotiating a peace deal or any other agreement with another head of state or entity I mean that’s really you know that’s a psychological question that I might not be equipped to answer I mean it’s a you know all of us want to see in other people you know a mirror of ourselves and you know we think this way so why can’t other people think this way I mean it’s funny though I think during the Cold War at least the early part of the Cold War I don’t think people thought of you know Stalin or even Khrushchev as being like us and they did think it was a different way of thinking and behaving and they did understand that you know there’s a there’s a you know there’s a different mentality I think that what happened in the in particular since the end of the Cold War since since 1989 you know we it’s almost like we had you know we you know we we developed this Frame of thinking about Russia and I don’t you know incidentally not just Russia China and others you know that said all right you know we don’t all agree about everything but you know there are there are areas of rationality where where we all share the same interests at least we have the same interests and there was a you know this belief that’s much that’s that’s mocked now but was was held very sincerely at the time which is that you know if we in involve the Russians in a web of economic interests you know or the Chinese in a web of economic interest then you know maybe they won’t become exactly like us but they’ll become kind of civilized and they’ll become part of our world and we’ll all share the same you know the WTO and the you know and the you know and various trade agreements and and we can operate them you know at least there’ll be some basis for you know for for for Commerce and trade and that will lead to better conversation and they’ll be that we all share something that we can rationally discuss and I think the Assumption I mean that was The Germ the Assumption behind Germany’s intensive relationship with Russia I mean again bad though it looks now I think it started out as a you know as a belief that you know you know if we want to live well with the Russians we want to get along with them they’re a power on this kind a lot of Germans are still afraid of the Russians quite deep down I think you know then what we need to do is have this you know deep trade links that can’t be broken you know because at the end of the day people’s economic interests will always be there and you know my feeling is that’s now been broken the degree to which the Russians were willing to sacrifice their own economic interest and sacrifice their own prosperity has has begun to make inroads into Western thinking about about Russia or not just Russia actually but about that whole set of assumptions you know our assumptions that you know at the end of the day everybody’s rational and they have self-interest and they want to trade stuff and that seems to me one of the casualties of this war is that idea but you’re right I mean it was for a long time it was in other it was something about the the many years we had of peace and the many years that we had of you know of this idea that the world could be run as an economic project that I think created that impression thank you very much technically
we are out of time so we can go maybe without completely exhausting our speaker for another 15 minutes we have I understand already four people here so maybe we’ll gather questions here and they have also I’m the only advocate here for people who are online so maybe we’ll collect questions here and you will you will provide answers to the questions that you really like and then there will be all sorts of questions coming from online and then unfortunately we’ll have to we’ll have to come forward if there are going to be a lot of questions I’m going to write them down now hahaha great admirer of your work and it’s a treat to be here thank you I am curious to know more about the project I’ve waited so long I forgot the name the Reckoning project could you say more about its Beginnings how did it get started how much of a role did you play in getting it started and is there a book we might expect based on all the stories you’re collecting from them I should be clear that I’m not part of it I mean I’m not I don’t run it it’s a it’s a it’s run by colleagues you want me to do more questions okay well I’ll just do this one it’s it’s in fact Peter pomeranzev has a role it was set up by a couple of Ukrainian journalists who you know the idea was that you know very early on in the war it became you know the for I think particularly after bucha it became clear that you know there were these terrible human rights violations and there are a number of groups collecting information about war crimes and so on all over Ukraine there are some legal groups obviously the human rights organizations are there the Ukrainian state of course is doing this I mean I I’ve seen it in action they they also have a you know they’re they’re you know local policemen are now being trained for how to how to write down and describe you know an attack or or a or a crime in a way that would be acceptable for a for an international court so there’s a lot of a lot of people are working on this and this is this is a just one of many groups the only thing that’s specific and different about it is that they are you know human rights organizations will usually go in and they have a sort of formula when they interview people you know we need to know certain things about what happened and there’s a and this is you know this is because they’re collecting certain kinds of information that will then be presented at a tribunal and this project tries to do something a little bit more than that so it collects a lot of it does long interviews it does you know to try and get nuance and detail and then it hopes to some of that material will be used also for courts but some of it they hope will be used in journalism and so what I used for this project was just one fraction of of what they do they’ve done a couple of documentaries they have I mean they don’t have a website yet I’m sure they eventually will they’re Fair obviously they’re new they were created since the war started that I think they’ve just raised a bunch more money so I think over the next couple of years they’ll begin to produce more I think there are other ideas to work with other organizations so they did a project with Time Magazine and they’ve done a couple of other projects with other newspapers and magazines so the idea is to is to is to in you know get the stories into media that people actually read I think so our second attempt but we collecting the questions yeah hi thank you for your work and just wanted to ask you to build and help the things that you already said about Russians or not willing to make any changes in their own country I wanted to ask you about Russians who left Russia those the half of the million that are abroad do you see any hope that the change start abroad I I have a comment so well first of all I’d like to say that there are relatively few people who are as they say for real and you’re one of them I’d like to thank you for that and now just a short comment for no particular reason I had to vacate the bookshelves I’ve been looking through browsing and reading some copies of 70s and 80s of continent this is the dissident magazine published in in Paris and for those who don’t know it’s a publication with people like social needs and Brodsky college so the creme de La Creme of Russian Exile intelligence here and I was struck by the fact that how irrelevant that is today relevant or irrelevant how irrelevant so number one it has is it the whole 20th century Passage by them so this is the ifs of Russian intelligencia Circa 19th century with all that hangs up indignation and stuff like that and another thing that I noticed is that there is no such thing as the Soviet that is Russian that’s my particular conclusion after reading through these materials I was particularly interested in Victor nicrosso who is a what they say a decent guy the author of vocopostale inrada and he’s a kivite I myself consider myself a carewide so I and he’s describing Kiev of early 70s this is my time formative years so and he’s totally just like other authors totally blind to the national issue this is the whole idea was that once the communism is removed we all live like brothers the whole idea of nationality National rise Independence sovereignty is totally Beyond these guys and I like your comment on that I didn’t hear all of that but I think I can comment but I meant well okay thank you thank you so much for your fantastic presentation today and for all the important work that you’re doing my name is I work at the Ukrainian Research Institute and my question since you also teach my question would be more about the state of the field if you wish in studying the region so the region that consists of Russia but also Eastern Europe and and kind of the countries in that area and we know we know that for several decades since World War II Russia of course dominated the space in how the space was studied right if you speak about Slavic studies usually we understand it’s all Russian studies and then a couple of sprinklings of Polish and Ukrainian and whatever else kind of makes it in there and so of course the Ukrainian Research Institute as a project was created to kind of decentralize that space and to you know provide more opportunity for Scholars studying other nations or cultures to kind of get in and maybe reclaim some of that knowledge but also present it as a relevant one however as we see currently from the debates with our colleagues and friends at the universities and elsewhere most of them are seem at least to be less concerned about the lives and the loss of lives of ukrainians and more about how they will continue studying Russian Art tolstoin Dostoyevsky and literature and all of that right now as the work goes on and in the estimate of the war and so my question is more about the transformation of the field that you see or that you think should happen and also about you know what else can be done to shift the focus away from quote unquote great Russian anything to just Russian and just polish Ukrainian and others thank you answer questions so I’ll answer the last one first I hope all of you are like ready and prepared because the Golden Age of Ukrainian studies is about to arrive you know so so do you have a lot I hope you have like you know a lot of energy and you’ve got new courses you want to teach and you have some program teaching people how to speak Ukrainian because you know I mean I know it just from the number of my friends who call me their daughter is 18 she wants to take a year off before college she wants to go to Poland or Ukraine to work with ukrainians what does she do and so you know I now have people who I know to call you know you know and I know what questions to ask for you know does she speak any relevant languages no you know but you know I really think there’s never been a moment when people have been as interested and you know and I speak here as somebody who wrote a book about Ukraine right before this happened and had Publishers who didn’t think it was that interesting and then got very excited about it later on so you know you know I I think the shift is is happening already I mean these things take years to work through whatever I mean you you people know more about University Department and tenure and so on you know it it you know it’s it’s already going on I mean and of course there are always going to be people who study Dostoyevsky and Russian art history just like they’re people who study you know you know proust and French art history so you know they’ll they’ll they’ll exist and we need them too and I don’t see why they shouldn’t keep doing it you know but I I do think there is going to be a huge interest going forward in the history of Ukraine in you know in in understanding Ukraine and understanding the geopolitics and studying and working there you know fingers crossed after the war people want to go there there will be a lot to do there young people want to go there I mean I know as I said I I know lots already and and I think there will be more so I just hope everyone here is gearing up for it yeah you know the other two questions were about Russians I mean you know so so you know it’s not that I’m an I don’t want to be naive but I also don’t want to be you know it’s very important not to be to remember that nothing is inevitable and no countries are ever condemned to be a certain way that there isn’t a law of history that says Russia has to be the way it is because it was always Russia you know you were you were of course right to quote earlier the Marquita Christine because so much of what he says including there’s a version of potemkin villages that he sees on his trip as well that
you know that that remains relevant today but countries do change you know and stuff does happen that makes them different I mean Ukraine is one of the countries that I know that’s changed the most you know almost more than anybody else I mean Poland has also changed but you know the difference between Ukraine in 1990 and Ukraine now is enormous you know countries change they evolve things happen they have different kinds of leaders leaders push them in one direction or another and I really refuse to say that Russia can’t change you know I I really won’t I’m I I I don’t believe that of course you know the question is where would the change come from you know we we already talked about this a little bit the Exiles might turn out to be important it was very funny I have a one Russian friend who was really one of the last Russian opposition people left and she finally she was she was threatened with arrests and so she finally left Moscow a few months ago and I was talking to her about Russian Exiles and she was actually saying oh nothing good can ever come of Exiles you know the only thing that you know the only real change has to come from in you know there’s never been any Exiles who’ve done anything before in Russian history I was like wait a second and she said you’re not going to tell me Trotsky are you and I said yes I was just going to say Trotsky so you know there is this tradition of Exiles changing Russia and maybe it’s an ugly tradition and maybe that’s not the kind of change you want and those aren’t the kind of Exiles you want but it’s there I mean it’s it’s it’s part of what happened before you know and there there is a part of the Exile I can’t speak to every single Exile and you know sure some of them were opportunists who just didn’t want to fight in the war and you know some of them are just like Tech guys who were mad that they were cut off from the internet you know but but there is a there is certainly a part of the Exile community that is you know that is political that would like to country to be different that is very devastated by what’s happened that isn’t imperialist and isn’t you know that you know you know deeply regrets and is sorry and embarrassed by the war and some of those people will go on working in Russian language media some of them are doing it now some of them will you know will organize in some ways outside the country I mean I think right now they’re all very you know they’re disoriented and they’re at the stage of trying to figure out like where their kids are going to go to school and so I mean there’s a there’s a there’s a moment of being pushed out of the country where the first part of it is logistical rather than intellectual but you know it’s really I I you know I think there is the war has had you know this change that I spoke of inside Russia I think it’s happened already in a lot of the liberal Russian Community they understand you know what a catastrophe the Crimean invasion was and they’re willing to say so and I and I think that should be encouraged I mean I decide you know there’s nothing there’s I think there’s nothing inevitable there’s nothing genetic about about the Russian regime and there will be you know and there are I would also say there are pieces and stories from Russian history that they can draw on I mean Russia modern Russia really was a modern Soviet Union but invented the modern Human Rights Movement I mean there’s a there’s a tradition of dissidents in Russia there’s a tradition of you know a small but important tradition of liberal politics in Russia and they will continue to draw on it and try and develop it and it might be a long-term project but sometimes you know long-term projects have an impact so so I don’t I don’t want to feel I don’t want to feel hopeless about Russia and I do think that you know there are some of the Exiles will will try and be part of whatever change is coming I’ll say it like that thank you very much some technical detail not a big statement Trotsky came from her son so to two questions that I have here and again that they’re not maybe closely related the first one is please say more about the genocide intents and the Russia’s ideology and the second is did Putin’s decision to keep the invasion plans closely held to a few advisors mean the Russian army never had an opportunity to prepare an occupation plan and this will be able to to concluding questions so the the second question the reason why well if it’s partly you know part of why there was no occupation plan was that you know Putin was keeping the the the truth about the invasion quiet but I think the bigger reason was that Putin had a you know had a completely different theory of what was going to happen you know his theory was that there wasn’t going to need to be an occupation in that sense because the Ukrainian government was going to fall quickly zielinski would be dead or in Exile he would be replaced I don’t know by Medved choke or by you know Yana kovich would come back on a horse or something you know I didn’t know exactly what the plan was but somebody would come back and run Ukraine as a you know as a pro-russian Ukrainian and that most people would accept it you know the the you know the idea was that the Ukrainian Elite is small and unpopular and you know most ukrainians don’t support it and most of them will welcome this reunification with Russia and I think they I think Putin at least believed that and you know maybe he believed it because people were saying it to him and you know knowing what he wanted to hear over the past you know decade you know or maybe you know I mean remember he’s somebody who has very little contact with modern Ukraine or ukrainians he doesn’t know very much about it he’s spent very little time with you know with any any Ukrainian so he’s you know so so he didn’t see it and and I think I think that was what they so they didn’t think they were going to have to do any kind of transformation or you know thinking about how to you know you know because they they thought that just eliminating the leadership would be enough and then as I say when they actually arrived in kharkiv or or or Kherson or zapparesia they discovered actually there were all these other leaders these Mayors and you know City councilors who had who had real Authority and had real legitimacy because they were elected and that was the thing they didn’t know about and they hadn’t considered so so that that would be my answer to that I mean you know genocide you know I don’t have any I don’t have any doubt that what the Russians are doing is you know in the broadest sense of the word in the in the Raphael lemkin description you know definition is clearly genocidal I mean it’s a you know the idea is to erase eliminate Ukrainian culture destroy the Ukrainian language kill if not every single Ukrainian then many of them you know to remove people from the land and then maybe eventually replace them with Russians I mean in a way the signature policy here is not really the you know the the torture and so on that I was describing in my talk but it’s really the theft of children which is one of the most you know in some ways the the most diabolical thing that they’ve done I mean this capturing children you know that you know it’s happened in different ways I mean it’s I mean you all know the stories I mean some of it is orphanages some of it is people in occupied territories who sent their children to Summer Camps and the idea of capturing children taking them to Russia telling them their parents don’t want them anymore making them learn Russian and teaching them to be Russians I mean this is a you know this is a clear attempt to erase ukrainians and created you know create people you know make them into Russians into something else and that seems to be as I say I I don’t think the Russians had thought it would be necessary at scale so I didn’t you know they didn’t they imagined that lots of ukrainians would voluntarily become Russians because that’s what they thought they thought all Russian speakers were Russians I’m the way the British used to think all English speakers were English and and you know it’s you know so it’s not it’s not all you know it’s not well planned and systematic but the you know clearly the the intention is genocidal so I don’t have any problem using that word in in the context of the occupation well certainly ran out of questions here online we probably have no chance of running out of questions here in the audience but we have we have to end it at some point and I guess this is this is the point where we’re ending and I want I want to thank to thank an apple once again for for really really very very interesting very thought-provoking presentation but also for answering questions and and in in the most effective way possible so thank you very much thank you [Music] before you left and before I forgot there is this is not the last event that happens during this semester sponsored by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute we all looking forward to you coming back on Monday April the 3rd at 4 30. the event will be Harvard Hill Ukraine group and Ukrainian clinical Scholars speak about health care challenges in Ukraine so I’m looking forward to welcoming you back to one of our events or rather one of the corresponsive events by The Institute thank you