Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War

What happened during World War II? Was that once the Germans started to run out of manpower, they created foreign legion groups. But because those people were not Aryans, they couldn't be trusted. So they were put under the command of Heinrich Himmler and the commando SS, and became known as SS Waffen units, and one of such units was created in Ukraine. The following is a conversation with Serhii Plokhy, a historian at Harvard University and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute, also at Harvard. As a historian, he specializes in the history of Eastern Europe with an emphasis on Ukraine. He wrote a lot of great books on Ukraine and Russia, the Soviet Union, on Slavic peoples in general across centuries, on Chernobyl and nuclear disasters, and on the current war in Ukraine, a book titled The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History.

Very often people confuse three different processes that were taking place in the late '80s and early '90s, and the one was the collapse of communism as ideology. Another was the end of the Cold War. And the third one was the end of the Soviet Union. All of this processes were interrelated, interconnected, but when people provide ideology as the explanation for all of these processes, that's where I disagree, because ideological collapse happened on the territory of the Soviet Union in general. The Soviet Union lost the Cold War, whether we're talking about Moscow, Leningrad, or St. Petersburg now, or Vladivostok. But the fall of the Soviet Union is about a story in which Vladivostok and St. Petersburg ended up in one country, and Kyiv, Minsk and Dushanbe ended in different countries.

You wrote a book, The Origins of the Slavic Nations. So let's go back into history. What is the origin of Slavic nations? We can look at that from different perspectives, and we are now making major breakthroughs in answering this question with the very interesting, innovative linguistic analysis, the study of DNA. So that's really the new frontier. We are getting into a pre-historical period where there is no historical sources.

You wrote the book, The Cossack Myth: History and Nationhood in the Age of Empires. It tells the story of an anonymous manuscript called The History of the Rus. It started being circulated in the 1820s. I would love it if you can tell the story of this. This is supposedly one of the most impactful texts in history, modern history. So what's the importance of this text? What did it contain? How did it define the future of the region? In the first decades of the 19th century, after Napoleonic Wars, a mysterious text emerged that was attributed to an Orthodox archbishop that was long dead, which was claiming that the Cossacks of Ukraine were in fact the original Rus people, and that they had the right for particular place, for central place, in the Russian Empire. And it tells the history of the Cossacks. It's the era of romanticism, full of all sorts of drama, there are heroes, there are villains.

So, there's national communism and radical nationalism. Well, let me ask you about the radical nationalism, because that is a topic that comes up in the discussion of the war in Ukraine today. Can you tell me about Stepan Bandera? Who was he, this controversial far-right Ukrainian revolutionary? The [inaudible 00:38:32] lists two Stepan Banderas. One is the real person and another is mythology that really comes with this name. And the real person was a young student, nationalistically oriented student, in the late 1920s and early 1930s in the part of Ukraine that was controlled by Poland, who belonged to the generation who regretted that they were not born in time for the big struggles of the World War I and Revolution at that time. They believed that their fathers lost opportunity for Ukraine to become independent and that a new ideology was needed, and that ideology was radical nationalism, and new tactics were needed.

And the way to defend against that is to bring in the context. Let us move gracefully throughout, back and forth through history, back to Bandera. You wrote a book on the KGB spy Bohdan Stashynsky. Can you tell his story? This is a story of the history of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, and Bandera as well, already after the end of the Second World War.

You wrote the book, the Russo-Ukrainian War, the Return of History, that gives the full context leading up to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February, 2022. Can you take me through the key moments in history that led up to this war? So, we'll mention the collapse of the Soviet Union. We could probably go much farther back, but the collapse of the Soviet Union mentioned 2014. Maybe you can highlight key moments that led up to 2022. The key moments would be first, the year 2004, known for Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and then the year 2013, known as the Revolution of Dignity. Both were the revolts against the something that by significant part of Ukrainian population was considered to be completely, completely unacceptable actions on the part of the government and people in the government at that time. The Orange Revolution of 2004 was a protest against falsified presidential elections and rejection of a candidate that was supported by Russia, publicly supported by Russia. I remember being in Moscow at that time and couldn't believe my eyes went, in the center of Russia, I saw a billboard with Yanukovych. The trick was that there were a lot of Ukrainians in Russia and in Moscow in particular, and they had the right to vote. And it led to the election as Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, who put on the agenda the issue of Ukraine's membership in NATO. So, it was very clear pro-Western orientation. And the second case was the Revolution of Dignity 2013, with some of the same characters including Yanukovych, who at that time was already president of Ukraine. And there the question was of the government promising the people for one year at least to sign an association agreement with European Union, and then turning over almost overnight and saying that they were not going to do that.

I talked to John Mearsheimer recently, there's a lot of people that believe NATO had a big contribution to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. So what role did NATO play in this full history from Bucharest in 2008 to today? NATO was a big part certainly of the Russian justification for the war, that was the theme that was up there in the months leading to the aggression. The truth is that, and Vladimir Putin went on records saying that, that the Western leaders were telling him again and again that there is no chance for Ukraine to become member of NATO anytime soon. Russia was very effective back in the year two '08 in stopping Ukraine and Georgia on the path of joining NATO. There was a Bucharest Summit at which the US president at that time, George W. Bush was pushing for the membership. And Putin convinced leaders of France and Germany to block that membership. And after that membership for Ukraine and for Georgia was really removed from the realistic agenda for NATO. And that's what the leaders of the western world in the month leading into the February 2022 aggression were trying to convey to Vladimir Putin.

Why did the peace talks fail? There was a lot of peace talks. The main reason is that the conditions that Russia was trying to impose on Ukraine were basically unacceptable for Ukraine. Because one of the conditions apart from this strange thing called Denazification, was of course de facto loss of the territory. And for the future, really staying outside either of NATO or any Western support, which was very clear. You can buy a couple of weeks, you can buy a couple of months, but in the conditions like that Russia will come back tomorrow and will take over everything.

So thinking about what 2024 brings, Zelensky just fired Ukraine's head of the army, a man you've mentioned, General Valery Zaluzhny. What do you make of this development? This is a very, very dangerous moment in the war. The reason for that is that Zaluzhny is someone who is very popular with the army and we people in general. So if you look at that through American prism, that would be something analogous to President Truman firing General MacArthur, given that stakes for U.S at that time were very high, but probably not as high as they're for Ukraine today. In both cases, what is at stake is certainly the idea that the political leadership and military leadership have to be on the same page.

Do you think there's a degree during wartime that the power that comes with being a war president can corrupt the person, sort of push you away from the democratic mindset towards an authoritarian one? I think that there is a possibility of that, right? In the conditions of any emergency, a war, in the case of the Soviet Union, there was a Chernobyl disaster and so on and so forth, you make decisions much faster. You create this vertical and then it's very easy to get really used to that way dealing with the conditions of emergency. And in continuing emergency or with no emergency, they're continuing the emergency mode. I think again, that would be a very, very natural thing for any human being to do to make it easier. Should I do that easier and in more effective way, or should I do the right way? That's the challenge. Sometimes it's difficult to answer this question.

I could talk to you for many more hours on Chernobyl alone, since you've written a book on Chernobyl and nuclear disaster. There's just a million possible conversations here, but let me just jump around history a little bit. Back before World War II, my grandmother lived through Holodomor and World War II, Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Holodomor, what do you learn let's say about human nature and about governments and nations from the fact that Holodomor happened? And maybe you could say what it is and why it happened? Holodomor is a massive famine in Ukraine between the years 1932 and 1934, and it happened as the result of forceful collectivization of the agriculture, and a tamp on the part of Stalin also really roll Ukraine into the Soviet Union with basically no potential opposition from Ukraine, now national communists. So two things came together in December of 1932 when in the same decree, Stalin and Molotov signed a decree on the acquisition of the grain, which led eventually to the mass starvation, and on the banning of Ukrainian language publications and education in other Soviet republics outside of Ukraine, and introducing limitations on the so-called Ukrainianization policies, so the use of Ukrainian language in Ukraine itself. And the numbers are debated. The numbers that most of the scholars work today are 4 million, but again, there are larger numbers as well that circulate.

Is there something fundamental about communism and centralized planning that's part of the problem here? Maybe this also connects to the story of Chernobyl, where the Chernobyl disaster is not just a story of failure of a nuclear power plant, but it's an entire institution of the scientific and nuclear institution, but the entirety of the government. There is, and there is a number of factors of political and social character that produced Chernobyl. One of them is generally the atmosphere of secrecy in the Soviet Union in the conditions of the Cold War. Chernobyl reactor was a dual purpose reactor. It could boil water today and produce enriched uranium tomorrow, so it was top secret and if there were problems with that reactor, those problems were kept secret even at people who operated the reactor. That's what happened in Chernobyl. Another big, big part of the story, which is specifically Soviet, that's the nature of the managerial culture and administrative culture in which people had no right to make their own decisions in their place, in their position.

So let me just ask about nuclear safety because there's an interesting point you make. You wrote in the book in Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters, so technically nuclear energy is extremely safe. If there's a number of people died per energy generated, it's much safer than coal oil, for example, as far as I understand. But the case you also make is you write, quote, "Many of the political, economic, social and cultural factors that led to the accidents of the past are still with us today, making the nuclear industry vulnerable to repeating old mistakes in new and unexpected ways and any new accidents are certain to create new anti-nuclear mobilization." And then you continue with, "This makes the nuclear industry not only risky to operate, but also impossible to count on as a long-term solution to an overwhelming problem." Can you explain that perspective? It's an interesting one, speaking to the psychology when an accident does happen, it has a dramatic effect. And also speaking to the fact that accidents can happen, not because of the safety of the nuclear power plant, but of the underlying structure of government that oversees it.

Let's zoom out on the world. We talked about the war in Ukraine. How does the war in Ukraine change the world order? Let me just look at everything that's going on. Zoom out a bit. China, the Israel-Gaza war, the Middle East, India. What is interesting to you, important to think about, in the coming years and decades? As a historian, and I'm trained that way, I have a feeling of deja vu. I see the Cold War is coming back in many of its features. And the war started, and we discussed that, in 2014, at least in my interpretation, with Russia trying to really reestablish its control over the post-Soviet space and Ukraine was crucial for that project. The more global Russian vision since 1990s was that they didn't like the American monopolar world. They knew and realized that they couldn't go back to the bipolar world of the Cold War era. So the vision was multipolar world. Again, it wasn't just academic exercise, it was a political exercise in which Russia would be one of the poles on par with China, on par with European Union, on par with the United States. That's very broadly speaking the context in which the war starts in 2014.