As I walked by the Ploshchad’ Vosstaniia metro stop, across from the Moscow Railway Station, a pop-up protest streamed past me, chanting: “Ukraine is not our enemy” and “No to war!” Mostly, these were young men and women who reminded me of my students.
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Cannons rang out and explosions shook the building, interrupting the singing onstage. What was going on? Was the war really here? No. It was just the salute to commemorate February 23 and the Defenders of the Fatherland. No worries.
Continue reading...Today marks one year since Russia began its illegal and immoral military invasion of Ukraine. We continue to be horrified at the wanton destruction and loss of life brought about by Russia’s war on its neighbor. In lieu of yet another attempt to make sense of the situation, we are opting not to publish any content on the Jordan Center Blog today.
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It makes sense that politicians around the world are afraid of Putin. But Ukrainians are living in immediate fear for their lives right now. And we understand firsthand that Putin will not stop with Ukraine if the world permits it. The citizens of many more countries will be in immediate danger and this disaster will continue. Putin must be stopped by any means necessary.
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In April 2022, I reflected on the environmental impact of the war in Ukraine by reimagining it through Lesia Ukraïnka’s fairy-drama “Forest Song.” On the verge of the invasion’s one-year anniversary, my evaluation of its environmental consequences is far more severe.
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As a historian, what struck me most about the historical narrative of Vladimir Putin’s speech was not only what “historical facts”—to borrow his terminology—Putin used, but also what he left out.
Continue reading...I grew up in Kharkiv. Countless memories are tied to the main city square, which has now been bombed. Almost a year ago, I learned that my own childhood home was also bombed from the air and burned to the ground.
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Self-sufficiency now is the Putin’s regime’s watchword. Nonetheless, as in Soviet times, today’s isolation is tempered in ways that belie the trope of a walled “Fortress Russia.”
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Taken together, Khersonskii’s posts imagine a future multilingual society that recognizes the civic obligation of understanding and speaking Ukrainian. His own bilingualism, meanwhile, helps mitigate language conflict by modeling flexibility within individual linguistic practice.
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Immediately after Euromaidan, Khersonskii began to reflect on his own precarious position as a Russophone patriot of Ukraine who had published his poetry primarily in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
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In 2018, Boris Khersonskii, Ukraine’s most famous Russian-language poet, wrote on Facebook—in Ukrainian: “My credo is: in Odesa, obstruct the Russian language gently, but oppose boorishness on the part of Russian cultural stars decisively. I write this as a mostly Russophone person.” What triggered this turn against Russian by one of its most sophisticated artistic users? Is the shift to Ukrainian in Khersonskii’s linguistic practice consistent and irreversible? And, if a leading Russophone poets takes such a dim view of the language, can the end of Russian-language literature in what the Russian state arrogantly calls its “near abroad” be far behind?
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As the famous Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov pointed out in a June article for “The New Statesman,” the atrocities of recent months have made it quite likely that Russian will cease to exist as a language of culture in Ukraine.
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The Russian military is deliberately targeting key farming-related assets and facilities with the aim of inflicting short- and long-term harm. Moreover, by blockading the Black and Azov seas, Russia controls how much Ukrainian grain, oilseeds and other food commodities reach global markets.
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In May 2022, while wrapping up edits on my contribution to Socrates in Russia amidst a stream of dreadful news from the Ukrainian front, I learned that the eighteenth-century estate where Skovoroda spent his final years, and nearby which he was laid to rest, was destroyed by Russian air strikes. Hryhoriy Skovoroda is still here, invisibly, in our cultural memory. Our world has once again become the one that Skovoroda despised, described as “flesh and whips and tears.” No to war.
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The story of Socrates has long been a vessel for interpretation. Philosophers, writers, and artists in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Soviet and post-Soviet space have actively participated in this process, creating their own Socrateses for their respective eras and environments.
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One striking strategy employed by Ukrainian writers across various genres is what literary historian Kate McLoughlin calls “parapolemics”—that is, focus on the spatial or temporal “outskirts” of war.
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Russian propaganda derives its effectiveness from political apathy rather than its ability to persuade. Because citizens understand that their actions cannot affect the autocrat’s policies, they invest only minimal resources in acquiring political information or thinking about politics at all. This state of affairs, in turn, leads to a very superficial processing of information.
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Skoropadskyi’s struggles have had a long legacy. Arguably, participants in the Orange Revolution, Euromaidan, and other transformative national events have had to confront some of the same thorny issues around Ukrainian national identity that confounded the onetime Hetman.
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Instead of giving funding for travel to archives in Russia, funding should be determined by the project itself. Scholars should be able to propose travel to a variety of places in the US or elsewhere other than Russia. The needs of the project would determine the places where research would be done. This would avoid fetishizing the Russian archives. Travel to Russia is not the main point. Collecting relevant material for a dissertation or other scholarly project is.
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Just as Europe must plan for an energy future without Russian fossil fuels, the field of history and related fields must plan for a future without access to Russian archives.
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