History Shows That Evil Comes in Cycles

BOHM DIALOGUE Vol. 31 | October 9, 2022

Marci Shore, Mychailo Wynnyckyj, Julia Ovcharenko,
Chris Keulemans, Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski

New Haven—Vienna—Amsterdam—Kyiv

Summary

How can history be used to take a society into the future? Technological progress hasn’t brought moral progress. Participants discuss the problem of evil. If evil is the absence of good how can evil have agency? History shows that evil comes in cycles. How can education respond in order to break the cycle? Vulnerability to misinformation is discussed and contrasted with Ukrainian resistance to mirroring propaganda. Education as a means of instilling responsibility for critical thinking is explored. The future of russia after the war will require that someone take responsibility for its deputinization. The need to and ways to reform school curriculum in history is discussed. The nature of societal change is explored. Participants discuss monolinguality as exemplified by the U.S. society vs. multilinguality. The nature of guilt and responsibility is explored. The need to tailor the message to the audience is emphasized. What does it mean to be Ukrainian? The concept of human dignity is fundamental. History is discussed as being rediscovered, redefined, and used to various ends in Ukraine. A historian’s obligation to see the past clearly is emphasized. A society has a moral obligation to face the truth. Is Ukraine ready to do that? Zelenskyy’s discourse and the digitization of the war are discussed. Ukraine’s domestic politics is explored, including the need for a new immigration policy and related identity issues. 

Key words

deputinization subjectivity trumpism tyranny Ukraine russia history war education evil propaganda Zelenskyy identity social media

Timecode

05:42   lack of moral progress

07:05   the concept of evil

14:25   issues in education

21:15   responsibility for russia

25:19   possible responses to russia

30:47   revival of Ukrainian history

33:51   challenges in Europe

44:25   nature of societal transformation

52:12   explaining the war to a U.S. audience

56:55   the importance of reclaiming history

01:08:39   civic sense of identity in Ukraine

01:17:14   status of history in Ukraine

01:21:46   a historian’s view of history

01:46:45   Zelenskyy vs. Thatcher and Reagan

Participants

C — Chris Keulemans
D — Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski
J — Julia Ovcharenko
M — Marci Shore
W — Mychailo Wynnyckyj

THE DIALOGUE

C: Marci, it’s great that you’re able to join. You seem to be writing, speaking, following the situation non-stop.

M: I’m doing the best I can. I’ve thrown everything I have at it. Ordinarily, I would complain and say I’m exhausted and I have nothing else to say, but since I’m not in a war zone and some of you guys are in the war zone, I really don’t feel I’ve explained anything. As my 10-year-old daughter said to me this summer, ‘Mommy, you and Daddy keep saying that you have so much work to do, because you’re trying to save the world. But it seems to me that the world has not gotten saved. So you guys must not be doing a very good job.’ You can’t argue with that logic, it’s a very fair point. We have not yet managed to save the world.

W: We now have someone to blame for all of our problems, according to your daughter. That’s good.

M: She’s very sharp. She, of course, thinks—and so does my son—that if kids were running the world, we wouldn’t have these problems. They wouldn’t be doing stupid things invading other countries.

C: She’s probably right.

W: I will tell you that our kids say exactly the same thing. We have four of them and they’re all in the same boat. It’s all these adults that have screwed up everything around us.

M: It’s totally understandable.

J: Kids of historians ask even deeper questions, because the historians seem to know more about the past and maybe learn more from the mistakes. This actually gets us closer to the question for today’s dialogue: How do we take everything we know from history, how do we select the right history? How to make a project of that into the future, if it’s possible.

M: That’s a big question. One of the questions children of historians do ask, and is the question we’re all asking but haven’t answered, is why? They want to know, they want to understand why there’s evil. They want to understand why there’s cruelty. They want to understand why people are so stupid. Why are so many people racist? Why do so many people vote for the bad guy? Why do so many people want to hurt other people? Why, why, why, why, why?

D: Great.

M: We’ve been working on those. Recently I said to my daughter, ‘Tina, historians, we have learned to understand a lot about how racism works, how fascism works, how totalitarianism works.’ They keep asking why do russians want to kill Ukrainians? Why would they want to come kill? An excellent question. And I said, we’ve understood really a lot about how these things work, but we haven’t yet come up with some magical solution for making it stop. And being the child of the pandemic she said ‘Well we need a vaccination against manipulation.’ 

[05:42] lack of moral progress

Technological progress hasn’t necessarily brought moral progress. My father’s a doctor. He just recently retired, and one of the great sources of joy in his life has been being able to heal people at the end of his career that he would have had no chance of saving at the beginning of his career because medical knowledge has improved so much. But how is it that putin can pull things out of a hat that are variations on what stalin or hitler were doing a century ago? And people fall for it. How is that possible? How is it possible that we’re torturing people in the 21st century? How do we not have an answer? 

W: Marci, as you were talking, I picked up a book that’s on my bookshelf. It happens to look like this.

M: Oh, that’s very sweet!

[07:05] the concept of evil

W: And I opened it up to page 109, which was completely random, where you’re quoting some Polish philosophers, and specifically Marcin Krol, who says ‘We’re dealing with a moderate economic crisis, a serious political crisis, a dramatic civilizational crisis, and perhaps a fatal spiritual crisis.’ And the journalists asked ‘What is the fatal spiritual crisis?’ The answer is, ‘We’ve ceased posing questions to ourselves.’ ‘What questions?’ ‘Metaphysical questions. No one contemplates, for instance, where evil comes from.’ 

I had a discussion with some intellectual, spiritual friends of mine here in Kyiv and in Lviv. And I wrote an article, (but I’m not very proud of this one) in the Kyiv Post. In it, I was trying to get our heads around the concept of evil and western civilization. It was actually prompted by the suggestion by Amnesty International that Ukrainians are equally at fault and that we should get together. Recep Erdoğan actually came out and said there’s going to be a meeting between the Western leaders and putin about Ukraine, and it’s going to be without Ukraine, which is really quite alarming. I was thinking about this, and everything that I ever remember reading about philosophy, and I went back to Leibniz, and I went back to Kant. I remembered the statement that good exists, and evil is simply the absence of good. Well if that’s the case, then the question becomes if evil is the absence of good how can evil have agency? When we talk about what happened in Bucha, when we talk about what happened in Mariupol, we see evil having agency. I think that metaphysical question of where does it come from and how does it spread is something that we don’t want to ask. Two thousand years of philosophy has taught us, and this goes back to Aquinas and Augustine, that evil is simply an absence of good, which means that you can always, in any person find some good, which is the basis of dialogue, it’s the basis of compromise, it’s the basis of reconciliation. 

But having seen what we’ve seen recently, I’ve come to very much question that. I had a wonderful conversation at Ukrainian Catholic University about these things with several people that I really respect who are very spiritual, much more spiritual than I would be. And they said to me, ‘It’s not evil itself that has agency, it’s the person who has the quality of evil that is the agent.’ Which means that it’s all putin’s fault. And everybody else is just a puppet. I was thinking that this, this question of where does evil come from, and what is the quality of evil, is something that you touch upon in your book, the Polish philosophers that you mentioned that went through Solidarity and then the martial law. I talk about this, and I think we’re coming full circle in Ukraine. 

C: Demyan, it’s something that you consistently bring up during our Sunday talks.

D: Yes.

C: Especially, when thinking about the society for the future.

M: That evil.

J: How can we imagine, how can we develop our society beyond victory, if evil exists? What place does evil have?

D: Chris, we haven’t got answers yet. We have only questions. We have this Logos. We are working, we are moving, and this is the answer. We haven’t verbalized it.

J: If we are to learn from history, taking into account everything we know from the wars and the evil that already existed, it seems it comes in cycles. Why should we experience evil again under other conditions? What is not learned from the past or what does the new generation have to learn from having this experience again? If we talk about education, what is not enough in education to learn from the evil past? Or what should we introduce to the educational system in order to prevent war, wars repeating?

[14:25] issues in education

M: I think that’s precisely the point that certainly all of us who work in education have been obsessing about. That’s been my obsession since Trump won the election here in 2016. With everything that came out about russian interference in the American elections which clearly showed there was russian interference, we now know that the same troll factory that generated stories about the Maidan being a CIA conspiracy and Ukrainian nazis coming to kill russian speakers also generated the story about Hillary Clinton kidnapping children and hiding them in the basement of a pizza restaurant. And it turns out that we were just as vulnerable as people in the Donbas or in russia were to these stories. My husband was one of the people who did a lot to show that story for what it was, and it would not have worked if we hadn’t been so stupid. You can generate indefinite stories about Hillary Clinton kidnapping children and hiding them in a non-existent basement of a pizza place in Washington with no evidence, but if we were able to think, these stories wouldn’t have done anything. We have to take responsibility for the fact that we were vulnerable to the degree that we should not have been. Our real question is how to take responsibility for the fact that we have a population who seemingly is not able to think. How is it possible that so many people are not thinking? This summer I went to Vilnius to see friends from the Moskovskaya shkola grazhdanskogo prosveshcheniya (Moscow School of Civic Education, Московская школа гражданского просвещения), which was started 30 years ago by Elena Nemyrovskaia and Yuriy Senokosov, who were students of Merab Mamardashvili. So this is old soviet intelligentsia born in the 30s. They are elderly now, and not California elderly who have been getting up every morning going jogging, drinking protein milkshakes. They’re quite fragile at this point. When the soviet union broke up, their project was the Kantian project (from Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment”) in that we must have the courage to use our own reason; our people are coming out of these 70 years of soviet rule, we must teach them to think. There can be no substitute for people who can think. And so they created this organization to run seminars for NGO activists, for policy people, for teachers, for journalists, for human rights activists. That was going quite well until the Maidan, when they were declared foreign agents. Then they had to hold their meetings in different cities abroad. And they were still bringing people from russia, but it was clearly getting very sketchy, because people had to take a risk to cross the border. The first time I came and gave a seminar for them, I met them in Belgrade and they had 50 people there from all over, mostly outside the cities, small-town teachers and human rights activists. Everybody was nervous, nobody knew who might be an informer. We weren’t wearing name tags, there was no published program, but we had faith in the idea that you can teach people critical thinking skills. You can educate a population to ask themselves these questions. 

It was only maybe a year and a half or two years ago that finally it was clear they were about to get arrested, and they finally were convinced to stay in Riga. But these people are devoted to working on the russians, so in their 80s they’re never going to be able to go back to their apartments in Moscow. When I went to Vilnius, they were having a meeting of the Belarusian opposition and russian opposition. There was only one person who had crossed the border who planned to go back. And he was already expecting to get arrested and had made that existential decision. Everyone was tearing their hair out and on the verge of suicide. And Lena just said, “Marcia, я родилась при cталине (I was born when stalin was alive). I lived through all our hopes of Perestroika, and now I’m dying with this.”

For them it’s the failure of their whole lives. And she said, we’re gonna die, but you must go tell everyone in the West ‘Украина не должна проиграть. (Ukraine mustn’t lose.)’ She kept talking about prosveshcheniye, образование (enlightenment, education): education, education, education. Your generation has to go on, we have to teach people to think. And it was just tragic. They are in their 80s, this is the failure of their entire lives, and even at that moment they say all we have is education. That’s all, that’s the vaccination against manipulation. People have to be able to think, whatever these new technologies are to contribute to manipulation. Our defense still has to be teaching people to think. How we do that, that’s still an open question.

J: And immediately another question comes up. When the war is over, who would take the responsibility of changing the minds of russians? Who would be the people who take over russian society, and how much can we be sure that they would be successful?

[21:15] responsibility for russia

W: One of the things that I’ve been trying to do over the last three months, is I’ve switched from seeing myself as an external information warrior to someone who is doing more in terms of internal thinking and organizing in civil society and intellectual circles in Ukraine. I would say that one of the things that we’ve been trying to get across in the external world is an idea that russia as a geopolitical entity is unlikely to survive this war. So when we talk about who will be taking responsibility for russia, we need to understand that there will be multiple countries in the post-russia space. In the same way as we had the post-soviet space, now it’s going to be the post-russia space. But certainly we will not have enough resources to handle 140 million people in this vast territory. So it will probably change the geopolitical map of Europe. A certain level of responsibility will fall upon Ukrainians. I think that certainly it will be in Ukraine’s interests to take responsibility for, if you wish, deputinization and perhaps an equivalent to denazification or something like that in the areas that are immediately to the east and north of Ukraine. Now that needs to be tempered in the statement of ‘We are not interested in expanding the empire or expanding the borders of Ukraine into an empire.’ That’s not what we’re talking about. But we are talking about a certain territory, in which soft power needs to have a voice. The Ukrainian word is змістовне (meaningful).

To the question of how we define the content of education within Ukraine. Certainly, the school level is much more important than higher education, because you will capture more people at the high school level. In other words, a grade 8-to-12 concept. That period of time, in my opinion, is key. But it’s not going to be a reform that will require effort only in Ukraine. I think it will require an awful lot of effort also in Kursk, in Rostov, and in belarus. I’m perhaps taking a little bit too long on this one, but when we speak of a Marshall Plan for Ukraine, we need to realize that the Marshall Plan first of all was not about France and it was not about Britain, who were the victims of nazi Germany. It was about nazi Germany, it was about making sure that this never happens again and that we re-educate the Germans. In the same way, as much as Ukrainians would to see Western money coming in to rebuild the country, we’re going to have to take responsibility for re-educating Western russia, even though this idea is quite frankly not very popular in Ukraine. And the rest will have to be managed. And that’s going to be a massive undertaking that I’m not sure policymakers in the West are particularly prepared for. And that really is quite frightening.

[25:19] possible responses to russia

M: It’s a really good question. One of the sources of sadness through this whole war has been this complete break between russians and Ukrainians. A friend of mine said to me, ‘Marci, our Ukrainian friends have a right to say they are never going to speak to any russians again regardless of what position they take. The rest of us don’t have that right. We haven’t been any braver than they are.’ I don’t know any putin supporters among my russian friends and colleagues over the course of the past 30 years, but I know they constitute most of the country. So obviously my pool of people is not representative. We could have a long talk about how even the liberal russian intelligentsia did not fully understand the situation in Ukraine and the vestiges of imperialism, how they are too self-absorbed in their own tragedy. But even if they’re ten percent, five percent of russia, that’s a lot of people. russia is a big country. So my fantasy would be something like the Teach for America program that we have here, where you get these young energetic college graduates, who want to save the world and haven’t yet been beaten down by all the reasons why it’s not possible. They’ve come from these fancy universities and now have their liberal education and don’t yet have families to take care of or mortgages to pay. And you send them out to these impoverished inner city and rural schools in these Trump-supporting areas for two years. You put them in the classroom with kids, and they throw themselves at it. And it’s exhausting, and it’s the thing nobody can do forever, but if you get people at the right moment, it’s just the thing, because it’s a transformative experience for the young people who are having a potentially revolutionary impact on these students. There’s a bit of a 19th century ‘going to the people’ about it. In this case, it would not be at the university level, that’s already too late. The ones at University are already a select group, they don’t need the intervention as much. You’ve got to get them earlier. I’m biased, because I’ve got kids of a younger age, but you’ve got to get them at this formative stage. And you’ve got to send them into these small places, where people aren’t asking these questions, where they haven’t been given perhaps the resources to make it easier to ask these questions. I mean Chris and I know our friends from the Fundacja Pogranicze from the borderlands in Poland. They’ve done this for 30 years now.

C: Kristoff was one of the first people.

M: it’s positivist, in Polish you say ‘praca u podstaw‘, ‘work at the foundations.’ They have worked with these young people in these very provincial settings. They’ve put enormous amounts of human resources into it. But the extraordinary thing is you show up there and even though you’re deep in the Polish provinces, where an hour and a half away you have attacks on LGBT groups, and anti-Semitism, and all these things, they have created a space where they have actually educated people differently. It’s an anti-fascist training camp, except that it’s very beautiful, and people do lots of art, theater, and music. What gives me hope is I’ve now also seen these young people grow up over the last ten years. The young teenagers there, who were babysitting for my kids ten years ago, now have their own families, and what that project has proven to me is that it can be done. If it can be done on a small scale, that means it is possible. And if it’s possible, that has to give us hope that there’s some way to create it on a larger scale. You can work with these young people so that you raise them even in a place where they’re impoverished, even in a place where they don’t get to travel, even in a place where they don’t have resources—you can raise them in such a way that they’re asking themselves these kinds of questions.

[30:47] revival of Ukrainian history

J: Talking about scales. Social science says that three or five percent of the total population would be enough to get a good transformation in society. These numbers give us hope that small initiatives that engage just a few intellectuals can bring new knowledge or can create institutions that provide transformations to the whole society. But they also make us wonder if it’s true, and how this knowledge could be spread in the age of social media, when the minds of young people are busy with TikTok etc. 

We asked ourselves about history. Ukraine now is reviving their own history. The war makes us more attentive to the actual history. We dig deep into the events, we find connections, so we discover names that were totally forgotten, and understand how Ukraine was connected to the Western Europe much more and for a longer period of time than it was under the russian empire occupation. There’s this good feeling of “Oh, things were actually different, and everything we knew before was lies. That’s good news for us.” The next step is how to spread this good news. But what about the other side, are other countries open to hear this? propaganda was so deep inside different countries. In Austria, Germany, we feel this resistance inside the countries now, and working with these resistance is really hard. So again we have the question about scales. How much all of this should be said from the Ukrainian side? How much should we invest in communication outside Ukraine to get the new understanding of history rooted in other societies?

[33:51] challenges in Europe

M: It’s a good question. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Since the war started, I’ve been to Austria, to Lithuania, and Hungary to meet with Ukrainian students and women. I’m not really rooted anywhere, but I have this smattering of different perspectives. I’ve noticed a couple things. One, the issues that Ukrainians are worried about in Europe are not necessarily the same ones in America. For example, when my Ukrainian friends say the problem is everybody is too dazzled by Pushkin and they don’t read Shevchenko—that might make sense in Paris, but I assure you in America everyone is not so dazzled by Pushkin. Nobody has heard of Pushkin, they don’t read poetry. The number of people who are attached to Pushkin can be confined to a handful of my colleagues in Slavic departments, almost all of whom have been advocating for Ukraine. Our Tolstoy expert in the Slavic department at Yale opened the annual Slavic Department reception by toasting to the Ukrainian victories and Kharkiv. No one here is more attached to Tolstoy than she is. The problem in America is that Americans only care about America. Not that they don’t care about Pushkin, they don’t care about Tolstoy, they don’t read great novels. That’s just not the issue. The US is a big country, and the vast majority of Americans have never had a passport. When I started going to Europe and especially into former Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, my East European friends could not believe this. People who had waited their whole lives trying to get a passport, what it meant to be able to cross a border. They were like, ‘You come from a country where anyone can pay 25 dollars and get a passport, and most people have never bothered to do it?’ My parents had never had a passport when I was growing up. Why would you need a passport? 

America is also a monolingual country. On some level for Americans things that happen in languages other than English are not quite real. It’s very hard for them to imagine. This is part of what inclines me to think that Ukrainians should not give up russian, even though it’s not my right to intervene in that discussion— because I see how much of a deficit monolingualism is. It’s a deficit not just linguistically, it’s a deficit imaginatively. If you grow up multilingual, if you grow up with two languages, it’s more than just those two languages. Conceptually you understand what it means to code-switch. You understand language on a meta level. If you grow up bilingual, you can theoretically imagine what a third language or a fourth language would be like. If the world has only ever existed in one, the second is unimaginable. It’s a huge problem for Americans that we’re not aware of. 

I feel it doesn’t make sense to talk to the Americans about all of these discussions about why aren’t you teaching more Shevchenko? I’d be happy to teach more Shevchenko, I teach Zhadan. That’s not reaching out to Americans. That’s a tiny handful of people in Slavic departments who are already interested in, and mostly already completely on your side. In Vienna, in Paris you still have this cult of the ballet high culture thing. But America—you might remember that Adorno and Horkheimer came here as German-Jewish refugees and were horrified by the fact that we have no culture, we’re barbarians. We have a culture industry, we have Hollywood. You need a total paradigm shift. 

The other problem that you have in America is the radical right that’s just fascist. You have the trumpists who are just fascist. And then you have a far left that is very self-critical and feels everything bad that’s ever happened in the world is because of America’s imperial ambitions. I’m sympathetic to a lot of that critique, but the problem is that then, anyone against America must be a good thing, and we’re taking responsibility by being self-critical of America. That’s not very helpful, because the fact that one person or one country does bad things does not exclude the fact that there are other people doing bad things. 

There’s a position on the moderate left, which is much more understandable and deserves more conversation, which is that we have grotesque inequality in this country. We have children starving in this very rich country. We have children being poisoned with lead water in Mississippi, because they can’t get clean water. So how are we throwing these billions of dollars of resources into sending weapons to Ukraine? How can we justify this, when our own country is falling apart? And why Ukraine matters for Americans, even if you take the moral position that Ukraine deserves to win and deserves to be helped, there’s still the moral argument that we are representatives of this domestic constituency, these people are suffering, and we have to help them first. That’s an argument to which I’m much more sympathetic. A different argument needs to be made about how what is happening in Ukraine and russia is of immediate and direct relevance to all of us and to the whole world. That would be the American messaging. 

I tried to intervene with the Germans a bit with an argument about the relationship between guilt and responsibility. The Germans, arguably, are the worst offenders of the Francis Fukuyama-esque ‘end of history’ delusion, which arguably Americans contributed more to creating. We weren’t asking ourselves these questions in the 1990s about whether liberal democracy and the free market just naturally all reinforced one another in this Hegelian telos way. The justification then for trading with putin and in the end becoming totally dependent on German gas, was just that you engage in a free market economy, and that’s just part of this harmonious utopian capitalist package, in which engaging in free trade just naturally shapes everyone into good liberal democrats. Turns out that’s not true. There’s no Hegelian end of history. It turns out that those things don’t necessarily go together. It might have been understandable why people had that idea, but clearly all this trade with putin has not turned him into a nicer person in any way at all. 

The Germans also have to have a reckoning. There’s this sentiment of ‘We accepted our guilt. We’ve been atoning. We’ve been repenting. We’re very reluctant to act or to get involved with violence, because at one time we did that too much.’ That’s an understandable reaction, but it’s effectively an evasion of responsibility. So the philosophical argument I was trying to make in this Foreign Policy piece, in which what I thought my beautiful Heideggerian ending got butchered by my editor, was that the source of responsibility is not guilt. Guilt is for something that you did that you might not have done. Responsibility has to be a priori. It has to be non-contingent. It has to be always already. It has to be with us all the time. I’m borrowing Jan Patočka’s reading of Heidegger. It’s always with us. We are always already responsible, there’s no escape from responsibility, it’s not that we’re responsible because our grandfathers did X or Y. We’re responsible, because we are human beings in this world, and we are always responsible. We live in this world together. I think that has to be the paradigm shift on behalf of everybody, the russians, the Germans, all of us. We live in this world together, we are all responsible. 

W: I took a whole bunch of notes as Marci was speaking. And I’m hoping that she doesn’t mind a little bit of debate.

M: Oh, please, please, go for it.

[44:25] nature of societal transformation

W: Okay. Your fear of the fact that if Ukrainians lose russian, they will become monolingual, I think, is something that is really misplaced, because russian is currently throughout the Eastern European countries being replaced by English. And that is in fact, probably, a much more positive development not just historically and culturally etc., but because of the fact that these two languages are very different in terms of their roots. And therefore they represent very different cultural spaces.

M: Your native language is English, right?

W: Yes, I’m born in Canada. I spent the last twenty years living in Ukraine, and I’m a Ukrainian citizen now, but I’m educated in the UK. There’s an interesting fact you brought up. Your friend, who is a Pushkin fan, who’s raising toasts for Ukrainian soldiers. I had a supervisor at the University of Cambridge by the name of David Lane, whom you may have heard of, who’s a post-soviet expert, published many books, etc. He’s now long since retired, he’s in his late 80s and I wish him a long life. But he is very much a pro-russian person, because russia is a continuation of the great soviet experiment, and we are all about creating human experiments. One of the things I learned from him was to justify absolutely everything that I ever write. He traveled for the first time to Kyiv in the early 90s, having been to Moscow and Saint Petersburg many times in the soviet period. Assuming that Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Yekaterinburg were the be-all and end-all of what it is to be soviet, certainly Kyiv was not supposed to be any different than Yekaterinburg, for example. It turned out that it differed significantly, and does now. The reason I say this is, I wouldn’t want to be as positive on the Eastern European centers as Marci is. I think that there are some significant soviet apologists, who have become russian apologists. The most well-known of course is Richard Sakwa and the whole school of Richard Sakwa is still very much alive, which is really quite scary. My book was very much inspired by trying to answer, in the section that is more sociological, what is coming from Richard Sakwa. So I think, Julia, in terms of your statement about small groups being enough—and we can argue whether it’s 7, or 10, or 15, or 20 percent—to change discourse within a country, it comes from a period in an industrial society, when we would rely upon mass media, which would be controlled by a certain, if you like, Madison Avenue equivalent. That doesn’t happen anymore. The example I see here is the United States, where we have very much an intellectual elite that has absolutely no time or place for Trumpism, and yet we have significant portions of the population nevertheless voting for Trump. I have American acquaintances, with whom I simply don’t talk about politics, because it would be very painful for both of us, quite frankly. And many of them work in the US government, incidentally, in the State Department and other places. The State Department is a cross-section of the U.S society, and people have different views, even though many of them completed their education in places like Colombia and John Hopkins—if not Ivy League then certainly top US universities. So I think that in an age of social media, in an age of liberalism that allows for multiple opinions to be considered legitimate, we have to get away from the idea of a small group shaping the discourse. It’s a little elitist, and it comes from a hierarchical conception of society which dates back to the industrial era, which we are very much past. 

You must first realize what the context of the audience that you’re talking to is, and then you’re trying to somehow relativize your message to that audience. So for example, in my multiple interventions with high school students in Montana…

[52:12] explaining the war to a U.S. audience

…they would ask me to explain what the war is about. The standard question is, why should we care about Ukraine? Most of us can’t place it on a map, certainly we don’t understand the language. The end of history happened a long time ago, you’re backward, you’re corrupt, you’re somewhere out there on the frontier of Europe, who cares about you? It’s your problem. And at the end of the day, obviously, putin is fighting NATO rather than you. And you can get into a discussion about NATO, and you can get into a discussion about the United States being a leader in the world, etc. Most of the students are pretty isolationists, in fact. And it may sound banal, but I started quoting the U.S national anthem. And our flag is still here, and that’s important, because you folks are about fighting for flags and freedom, and these wonderful words that you pledge allegiance to every morning, and you actually believe them. So the idea was to bait and switch that way. I was using the American national anthem, which for children in Montana is extremely important, and they pledge allegiance to the flag.

I use the similar message to my audience in India, where, as Marci said, anti-American imperialism is very often just assumed of the Left. What we did in India was to remove the anti-American portions and to talk about imperialism, talk about russian imperialism and that russia is an imperialist power, and that russia is a territorial empire that is subjugating colonies. You and I can discuss whether Ukraine is in fact a colony of russia or was ever a colony—it would be a very specific colony, because most Ukrainian intellectuals became part of the imperial center, I mean Hohol (as spoken in Ukrainian, Gogol) and Shevchenko as well. But the point is that the word Imperialism is immediately understood and then what you’re doing is simply removing the adjective and talking about russian imperialism as opposed to American imperialism. That seems to work. That seems to be a message that is acceptable. 

And the final thing that I wanted to say is that I really understand the concept of your statement, Marci, on responsibility. One of the things that we are very much developing in Ukraine, certainly in intellectual circles that I am in, is the concept of responsibility being the flip-side of dignity, dignity in the sense of ‘гідність’. So if we recognize dignity as a universal concept that is fundamental to the condition of being human, responsibility is the condition of interaction with others, whom we recognize as having dignity. This responsibility is also going to be reflecting that recognition through responsibility for themselves, for others, etc. 

[56:55] the importance of reclaiming history

C: I’m very much the least well-educated person here, when we’re talking about these things right now, but I keep thinking about the questions that Damyan and Julia presented to us for today. To begin with I was curious to hear in what way is history being rediscovered, researched, redefined today in Ukraine? I see the importance of reclaiming your history, but I’m most curious to hear if this is a redefining history to make sense of today? To pick from history what is useful for the fight of today? And now that I’m listening to Marci and Mychailo, it’s sudden news to me that however hard Ukrainians are working to define, reclaim history and to present a different,more realistic history to the outside world, the outside world, be it Western Europe or the US, is not interested. Julia, you said that we need to bring the sense that Ukraine has had long ties to the rest of Europe into the consciousness through education, through arts and culture, but also in the political realm. You wrote, ‘We want to tell other people in other countries this true story. Will they be ready to hear us, under what conditions, and will there be resistance to this story, and why?’ Right now I’m thinking who’s going to be ready and interested and open to listen to this new version of history?

M: I’ve been taking notes on some things to say to individual points. One that Mychailo said about dignity and responsibility. I’m going to restrain myself from launching into a whole lecture on Kant—at every dark and creepy moment in European history, when intellectuals don’t know what to do, they start shouting ‘zurück zu Kant,’ ‘back to Kant.’ There’s a reason for that: you go back to the categorical imperative, you always treat a person as an ends, never as a means, which means you always treat a person as a subject and not an object, as a responsible agent and not as a passive thing. In the 1970s, 1980s Adam Michnik took the word ‘podmiotowość,’ subjectivity, and injected it into the discourse of solidarity. In Polish there’s a distinction between ‘subiektywność’ and ‘podmiotowość’: between ‘subjectivity’ as you’re something that could be perhaps dependent on one’s position here or there and ‘podmiotowość’ which is really the quality of being a subject as opposed to an object, being in a nominative case as opposed to the accusative case. And that is always already bound up with responsibility. In Kant’s fundamental definition of a human being, human beings are distinctive, because we have dignity. I try to use this to talk about ‘продажность’ and subjectivity, and the revolt against ‘произвол’ (russian, arbitrariness). ‘Произвол,’ this russian word, takes arbitrariness and tyranny together. To revolt against that is to say that I’m a person and not a thing, I am a subject and not an object, I’m not just a toy of the powers that be. It’s to assert one’s dignity and it’s simultaneously to assert one’s responsibility. I realize I’m not here to lecture you guys on Kant, but I take some pleasure in the fact that some of these wonderful Ukrainian graduate students I taught Kant to are now doing important things in military strategy and I want to think that Kant is making a difference. 

I think that’s absolutely fundamental, that’s where everything has to start. For me that was what was so special about the Maidan, that was that moment where you said ‘I’m not going to be treated as a thing. I’m going to take responsibility.’ I had been an agnostic about Zelenskyy, but when he came out that night in that famous video and said ‘Я президент, тут’ (Ukrainian, “I, the President, am here”), That was a historic moment. That was an existential statement. Whatever other good things or bad things he had done in the past, that was a moment of ‘I’m going to take responsibility.’ And that changed everything. 

I won’t intervene in the language question, because it’s not my country, I don’t have any right. I never tell everyone they should learn English, because I feel like an American imperialist. I try to avoid just writing to people in English and blindly assuming they should understand. The war has changed that a little bit, because now I’m afraid to write to people in russian. I’ve always felt that as an American my job is not to be an American imperialist and make everyone speak English. I will just leave that at the more languages — the better. You should always add, you should never purge. I’ve spent my whole adult life learning languages. I’ve deeply regretted that I wasn’t raised bilingual or multilingual. 

Now, analogies—I’ll just share one about talking to different audiences. Early in the war I had to give a briefing for one of our Congress people and their staff in Washington. I went to the Capitol Hill and was trying to convince people to immediately send long-range high precision missiles. That’s not my usual thing. I teach Kant. I’m not your missile person. So I said imagine a fascist regime here. And in order to make America great again, the regime believes we should have the whole continent. So Trump decides to invade Canada. Now, you know 500 years ago the borders were in a different place. It’s a bilingual country, French and English, but really everyone also speaks English even if they’re native French speakers. Suppose the American army led by a Trumpist fascist dictatorship shows up and starts shelling Toronto. Would anybody ask why are they not happy about that in Toronto? After all they speak English and we speak English, and they eat hamburgers and french fries and we eat hamburgers and french fries. Culturally we’re very similar, so why would they mind? But it’s a different country. 

I did my MA in Toronto. It’s a soft border in the way that the border between Ukraine and russia had been a soft border, in the sense that lots of Americans go on to university in Canada, lots of Canadians come to American universities. It’s a real border, but not particularly difficult to cross. You could cross the border with a driver’s license. I understood I was in a different country. They have gun control laws, they have universal health care, the cities are very different, it’s much safer living in Toronto. But it was very easy for me to adjust. I didn’t feel awkward or foreign. I felt that was an analogy a lot of Americans could understand. And if we started showing up and just bombing maternity wards and slaughtering people and torturing them, would anybody say ‘Gee, why should the Canadians mind? After all, why wouldn’t they want to be part of our great country, because they also speak English?’

J: Thank you for this analogy. It’s really helpful to understand how you can explain how things work in Ukraine to a different culture.

[01:08:39] civic sense of identity in Ukraine

M: Another thing that Americans should really understand is that there are many different countries where people speak English. There’s American English, there’s British English, there’s Australian English, there’s New Zealand… We’re the last people who should be in a position to say ‘Oh come on, they speak russian, should they be part of russia.’ That’s a non-argument. 

I have a couple things to say about history. Of course I’m a historian, so I care deeply about history and people understanding history. But I would also say that even if everyone in Kyiv were vladimir putin’s personal first cousin, even if everyone in Kyiv were ethnically russian and didn’t speak Ukrainian, it would in no way justify showing up and slaughtering people in Kyiv. That’s just completely insane as a motive of justification for anything. 

One of the things that I found very gratifying watching Ukraine from a distance over the years is seeing a civic sense of identity emerge in Ukraine. What it means to be Ukrainian has become a sense of choosing to be Ukrainian as opposed to doing some racialist genealogy on yourself and deciding if you really have the right grandparents and the right blood. You’re talking about a society of people—and here I’ll put aside the word “nation” and I’ll just say society—a society of people who don’t want to live under putin’s neo-totalitarian regime. Who have a right not to do that, regardless of what the genealogy is, and what the languages are. People have a right to choose. 

I knew nothing about the military before this war started. A former student of mine said to me about the tank convoy, those 40 miles, “No military commander would have that as a strategy, unless they were really very certain that they were going to meet with the warm reception, they were going to be victorious very quickly, they’d be having a victory parade in three days. It’s not the strategy that you would use if you thought that you were going to meet resistance.” And I thought, that’s interesting, because anyone who has ever spent two hours in Kyiv would know that he was going to meet resistance. You don’t have to be an expert, you don’t have to speak the language. Any of my friends, who would have stopped in on a layover and gone to dinner and had a movie in Kyiv, would know enough about Kyiv to know that nobody was going to be happy to see the russian army in Kyiv. That’s just glaringly obvious. So what was really going on? What could make you be that deluded as to think that people in Kyiv would be happy to see you? I’m happy to talk about what happened in the 16th century, I’m happy to talk about what happened in the 20th century, but the right to self-determination is not contingent upon that. Nobody has a right to show up and start slaughtering people. 

I’m finishing now an introduction to Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s “The Length of Days” («Долгота дней») that’s coming out in English translation. And one of the things that sometimes makes me nervous about these conversations about literature and imperialism since the war started, is that Ukraine has great literature therefore Ukraine is entitled to its survival. Ukraine has great literature and Ukraine is entitled to its survival, but the latter is not contingent upon the former. You should not have to prove your kinship with Nobel prize-winning poets, in order to say you have a right not to be buried under rubble. That right is a priority. We’re reading the most grotesque accounts of people being tortured by electrocution. You don’t need to defend their right not to be tortured by saying our literature is as good as your literature. That’s a whole separate issue. There has to be some basic concept of human rights and human dignity that is prior to everything else. And that is the basis for the discussion about everything else.

C: Still, Julia and Demyan, I’m sure you agree with Marci here, but it seems you’re convinced that it’s important to represent the valued depth, the history of Ukrainian independence, Ukrainian arts and culture to prevent something like this from continuing, to prevent something like this from happening again?

J: It’s becoming more clear for me now how different the ways of approaching the European audience and the American audience have to be. So maybe for the US a good TV show could be a good method, but for Europe, I think it’s more important for Europe itself to reshape the place of Ukraine in its vision. It’s just a way to talk about the important things we live for. And it’s not about the place of some specific country in some specific century and our connections to others.

[01:17:14] status of history in Ukraine

W: We have very often heard in Ukraine, particularly from people like Yaroslav Hrytsak and others, that Ukraine wants to be a ‘normal country.’ And my attitude towards that is, in normal countries we are not fixated on history. I get the impression that Ukrainians for the last thirty years, because of political technologists as they’re called, because of a variety of people who were interested in using the politics of memory as a means towards electoral success and perhaps even some of them being funded from the Kremlin, we’ve made history into a national pastime, which it isn’t in normal countries. It’s one subject that is the equivalent of physics or the equivalent of any other history or any other subject that you would take in university. But it’s not something that is part of daily discourse, which it was in Ukraine for a good twenty years, because the question of Red the Army, UPA (УПА, Ukrainian Insurgent Army), still дивізія “Галичина” (Division “Galicia”) to this day. 

Six years I did a summer school on Ukraine for Western students coming into to Mohylyanka, and I had this thing about a Red Army officer in a budenovka looking one way and pointing in that direction, and then an UPA officer pointing the other direction, and in the middle you have a kozak, sitting there with with his pipe, looking at that with his head in his hands saying ‘Why should I care?’ Obviously, it was part of discourse for a very long time. History was very politicized, but I think we’re becoming a little bit more of a normal country. History is for historians, which is fine. I read a lot of history myself, but I don’t think it’s something that really should be affecting our daily discourse, let’s put it that way. I think we should be much more forward-looking and present oriented.

M: I also give a lot of talks. I was at a shabbat dinner that Chabad organized till two in the morning on Friday, talking about Ukraine. I’m involved in a lot of these discussions about the Ukrainian Jewish past, about the Polish-Ukrainian past.

W: How do you feel about Dershowitz’s article in Newsweek?

M: Oh, I haven’t read that.

W: He says basically that Ukrainians are all nazi collaborators and are responsible for the Holocaust. The fact that Zelenskyy dared to criticize the politics of Israel with respect to Ukraine, in other words being basically pretty well neutral, is just an affront, because of the fact that the Ukrainians have just as much guilt with respect to the Second World War as the Germans and the nazis, etc. So it’s a very, it’s a scathing article in Newsweek.

M: Who wrote this?

W: Alan Dershowitz.

[01:21:46] a historian’s view of history

M: I did a feuilleton about the Jewish question for the Jewish Review of Books, which I did somewhat reluctantly, but I let the editor talk me into it, then I was glad that I did. The one thing I’ve stressed, as a historian you always have to face the past with eyes wide open. There were Ukrainians who collaborated with nazis and killed Jews. There are bloody episodes of ethnic cleansing against Poles in Volhynia. History is full of horrific things that happened. And this is why whenever people are renaming streets, I’m always pleading to no avail. Name them after berries, fruits and flowers, I say, not after people. People are just people, and people don’t get through nazism and stalinism with clean hands. There are no perfect human beings. There are people who hold up better, they’re people who hold up worse. It’s dangerous to heroize people. I think there are moments when people rise to the occasion. This is what was so significant for me about what Zelenskyy did. Not because I think he led a perfect life before that or has always made the perfect decisions, but because there was a moment when he rose to the occasion, and that makes a difference. 

One of the things I always try to teach my students is that there are these moments of contingency and moments of decision making. And there are no iron laws of history, there are human beings, there’s an intersection of chance and choice at different moments. 

I don’t believe in inherited guilt. Not for Jews, not for Ukrainians, not for Poles, not for russians. I don’t think we are guilty of what our grandparents did. I think we are all responsible for looking at that past with eyes wide open. Our responsibility is not to atone for what people did before we were born. Our responsibility is not to whitewash and not to turn away from what happened. And that goes for Americans with respect to slavery, with respect to the Jim Crow laws that were the model literally for the Nuremberg Laws. Americans sent racially segregated troops to fight the nazis. We had miscegenation laws making interracial marriage illegal in many states until 1967. That’s 22 years after the nazis were defeated. We have a lot of our own accounting to do. And what’s been very gratifying to me about working with a new generation of historians, is that they are saying our job is to sit in those archives and figure out the truth and tell that as best we can.

When I first came to Eastern Europe in the 1990s, a lot of the older people I met who helped me understand what happened during nazism and stalinism had been adults at that time and were in various ways both victims and personally implicated in it. Now that’s really no longer true and the number of people who were of an age to be responsible for their decisions in 1942 who are still alive today… It’s a very small handful of people that you can count on a couple of hands, who are now 100 years old, who are not really playing a very active role. So now we’re in a different space. Now all of us have a responsibility to face that with eyes wide open. There’s a book, there’s a fantastic book that everyone Ukrainian should read. It was actually translated into Ukrainian by Nelya Vakhovska (Неля Ваховська). Martin Pollack’s book “Der Tote im Bunker,” “The Dead Man in the Bunker.” He’s an Austrian author and a translator and a Slavicist, and the son of an SS man. In his 60s he wrote this book about his father, who was in the SS and the Gestapo. I love this book because it’s absolutely fearless. It’s clearly a difficult book to write, but he investigates, he goes through the archives, he goes through the material, he goes back, but it’s not about neurotic guilt. It’s not about repentance, it’s not about guilt by contiguity. It’s about ‘I am responsible for facing the truth.’ And I felt that should be our model. We are all responsible for facing the truth. 

I’ve been working on that as a way in which Ukrainians should be judged. They should be judged not by whether their great-grandparents were guilty of X or Y at moments or how that could be either justified or not justified, but how they’re facing the past today. And here I think we go back to the dissident philosophy of the 70s and 80s, and feel epistemological questions are ethical questions. We have a moral obligation to face the truth. I think Ukraine has a generation that’s ready to do that. 

Do you know Nathan Englander’s story ‘What we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank’? Somebody should do a Ukrainian translation of this. There’s a Polish translation, there’s a Serbian translation. I think it was one of the most important moments in post Holocaust Jewish literature. I’m now going to ruin the story for you by telling it to you, but you’ll see why. I think it matters. So Nathan Englander is an American Jewish writer of my generation who has lived in Israel, lived in New York and spent his life grappling with the meaning of Jewish communities in the relationship with the Holocaust. And this story is about two women who grew up in a religious Orthodox Jewish community in New York from our generation. They then go off in different directions. One of them, Deb, marries a secular American Jew, they move to Florida, they have this bourgeois American life. The other marries the child of Holocaust survivors. They become ultra-orthodox, they become Hasidic, they move to Israel, they have 10 children. Then they reconnect via Facebook, and they meet now with their respective husbands of twenty years, years later in Florida. And they’re then reflecting on their childhood and reminiscing. they start to drink and they start to smoke marijuana and then they get less and less inhibited. And they recall this game that they played as girls and then as teenagers in New York: the game was called ‘The Anne Frank game.’ You had to imagine somebody you knew, who was not Jewish. And they lived in these Jewish communities that were fairly tight, but there would be the bus driver or the guy at the store, the postman—you were always having interactions with people who were not Jews, but who were a degree of separation from your immediate intimate world. So you would have to imagine somebody in your life who was not a Jew, imagine that they were in occupied Europe during the Holocaust and say would he or she have saved me. Would they have risked their lives to save me? And then they start playing it with one another. And so the woman Deb, who married the American, has to look at her husband and imagine that he was a non-Jew in occupied Europe, and say would he have saved me. And she looks at him and says ‘Yes, of course, he would.’ And then the other woman, who married the child of Holocaust survivors, has to imagine that he is a non-Jew, he’s in an occupied Europe during the war, and say would he have saved me. And she looks at him and she says ‘Yes.’ But at that moment all four of them realize it’s not true. That none of them are sure. And that source of uncertainty becomes a source of terror in the room that nobody can speak about. I’ve now ruined the story for you, but you see why. The reason why it was so brilliant to me was that this sense of what we are afraid of is also inside of ourselves. This idea that bad guys were out to get us. The idea that you can draw a clean line and then find a safe space among your own—the tragedy of the human condition is that there is no such safe space. 

We try to hold on to the idea that we were the victims and we were the good guys, and others were the bad guys because it gives us some sense of security, and it gives us some sense of clear lines. And I’m a parent, I’m very empathetic to the desire to find a safe space in the world. But I really think the tragedy of the human condition is that it doesn’t exist. And part of our responsibility is confronting that. We are always already responsible at every moment for what we’re doing and how we’re acting in the world that we’re creating. There’s no escape into this bubble or that bubble. 

C: How does this relate to the way, Julia and Demyan, you see more and more Ukrainians working with their history, rediscovering their history?

J: The UPA and the nationalist stories from the Ukrainian past seem to be overrated or manipulative. At the time when it happened it was about a small part of Ukrainian Society. The larger Ukrainian society is very multifaceted, so this is the same I would say about this safe space. Ukraine generally felt a safe space at least for chauvinist stories. What I frightens me is that a chauvinistic attitude comes after this war, because it would make us put a line or differently align who are Ukrainians and who are russians, and it’s not about ethnicity or nationality or the place you come, it’s about the mindset, it’s about the political nation. The discourse about canceling russian culture seems to be dangerous in terms of this division in society. It is reasonable for sure. It is reasonable, we have to define what is evil and take this in our narratives, because without that it’s impossible to think who is right, who’s wrong. But still I see danger in that: it sets out some new borders that maybe have to be accepted, but it also sounds like a message into the future meaning that in the future, after the war, after the victory we will have to work with these supporters again.

M: I think one of the ways in which Zelenskyy’s messaging has been brilliant, has been in refusing to be pulled into a memetic relationship with the russians and with russian propaganda. You have people like Margarita Simonyan saying, “Вся надежда на голод” — ‘All our hope is in famine. We’re blackmailing the world with famine. Shamelessly, openly. We’re going to exterminate you, we’re going to irradiate you’. Historically it’s very easy to mirror the enemy. What Zelenskyy and his team have done ingeniously is to not do that, not use that language. And this was an insight I got from my brother at the beginning of the war. My brother has nothing to do with Ukraine or Eastern Europe, he’s an opera composer. At the beginning of the war, when I was saying to him, ‘I never would have guessed this man [Zelenskyy] would rise to the occasion this way. Look at his messaging, listen to these speeches.’ And he said, ‘Marci, I’m not surprised. I don’t know anything about Ukraine, but these are skills a good comic actor has. You have to be able to improvise.’

W: I’m going to say that it’s easy to be agnostic about Zelenskyy when you don’t live in Ukraine. 

J: How do you explain that, Mychailo?

W: It’s much more difficult in Ukraine. It’s the same type of thing where I could say that I’m agnostic about Trump, or about Hillary Clinton, or I’m agnostic about Joe Biden. I don’t follow American politics on a daily basis, and therefore I can afford to be agnostic. But the reality is, that Zelenskyy has very much, in my opinion, authoritarian tendencies. And I think that we need to be talking about that openly. Yes he’s done absolutely everything correctly after February 24th, absolutely, no doubt. But prior to that he basically monopolized everything that had to do with the executive and the legislative branch and to a large extent the judicial as well. I’m really not sure what’s going to be happening after the war, but I very much hope that Zelenskyy is going to be like Winston Churchill, who won the war and then lost the election. Because if Zelenskyy loses the next election, then Ukraine will be fine as a democracy again. As someone who has an intimate knowledge of what’s going on, for example, in health care policy, I’m much less agnostic when it comes to Zelenskyy, and a great deal more critical. Zelenskyy’s party positioned itself as being libertarian before it came into office, and many of its policies were very much libertarian. I tend to be in my politics right of center, but that doesn’t mean that I am radical right, and the privatization of healthcare, the privatization of education is something that I find absolutely appalling. The fact that in four days it will be two years that we have had a minister of education who plagiarized his dissertation… You could claim by reading the Constitution that it is not really Zelenskyy’s problem, but the reality is that the reason Shkarlet is still in office is strictly 100% because of Zelenskyy. Certainly he has no followers in the Parliamentary Fraction, I know for a fact that he’s hated by Shmyhal. The two don’t even say hello to each other. So my apologies Marci, but your agnosticism is because of the fact that you’re not really into Ukrainian politics on a daily basis.

M: And I completely admit that. Leaving aside the fact that I don’t actually have anything to do with internal Ukrainian politics, but in terms of Zelenskyy’s messaging, which I think is going to be a topic for historians, because it’s being done in a way that has not been done before. It’s countering the post-truth and neo-totalitarianism that we have not seen in this form before, that has elements of continuity with 20th century totalitarianism, but also variations. I think this is going to be an intellectual history topic for a couple generations to come. When Zelenskyy addresses the russian soldiers, he says, ‘We will treat you достойно (with dignity). We will not be you. If you put down your arms, we will not disclose the conditions in which you came under capture. We won’t say whether we captured you, whether you surrendered. We will not forcibly exchange you, if you don’t want to go back. We will not torture you the way you are torturing people.’ It’s very hard not to mirror the enemy in a moment of war. Historically very few people pull this off. If Ukraine can maintain that, that’s a historic accomplishment. And that’s a message to the world.

[01:46:45] Zelenskyy vs. Thatcher and Reagan

W: I’m sorry to interrupt, but I have to. Could you please do yourself a favor as a historian? Do a direct comparison of Zelenskyy’s discourse with the discourse of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. You will find it is a copy. Now knowing your politics, I specifically mentioned those two politicians, both of whom were wartime politicians, one of whom was also an actor and you will find a direct mirror. I happen to know that because the people who are the speech writers in the office of the presidency happen to also be people that are historians of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. In other words, they’re taking the discourse directly from them. Now, in today’s context you as someone who is left of center find Zelenskyy’s discourse to be fascinating and interesting. Just realize that the context may have changed a little bit, but when these people were speaking in the United States or in Great Britain, in your youth you probably found them to be highly objectionable.

M: What I was thinking about Zelenskyy was in the example I’ve used with my students, Patron’s Twitter feed. So Margarita Simonyan is saying ‘We’re blackmailing the world with famine.’ And Zelenskyy got these messengers saying ‘Look, we have our mine-sniffing comfort dog who does yoga. Namaste everybody!’ First of all, technologically you could not pull that off before Twitter, there was no such possibility. But the fact is, that conversation is going on, that humor, and there’s a role for dogs and cats in messaging. Technologically, this has never happened before. Yes, we have been morally superior before, but Patron wishing everybody namaste and having his own Twitter account, that? I mean you could not put Patron’s Twitter account and Margarita Simonyan’s Twitter account next to each other. you’re really in two different civilizational spaces. I think that is brilliant. I think that off-centeredness matters. The first time I saw a live briefing with Dmytro Kuleba, you put Lavrov and Kuleba next to each other, and it’s not even that they have different personalities, it’s that they’re from different species. They’re from totally different civilizational realities. And I think that’s what you need, you need a totally different tone. You need the moral integrity of the ‘Yes, we are morally superior.’ But you also need that tone, you need that ironic distance, you need that ability to to say the thing that is ironic or sarcastic and not just as malicious as the person last said to you. I think strategically that will matter. I think dissertations are going to be written on the roles of dogs and cats in Ukrainian wartime messaging. And maybe Reagan and Thatcher also had dogs and cats, but we didn’t have the technology to play with things in the way we’re doing now. You didn’t have the memes, you didn’t have the sarcasm, you couldn’t troll Elon Musk back when he started a survey—technologically, the possibility didn’t exist before. 

J: The digitalization of this war also makes us think of other ways in which it is different. Anyone can watch everything online, and experience the worst atrocities of this war in real time. And still be involved or not. The decision of how far an individual wants to remain from the events makes a difference. 

M: I was surprised, when at the beginning of the war people asked me how this is different from the Second World War. The first thing I would say is, the Internet. Imagine we had a live stream into the gas chambers. 

Anecdotally I can tell you that the number of Americans I encounter, who have nothing to do with Ukraine, who tell me that they know about this because they follow Patron’s Twitter account, is quite remarkable. You’ve got all these people, who are drawn to some humanist humor or who have dogs or who have cats. You’ve got a totally new demographic.

J: And what do we learn from that?

M: I’m always interested in what’s new, what is really new because it couldn’t have existed in this form before and what are the similarities and dissimilarities with what came before.

W: I’d like to bring up Margaret Thatcher’s handbag, which I consider to be a direct analogy to Patron and his Twitter account. It’s a way of manipulating discourse with things that are unexpected. Obviously it’s pre-Twitter, but the analogy I think is pretty obvious. I wasn’t able to find anything that’s similar on Reagan, but I’m sure people will write dissertations in the same way as Vogue wrote about Thatcher’s handbag, and I’m sure there are dissertations about Thatcher’s handbag. But the point is that it actually is not as new as some of us would believe. In fact, it’s just a modernization of… I’m going to say rightist rather than right wing, but rightist political technologies that have been used in the past.

M: So what do you think Zelenskyy should be doing? 

W: I think he’s doing everything correctly right now. Since February 24th, Zelenskyy did everything correct, except for perhaps in September he should have rotated certain ministers out of his cabinet. That he should have done domestically, because September was a time to do it. And the reality is that he basically didn’t have the time for it, because he says, ‘No time for domestic politics.’ At the same time he insists on making every single decision when it comes to every appointment. I think that that’s the major problem when personal appointments are monopolized by the president, who incidentally according to the Constitution is not supposed to monopolize personal appointments. Out of the, what is it, 30, I think cabinet members, I would say that at least half need to be rotated out. We’ve got scandals in the judiciary at the moment, which are just absolutely horrific, including the fact that one of the judges of the Appellate Court of Kyiv has been found to have a russian passport and is a russian citizen. And at the same time for some reason or other he’s not being dismissed, even though the Constitution directly requires him to be dismissed. We’ve got the anti-corruption bodies quite frankly going after a friend of mine by the name of Pavlo Kovtonyuk, who served as Deputy Minister of Health under Ulana Suprun. Now, four years later, he is being dragged in for having signed some piece of paper… In other words there’s things going on internally within the country that are problematic. President Zelenskyy is doing everything right in terms of foreign policy, in terms of maintaining the anti-putin coalition, in terms of getting the Lend Lease going, in terms of getting armaments to the front, not getting his hands into trying to run military matters, but actually having the Head of the General Staff run that, which is the way it should be. In other words, he is doing everything right in the military and foreign policies areas. But domestic policy is a mess.

C: It’s interesting to listen, because this is how we build history, this is how we build a historical narrative. 

M: Mychailo, you were the first person in Ukraine who even brought up domestic politics since the war started. I’m curious to see how much space other people in Ukraine have for even thinking critically about the subject at this moment of such extremity and existential threat. I’m very impressed that you could actually even think about this at the moment.

W: We’ve run four conferences on a joint platform between Cobble Hill Academy and Ukrainian Catholic University which have been focused on Ukraine after the war, in other words, what country are we building. One of them has been centered on education, because that’s something that everyone is interested in. Others have been centered on what we call ‘гуманітарна політика,’ which I guess would translate as ‘cultural policy.’ I think everyone understands that we have approximately seven million people that have been displaced during the war, and by many estimates about half of those are out of the country at the moment, and it is quite likely that a significant portion of those will not be returning. The polling data amongst refugees or displaced people in Poland at the moment is showing upwards of about 20 percent that have no intention of coming back, regardless of what happens in the world. If Ukraine is going to be rebuilding, if Ukraine is going to be a vibrant country again with the demographic situation that we have, we have to be talking about immigration and that raises identity issues. The identity issues are not necessarily about russian speaking versus Ukrainian speaking, etc. It’s about, for example, how do Ukrainians feel about the fact that maybe every fifth student in a Kyiv school is going to be wearing a hijab. How are we going to be managing the fact that we’re expecting a relatively large influx of Central Asian, perhaps, migrant workers, immigrants who traditionally have not been exactly accepted in Ukrainian society. So these are the things that we’re talking about, about demographics, about immigration, about identity, about education, and it’s always done with a focus of trying to create a vision of Ukraine post-war. This has very little to do with the military situation and with foreign policy, the exception being an understanding that we will have to take responsibility for part of the post-russian space. There’s also an understanding of the fact that in terms of economics Ukraine has to become an equivalent of a ‘tiger,’ whatever you want to call that, there needs to be some very fast economic growth. That will require institutional changes in terms of judiciary and rule of law. That is the only way that we will be able to build some soft power that will be required to make us into a regional leader. So to the extent that foreign policy is an extension of economic policy, we are also talking about foreign policy. 

So I think that it’s interesting that I’m the first that you’ve come up with, because quite frankly there is an intellectual community that is talking about not only domestic politics, but I would say trying to create a vision of domestic issues post-war.

M: I think that people who have been reaching out to me since the war began have been people reaching out to me for a specific reason to help with outreach connected to the war. I find it extremely impressive that there’s already planning going on for the next stage. I mean I’m a neurotic catastrophist, so I panic very easily. I find it very inspiring, to some extent comforting that you guys are already on what the reforms are going to be after the war.

W: Marci, do you remember your time at Maidan? The safest place in Kyiv was Maidan.

M: That’s what everybody told me. 

M: Everybody told me that, it was so striking. 

W: I would say that the analogy is very similar to the war at the moment. When you’re in Ukraine you actually feel a lot safer than when you’re watching the war from outside.

M: That’s very interesting.

W: I got a little bit concerned when they were bombing Irpin today, and I happened to be sitting in Kyiv. Particularly since three of our kids happen to be somewhere outside as they say ‘гуляють.’ But again that ended as you could see ten minutes afterwards, so it’s okay. You go through these things. We get used to these things and there’s no heroism in it. 

J: The Ukrainians say ‘We are planning what we are going to do after the nuke attack and buying Christmas presents at the same time.’

W: Did you guys read about the memes that we’re going through on social media last week about the nuclear attack? The meme that was about Shchekavytsya (Щекавиця), which is a hill in Kyiv, literally, just outside. It’s named after Shchek, one of the legendary founders of Kyiv. I think it was on Twitter, that based on the fact that there’s going to be a nuclear attack, how about, if the world is going to end anyway, why don’t we just organize an orgy on Shchekavytsya. So people started selling tickets. There was this huge discussion about who’s going to be involved in the orgy, and who’s going to be watching the orgy, do you bring cots, do you bring beds, do you bring just towels and that thing. And then it got into a discussion of STDs, and should we be afraid of these things if the world was ending anyway. This lasted for a week and it was all actually in Ukrainian, which was really interesting, because there was somebody who tried to put a comment up in russian and it was immediately taken down, because this is not for russians. I mean this orgy is for Ukrainian speakers only, which is I guess not very tolerant of us, but nevertheless.

J: And designers developed new logos for this hill. 

C: Cool.

J: Humor is another strong weapon of Ukrainians.

C: Exactly.

M: I think that’s really important. I taught Bergson, and I gave some of my students his essay on laughter. I think this is an important moment for that. 

Questions 

1. In her essay for Foreign Policy, Dr. Shore operates with the concepts of guilt and responsibility. How do you understand these concepts? What are the moral implications of your understanding? 

2. The Teach for America program is an example of a national service program. In post-war Ukraine, would you be in favor or against some form of national service? Why? 

3. Large-scale international exchange programs are a well-developed tool of cultural diplomacy. How could Ukraine use this tool to advance its foreign policy objectives? If you could organize an exchange program, what would it look like? 

Resources

Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. Martino Fine Books, 2014. 

Jan Patočka and the Heritage of Phenomenology. Centenary Papers. Edited by Erika Abrams, Ivan Chvatik. Contributions to Phenomenology (CTPH, volume 61). E-book: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-90-481-9124-6.

Wynnyckyj, Mychailo . “The Root of Evil Blurred by Amnesty International.” Kyiv Post. August 10, 2022.

Мартін Поллак. Мрець у бункері. Історія мого батька. З нім. пер. Неля Ваховська; передм. Тімоті Снайдера = Der Tote im Bunker. Bericht über meinen Vater / Martin Pollack: [роман-дослідження]. — Чернівці: Книги-ХХІ, 2014. — 247 с.