The Rest Is History - 155. Ukraine and Russia

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

With eastern Europe apparently on the brink of war and Vladimir Putin citing history as pretext, what exactly is Ukraine? Is it distinct from Russia, and how long has it existed? Tom and Dominic run through a brutal and fractured history, from the Viking conquest and Kyivan Rus', to the ever-shifting landscape in the early modern period, to the incredibly complicated Russian Civil War, right up to the modern day. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia. That was Vladimir Putin in a televised address that he gave on the 21st of February. And Dominic, the Russian president has really been casting himself as a top analyst of Ukrainian history recently, hasn't he? He has indeed, Tom. Obviously, we've been looking forward to doing a podcast about the history of Ukraine for a while. We did think about having a self-styled historian of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin from Moscow, but he's otherwise engaged, it seems, in invading Ukraine. So we're going to do the whole sweep ourselves without his assistance,

would you believe? It's an amazingly interesting, convoluted and complicated story, the history of Ukraine. It is, absolutely. And on that line that I began with, modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia. I mean, that is very important to Putin. Obviously, it provides him with his Kazusbelli, his justification for invading Ukraine. But implicit in our intention to look at the history of Ukraine as something distinct is a kind of rejection of that idea, isn't there uh yes i don't think well we're going to go through the history for you know 1 500 years or so 1 200 years i suppose um but i don't think that history does show that uh ukraine was created by the bolsheviks i don't think it was there's obviously ukrainian national sensibility before that a sense of ukraine is a distinct place um the name name Ukraine means kind of Ukraine, the land on the edge, the kind of

borderland. And that's part of Ukraine's problem. But it is not Muscovy. It is not Russia. It is something distinct. And to Vladimir Putin, that is an affront because he thinks it should be part of Russia, that the Ukrainians are little Russians. But as we shall see in the sweep, they have a very entangled, complicated history, rather like Britain and Ireland, actually, or lots of other countries with smaller neighbours. But they are different phenomena. that the reason that this story is very, very complicated, that, you know, as the listeners will find out, there are a lot of partitions, the borders kind of move this way and that, they vanish completely and so on. Do you think that that is essentially what enables Putin to make this case? That Ukraine often, I mean, it hasn't existed as a national entity for long sweeps of time? Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth in that, Tom.

I think it's part of a part of Europe that includes, let's say, Poland or Belarus, where borders have changed a lot, where empires, great empires, have swallowed up nations and then they've disgorged them again at the end. And I think that makes the story much more complicated. And almost every detail of what we'll be talking about is actually contested. So even the names, you know, you and I both call Kiev, well, we think of it as Kiev.

As in chicken Kiev, don't we? Exactly, because we're children of the sort of 70s. Of that age. And even the names of the places, the names of the people are contested. So for those of you who are listening kind of poised to complain, we'll probably get them all wrong one way or another, because that's the nature of the beast, actually. I mean, even the very origins of Ukraine have been argued about by historians. Well, Dominic, just before we go back and we start looking at the history of it, two further questions. The first is, do you think our sense

of Ukraine as a distinct national cultural entity, that that's been blotted out by the fact that its history in the 20th century was so horrendous, so that we tend to think of its sufferings rather than perhaps of its cultural achievements. Yeah, I think that's a really good point, Tom. We think of Ukraine as part of what the historian Timothy Snyder calls the bloodlands. So kind of Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, places that were fought over by Hitler and Stalin, basically. It's just a sort of colossal blood-soaked battleground. And there is much more to the history than that. But it has to be said, there's an awful lot of terrible suffering in Ukrainian history. I mean, there's a period in

the 17th century that's just called the ruin. And when you've got a bit of your history that's called that, you know it's not good. And one last question before we plunge into the vast sweep of Ukrainian history. Previously, we did a kind of emergency episode on the history of Afghanistan when the American evacuation happened. So this is the second time that we're responding to great geopolitical events with a kind of emergency episode of this podcast do you i mean how large crisis do you think this is as a historian of of modern britain modern america modern europe and presumably a greater moment of geopolitical crisis than the evacuation of afghanistan by nato yeah i think absolutely a bigger than the evacuation of afghanistan was a humiliation for the Western powers and for the Western kind of model, but it wasn't an existential threat.

I think it's no exaggeration to say it's the greatest crisis really that probably the world has faced since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. I mean, the comparison that a lot of people make is with the 1930s. It's maybe not massively – I mean's it's it's obviously not quite on that scale but you know um a war in europe that could see tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of people killed could see a huge capital city in kiev be surrounded potentially bombed i mean that's a pretty terrifying prospect and um you know you can see it in the stock market and oil prices. Even if Britain and the Western powers don't become militarily directly sucked in, it will have a huge impact, I would say,

on the lives of ordinary people. Right. So the specific measure that Putin announced in his televised speech on Monday was that he was recognizing the independence and sovereignty of the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic. And these are regions in the east of Ukraine, very heavily industrialized with a lot of Russian speakers. Previously, he had annexed the Crimea, which had been part of Ukraine, but previously hadn't. I mean, and essentially, the point of this is that the borders are constantly slipping in this area. And you could argue that that's because it has a kind of fundamentally featureless quality,

the landscape, that it's very difficult to draw borders on it. And do you know, Dominic, the first historian to point this out, how difficult and challenging it was to pin down features to work out where you were if you were roaming around this land. Well, since it's you, Tom, I'm going to guess it's Greek. Is it Greek? Is it the father of history? It is. It's Herodotus. So this is really, this is my big contribution, is that the land that we now call Ukraine first appears in the very first work of history ever written, which is Herodotus' Histories. And he describes the Persian king Darius trying to conquer the Scythians, the people who inhabit that region. And basically the Scythians just run away. And poor old Darius goes kind of harrying around all over the place and he just can't find anything to conquer. And then he withdraws and he abandons Ukraine to the kind of the various nomadic people who had lived there. And essentially that is its history for another, well, certainly another thousand years, thousand years and more,

is various nomadic peoples occupying it, kind of loose loose vague empires so dominic we actually did um quite recently about a month ago an episode on um the vikings in the east about how um scandinavians came down the niper uh and and established a great capital at kiev um but you remember you remember we had the the froachers pechnegs who were yeah Yeah. The Pechenegs were very fierce. Very fierce. They were cutting off people's heads and turning them into golden drinking vessels. All that kind of stuff. That was absolutely par for the course. Which the Scythians had been doing back in Herodotus' day.

It's just a thing that people say about nomads, isn't it? It is. It's just the sort of standard thing that people say. Yeah, so we did do the Vikings in the East podcast. And that's where the Ukrainian history, and indeed, I mean, this is how complicated it is, and indeed Russian history often begins. So it begins with, for those people who didn't listen to those Viking episodes, the Vikings, before they came, actually pretty much just before they came west

to England and battled, you know, the Anglo-Saxons and Alpha the Great, they went east and they went down the rivers, down the Dnieper and the Volga. And this fellow called Rurik, legend has it, was asked to come into Novgorod by the local Slavs and basically sort it all out and install sort of the firm smack of government. And then some pals of his or some sort of cronies, Askold and Deer, they went off and founded Kiev. And then one of Rurik's, another sort of crony of his

who was the sort of regent for Rurik's son, Igor, a man called Oleg, he went and captured Kiev. And basically that sort of bit of Viking feuding started this state, which you know a lot about, Tom, which is Kievan Rus. And that's where we get Russia, the word Russia from. Yeah, but it's ruled from Kiev. Yeah. So Kiev, which I think had actually existed before they arrived.

It was a kind of Slav town, hadn't it? Yeah, it was a kind of fort on a hill. But it becomes the center of this kind of increasingly, I dare one say, civilized empire, because it starts to take on the influence of Byzantium, of Constantinople to the south. It has this vast sweep of lands reaching right the way up to nov grod and beyond so huge in scale um and uh i think one could safely say that the chief feature of this um of this uh empire is the incredibly entertaining deaths of its rulers so there's according according to the the sources which are not all they could be uh there was one there's a guy who uh gets tied up

between two uh fir trees that have been pulled down and then they cut the fir trees and they bang and he spits in two and then there's you made the same noise in the full podcast tom very good to see you keeping the same noise and then there's another guy who um kicks the skull of his horse and a snake comes out and bites him yeah but um they're also very proficient so um there's saint olga who you know becomes a saint but also big fan of hers and she um she firebombs um refractory uh local towns by unleashing burning sparrows on them and then of course, there is Vladimir, who is the Ukrainian prince who converts to Christianity. When you say Ukrainian, he's Rus. They're called the Rus, aren't they?

Because for those people who didn't listen to the last podcast. So they're called the Rus because the root means kind of rowers, doesn't it? Oarsmen. Yeah, going down the rivers yeah and the lakes so that's what they're so what they're sort of creating is it's a sort of it's not quite maritime isn't quite there but it's a riverine empire of trading stations and the focus of it which makes it no longer viking in the long run is constantinople that's the place you go to sell all your stuff. And that's the sort of great economic and cultural magnet.

And you mentioned Vladimir. When he converts to orthodoxy, he has a great auction, doesn't he? Is auction the right word? He basically sends people out to go check out the Muslims and the Jews and all these different religions, And he chooses orthodoxy. And that is the defining moment in creating East Slavic kind of culture, because orthodoxy becomes the big thing. Dominic, you mentioned Slavic.

I mean, that's also the other great thing, isn't it? That if these Viking chieftains gradually become ever more Slavic, and the parallel that we mentioned in the fuller length episode we did was the Dukes of Normandy becoming ever more French. So it's that kind of process that the distinctively Nordic quality of these princes of Kiev gets kind of swallowed up. So you have Vladimir who, you know, very classy. He marries the sister of the Byzantine emperor.

So that's no barbarian prince had ever pulled that stunt off before and then his son yaroslav who starts off as yaroslav the lame and then ends up yaroslav the wise which is the measure of how well he does i made the same joke that i made last time he's upwardly mobile for a for a lame man he's upwardly mobile very good very good um and he i said i mean he starts laying down law codes um all the kind of stuff that you need as a go-getting um 11th century uh christian monarch and then it starts to slightly fall away doesn't it yeah so it's a sort of it's definitely a state of a kind by that point um kiev and rus it's it's huge geographically it's probably not

as co it's not as sophisticated as the eastern roman empire as byzantium it's not as coherent as let's say anglo-saxon england is at the same time more frank here france um but yeah it's a it's a big entity it's a big and important european entity and it's marrying into royal right uh european royalty it is I'd say. It is European. There's absolutely no doubt about that. Kievan Rus is definitely European in the sense that there is a kind of a Europe.

It's part of the same constellation. It's part of the world of Christendom, all that stuff. But you're right. It starts to go into decline in the 11th, 12th, 13th centuries. Part of this actually is, you know, we mentioned about Constantinople being the big magnet. It's partly because Constantinople itself is having a tough time in these years,

particularly after the Crusades, which are responsible for so much misery in the world. When they sack Constantinople in 1204, that's very bad news for Kievan Rus because Constantinople is where they settle their stuff. That's very bad news for Kievan Rus, because Constantinople is where they settle their stuff. That's their destination. And that puts more pressure on. And also, the Kievan rulers have a very strange system where when one dies, it's not necessarily the oldest son that succeeds.

It's just the next eldest person in the whole family. So that just makes it endless. Yeah, because if there's like one person- Family feuds. Older than you, you just kill them. But as soon as you're the oldest, you have to watch your back. So there's a terrible-

Yeah, it doesn't make for a good Christmas. There's a terrible amount of feuding. And even before the arrival of some very colorful characters from the East, who we'll come to in a second, even before that, there is a sense that Kiev is losing a bit of momentum to two other rivals that are both in what is now Russia. So one is Novgorod, which is of longstanding. And the other is a principality called Vladimir Suzdal,

which is nearer to Moscow, which is sort of central Russia. So it's sort of losing a bit of momentum. And then we have these characters who all the listeners will have heard of called the Mongols. Yeah. And generally when the Mongols turn up. That's bad news. It's not good news, is it? And they turn up outside Kiev in 1240? They do. So the Mongols, I know we'll have some new listeners because it's a newsworthy subject. So if you enjoy what you're listening to, we have a podcast coming up in a few weeks just about Genghis Khan and theongols i think the mongols i think are pretty poorly behaved so they turn up outside kiev in 1240 and they sack kiev i mean they're basically as they do to every city that defies them they they sack it they absolutely tear everything down

they kill i think 50 000 people and destroy out of that of out of you know 40 big buildings they they tear down 34 of them. They basically utterly level Kiev. And after that, the power of Kievan Rus is utterly, utterly broken. The state basically is destroyed. And that, the coming of the Mongols, I think, is such an important moment in this story because Kievan Rus, which occupied what was now Ukraine, is broken. And the big rising power is a grand duchy that basically is a client of the Mongols,

is a vassal of the Mongols and a kind of intermediary of the Slavs. And that is a place called Muscovy, Moscow. And that's going to be the genesis of Russia. So you get a slight, it's also Orthodox. It's got the same Slavic culture, but it's a different kind of pole to Kiev. But also, I mean, in the 14th century, by the 14th century, if we're looking at Kiev and Riz, what it's been, what's going to become Ukraine, it's basically divided three ways, right? So the Mongongols the brilliantly named golden horde the golden horde imagine it's absolutely my favorite horde if you

were gonna have a horde you'd call it the golden horde wouldn't you yeah i'd go for the golden horde every time yeah um and and then uh poland which of course is catholic yeah um and then there's another duchy which is the grand d Duchy of Lithuania. Yeah, such an interesting subject. So longstanding listeners will know that we promised about 18 months ago that we would do a podcast about the history of Poland and Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, because it's such a strange state. But basically, yes, you've got the – well, there's the Golden Horde, and that sort of evolves or devolves or sort of degenerates

into basically a Crimean carnate. So Crimea is this peninsula that juts out into the Black Sea and there's a carnate based on Crimea. And that's where the Black Death originally comes to Western Europe because there's a siege there and they supposedly fire bodies and all that kind of stuff. That's right. Exactly right. And then you've got a bit that's run by the Poles.

And then you've got a bit that is taken over by Lithuania. And Lithuania is a very strange place because it's a massive, massive realm. But it's quite sort of – it's not immensely sophisticated by European standards. And it's still pagan at this stage. And it's pagan. Yes.

So interesting. It's the last pagan redoubt in in in europe um but then in 1385 lithuania and poland basically have a dynastic alliance they're not they're not they're still separate they're a bit like scotland and england james friend of the show james the first with his big tongue um so poland and lithuania have the same king who is vladislav jagiel and he announced thank you my polish is top notch um so uh so they become they have the same ruling kind of elite or the same king rather and then in 1569 they finally become united in one commonwealth the polish lithuanian

commonwealth and actually if you look at a map of the polish lithuanian commonwealth almost all of present-day ukraine is part of that it's not which is all the way to the black sea doesn't it yeah it's actually all the way to the back sea it's not part of so it's again it is absolutely not part of muscovy at this point it does have a separate distinct history yes it's not part of so it's again it is absolutely not part of muscovy at this point it does have a separate distinct history yes it's slavic yes it is orthodox but it is um it is ruled and actually what ends up happening is that what becomes belarus belongs to the grand duchy lithuania that part of the commonwealth and what becomes uk becomes Ukraine belongs to the kingdom of Poland. So that's partly how Belarus and Ukraine have separate identities.

And then basically the story is kind of, you know, they've got Polish overlords. And the Poles are Catholic. They are, exactly. And the Ukrainians are Orthodox. So what kind of tensions are building up there? Big tensions, Tom. You love a religious tension. I do.

So all you have is, we're going forward now. The Commonwealth was created in 1569, so in the 16th, 17th centuries. And you have to imagine it's very, very rural. It's kind of flat, rural territory. These huge landed estates with Polish elites, Catholic elites. The Polish later call it the Kresi, which is the edge lands. That gives you a sort of sense of how people have often thought of Ukraine. You mentioned Herodotus and the borders, this idea of being a constant fracture zone,

a kind of border zone. It doesn't mean it doesn't have a distinct identity of its own, but it means there's always people fighting over it. Anyway, the Poles, as you say, are Catholic. What come to be called Ukrainians, so the word that people use before Ukraine is Ruthenians, which obviously comes from Kievan Rus. And they continue to use that word, don't they? I mean, in Austria and Hungary and all that kind of thing, the word Ruthenian continues to mean Ukrainian up until the 19th century, is it?

Yeah, early 20th century, Tom. Early 20th century early 20th century definitely absolutely and there are still people who are called who are called russians um in kind of the carpathian mountains to this day people who call themselves russians um so from russ anyway so they are um orthodox as you say but they're ruled by uh kind Catholic overlords. And what you have, which is really interesting, is that in 1596, basically, they do a deal with the Vatican, because obviously religious identity is so important. And the deal is that they will create their own sort of church within Catholicism that is both Orthodox and Catholic. Who's doing this? The Ukrainian nobles? The sort of, yes, exactly.

The religious elites in what is now Ukraine. So it's called the Uniate Church. So basically it's a Catholic church. It's under the jurisdiction of the Pope, but they get to keep their Eastern Rite. They get to keep their Slavonic liturgy and they get to have married clergy even, which Catholics aren't normally allowed. So in other words, it looks like an Orthodox church, but it's under Catholic suzerainty.

And that becomes a huge dividing line for the next 300 years or so, because the Russians, who are obviously Orthodox, when they end up ruling Ukraine, they don't approve of the Uniate Church at all. They're completely against it because they see it as anti-russian yes and also at the same time isn't it about kind of 1580 that um a kind of great cultural center is founded um and it has a printing press and i think the first bible in slavonic is published there so it's this you're starting to get the sense of this distinctive dare we call it ukrainian yet i mean that well that's kind of anachronistic anachronistic but but a distinctive religious culture a distinctive um intellectual culture

is starting to emerge yeah you know and it's and it's the end of the 16th century which is a time where this is happening across europe so again this is part of a you know it's not specific to to you know to this eastern half of europe it's happening in london it's happening in france it's happening all over the place right amsterdam that's the story is not as you say absolutely it's not a unique story um they are a definite there are people with their own kind of folkloric traditions their own religious traditions and so on and as you say through printing and that will become a much bigger thing obviously through literacy in the 19th century, they're getting a sort of sense of themselves, of their own distinctiveness. But there is one other element that I think is pretty unique. Yes. So I was going to ask you about that.

You don't know what it is, Tom? Or do you? Well, I do. Would it be the Kazakhs? It is. The adventurers, the freemen that we know as the cossacks it is exactly very good so yeah the word kazakh is turkish and as you say i mean it's kind of outlaw kind of freebooter um lad yeah sort of soldier of fortune um and what basically happens are is that in this area of sort of what is now southwestern Ukraine, sorry, southeastern Ukraine, there are these places that the Poles call the wild fields.

There's these big sort of open steps. And over time, runaway serfs, exiled nobles, bandits, outlaws, they end up kind of taking refuge in these great sort of open grasslands where their enemies or the sort of Muscovites or the Polish authorities can't catch up with them. I mean, it's a bit like a kind of Wild West in America, American West. Except that they're gathering honey. Yeah. It's a lovely detail.

They are. They're beekeeperskeepers they're frustrated beekeepers so they end up in this they go to the lowered nipa there's a phrase which means beyond the rapids so beyond the rapids of the lowered nipa and um it's zaporochi and the place ends up being called zaporozhia and they become known as the sort of the Zaporozhian host. I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrongly, by the way, so don't bother. My Ukrainian is as bad as my Russian. Let's put it that way. Should we just say the Cossacks?

Yeah. Well, we should do, but I think the fact that they're a host. We've had a horde. I think you've got to have a host as well. Yeah. So they're not uniates. They are orthodox. And they're very, they're kind of answerable only to themselves. And they're very kind of volatile and fierce and stuff.

And they have, they hate, they don't like the polls. They don't like being bossed around by the polls. Are they a proud and freedom loving people? They are. They're a bit like those, who are those fellows in Game of Thrones? The Dothraki. The Dothraki. There's a bit of a kind of Dothraki.

I mean, the Dothraki are also kind of native American. In which case, they're a throwback to the Scythians and the tradition of nomadic people. I think they absolutely are. Almost self-consciously, actually, Tom. They have this sort of, we won't, you know, there's a sort of libertarian element, anarchic element to them. And a very important figure, actually a massively important figure in this history, I shouldn't undersell him, is a Cossack leader called Bogdan Khmelnytsky. I'm sure I've pronounced that very poorly.

I noticed you're not pronouncing any of these names. Well, I knew that his name was coming. So I've been practicing it all morning. And you never got to say it. No. So this guy, go on, tell us about him. Bogdan Chmielnicki. So he leads a rebellion against the Poles,

against the Polish kind of landowners of Cossacks in 1654, which is an incredibly important date. One of the really important dates in this whole story. It's 300 years, by the way, before Khrushchev will give Crimea to Ukraine. And he does that deliberately because it's the anniversary of this moment. So Khmelnytsky reaches a deal with the Russian Tsar at this point, 1654. And the details of that deal have been argued about very ferociously by Russian and Ukrainian historians. Okay. So what would Putin say about it? Putin would say Khmelnytsky and the Cossacks agreed that in return for Russian aid against

the Poles, they would be basically vassal subjects of the Russian Tsar. And that from this point onwards, the Cossacks living in southern and sort of eastern Ukraine were subject to the overlordship of Moscow. And what would Ukrainians say? Ukrainians would say, no, that's not right. The deal was that we would be allied to the Russians and we would maybe acknowledge them in a very vague way as overlords but we would have our own chief called a hetman our own leader we'd have our own arrangements we would have be able to conduct our own foreign relations and i'm

not qualified to tell you which of those versions is accurate and in a way tom i suppose it doesn't really matter which is which is truly accurate if, it was. What matters is the meaning that people give them now. Russians see this as proof that Ukraine is kind of subject to Moscow. And Ukrainians say, no, this is a moment of our independence. So, Dominic, this is happening in 1654. At the same time in Britain and Ireland, this is when the protectorate, Cromwell's protectorate, his troops are essentially brutalising Ireland, very much kind of annexing it to English control. Cromwell has also brought Scotland under English control. Is there a kind of similar process there?

Do you think a kind of inchoate process of state formation? Do you know what, Tom? It's not a bad analogy. I mean, obviously it's not an exact analogy by any means. But I did, when I was reading this story and preparing for this podcast, I did think quite often about the relationship with Britain and Ireland. And, you know, that sort of sense of having very much intertwined histories but but still distinct but distinct exactly that it's

the same thing you know it would be mad now it would be mad to deny that britain and ireland have an incredibly tangled history but it would equally be mad to deny or to the island is different that it has its own identity and its own kind of flavor its own historical narrative um and so would it be an exaggeration to say that the way that ukrainians feel now about russian claims that that ukraine is part of russia would be like the irish might feel if suddenly someone in britain said you know you're part of the united kingdom i think you're exactly right, Tom. That's exactly what I thought.

That's, I mean, it's funny that we both thought the same thing because we didn't, we're a bit like, this is a bit like when Putin said to his men on Monday, we absolutely haven't discussed this beforehand. You will now tell me what you think. So this is, I mean, we genuinely haven't discussed this beforehand. And this is exactly what I thought, that it is rather like somebody from,

if somebody in 21st century Britain said to somebody from Limerick, you're not actually Irish because that's not a thing. You're all British. I mean, it would be unthinkable, wouldn't it? It would seem demented. Although, of course, there are people in Ireland who do say they're British. So again, that's a- But I don't think they would deny, I don't think even they would deny that there is such a thing as being Irish. I think the implication of the more extreme kind of Putinist interpretation is that basically Ukrainians are just a form of Russians.

But it's just that if we think that the complexities of Russian speakers who perhaps are sympathetic to what Putin's doing in the eastern regions of Ukraine. This is all weird stuff that has nothing to do with us. And you just have to look at Northern Ireland to see the historical legacy of different traditions, different rulers, all that kind of stuff. Well, just on that, just on the language thing, it was really interesting. Actually, Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, is a Russian speaker.

And actually, being a Russian speaker does not automatically mean you are pro-Russian. Rather like, actually, in Ireland, being an English speaker doesn't mean you crave unity with the United Kingdom. Anyway, maybe, Tom, we should have a break now and we should return with... The Ruin. The Ruin, exactly. So don't go away.

We will be back with The Ruin. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free

listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. hello welcome back to the rest is history to um a special edition we are doing on ukraine prompted of course by um current events um dominic when we left we had arrived at the cossacks yeah and the great cossack chieftain kamil ninsky oh come on tom that was poor kamil ninsky yeah who has um signed a treaty with Muscovy, the rising power of Muscovy. The exact terms of that treaty remain contested to this day. But he's a potent, imposing figure leading this kind of almost independent Cossacks state in the area of what's now Ukraine. But things go very rapidly wrong. And this is the

period that Ukrainians know as the ruin. So what is so ruinous about the ruin? Well, there are two moments in Ukrainian history that are just, even by the standards of Ukraine in history, dementedly complicated. The ruin is one and the period just at the end of the First World War is the other. So the ruin, the 17th century is a horrendous period generally because it's a sort of little ice age, global kind of cooling, famine everywhere, religious conflict everywhere. And what happens in the Ukrainian version of that is the thing called the ruin, the Poles call it the deluge. Basically everybody fights everybody. So the Cossacks fight each other, the Cossacks fight the peasants, the Poles are involved, the Russians are involved, the Crimeans are involved, the Ottomans are involved. There are all these sort of rival armies doing deals with other people long story um short at one point ukraine's kind of

partitioned along the line of the river denipa so the poles get the western half what's called the right bank and the russians get the the other half the left is that the is that the hilariously named treaty of eternal peace i think it is the treaty of eternal peace um it doesn't quite live up to its billing. The most inaccurately named treaty of all time. Exactly. I mean, what basically happens is in central and eastern Ukraine, you have the Cossack Hetmanate, the sort of Cossack state.

I wouldn't want to be a Cossack Hetman. Well, well. So that's top Cossack, basically. The top Cossack is a man called Ivan Mazepa. He's very famous. Friend of the show. Very controversial. So that's top Cossack, basically. The top Cossack is a man called Ivan Mazepa. He's very famous. Friend of the show. Very controversial. Because we, Dominic, we did a whole series of the top 10 times that the weather has influenced history, didn't we? And Mazepa featured in that.

I'd forgotten we did. Yeah, we did. The Great Northern War. In the Great Northern War. Between the Swedes and the Russians. So at one point, just when you think Ukrainian history couldn't get any more complicated and more important. The Swedes turn up. The Swedes get stuck in.

Basically, what happens is that Mazepa clearly dreams of an independent Ukrainian state. He wouldn't have called it Ukrainian. They're not using that word. But he dreams of a state on that territory. He's been allied to Peter the Great, the sort of colossal and very, as we discovered in our parties podcast, very poorly behaved, very bad house guest, Peter the Great. Don't sublet to a seven-foot tall czar. So he's been allied to Peter the Great.

He turns against Peter the Great and basically does a deal with Peter the Great's implacable arch enemy, Charles the 12th of Sweden. And they're fighting the Great Northern War for control. Who's going to be the top dog? Who's going to be the superpower of the sort of North? Which is such a great name for a war. It is. If you're going to have a war. But if you're going to have a horde, it's going to be golden.

If you're going to have a war, it should be Great Northern. I think. Yeah. So this is a great, great episode for brilliant names it is and they fight charles the 12th and peter the great and even mazepa they have this great showdown um at a place called poltava in 1709 one of the great decisive battles of european history that most people in britain have never heard of um it is won by the r. Mazepa and Charles XII of Sweden are comprehensively defeated. And from that point on, really, most of Ukraine just ends up in the Russian imperial

orbit. Now Mazepa, really interestingly, he's an absolute hate figure for the Russians. And for centuries, Russian Orthodox churches, they were just going to curse his name on the first Sunday in every Lent, Mazepa, this terrible villain. But in Ukraine now, he is something of a hero. So his face adorns the 10 hryvnia note. He's a sort of pioneer of patriotic independence movements and all this sort of thing. Which is one of the reasons why Byron wrote about him. Right. Byron wrote an entire poem about him.

That I did not know, Tom. Your knowledge of Byron obviously is second to none. Well, it's all set in the aftermath of the Battle of Poltova and Mazepa tells the story of his life to cheer Charles up. Oh, that's nice. And it's a very good poem. It involves him being tied to a horse and being sent galloping naked across the the steps well i don't know did that happen in real life i don't know you're not i know you're not sure about that okay but but you know for the appeal of him for

byron is that he's a figure of national independence of you know explosive energy all that kind of stuff that byron was as well so um we're starting to get into the age now, aren't we, of the kind of the romantic sense that peoples have a national essence. Exactly. And we're getting towards the age of nationalism, I suppose. But Ukraine at this point does not obviously exist as anything like a nation state. So it's still the Hetmanate, right? It's still the Hetmanate, exactly. Most of it is absorbed into the Russian Empire

and its Hetmanet nature is basically being whittled away. Its autonomy is whittled away and Catherine the Great basically abolishes it. At the same time, the other bit of Ukraine that we haven't really talked about, which is Crimea and the bit just by Crimea ends up being

that's the Crimea incarnate and it has been since the collapse of the Golden Horde. Catherine the Great annexes that in 1783. She calls it Novorossiya, New Russia. That incidentally is how Vladimir Putin sometimes talks about it. He basically says, you know, it's New Russia, it's part of Russia. This is places like Odessa or Dnipro, kind of big Ukrainian cities. And Catherine the Great settles newcomers there, so Russians and Ukrainians, in place of the kind of Tatars who had lived there before.

But Dominic, there's another region of what will become Ukraine as well, isn't there? Galicia. Yeah, that's still Polish. So that's still part of Poland. But then towards the end of the 18th century, Poland vanishes and gets cut up. So we should say, actually, Ukraine is not alone in having this very tangled, convoluted history where bits of it keep disappearing and reappearing, because exactly the same thing is happening with Poland and indeed with other European countries as well they do um i'm sure you must have seen them kind of get them on youtube or whatever where they show national borders in europe kind of moving at a very fast speed so you know 20 20 years every second or something exactly and if you look at eastern

europe far more than in western europe it's absolutely bewildering it is because because empires have come from nowhere spread across you, you know, half the continent, vanish again, get divided up. And essentially, this is what Ukraine has suffered. This is exactly what happened. So Portugal is always Portugal. It's always in the same place. Well, until it gets swallowed up by Spain and then it comes back again. Whereas Poland is kind of moving around all over the place on that map.

Sometimes it exists, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's just in the wrong place completely. Well, Ukraine, yes, the Western bit, Galicia, is Polish. And basically what ends up happening is Poland itself is absorbed. Most of modern-day Ukraine ends up being Russian in the Russian Empire, and Galicia belongs to Austria-Hungary. Now, if you look at any map of Ukraine on linguistic, economic, political voting, and all these kinds of things, Galicia, the Western bit, always is slightly more different or more extreme than other parts of the

country. That's the bit around Lviv. And Lviv itself looks like a Polish or Central European city. And that is the bit that the Americansicans when they withdrew their embassy from kiev i think a couple of you know a few days ago last week perhaps that's the region they went to yeah exactly that's where persistently whenever there's trouble with russia that's where ukrainians have tended to go to that the galician end of ukraine because it's the it's the most sort of central european rather than eastern european kind of end of Ukraine. It has been said, I don't know how true this is, that apocryphally Putin is supposed to have said at one point, I don't know if he said it to George W. Bush or he said it to one of the leaders of Poland, why don't you just take that bit and I'll take the rest

because Ukraine isn't really a country. I mean, that's actually not right. Ukraine clearly is a country. As you see from what happens in the 19th century. So in the 19th century, the bit that is Russian. Which is most of it. Which is most of it. The Russians make a huge attempt to Russify it.

I mean, we talked about how Catholic and the Great and Novorossiya. So they really tried to suppress the Uniate Greek Catholic Church. They want everyone to be Orthodox. They tried to suppress Ukrainian language. What's also happening is that parts of Ukraine, specifically the Donbass, which is the area that is in the news right now, so Donetsk, basically, that becomes very, very industrial. We did a podcast, Tom, about Anglo-Ukrainian relations when England played Ukraine in Euro 2020, even though it was held in 2021. And we talked about how Donetsk was founded by a man called Hughes, a Welshman. And we culturally appropriated him,

didn't we? We did, because we claimed he was English. Well, we didn't. No, we didn't. But Welsh listeners will never forgive us for that. No, they won't. But right. And that's actually an interesting parallel with Wales, because what happened in Wales in exactly the same period was that lots of English speakers, English people, flooded into South Wales to work in the coal mines and the steelworks. And at the same time, exactly the same time, Russian speakers are flooding into this part of Ukraine to work in the steel factories and the coal mines and all those kinds of things.

So it's the same thing. That's why the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic that Putin's just recognised, that's why there's such support because there are so many Russians there. Well, there are Russians. There are unquestionably some, whether there are majorities is a very fraught question. But there are definitely,

I mean, there are definitely a majority of Russian speakers, but whether a majority of pro-Russian kind of Putinists, that's a different matter. Of course, of course. But in general, the cities, the towns, the industrializing towns are more russified. They are, agreed. And it's the countryside that is the kind of... So the peasantry is still kind of Ruthenians, which the word Ukraine is beginning to be used in the 19th century.

And the universities are really key as well, because in the universities and in sort of liberal intellectual circles, you have exactly the same thing in Ukraine that you have in Germany or what becomes Germany, in Italy, in Poland, in Ireland, frankly, later on, in what becomes the Czech lands. So a sense of rediscovering a kind of folklore, slightly, is it an invention of a national story? It's not, I think invention is too strong. And also great writers, right? So there's Taras Shevchenko. Yeah, exactly. The great mid-90th century writer who is a peasant.

So he, that's terribly important, isn't it? It's the idea of the authentic peasant consciousness rising up from the soil and giving voice to these deep, primordial national instincts that reach back centuries and centuries and centuries. Tom, you mentioned Ireland before. Anybody who's read W.B. Yeats will be very familiar with this idea that there are this kind of, there are the people of the soil, you know, who've been downtrodden and oppressed.

And now they've discovered their kind of national voice. And that's exactly what Shevchenko represents. So he writes about romantic stuff about the Cossacks, about how great they were. He writes about how terrible the Tsars are. Yeah, and the Tsars are- Lots of folklore, lots of, you know, about how great they were. He writes about how terrible the Tsars are. Yeah, and the Tsars... Lots of folklore, lots of, you know, all that kind of stuff. He is, exactly.

And the Russians are very down on him. So the Tsars... Yes, well, not surprisingly. Alexander II in 1876, he bans Ukrainian books, he bans Ukrainian recitals in the Ukrainian language, he bans Ukrainian in education. It's very... I mean, this is about the point. Maybe it's it's very i mean well this is about the point

maybe it's a tiny bit early but this is about the point when people are you beginning to use the word ukraine ukrainian rather than ruthenian um and in a way that's because they want to cast off the idea that they're just little russians they're not just other russians they've got their own distinct history and they they want to you know, to celebrate it and stuff. But this tradition of repression of Ukrainian national consciousness, national language, all that kind of stuff, the kind of Putinist approach, as so often, goes back to the Tsars, right? It is. It's a Russian Tsarist approach. Absolutely it is.

You stamp down on ukrainian language ukrainian literature all that kind of stuff and so what you get in this period as again later is that you get ukrainian writers fleeing to lviv and to exactly they do because in galicia in the austrian bit um i mean the austrians aren't massively keen on this either i mean they try to stamp it down a little bit but they try to stamp it down in a very kind of half-hearted kind of way compared with the russians um so the russians are all kind of whips and siberia yeah austrians are all cross marches through snow their austrians are all like fancy uniforms and cream cakes and mozart yeah they're doing what you'd rather have yeah and now sometimes my um my editor wrote a book about my editor at penguin wrote a book about

um the hapsburg ember and he said i was much too indulgent on the Austrians and that actually they could be pretty strict themselves. But I still think, like you, Tom, I'd take my chances in a Viennese coffeehouse before a Russian prison. So anyway, yes, there's definitely Ukrainian sentiment among the intelligentsia, and there's definitely a sense among the peasantry that they are something. They are not just Russians before the First World War. Right. And so we're nowires, you know, going to generate quite a lot of upheaval, most notably in Sarajevo. But before that, you have a kind of group of students, of activists, people like that, the revolutionary Ukrainian party, who in 1900 published a pamphlet that for the very first time

states as a political goal that there should be one single, indivisible, free, independent Ukraine. The first year of the 20th century, there it is. And that's in Kharkiv, Tom, which is actually now right in the firing line of a potential Russian invasion. And it's one of those cities that, you know, Putinists say ought to be Russian is really Russian. And the fact that's coming from there is quite telling, I think. So obviously, yes, there was the sentiment before the First World War, and then the First World War completely turbocharges it. Actually, really interestingly, what happens when the Russians... In the first year of the First World War, the Russians make great headway against the Austrians in the first few months. And when they go into Galicia, which has been this kind of motor of Ukrainianism, it's so telling. What do they do? They shut it all down. They try to suppress it. They try to shut down the Union Church. They banned the use of Ruthenian. But obviously, then the Germans and the Austrians drive them back. And basically, the Russian war machine ends up falling apart in 1917. And if you thought the ruin was complicated, what happens between 1917 and 1922 in Ukraine, I mean, it's not just complicated, it's completely bonkers.

Incomprehensible. So there's, I'll tell you, I tried to make a list at one point. There's a Ukrainian People's Republic. There's a West Ukrainian People's Republic. There's a Bolshevik Soviet Republic. There's an anarchist group as well. There's a hetmanate. There's a directorate. The Germans are there at one point.

The Poles are there. The White Russian Army are there. So it's, I mean, you have multiple, multiple armies. And to give you a sense of this, all of this, by the way, is missing in Vladimir Putin's recital of history that he did on TV. He basically says, oh, the idea of Ukraine was created by the Bolsheviks, but he misses out the fact that at the end of the First World War, there's this obvious tremendous resilience of the Ukrainian idea because there are all these different people trying to set up a Ukrainian state. So they really do, lots of different people clearly believe in a Ukraine. But Dominic, wouldn't it be fair to say

that also that an understanding of this is missing from most people in the West? I mean, certainly basically until I looked at this from my understanding of the period, because for us in the West, you have the First World War and then it stops. But basically the horror for Ukraine is that the period of horror that is initiated in 1914, I mean, it doesn't stop for decades and decades and decades. Because essentially what had been the First World War mutates into the Russian Civil War. But Russia at this point includes a large chunk of Ukraine. So the Bolsheviks, you know, so you've got, I mean, basically you've got with the Russian Civil War, you've got the white armies who are czarists. You've got the Red Army, say the Bolshesheviks and then you've got a ukrainian nationalist army and they're all kind of well armies yeah armies they're all kind of charging

around attacking each other so to give you a sense of this tom kiev in two years it it changed hands 16 times god so there's a brilliant novel by mikhail bulgakov called the white guard um that captures this and and basically you know there are just armies every few days there's a brilliant novel by Mikhail Bulgakov called The White Guard that captures this. And basically, you know, there are just armies. Every few days, there's a different army entering the city from a different direction and killing loads of people. There are horrific pogroms. There are some historians who argue, you know, the Holocaust in the sort of what Timothy Stein calls the bloodlands. That kind of gets going even before the Nazisis pitch so we should we should we haven't

mentioned the jews and ukraine is also one of the perhaps the great european center of jewish culture it is exactly so we mentioned levive um philip sands the human rights lawyer wrote an absolutely brilliant book called east west street about um the extermination of the Jews in Lviv, where he has a kind of his family history goes back to. And for those people who are interested, it really brings that alive. The Rat Line as well, his brilliant podcast series. The German commander who he's kind of trying to track down was the commander there, I think. That's right, exactly, yes.

But the history of that is much, I mean, it goes back to the so the jews are kind of settling there through the 16th century 17th century 18th century this this incredibly vibrant culture east european culture so you know in a sense the kind of the idea that you have of east european culture is at least as much ukrainian as it is polish yes it is right i mean you know at least as much maybe more well because partly because those the the border between poland and ukraine is very messy you know there are people on either side of the border so so there's not a a distinct because their histories are rather like ukraine and and russia because their histories are so tightly interwoven but you do also have this tradition of a kind of occasional pogroms you do peasant peasants who um because jews are settled much

more in in villages than out in the fields uh and and then in the 19th century as well i think there are there are some so that's also part of this toxic brew that is starting to bubble up exactly yeah and actually the next few decades are a very grim story but one interesting point before we get into the grimness. Going back to Putin's remark about the Bolsheviks inventing Ukraine, that's clearly not the case because what happens in 1922 when they form the Soviet Union

is basically even the Bolsheviks in Ukraine recognise that the national idea is now so strong that Ukraine cannot be admitted to the Soviet Union as merely part of Russia. Well, because the Ukrainians had just defeated the Red Army, right? I mean, you know, Ukrainian Nationalist Army had just defeated the Red Army,

even though they've now been swallowed up again. Yeah, because clearly the national idea, as all across Europe in the 1920s, as in Ireland, as in what becomes Czechoslovakia or what becomes Yugoslavia, the national idea is so strong and so powerful, you can't just crush it. And so that's why it becomes the Soviet Union. Right. Not the Russian Empire.

And Ukraine is implicitly, well, not implicitly, explicitly acknowledged as a constituent kind of nation of the Soviet Union. I mean, maybe they wouldn't use the word nation. But then, obviously, everything is really horrible. So there's a famine in 1921, 22. And then Stalin launches collectivization at the beginning of the 1930s.

So basically what's happening- And then there really is a famine. Yeah, so what's happening there is Ukraine has been the breadbasket of the Russian Empire. But Stalin wants to sell all that grain abroad to pay for industrialization because he thinks you have to industrialize because Marxist kind of logic demands it. And he wants to collectivize as well. I mean, wherever peasant farmers are collectivized, there is suffering.

There is. Because there are more peasant farmers in Ukraine. Therefore, the scale of suffering in Ukraine is off the scale. It is. So about, I mean, let's say if about 5 million people died in the Soviet famine of the early 1930s, probably about 4 million of them were Ukrainians. This is the event known as the Holodmor yeah exactly and it's um you know it's a terrible uh it leaves this awful scar in the ukrainian national consciousness and particularly actually in the last sort of 30 or 40 years because it's been able to be talked about

more freely under the soviet union you weren't really allowed to talk about it. And you certainly weren't allowed to talk about it as a distinctly Ukrainian tragedy because that was seen as kind of nationalism. But obviously, it's become a massive psychological element in modern Ukrainian identity. Sorry, Tom, I interrupted you. No, I interrupted you. But just on that, you said about how people weren't allowed under the Soviet Union to talk about it as being distinctively Ukrainian. And my understanding is that in the very early years of the Soviet Union, actually, Ukrainian self-expression is given license. So Ukrainian does start to be studied in schools, all that kind of thing.

And then another way in which Stalinism is terrible for Ukraine is that he slams the brakes on that. Yeah. The big process of Russification again, the, the church in Ukraine, which, you know,

is a key, key kind of vessel for Ukrainian national self-consciousness that gets very, very brutally repressed. And then under the great Terror of 37-38, Ukraine suffers disproportionately from that. Yeah, Stalin is such a strange character because, of course, he's Georgian. Ukraine and Georgia are the two most, how's the word, they're the two constituent parts of the Soviet Union, apart from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, which is swallowed up later. They're the two part constituent parts of the soviet union apart from latvia lithuania estonia which is swallowed up later they're the two parts of the initial soviet union that have the the strongest kind of national consciousness and starling comes from one of them

and perhaps because he's georgian he's much he's he's really intolerant actually of of nationalist sentiments so when he takes over effectively from lenin, or from the sort of, after the chaos surrounding that's followed Lenin's death, Stalin really crushes, you know, Ukrainian sentiment. And you see that kind of come and go throughout the history of the Soviet Union. There'll be periods when Ukrainianization comes back up, and then the authorities and the Kremlin kind of clamped down on it again um later dominic do you think that with with stalin and ukraine in the 30s um he's kind of consciously preparing for a war with what he would call the capitalist powers but increasingly you know that that would

include germany and he knows that in a you know ukraine is the borderland that it's going to be in the front line and so therefore ukraine more than anywhere perhaps he he has to to be particularly brutal as he sees it yeah i think so prepare the so because it's the kind of it's the buffer for russia proper and you know if if you've just had a famine that has claimed four million people the beginning of the 30s. With the start of the Second World War and the declaration of war against the Soviet Union in 1941, fresh horrors, you know, of a comparable scale. Well, Stalin is paranoid about everybody, and he's right to be paranoid about Ukraine in a sense, because, as you say, fresh horrors will come.

And that's partly when the Nazis invade in 1941, some Ukrainians welcome it because they, nationalists, welcome it. So the most famous example is a man called Stepan Bandera, who's, again, a real hate figure for kind of Russian nationalists. They see him as a fascist, as a Nazi, all this stuff. Because at first, he's very much pro, you know, the Germans invading. Thinks this is tremendous because this will allow them to be liberated from their kind of Russian yoke. I mean, this is a very familiar pattern in that sort of part of Europe,

in the Baltic states as well. Actually, he then turned against the Nazis later on. Well, because Hitler's terrible. I mean, his treatment of the Ukrainians is monstrous. Because what you think when you're Ukrainian is, well, we've had the most awful time under Stalin. I mean, it couldn't be worse than Stalin because so many people have died. The Germans are arriving, hurrah, because they think of the Germans from the First World War and they think, well, they were kind of our allies and stuff.

The Nazis arrive, and yes, as you say, you know, the most horrendous, horrendous death toll. Hitler wants Ukraine as Lebensraum, as a place for germans to spread but he also wants to eliminate the jews tom well he well he yes he wants to eliminate the jews but he his his policy for dealing with the ukrainians is to kind of give them beads and i think to put up loud speakers in villages and play music every saturday so that the ukrainian peasants will come and dance and that'll keep them happy he He just thinks they'll be slaves, basically. They'll be, the Jews will be dead and the Ukrainians will be slaves. I mean, not as bad as the Poles though, right?

I mean, the Poles are kind of- Well, he has a particular, he has a hatred, he has a hatred of the Poles. I don't think he has a hatred of the Ukrainians, but he does regard them as inferior. And he thinks if they have this future, it's purely as kind of Slavic helots in this German, you know, new Germany, basically. And when we talk about the Nazi invasion of Russia, I mean, actually, Russia proper, not very much gets occupied, right? But the whole of Ukraine does.

Yeah. So the whole of Ukraine is under Nazi rule for kind of three years. Yeah. And the course of the future of the Second World War is decided, you know, all of these battles happen in Ukraine, but the most horrendous slaughter, the Red Army and the Wehrmacht going kind of back and forth, crushing, I mean, literally crushing villages beneath their tank tracks, civilians being killed. Of course, when you're occupied by one side or the other, your instinct is to collaborate with the occupiers just to get along. But that means if they then lose, the people who beat them will probably kill you or put you except that lots of ukrainians then join the red army when they come rolling back in they do yes so i i gather that um that more ukrainians died fighting with the red army than british french american casualties all put

together that's a good kind of amazing that's an incredible fact. Amazing fact. But what happens at the end of the war? I mean, 7 million people have been killed from Ukraine. And that's including the Jews killed in the Holocaust? Yeah. 10 million people have been left homeless. And basically, Ukraine has lost about half of its national wealth. I mean, when you think about how we go on in Britain, about the, I mean, go on.

I mean, that sounds like i'm being unduly self-flagellating when we think of the way we talk about what happened to coventry or london in the blitz or how americans talk about pearl harbor um and then you think about what happened to ukraine i mean it's just no it's in a different league i think it's so i think it's it's almost so numbing it's all it's and when you add to that the the famine that had happened 10 years previously yeah i mean it's the scale of the human suffering is kind of beyond comprehension it is i was about to say exactly the same it defies your brain seizes up it defies imagination it really defies imagination which is why it's so tragic the

thoughts of it happening ever happening again um so tragic, the thought of it happening again. So anyway, before we sort of get too maudlin, it comes out of World War II, back in the Soviet Union. Stalin dies in 1953, and Nikita Khrushchev takes over. He had been the party boss in Ukraine in the late 1930s. He had orchestrated Stalin's purges there. Khrushchev was, you know, the sort of image of him sometimes that you get is this sort of round jolly man kind of exchanging quips with richard nixon khrushchev had quite a lot of blood on his hands however he was perhaps more sympathetic to ukraine than stalin was so we mentioned 1654 and that that landmark deal tom do you want to say his name again? Bogdan?

I'll leave it to you. Bogdan Khmelnytsky, that he had struck as the Cossack leader with the Tsar. And to mark that moment for the 300th anniversary, Khrushchev gives Ukraine a present. And that present is Crimea. Now, of course, Crimea has always been, you know, its history has always been very closely related with that of the rest of Ukraine. But it has often been slightly separate because it was a different carnate and then because it was the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet. And it was, you know, it's not full of, as it were, of former Ruthenians. It doesn't have quite the same history. So that creates a bit of a ticking time bomb, the award of Crimea. Although, to be fair, the Russians recognize it and make no fuss about it in the 1990s when Ukraine becomes independent.

So Dominic, just before we get onto that, two things about Ukraine and the Soviet Union after the war. One is they become a member of the United Nations, I think. They do, yeah. Very strange that that happens but again so that again undermines putin's argument that you know i mean the soviet union recognized it so so the ukraine is a member of the united nations even as a member of the soviet union the other of course the most famous thing that happens um in the soviet period in in uh ukraine after the war is chernobyl yeah 86 yeah massively important i think in discrediting the soviet leadership in creating a sense of

well it doesn't create a sense of ukrainian distinctiveness because it's always been there and actually there have been moments in between those in the preceding period so in particularly in the 60s and early 70s there'd been a kind bit of a Ukrainian revival and lots of books and journals published and people reviving the Ukrainian language and so on. But then Chernobyl happens. And that is a metaphor and a half, isn't it? It is. Absolutely, it is. It's a great cloud of radioactivity drifting across the air.

Well, actually, most of the cloud the cloud tom ends up over belarus not over ukraine so it's belarus that is most scarred by chernobyl not ukraine but as you say it happens in ukraine that the authorities in moscow in the kremlin try to cover it up and deny it for so long this is gorbachev right you know it's not his predecessors um so it absolutely creates a sense of anger and a sense of you know it just compounds everything that has been growing for so long. And like the Holodomor, it's a massively important moment in Ukraine's sense of itself as distinct. And you see at the end, I mean, again, Putin in his speech basically says the Ukrainians didn't want independence. It was a terrible mistake that they became separate.

This was all because of dreadful mistakes made by the Communist Party, i.e. Gorbachev, and the people around him. And it was all sort of top-down. That is, I mean, sorry to say, but that is, well, I'm not sorry to say it. I mean, that just is nonsense. There were demonstrations at the end of the 1980s in Lviv and Kiev by people calling for greater Ukrainian autonomy. There was new language law in 1989. So this is before the end of the Soviet Union in Ukraine,

generated from Kiev, saying they wanted Ukrainian to be the state language. There's a revive of the Union Church. There's an absolute sense at the end of the 1980s, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, that the forces of kind of nationalism and national self-affirmation are gaining ground. And then you get the first calls for independence in 1990.

So that's before the coup against Gorbachev. Then the coup against Gorbachev happens. And then from that point, you know, Moscow seems to be in a complete and utter shambles and chaos. And the new head of the Communist Party in Ukraine is man called Leonid Kravchuk. And he basically, you know, like so many ex-communist leaders

across Eastern Europe, he thinks, well, the way to stay in power, really, is to work with this new force that's emerged, which is national identity and so on. So in December 1991, he has an independence referendum. I mean, you know, the idea that Ukrainian independence is this sort of mistake or this aberration. The independence movement, they win 90% of the vote. They win in every single oblast of Ukraine, including Crimea. the idea that there was some agreement that when the Russian leaders agreed to Ukrainian independence, one of the conditions was that they would remain within the Russian sphere of

influence and that they wouldn't join NATO and that the Americans would not try and suck it into the Western sphere of influence. Is that true, do you think? I think it's complicated, actually, Tom. I think there were sort of verbal assurances, I guess. I think given in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I think there were definitely Western statesmen who said to their Russian equivalents at the time, well, obviously, we have no intention of pushing NATO to Russia's borders, and that's not going to happen. And I don't think they said that disingenuously. I think they just didn't envisage it would happen. But then it was never written into a treaty.

It wasn't written into a treaty. Never a formal agreement. I mean, what was written into a treaty in 1994 was the so-called Budapest referendum. Now, that's where Ukraine had got some of Russia's, Soviet Union's nuclear weapons. And Ukraine said, we will give up these nuclear weapons as long as our borders are guaranteed. And one of the countries that was, it's a bit like the famous piece of paper, assuring Belgian independence in the 19th century that becomes the sort of Casus Belli for World War I. One of the countries that signed the guarantee of Ukraine's borders was Russia,

Boris Yeltsin's Russia. So if there was a moment to say, well, actually, the borders aren't quite right, we're not happy with them, that was 1991, or between 1991 and 1994. Yeltsin was drunk, I guess. Well, Yeltsin was obviously hammered the whole time. Russia was in an absolute mess.

Ukraine, by the way, was also in an absolute mess. I mean, Ukraine actually, unbelievably, did even worse in the 1990s than Russia did. Ukraine lost 60% of its GDP. I mean, that's- That's a lot. That's a recession and a half. Its inflation rate was in the tens of thousands. I mean, it has suffered this utter economic meltdown, not least because, as we said earlier on, the Donbass and places like that, it's heavy industry, coal, steel.

It's dying out. It's doomed. I did a geography project on it at school. Of course you did. You know all about Donetsk. I do. I do. I can still draw a little map of it.

Yeah, but you can't say Bogdan Karnitsky. No, but I can say pig iron. Okay, well, that's good. That's what it was all about. Yeah, so Ukraine's history since independence has obviously been tortured. It's been very difficult. They've had the Orange Revolution in 2004. They then had the Euromaidan movement in 2014, which is basically the sort of popular uprising against the pro-Russian President Yanukovych because he wouldn't sign a deal with the EU.

And that then triggered Putin's annexation of Crimea and then the fermenting of separatism in Donetsk and Luhansk. And now we are kind of where we are. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, it's not a cheery story, really. It's not. And I think that's what makes the the the

you sort of feel like i mean you don't wish a war and invasion on anybody i mean that would that would be demented i wouldn't even wish on the french tom but uh but if there's one people in europe who probably say yeah who deserve who really do deserve a break um they are the ukrainians and i sort of i think it's it's tragic that they that they are in this um they're in this position now anyway we it is we said we wouldn't get maudlin so we shouldn't no um so we hope you've enjoyed that um obviously we've we've put this out because of the um you know the situation that we've we've just arrived at after our sweep through ukrainian history um we do have as we've mentioned already uh two other podcasts touching on this theme so there's the um

the two episodes that we did on the vikings in the east we did and then there is the episode that we did during the euros when um each time time England played a team, we would look at the history of England's relationship with that country. And of course, England played Ukraine, beat them in Rome. And so you'll find the top episodes joining English and Ukrainian history as well. And I think we are going to put them up. If you have a look at, at wherever you get this podcast, Spotify or iTunes or whatever, you will see them immediately listed immediately after this at the top of the list of episodes that we've recorded.

So if you listen to, if you haven't already listened to those, we hope you'll enjoy them. Well, Dominic, it's yeah. Yeah. Sober stuff,

sober stuff, very sober stuff. Let's hope, well, I mean, let's hope it's, yeah. Yeah. Sober stuff. Sober stuff. Very sober stuff. Let's hope, well, I mean. Let's hope it all sorts out. Yeah, like it will. Yeah. Right. We shall be back.

If you want to cheer yourself up, you should listen to our episode about the top 10 parties, disastrous parties in human history. There's quite a lot of death and mayhem in that. There is, but the fate. Not on quite the same scale. It would be hard to listen to the fate of diedrich graf von what's his name i can't remember but but it features a hoover hazel or whatever his name is that's all we'll say without without um cracking a smile and next week we have uh an episode on um the most uh calamitous

things that you could wear the things that um over the course of the history of fashion have caused the most casualties um and also we have um a couple of episodes uh basically posing question of when did the roman empire fall uh and we haven't actually recorded that yet but i suspect very much suspect for reasons i won't go into now that um that the crimea will feature in that as well so uh there will be a further touch of the Crimea in an episode on the Roman Empire next week. So if you've enjoyed this, I hope you will enjoy that as well. And in the meanwhile, goodbye.

Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com