Dan Snow's History Hit - The Origins of Kyiv

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

24th of February 2022 marked the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. This episode of Gone Medieval looks at the origins of its capital city, Kyiv, and how today it has become central to this ongoing conflict. Host Matt Lewis is joined by Dr. Olenka Pevny from the University of Cambridge. Together, they discuss the emergence of the Rus people, the consequences of the Mongols' arrival into the region - and ultimately how this period of medieval history has influenced eastern European relationships and the modern-day geopolitical stability of eastern Europe.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We've got an episode of our sibling podcast now for you lucky people. I'm in the Antarctic, so here's an episode of Gone Medieval with Matt Lewis. Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we thought it would be interesting to look at the origins of the city of Kiev, how the Rus people emerged, the arrival of the Mongol horde into the region, and the historical relationship between what is now Russia and what is now Ukraine. I'm joined today by Professor Dr Alenka Pevny, lecturer in Ukrainian and Slavonic studies at the University of Cambridge, to talk about the region around Ukraine during the medieval period and to try and add some depth to our understanding of what

happened then and maybe what's happening today. Thank you for joining us, Elenka. It's my pleasure. Wonderful to have you with us. So to start off with, what do we know about the region around Kiev before it was settled by the Rus people? Was there a cohesive body there or was it a disparate collection of peoples and tribes? So one of our issues is that we know very little about the Slavic people in the beginning. So we think the area that is today the Eastern Slavic world, so the area north of the Carpathian regions was settled sometime in the 6th century by a group of peoples that we refer to as Slavs who spoke a common language, so usually referred

to as common Slavics, common language. And they settled in the area north of the Carpathian mountains. And from there, they spread to Central Europe. And the language of the Slavs became distinguished into three different groups, South Slavic languages, the West Slavic and the East Slavic. And the Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusian languages belonged to the East Slavic group, which occupied the area north of the Carpathians, around Kiev, the Dnipro, all the way west to the Baltic Sea, the cities of Novgorod and Pskov. They were very disparate. So these were, the Slavs were composed of tribal units, and usually the names of the tribes took the names of local features of the environment. So we had the Derevljane, so they lived, Dervo is wood, they lived in the wooden areas,

the Poljane, the field areas. And each one of these tribes, as far as we know, probably spoke slightly different versions of the common Slavic language and had different forms of government and different religious and cultural practices. And is there a problem with source material for this period? We just don't really know what was going on too much during that period. So some of the Greek historians begin referring to the Slavs and we know a little begin to have some written mention of the Slavs in the 8th century but really we have very little information. We know they took baths for example,, to know that they were good hunters. They were said to be ruddy and rugged, you know, things of that sort, but very

little information because we have no written sources. Writing didn't really come to the East Slavic world until 863. So this is after 863, we begin to hear from locals. Well, even later, we begin to hear from local sources in the late 9th century. But basically, we hear from Eastern sources and the Greek sources a little bit about the Slavic tribes and everything else is archaeological evidence. And is it fair to say we start to know a little bit more about what's going on in this region with the arrival of the Rus people? Yes, it's fair to say that we begin to know more about this region when the Norsemen coming from Finland and Norway and Sweden begin to make their way down the river routes to Constantinople, and they begin to serve in the Constantinopolitan palace guard and begin to travel around the world. And we begin to hear more about the Rus in historical Byzantine sources. And this is how we begin to imagine the Rus. And we also know about the Rus from the main chronicle for the Rus period, which is the chronicle called the which is the tale of the bygone years. The only English translation that exists calls it the

Russian primary chronicle, even though we of course realize there was no Russia or modern nation state at this period. But part of the reason why we have these misconceptions is because of the loose translation of the word Rus. The truth is to know about the Rus is really quite complicated because I think as we begin to realize how complex our global world is, we begin to realize also the fluidity of meanings of words and of concepts. The way the word Rus was used was also not constant, not even in the medieval period. So if you read what is referred to as the Primary Chronicle or the Poviz Vramniklet, you begin to see that the term Rus is differently applied at different points of the Chronicle. So at first, it might refer to

the Norsemen coming down the river routes and establishing trading settlements along the river routes. Then eventually, you begin to see that it refers to a broader ruling class that is already intermarried with the Slavic populations. And then even later by the 12th century, it refers to the Rus lands. And Rus was never a state. I think that is one of the biggest problems that we have in studying this period. So I think when we think of a modern nation state,

we think of some sort of centralized government with firm borders. The Rus referred to themselves as belonging to the Rus lands. And actually, if Kievans, the people living in Kiev, in Kievan Rus, wrote about people living in Novgorod, they called it Novgorodian Rus, or the Vladimirian Rus. So there wasn't a conception of a unified Rus state. The conception of a unified Rus state develops in chronicle writing. So in this Povest Vremenih Let. So I guess what we're dealing with, which makes history so exciting and so complicated, is that everyone spins their own myth, right? History is the

relationship between the past and the present. And as we spin our myths, for example, today, we're recognizing that Ukraine exists. Ukraine existed for 30 years now when no one paid any attention to it. Unfortunately, it took the tragedy today for people to start spelling Kiev, transliterating it from Ukrainian rather than Russian. So a new myth is being born, I think, or maybe myth isn't the correct word, but I think what we need to define ourselves and how we define ourselves continuously changes the legends we tell about our past. So the issue with studying Rus is you have multiple legends. You have the legend that was created in the medieval period. You have the legend that was created in the early modern period. You have the legends created in Russia or in Muscovy, then in

the Russian Empire, then in the Soviet Union. You have the legends that were created in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, then in independent Ukraine. So you have various narratives. The issue with us in the West, and I am a New Yorker through and through, the issue with us is that we keep saying that we want to learn about the globe and tell global history, but we haven't yet figured out how to do this, because that's a lot of information. And how do you include everyone? So in most courses in the university, and this begins in middle school, we tell the story of the great Russian state, and we forget about all other peoples. The Rus, the term Rus, is complicated in this way. It was used differently throughout even the very early medieval period. But once Christianity comes to Rus, and writing comes to

Rus, it is, of course, the clerics and ecclesiastics that control the narrative. And the church in the Ruiz was controlled by the patriarch of Constantinople. And the Byzantines didn't necessarily know everything that was going on on the ground in the Ruiz lands, the vast expanse of Ruiz lands. They wanted unity and they wanted one metropolitan in the city of Kiev. It was usually a Greek who sat as the head of the church in the Rus. So for the early medieval period, we only have two local metropolitans in the Rus. Everyone else was a Greek. And the story they tell is a story of a unified Christian world occupying the Rus lands. So, for example, you'll always hear about the things that unite all of the Rus people, Holy Rus, Grand Holy Rus of the Russian narrative.

Well, there was no Rus state. There were many centers, princely centers, knizhestva, from the word kniaz, ruler, and there's a whole debate on how to translate kniaz, whether as king or prince. They fought each other constantly, but yet they did come from a single dynasty, the Ryurikid dynasty. So you will always hear that the Ryurikid dynasty sort of consolidates all the Rus lands. The second will be Orthodox Christianity. When the Rus became Christian, the church was not yet firmly divided into Orthodox and Latin Christianity. And even after 1054, which is usually used as the date for the schism, which is now being questioned in scholarship, There are numerous attempts to

unify the churches again. And this is very important for Ukrainian history because they did unify the church in Ukraine. And this is why Ukraine has a Western inheritance and a Greek Catholic church, as well as a Ukrainian Orthodox church. So that's the church narrative and the language narrative, that they all spoke one language. So it is true that they could probably understand themselves, the Rus from Novgorod and the Rus from Kiev, but there were already lingual differences and there was a diglossia. They used Church Slavonic, which comes from South Slavic, for their literary language, but spoke East Slavic. So we begin to see lingual differences already in the Rus period. And you can tell, for example, if a manuscript is written in Novgorod

or in a Southern Rus area. So the stress is always on a common language, common religion, and common dynasty. And I hope I've undermined those a little bit just now. Very much so, I think. A very complex picture, which probably isn't as complex as it actually is, to be fair. We tend to see these things through the lens of history as always having been the way they are now and obviously that isn't the case with those emerging narratives and emerging stories from the church and the Rus people and later the Russian state I guess it allows people to cherry pick what they want to tell the story of and allows them to tell almost any story based on

some source somewhere that will appear to back it up. But how does Kiev become a focus for the Kievan Rus state? We know of the Kievan Rus state. I think the Grand Prince of Kiev was generally seen as the senior Rus prince. Is that reasonable? How does Kiev become the focus for this area? Okay, so now I'm going to go back to the Rus. So first of all, if you take away the notion of the Rus state, right, you have to think about Rus as being multi-ethnic. The Norsemen were sea nomads, and they made their way down river routes. So it wasn't land that defined their state at the very beginning, but rather river routes and trading routes. So if you were to have a map of very early Rus, I would just not draw borders, you know, have things fizzle out towards the edges and highlight the river routes upon which all of these great cities of Rus that became the centers of principalities or the centers of Rus rulers developed. And Kiev happened to be on the Dnipro River on the way to Byzantium, to Constantinople, to the Greeks.

It was a convenient place to gather merchandise. So basically what was traded from Rus lands was fur and honey and most importantly slaves and brought to Byzantium and then goods were returned to the Rus lands. So Kiev, I think it's reasonable to assume that when the Rus came down these river routes, there were already settlements along these great and convenient points of trade and fishing. So Novgorod is one of these cities. Kiev is one of these cities. The Rus developed these cities into greater merchant centers of trade. And Kiev was one of these centers. And then, of course, there are all of these legends about the importance of the river for Kiev.

At the beginning of Rus history, the capital wasn't in Kiev. We had rulers such as Oleg, in Russian Oleg, who tried to move his capital somewhere further west, closer to Constantinople, the Bulgarians. But in the end, it was Kiev that became the most convenient center. And succession is a really interesting phenomenon in Ruys' lands. And we see that there are certain system of succession. So basically the first three sons of a ruler occupied the throne and only then did rulership pass on to the children of the eldest of the three sons. As you can imagine, as they had more and more children and multiplied, As they had more and more children and multiplied, this was a very difficult system to follow. And so in several cases, we have meetings recorded in the Povist Vremeniklet about how to resolve issues of succession. So it wasn't just succession of different rulers in line for the throne, but these rulers were associated with different Rus lands. And so in a way they had to move from one land to another, and that got pretty tiresome,

and you didn't want to lose your patrimonial land. So with time, in the 12th century already, you begin to see princes thinking about developing their own patrimonial lands and dividing their patrimonial lands among their sons. So in a way, the Golden Age of Kiev is really a very brief period, very end of the 10th century, early 11th century, when Christianity first comes. It's under Prince Volodymyr and Yaroslav. You might know them as Vladimir in Russian and Yaroslav, that we see things fairly contained

and Kiev as this central unit. But you begin to get Novgorod developing with the prince playing a secondary role in the Novgorod principality by 1169, the prince of Vladimir. So north, the city from which I would say Russian history begins and develops from Novgorod and Vladimir rather than from Kiev, they begin to try to develop their patrimonial lands to the extent that they write to Constantinople and want to have their own metropolitan in this land, right? But Constantinople says, no, I have no idea why. They probably just didn't know that how large the Rus' lands were. So I think the way it became

very central is partially the Rurikid princes settled there. The most senior prince held the throne of Kiev, even though the prince became quite undermined in the 12th century. So for example, from the second half of the 12th century to the end, we have the Kievan throne changing like 40 times. So it was really quite, the rulership was quite unstable. But I think we always consider, we think about these great men and great rulers. But the way we see history developing in the Ruys is actually we think these were skirmishes between the princes that didn't so much affect the population of the city, right? So Kiev, I would say, because of its strategic location and trade, and because it became the capital of Christianity. And so, you begin to see the

development of Kiev on the example of Constantinople. And so, most of the great structures that are built in Rus are built in centers such as Kiev and then Novgorod. And I think because the metropolitan, the head of the church, the connection with the Greeks was in Kiev, this becomes the most important location. And I'm going to add another thing to complicate things. This is the place where the chronicle of the Povis Vremenihliat is written. It's not written in Novgorod. It's not written in Chirnihiv. It's not written in Halic, all these other centres. Perhaps if the only chronicle that survived was the chronicle that was

written in another centre, we wouldn't see Kiev as... Quite so centre stage. Yeah, so I suppose the chronicle being written there puts Kiev centre stage in its own story. And if that's the only real story that we have, we don't have anything to challenge the idea that Kiev was central to everything that was going on. I was going to ask,

and I don't know whether it's still a question to ask, I was going to ask whether that means that Kiev and the area that is now Ukraine became central to the Rus people's identity and whether that plays into how Russia views Ukraine today. Very much so. We have chronicles from Novgorod as well. But the way the chronicles in Rus worked is this chronicle, the Povist Vremenikliat, was copied in every chronicle throughout Rus' lands. So instead of sitting down in Vladimir and writing the history of Vladimir, the Povist Vremenih Liat was brought to Vladimir, edited a little bit, you know,

with little parts they didn't like or something, or just maybe scribal shortcuts or mistakes, and then continued. Okay, so one of the things that allowed for Kiev to form such a central place in the imagination of first the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, and then the Tsardom of Russia, and then the Empire of Russia, and then the Russian Federation, is the fact that already in the medieval period, this chronicle, and this is why it's called the Primary Chronicle, was shared as the beginning part of the history of all the Rus lands. So I think then when looking back, and really the northern Rus lands begin to look back in the late 15th, early 16th century to the Kiev inheritance. At first, after the Mongol invasions, immediately after the Mongol invasions, Kiev does not play a very central role in the legends that are told in the late medieval period. It's the very end of the medieval

period, early modern period, that Kiev becomes again part of the legend spun in Muscovy and Russia. So one of the key differences in the telling of the legends of the past is that the legends that are associated with northern the Rus lands, i.e. eventually Muscovy and Russia, focus on the continuation of the Rurikid line dynasty. So it's the idea of rulership, the descent of the autocrat of the Muscovite and Russian states that establishes the continuity with Rus. We do know that the Rurikid dynasty died out in 1613, and we have the Romanov dynasty, but that's besides the point. In Ukraine, it's the emblematic importance of Kiev to rulership that's emphasized in later Muscovite texts and culture. and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings,

Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit

wherever you get your podcasts. I was going to ask next about what happens to break up those what we call the Keevan Roost states although I'm starting to suspect that that's the wrong thing to be calling them how does that get affected and broken up? I guess it's the arrival of the Mongol horde and the invasion of that region. Well, it's always easy to blame the outsider. And as with everything else, we are reconsidering in medieval Rus history the role of the Mongols. And I would say the Mongols really contribute quite a bit to the formation of the Muscovite state and to the formation of Russia. But the disintegration,

if you could call it that, or the further dispersal of rulership among Rus' lands already begins prior to the Mongols. So I mentioned 1169. 1169 is usually, I was going to say, every date is, you know, just selected for convenience, right? But 1169 is the day that Andrei Bogolyubsky, the Prince of Vladimir, so the Principality of Vladimir Suzdal, pillages Kiev. And Kiev had been pillaged before, but he pillages Kiev, and it's marked in the versions of the chronicles, both the ones continued in the north and the ones continued in the south. And he does something unimaginable, like Putin's invasion of Ukraine, but he does something unimaginable. He decides that he is going to put someone on the Kievan throne in his stead, and he himself will remain in Vladimir. So I think this was in the making already for some

time. It's because everyone is fighting over Kiev, and it becomes more convenient to develop your patrimonial lands than to fight for the throne of Kiev. Actually, a good lesson for Vladimir Putin, it might be better for him to develop Russia and help his people rather than start invading other sovereign states. But Andrei Bogoliubsky begins to develop the state. And after that, we just see many of the lines of the Rurikid dynasty establish themselves in different centers throughout the Rus lands. And the centers throughout the Rus lands multiply. So, you know, we are speaking about Ukraine now and Russia,

but Belarus also has its own language and history, and they trace their beginnings to Polotsk, one of the Rus lands that is most closely geographically associated with the Belarusian geographical plain. So I think it's the inability, the fact that the Rus lands did not have a single autocrat positioned in Kiev. What they had was a rule by this family that grew larger and larger and more and more dispersed. And because we didn't have the conception of a central state, all of these lands had their own armies, made their own agreements with their neighbors, concluded their own agreements with their neighbors, traded with different neighbors and lands. So they also began to develop cultural differences. Myself, I'm very interested in material culture. differences. Myself, I'm very interested in material culture. And you can even see that,

I think it's with greater ease that you see it in material culture, since not everyone can read the Church Slavonic or Old East Slavic that the manuscripts are written in. But you also begin, when I said the Povist Vremeniklet, that chronicle that everyone shares, it ends in about 1116, 1117, 1119. And after that, the chronicles are continued in these different Rus lands, right? So then you begin to get one of the compilations that belongs to the Southern Rus land, the chronicle continues with the history of Kiev. After Kiev, that chronicle moves to the history of Holodz and Volodymyr. You probably don't even know. These are all cities in western Ukraine. And these cities had very close connections with the Poles and Polish kingdoms. One of the rulers of these kingdoms even accepted the crown from the Pope in Rome. The chronicle that's continued in the north in the city of Vladimir focuses on the Vladimir

Suzdalian lands and then on Muscovite lands. And so they begin to diverge in the stories they tell. And this affects modern historiography, right? So Russian historiography sees a linear sort of theological continuation from Kiev to Vladimir to Moscow to St. Petersburg back to Moscow. They forget about everyone else in between. And the Ukrainians see the continuation of the Rus' inheritance from Rus' to Halich and Volodymyr in western Ukraine, to the Ruthenian lands in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, to the Cossack state, to modern Ukrainian independence. It's a much more complex story than history allows which i think is quite often the case isn't it and so it sounds like the roost states were already squabbling fighting amongst themselves and everything else so that when the mongols arrived did they actually you mentioned there

that they in some ways helped contribute to the formation of more consistency across this whole state i think we imagine the mongol h arriving, destroying everything and subduing everybody and murdering lots of people. But did they actually, in the longer term perhaps, throw an umbrella over all of these disparate states and give it a sense of cohesion that it didn't have before? Did they contribute to the bringing together of all of these tribes? I'm Matt Lewis. And'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga and in Gone Medieval we get into the greatest mysteries the gobsmacking details

and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history we're talking Vikings Normans Kings and Popes who were rarely the best of friends murder

rebellions and crusades find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. They contributed to the bringing together of Northern Rus lands under the rulership of Muscovy. So the northern Rus rulers did not free themselves of Mongol dominion until the 1480s, right? So what this meant was the Mongols actually, when they came to Rus, a given city or location put up opposition to Mongol rule, then that city was punished for this

opposition. But otherwise, the Mongols wanted to just collect basically taxes from these lands. And they were not repressive to the church in Ruthenian lands. So one of the things that you'll see also, if you study the history of Muscovy, is that the church and monasteries that go to the various northern lands of Siberia and establish monastic establishments there are part of this expansion of the Muscovite world to the east. So what we see is Muscovy under the Nilovichi. So this is a separate line that stems from Alexander Nevsky that established themselves in Moscow. They accept what is called the Yarlik, the right to rule from the Mongols, and they become tax collectors. And there is a fight among these princes in the northern principalities, so between Vladimir, later Moscow, and Fer, as to who should be the prime tax collector. they begin to centralize power. And it is from the Mongols that they begin to develop a centralized

administrative system, a tax collecting system, a mail system, and the idea of a ruler as an autocrat, a single autocrat. The Ukrainian lands and Belarusian lands aren't under Mongol control for as long as the northern Rus lands of Novgorod and Vladimir and Muscovy. They fall to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, because just as when Moscow is developing and growing, so, you know, Moscow is only founded in the 12th century, right? And it only begins to become an important city in the 14th century. At the same time, in the 12th century, right? And it only begins to become an important city in the 14th century. At the same time in the 14th century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which we never study in the West, begins to expand and it starts to incorporate all of the Rus lands that are today Belarus and Ukraine. And already in the 14th century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania

joined in marriage with the Polish rulers in the Kingdom of Poland, and eventually they formed the Commonwealth of the Polish-Lithuanian State in 1569. And so Belarus and most of what are today Ukrainian lands are within either the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Kingdom of Poland, or later the Commonwealth. And as the Commonwealth begins to pose a threat for the Grand Duchy of Muscovy and later for the Tsardom of Muscovy, for the Tsardom of Muscovy, it begins to pose a threat when the northern Rus lands, i.e. now Muscovy, the Tsardom of Russia, want to expand to the west. So some cities of Ukraine, like Novgorod, Siversky, Chernihiv, will float in and out of being under the jurisdiction of Muscovy and being under the jurisdiction of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. But what this does is creates a very different cultural development

in Belarusian and Ukrainian lands from that in Muscovy. Not just in terms of languages that become separated and different states and may be influenced by Polish, but also by Western culture. So the Reformation comes to the Orthodox Church in Ukrainian lands and Belarusian lands. It is only under Peter the Great that these reformative measures are transposed to the Russian Empire. But overall, for all of these centuries, really until some lands even longer,

but really until the mid 17th century, Ukraine has a consistent dialogue with culture of Western Europe. And that seems like a really strong parallel for where we are now. You have Russia, I think, trying to paint this picture that Ukraine and Kiev have always been Russian and always been under Russian control, while Ukraine, obviously an independent, sovereign nation, and have these kind of leanings towards the West that make Russia uncomfortable. That seems like a parallel that we're dealing with again now.

I think Putin is trying to make out that Ukraine has always been a Russian possession and they should own it, whereas Ukraine has very different ideas about the direction it wants its country to go. Are we repeating history here? I would say we are always repeating history. We're constantly repeating history. I am just hoping that we have learned something from or have a greater understanding of the mindset of autocrats and can somehow not allow for this type of genocide against a targeted group of people to continue or take place. So I don't know. I've been thinking about this over and over again. Do we ever learn from history?

We always say, let's not repeat our mistakes. And then we continuously repeat these mistakes. So I don't know how I would answer this question. What I would like to draw is a parallel that maybe the British people would understand better. So for example, if the imperialistic United States decided to bombard London and the UK, because in fact, the US can trace our roots to the British Isles and the U.K. should be part of the U.S. and U.S. history. Would you flee to France and Italy or would you stay and fight for your country? Because I keep asking the question whether I want my relatives to get out. What I want is for the world to recognize a sovereign state. And Ukraine does have its own language. It does have its own history. It does have its own culture. All of that isn't even worth

arguing about. But the point isn't the past. The point is today. The people of Ukraine say that they want to live in a democracy. They say that they want to have their own state, speak their own language. They're showing it with their lives and their bodies in front of tanks. So what difference in a way does it make what happened in the 16th century or the 8th century? And who is going to decide which century is the one we should go back to? And how will they make that decision? So I think that, for me, it is important for us in the educational system, already in middle school, to begin to recognize that all of Eastern Europe is not Russia, to stop including the history of in the introduction to Russian culture classes, to acknowledge the existence of different nation

states in the Soviet Union. And then perhaps we wouldn't have to catch up in a period of a week to understand what's happening in Eastern Europe. So again, I think it's to really see the world globally. You need to see the world from the perspective of the other and to see a world that no longer has centers and peripheries, but recognizes every city, every periphery, every other as a centre. God, that sounds so... No, that sounds absolutely right. I think that parallel between the US and the UK is a powerful one to make for us sitting here, because to some extent, it's exactly what Russia are doing. They are the US saying, we can trace our roots back here therefore we must own you and if we apply that

to the US and UK we would absolutely think well that's not right but we look at this in Russia and there's a sense of because we don't know enough about it and we don't know what's gone on you're left thinking is that right I don't know I mean it's not right it's absolutely wrong but I think our ignorance of the history of this area leaves us room to doubt what's going on. We're not confident enough about understanding that history to understand that Russia are just wrong. There is no right in what Russia are doing. And I think it's also important what you said about Russia are very selective about the points that they take Kiev to be an important part of Russia's history. an important part of Ruth's history. There are times when it was absolutely disconnected from Moscow and Moscovy and all of those other states and everything else and much more connected to the West, which is what they're trying to prevent now. So they ignore those bits of history

and they focus on the bits where they share a common heritage and all of this sort of stuff, and they're trying to gather these lands back together. And if we don't understand and know these things, we open the door for us to be tricked and fooled into believing some of that narrative too. So it's absolutely vital, I think, that we understand these things that you're telling us. It's why it's important, I think, that you're able to talk to us about these things today. So here's another. One of Putin's main excuses is that he's going in to protect Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine. So all of you, I feel sorry for you as an American. I would like to save all of the English-speaking citizens

of Great Britain and take them under my wing and protect them from your own culture and your own language and allow you to develop the American way. Sorry. No, I think those are absolutely spot on parallels. And I think that it helps us to fix those things in our mind. It's the same kind of argument that we need to understand is being made by Russia against Ukraine. And it's wrong, but I say, I think our ignorance allows us to at least wonder how true some of this stuff is. We don't understand it. And it's wrong, but I say I think our ignorance allows us to at least wonder how true some of this stuff is. We don't understand it, and therefore we're left thinking, you know, I don't know whether this is right or wrong, but it's wrong. It's very selective views of history, which is always dangerous because you can make any argument if you select

the right bit of history, the right moment to focus on. But if we have the much broader view, which I think you've just given us fantastically, it paints a very different picture and gives us a very different perspective of what's going on. So I think that's been incredibly powerful. Thank you. You're welcome. My pleasure. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to explain some of those fascinating details to us. And my thoughts and prayers are with those in Ukraine. And I know Alenka is affected by what is going on. So very much thinking of you too at the moment, Alenka.

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