Class 3: Geography and Ancient History (3)
They don't say "Russia".
They rarely say "Russians".
They almost never say "Russia".
They occasionally say "the Russian Federation".
But usually they talk about the Ruscisti,
and they talk about ruscism.
And when they refer the country,
they're calling it "Moscovia".
Why would you call it Moscovia?
Besides the fact that sounds sort of cool.
Why would you call it Moscovia?
Go for it.
- [Student] You're breaking the link
between Russia and Kievan Rus'.
- Yes. You're taking the Rus'.
So, Russia is called Rus',
which is a name that Russia took in 1721
when the Russian-
when the Russian Empire was founded.
If you call it Moscovia,
you're taking away the historical reference to Rus'
and you're also kind of naming it
as a smaller country than it is.
And you're suggesting that its boundaries
might have a certain flexibility. (chuckles)
You're also kind of suggesting that when you say Moscovia.
The other phrase they use a lot
as a euphemism for Russia is "aggressor state".
They say aggressor state.
Which is like neutral. "It's the aggressor state."
But it's also not neutral because you're suggesting that
that state might always be an aggressor, and so on.
So the next thing that I want to talk about
in this notion of
geography and deep geography and deep history is
I want us to think a little bit about
this late 20th century, early 21st century notion,
that of globalization,
and the idea that globalization has made
all this kind of careful work that we've done
in the first few lectures of this class irrelevant.
Because what globalization does-
this is the argument.
What globalization has done is that,
to use Thomas Friedman's phrase, it's flattened the world.
It's kind of made everything the same everywhere.
I mean, his example, one of his examples, was
airport lounges,
which frankly, I don't think is a great example,
not least because they're really different.
I mean, the ones in America are terrible, for example.
Okay.
But I give it as a joke in a different way,
because of course,
airport lounges is not a representative experience.
So the fact that airport lounges might be similar,
or McDonald's might be similar,
doesn't really take you very far.
But what I'm really going for here is the overall argument
that since the end of communism, something like that,
since the rise of global trade, the second globalization,
things are basically interchangeable.
Places are basically becoming more like other places.
And people are also becoming interchangeable.
Because there are only so many ideas in the world
and we share them all instantly through the Internet,
goes the idea,
therefore we're interchangeable.
Maximus and I are interchangeable.
Zhenya and Maximus are interchangeable.
So it doesn't matter what TF you have, actually.
(students chuckle)
We're all basically interchangeable
because we're all sharing ideas all the time.
And there are only so many ideas,
and we're sharing them instantaneously.
So maybe you don't have the idea I have right now,
but you can have it instantaneously.
So this is the notion.
So in this utopian view,
space doesn't really matter.
Traveling distances doesn't really matter.
'Cause we're all really kind of all in the same place
in the same time.
Now the objections to this are pretty clear.
One of them is, does information really travel?
In the world where we are,
well over 90% of the supporters of Viktor Orbán and Hungary
believe that Ukraine is at fault for this war.
And why do they think that?
They think it because that is their information space.
What Russians and Ukrainians think about this war
is obviously very different.
And it's not just because they're Russians and Ukrainians,
it's because they're in different information spaces.
What you and your cousin Harry may think about Donald Trump
might be very different.
And that might not just be because
you and your cousin Harry have other differences.
It might be because you are in different media spaces.
One could argue that what's happened, actually,
is that information space has created more differences
or it's created even firmer boundaries than existed before,
because the Internet, arguably,
actually travels less well than a newspaper does.
If I can print the same newspaper all over the world,
as used to be the case,
then I may be actually doing better than I'm doing
if I'm the Washington Post
and I can't get my stuff out in China today.
So, information maybe doesn't really travel, and it may-
And can we really go everywhere.
I mean, this is obviously on my mind,
'cause it took me 35 hours to get back from Kyiv.
But there is a certain cost in going places.
And when you take your body certain places,
it does have an effect on how you see things.
There's a difference between being in a place
and seeing it on a screen.
If you go somewhere
and it involves passports
and changing the gauge of a railway,
or it involves going through checkpoints,
that is different from just clicking on a picture,
to another picture, to another picture.
It changes the person.
By the way, one of the things
I found really interesting on the checkpoints,
and it has to do with this overall question of language
and where you are and how language suggests where you are,
the Ukrainian soldiers generally still speak Russian.
That's not really a big secret.
But at the checkpoints, if you're at a checkpoint,
the way they greet you
is they hit you with a really flowery, friendly Ukrainian.
And as long as you can hit them back
with a really flowery, friendly Ukrainian,
you're basically through the checkpoint.
Because there just aren't that many Russians
who can do that.
So you make sure you show your document,
but the language itself is the first checkpoint,
which is kind of interesting.
But where I want to really go with this is that,
in historical terms, it really does seem to matter
how far people get at certain times.
There really do seem to be historical turning points
where non-interchangeable people get, or don't get,
to very special places, and that it seems to matter.
A big classic example that we'll get to in about a week,
in our part of the world, is the Mongol invasion of Europe.
The Mongol invasion of Europe.
Well, when did the Mongols reach Paris?
I see, yes?
- [Student] They haven't yet.
- Yeah, good! Good answer.
I like that. I like the "yet",
I like the way you're holding the future open
for good things.
(class laughs)
That's awesome. That's really good.
Yeah, so in the late 1230s, early 1240s,
the Mongols aren't defeated by anybody.
The Batu Khan is not defeated by anybody.
We'll talk about this.
They have the stirrups,
they have the encirclement maneuvers, they have the calls.
They're not defeated by anybody in Europe.
They destroy every army, European army, they touch.
And that includes Kyiv,
but it doesn't include France.
Not because they couldn't have done it,
but because at a certain point,
the Batu Khan has to go back for a succession issue.
'Cause the main Khan has died.
But if the Batu Khan gets to Paris,
I mean, arguably no Renaissance, no Age of Exploration.
Probably some other part of the world
carries out the Age of Exploration, not the Europeans.
And it's a very, very, very different world.
And that's just a matter of one person dying.
If one person had died a year later,
we're probably looking at an extremely different world.
Not to say that the moment we're in
is quite comparable to that.
But it does strike me as being significant that,
and of course you can't help but think about this
when you're standing in the middle of Kyiv,
but it seems quite significant that Russian soldiers
do or don't get to Kyiv in February of 2022.
And it's really close. It's really close.
The Russians land in the Hostomel Airfield,
and their plan is to land there,
drop the paratroopers, drop the special forces, go in,
gather up the elite, kidnap them, probably exterminate them.
And that's part of the plan to take over the city.
And they get to Hostomel,
which is only about 35 kilometers, 20 miles,
from the center of Kyiv.
They get that far on the first day of the war.
They get that far, but the Ukrainians stop them.
There's a terrible battle around Hostomel
and it goes on, but the Ukrainians stop them.
Bucha, which you probably heard of
because of the atrocities,
And, I saw Bucha very briefly too.
It was also very, that was also kind of interesting
because the air raid sirens went off in Bucha,
and I was with the Ukrainian general
and he was like, "Well, we can always go to the basement
of the church, if anything actually happens."
Bucha is basically a bedroom community.
It's like 28 kilometers from Kyiv.
It's a suburb.
Irpin, where so many buildings are destroyed,
it's like a beautiful parked, it's a really nice place.
You might wanna, if you were like going up in the world
and you wanna have a nice place and drive, commute,
the American dream.
If you wanted to do that,
Irpin would be a wonderful place to go.
Now it's all shot up,
and there's a huge pile of burned cars,
and there building after building was destroyed
by Russian tanks as they were retreating.
That's like 20 kilometers from Kyiv.
And the same is true going the other direction
across the Dnieper towards Chernihiv.
The Russians got very, very, very close to Kyiv.
But they didn't get to Kyiv.
They didn't get that little difference,
those last 15 miles of physical geography
would seem to make a huge difference.
And the way people react to the war
also has a great deal to do with
how they understand the geography around them.
So for example,
time after time after time,
people who lived in Kyiv or other cities
would say, when the war started,
"i should go to the villages, I should go to the suburbs."
That's a natural thought.
Like, "They're gonna get to Kyiv,
I should go to my dacha, I should go to my grandmother's,
I should go to my second house."
But it was the villages actually that took the punishment,
time and time again.
People from Kyiv went to Bucha and Irpin,
because they thought Bucha and Irpin
would be safer than Kyiv, which turned out not to be true.
A friend of mine who lives close to the Dnieper,
the Dnieper runs through Kyiv.
And so, a friend of mine assumed
that the Russians would get as far as the river,
and the Ukrainians would then blow the bridges,
and then you only have one direction to flee.
So in moments like this, you're thinking in terms of space.
I wanted to go someplace besides Kyiv
and Bucha and Irpin and Hostomel.
I wanted to get outside of Kyiv Oblast.
And so I went with a friend to Chernihiv,
the Chernihiv Oblast,
which is just basically due north, a little bit east.
Chernihiv is a fascinating city.
We're gonna return to it.
It might have been on one of your maps.
The reason it was on one of your maps
is that it's an old city.
It's 500 years or so older than Moscow.
It's been there for a very long time. It's ancient.
And it is an ancient center also of scholarship,
of theology and of scholarship.
Along with Kyiv, it was one of the two great centers
of religious, and intellectual in general, disputation
in what's now Ukraine.
And one reason why I have Chernihiv in mind
is that this whole story about the Kyiv and the Moscow
and how it's all one place,
that was actually invented by a guy in Chernihiv.
It was invented by one person.
Like now, we all believe it.
