Class 3: Geography and Ancient History (4)
It has this incredible effect on-
And the reason he invented it
had everything to do with geography.
Oh, I forgot to put his name on the sheet. Okay.
(chalk tapping)
So in the war, in the Cossack wars of the 17th century,
which don't worry, we'll get to,
in the Cossack wars of the 17th century,
at the end of it, there's basically a stalemate
between Poland, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,
and Moscow.
And the stalemate is codified
at the Treaty of Andrusovo in 1667.
And according to that treaty,
the territory on the east of the Dnieper
was going to be Russia,
and west of the Dnieper was going to be Poland.
It was a little unclear what that meant for Kyiv,
because Kyiv was on both sides,
but eventually Kyiv ended up being part of,
being under control of, Moscow.
And that meant Chernihiv was as well.
So Kyiv and Chernihiv, which are these major centers
of European scholarship and thought,
are now suddenly under the control of Moscow,
which has no centers of scholarship and thought.
And no, that's just a statement of fact.
I mean, there aren't any universities,
there aren't any academies in Moscow at that time.
So Lazar Baranovych was a very intelligent guy,
one of the great theologians of his time,
and used to enjoying a certain amount of personal influence,
it should be said.
And when Chernihiv and Kyiv fall under Moscow,
he makes a play.
And see if you could think of a play
which is as good as this play.
He says,
to the fellow Orthodox clergy in Moscow, he says,
"You know what? We're actually all one country.
And the history of your country, that one in Moscow,
it actually begins in Kyiv."
And this was news to the people in Moscow.
This had not occurred to them.
This was not their story of themselves at the time.
But Baranovych said,
"Your history actually starts with Kyiv."
And of course, why does he say that?
Because that makes Kyiv really important.
Because, so suddenly Ukraine and Kyiv and Chernihiv
are not just places that got conquered by Moscow.
It turns out they're the beginning of the history of Moscow.
And that dignifies him,
and it dignifies his collegium, his school,
it dignifies Chernihiv, it dignifies Kyiv.
That seems like a pretty good play.
And it worked. For a while, it worked.
But you can then imagine what happens next.
What happens next is that eventually,
the Russian clerics say, take over the story on their own.
And they say, "Yes, okay, that's true."
But, after a couple generations, they pick up all the tricks
that the Ukrainians use to argue.
They learn the languages, too.
They start reading
the Western religious literature themselves.
They learn about theology and disputation.
And so they take the argument and they make it their own.
And then by the 18th century, it becomes a secular argument,
no longer a religious argument, but a secular argument.
When the Russian Empire is formed to 1721,
it's called the Russian Empire for this reason.
And then when Russia invents a secular history of itself
in the 19th century, it's this story.
But this story happened because of this guy,
who, if he drowned under his horse,
as people tended to do at the time.
If something had happened to him
on the way to writing that letter,
maybe that story would never have arisen.
And then maybe we would all analyze this war
a little bit better than we did.
And so, again, I'm just trying to make the point that
where a certain person is at a certain time and place
may matter, actually, a lot.
Like you couldn't actually trade Lazar Baranovych off
for anybody else. He wasn't interchangeable.
And those circumstances,
that Chernihiv fell under Russia at that particular time,
were very specific.
So Chernihiv itself was bombed in early March.
I was told by the locals, I haven't checked this yet myself,
but the guy who was actually doing the bombing runs
was himself born in Chernihiv,
which raises the question of how you can believe
different stories about the place where you're from.
When I was in the rubble, I was in-
There was one really terrible bombing run
which destroyed, or partially destroyed,
four major apartment buildings in one neighborhood.
And when I was there talking to people,
I was struck by a few things.
Like how, I mean, just like this place for young people,
like there was a kid there who was collecting books.
He had a book collection.
And he found an iPhone in the rubble.
Like he had all these books and he had an iPhone,
and as he walked out, he said to me, "I found an iPhone!"
Like, this is his childhood.
But also one thing that struck me is that
in these apartment buildings,
people don't necessarily know each other
or know who they are.
But then after the bombing,
people did know who one another were,
because they had to help each other with things.
And then it turns out when a building is destroyed,
that it has a history.
One of the reasons you know that is
that the same kind of bombing
will destroy different kinds of buildings in different ways.
So Soviet-era kommunalka, or Soviet-era buildings
that were put together from modules,
are very vulnerable to bombing, it turns out,
whereas post-1990s buildings are generally less so.
And you can literally see that worked out before your eyes.
Or another thing, in this complex of buildings
that was destroyed, one of them, it turns out,
like this is something you would never have to know,
but it turns out that one of them was built for
survivors of the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl.
And so they all came down and they got this building
as a way of moving away from where they were.
But that history would never have come out
without this other event.
When I went to the suburbs of Chernihiv,
I mean, the villages around,
I talked to a woman who had five Russian soldiers
in her house, in her basement.
And I said, "Okay, they're Russian soldiers,
but where were they actually from?"
Were they Russian, or were they some-
And she's, "Oh, they were from Bashkiria and Tatarstan,"
and I think maybe one of them was Russian from Russia,
he was from Siberia.
And they had a geography.
They had a notion that Ukraine was Russia.
But it's a funny kind of geography
because they're from so far away,
they're from thousands of miles away, in some cases.
And there she is, and they're all speaking Russian together.
And she's a native Russian speaker.
She was talking to me in Russian.
And they're telling her what Russia is
and that she's in Russia.
And there's something very strange about that,
but that's their deep geography,
and there's something about it which seems to really matter.
I'm gonna leave you with the last example,
which I'm sure you probably already thought of,
which is Kyiv itself.
So the way we think about cities
often has to do with particular things that happen
in those cities or in those neighborhoods.
Like Wannsee might not mean anything to you,
but Wannsee is where a famous plan was made
for the extermination of the remaining Jews of Europe.
It's a part of Berlin.
And so you, you cannot, once you know that,
you can't hear Wannsee and not think about that.
Or Vichy.
So Vichy in France is,
I mean, there's nice soda water and everything,
but it's a spa town,
but it's also where the collaborationist government
had its capital during the Second World War.
And so Vichy means that.
It's very hard to take that away from Vichy.
I would suggest that there's going to be
a little something around Kyiv like that,
but in a positive sense,
because Zelensky stayed.
If Zelensky had left, many things, I think,
would be different, in the world and in our minds
and in this class, probably.
But he stayed, and I think that makes Kyiv
mean something different than it would've otherwise been.
In other words, I'm trying to suggest that
this deep geography, although it's real,
is also fungible, it's changeable.
It can be altered by human action.
I'm thinking in particular about the night,
a couple of nights into the war,
where he made the selfie video, where he said,
"President tooth."
"I'm here."
And then he goes on, "My advisors are here.
We're all here. We're all right here."
And he was countering Russian propaganda,
which had said he had fled. That's part of it.
But also, he was saying,
"I'm here, I'm going to stay. I'm reassuring people."
And this is just my last example of the point that
maybe places and people aren't so interchangeable.
That it matters a great deal that when he said, "I am here,"
the buildings behind him were Kyiv,
and not Lvov and not Warsaw.
That everyone in Kyiv, when he said, "I am here,"
could recognize where he was in Kyiv.
And that "I'm here" was also the counter
to a different kind of deep geography.
Because at the moment when he said that,
there still were bombs falling in Kyiv
which were meant for him.
And there were still groups of assassins
moving towards Kyiv, or actually inside the city of Kyiv,
who were meant to kill him.
And they were operating under a different deep geography,
deep geography which goes something like this.
And I'm not, I don't have to invent this
because it's what Putin said in in 2021, 2022,
that Russia and Ukraine have always been one place,
and the people who say that Ukraine is a different place,
they are somehow exotic.
They somehow come from the outside.
They're Hapsburgs, they're Poles,
they're Europeans, they're Americans.
And therefore anyone who says that there's a Ukraine,
there's something flawed about that person.
They don't belong there.
They simply need to be removed.
And we'll remove them lexically,
by calling them Nazis or whatever it takes.
But we're also going remove them physically.
Because if we remove them physically,
then the rest of the Ukrainian people will go along with us,
and the war will be over.
That is a kind of deep geography.
And that deep geography animated the attempt
to take Kyiv and to kill this person.
So I had a lot of time to think about that,
because if you're visiting the President,
it takes a long time to get there, obviously.
Because like, they lead you here and they lead you there,
and then you're never gonna find your way out.
They lead you here, it's all dark and confusing,
and there are lots of checkpoints,
and there're lots of barriers and things.
And so it gets you to think,
how important is it actually that this person is right here,
as opposed to another person right here,
or this person being somewhere else?
So, the deep geography is important.
That was the point of this.
But also the deep geography can be changed.
The deep geography can be changed by action
and by experience and by renaming.
And I was thinking about that, I think about that as well.
I was there during this last, this Kharkiv counteroffensive,
when the Ukrainians took back almost all of Kharkiv.
And of course, that means that Kharkiv Oblast
now means something different than it did a few days ago.
And for the men and women
who were involved in that offensive,
it's gonna mean something different to them as well.
And that the fact that
so many Ukrainians
have had to move during this war, for bad reasons,
4 million deported to Russia,
well over 10 million crossed a Western border and come back,
people inside the country,
well over half the population has moved
