Ghosts of the Past in the Russian Invasion of Ukraine: Conversations with Historians Benjamin Nathans and Arch Getty. A Special Two-Part Episode

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shocked and perplexed the world. This special two-part episode of Then & Now features two outstanding historical observers: Benjamin Nathans, Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, and J. Arch Getty, Distinguished Research Professor of History at UCLA, offer much needed background and perspective on Russia's actions.  Professors Nathans and Getty discuss the historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine, the roots of Ukrainian national identity, and Vladimir Putin’s historical pretext for the invasion.

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Narrator 0:08

Welcome to London by the UCL and Latin Center for History and Policy. We study change in order to make change in the knowledge of the past. Every other week we examine the most pressing issues of the day through a historical lens, helping us understand what happened then and what that means for us.

David Myers 0:32

Welcome to Then and Now. I'm your host, David Myers, and I'm pleased to welcome Benjamin Nathans, the Alan Kors Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, to this two-part episode. Ben Nathans is the author of Beyond the Pale, The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, and to the success of our hopeless cause, the many lives of the Soviet dissident movement, due out from Princeton University Press in 2023. Ben Nathans' wide-ranging research spans 19th-century Russian and 20th century Soviet history, and he is an uncommonly wise observer of the way the past resurfaces in the present. We are now in day six of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with both Kyiv and Kharkiv under siege. One of the curious features of the invasion is the way in which visions of history have played a role, especially for Vladimir Putin, who offered his own elaborate and grievance-laden historical narrative on the eve of the invasion. To help us understand Putin and his vision, Russia and Ukraine, we're delighted to be talking with Ben Nathans. Welcome, Ben.

Ben Nathans 1:38

Thank you, David. It's great to be here.

David Myers 1:40

So let us jump right in. I know this is a tall order, but can you give us just a very brief primer on the complex historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine? Sure.

Ben Nathans 1:52

As some of your listeners may know, the word Ukraine, or uh in Ukrainian and Russian, Ukraina, literally means at the edge. So the name means borderland. It used to be called in English the Ukraine, the way some countries have had the definite article in front of them, like the Argentine. And its shift to Ukraine, a more conventional country name, is a sign that it is on its way and trying to be a fully independent sovereign state, not just somebody's borderland. It's an extremely rich and complex history that ties Russia and Ukraine together. It goes back more than a millennium. And in fact, the founding of both states involves pretty much the same story. That is, the establishment of an entity known as Kievan Rus or Kievan Russia, with Kiev as the capital of a new state which eventually embraced Christianity and gave rise to what we come to know as the Russian Empire. And for most of the history of Imperial Russia, Ukraine or the Ukraine was a province of the Russian Empire, along with many other non-Russian areas. There are three Slavic peoples and what eventually emerged as three distinct Slavic languages, Russian, Ukrainian, and Bielorussian, that emerged within that empire. And in the great age of nationalism and nationalist aspirations, namely the 19th century, that's when the debate started about whether Ukrainian was merely an inferior dialect of Russian, or was or was becoming its own language and its own culture. And in sync with lots of minority, non-state or stateless national or ethnic groups in Europe in the 19th century, a sizable portion of Ukrainian-speaking intelligentsia was leaning towards the idea that Ukraine was a distinct culture and should be a distinct society. I'm going through this very quickly, but I just want to give listeners an overview. When the Russian Empire collapsed under the stress of World War I, the first total war that called on the resources not just of an army but of an entire society, when that Russian Empire of the Tsars collapsed, is when Ukraine first emerged or first attempted to emerge as a truly sovereign state. That was a very short-lived experiment. First, because the Germans occupied this newly born Ukrainian state in the midst of the world war, and then because, as part of the Russian Revolution and the civil war that followed, Bolshevik forces, the Red Army, managed to reincorporate the Ukrainian territories into what would officially be established as the Soviet Union. This is where things get really interesting because the Soviet Union, unlike the Tsar's, did not ban the Ukrainian language, did not ban performances of theater pieces in Ukrainian, did not attempt to suppress the language and the culture. Instead, it formed a multinational federative empire in which Ukraine received the status of a union republic, meaning it had its own branch of the Communist Party. It could conduct education at all levels, from kindergarten through university in the Ukrainian language. And a version, a Soviet version, perhaps I should say a Stalinist version of Ukrainian culture was not only permitted, but was promoted by the Soviet state out of a belief that national differences were ultimately ephemeral. The only ones that would matter were those based in class, and that differences between Ukrainian and Russian culture were destined to evaporate as the Soviet Union forged the world's first working-class socialist society. That's the way things progressed through much of the Soviet period. Towards the end, a new movement for Ukrainian, at least autonomy within the Soviet structure emerged. And when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine emerged for the second time in the 20th century as a fully independent state. There's much more that could be said. I'll just add three footnotes to this and then I'll get back to you. One is if you remember the attempted coup d'etat in August of 1991, the thing that triggered that coup d'etat was the imminent signing of a treaty that would have given Ukraine de facto independence. So it's not just Putin, and it's not just in the last week or the last year or even the last decade that Ukrainian independence has been a lightning rod for uh conservative or reactionary Russians. The second thing is that Ukraine, as it has emerged as an independent state post-1991, has struggled to consolidate and define that identity. Ukraine is no less corrupt politically than Russia. It has not tamed its oligarchs. The transition from socialism to capitalism did not go well there either. And finally, the third thing I would like to say is that it's not just Putin's speeches from the past week that have outlined the case for Ukraine not being, in his view, a legitimate sovereign state. This goes back at least 15 years with Putin and probably further.

David Myers 8:16

Well, that's just a fantastic summary of a very complex textured relationship. Um I want to focus a little bit on the interesting tension between Ukrainian difference and similarity to Russia. So on one hand, Putin says Ukraine, I'm quoting from his uh famous speech on the eve of the invasion, Ukraine has never had its own authentic statehood. There's never been a sustainable statehood in Ukraine. And that jumps over that brief period uh in the late stages and in the immediate aftermath of the First World War when there was a that short-lived experiment. And I my question is while there may be a denial that Ukraine ever had its own statehood, which seems indeed arguable on historical grounds. Is there a sense on Putin's behalf or others that Ukraine is a separate nation, that it represents a national culture? Because Putin also said in that speech, let me emphasize once again that Ukraine for us is not just a neighboring country. It is an integral part of our own history, cultural, spiritual space. It sounds like during Soviet times there was a recognition of, in a certain sense, the national status of Ukrainian, not meriting sovereignty, but some form of national autonomy, picking up on sort of non-statist versions of nationalism. But how do Russians, and Putin in particular, actually regard Ukraine as a discrete national culture that is familiarly linked to Russian culture, or as Putin said in a speech, as an integral part of our own history, culture, spiritual space? What Russians think, and remember there are almost 150 million of them, is not easy to say. There is some polling data, but it's not clear that it's very reliable. What I can tell you from the most reliable polling source that we have, which is the Lavada Center in Moscow, up until the end of 2021, at no time has more than 20% of the polled Russian population, polled by the Levada Center, at no time has more than 20% of the population thought that Russia and Ukraine should belong to the same state, that they should be politically merged. So my best guess is that there has not been anything approaching a consensus in the Russian population that these two people belong in the same political framework. But Putin's comments on this, as tendentious as they may be, are not entirely divorced from reality. And let me try to explain what I mean by that. Today's Russian state, as with the imperial state prior to 1917, traces its origins to Kiev and Rus. That is the origin story of Russian statehood. And as you can imagine, it's not a simple thing to try to accept the fact that the origin story of your state may involve a story that is now outside the territory that you control. That's a complicated legacy to try to make peace with. Even the greatest of Ukrainian writers, Gogol, wrote mostly in Russian, although he sprinkled a lot of Ukrainianisms into his rhetoric and into his prose. The nickname for Ukrainian used to be uh Little Russians. And that I think captures perfectly the sense both of sort of brotherhood, but it's clear who's the big brother and who's the little brother. What Putin likes to believe, and probably does believe, is that Ukrainians and Russians, and for that matter Bellorussians, are blood brothers, that any attempt to weaken or thin out those relationships can only stem from a Western plot to weaken all three by driving them apart, and that any movement in Ukraine towards independence, much less affiliation with the European Union or NATO, can again only be driven by Western interests and a Western covert campaign. He seems either incapable or simply unwilling to contemplate the idea that the move towards a sovereign, independent Ukraine might actually be coming from the Ukrainian people themselves. He just doesn't think along those lines. He is, by training and by disposition, so uh inclined, almost reflexively, to see the hand of the West in any kind of popular unrest or descent from the ruling line that he he just doesn't seem to grasp what is actually going on in Ukraine. And he may not even grasp that he, more than anybody today, is more responsible for driving Ukraine into the arms of the West. He really has made Ukrainians much more pro-Western, pro-EU, pro-NATO than they ever were. And finally, I just want to say during the 20th century, when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, many, many millions of Russians moved to Ukraine and settled in the major cities. A good number of Ukrainians also moved into the Russian Republic of the Soviet Union. There's a lot of mixing of these populations. There's a lot of intermarriage. There are a lot of people, you know, who have one parent who's Ukrainian and one parent who's Russian. This is extremely common. And that makes this war all the more cruel and upsetting, that it has really torn apart people who, in many ways, are linked by kinship and culture. So, how do we square that sense of kinship and Putin's belief that Russians and Ukrainians and Belarusians are blood siblings with Putin's justifiable assertion that Ukrainian fascists were the collaborators of Nazis in the Second World War? How do those two images of Ukrainians sit with one another?

Ben Nathans 14:43

Putin is very unusual among world leaders for the detail with which he engages history and the historical record. Over the last decade or so, he has published and put his name to, I mean, I'm sure somebody else wrote them, but he he went over them and put his name on about a half a dozen really detailed essays about the Soviet role in World War II, about Russia-Ukrainian relations, about the post-Soviet fortunes of Russia on the international stage. I can't think of another world leader who has engaged so deeply with recent history. These essays are extremely detailed. They are also extremely tendentious, they cherry pick their facts, and any professional historian who knows this history will recognize how selective they are. So when Putin talks about fascists in Ukraine, he's really talking about two things. One is the historical record of collaboration by Ukrainian nationalists with the occupying Nazi army. That collaboration was driven above all by the simple political maxim that my enemy's enemy is my friend. Stalin was the enemy because of the starvation that he had induced artificially in Ukraine in the 1930s and for a host of other reasons. And the Nazi occupying forces was the enemy's enemy. There were also internal reasons. Ukrainian nationalists in the 1940s and into the 50s tended to be virtually anti-Semitic. And of course, the Nazis were good news for anti-Semites in Ukraine. I want to remind everybody, though, that World War II was more than 75 years ago. And it's a very different thing for Putin to say that Nazi or neo-Nazi forces are on the rise in Ukraine today, much less the truly delusional assertion that they control the levers of today's Ukrainian government. As many people have pointed out, the current president of Ukraine, who was democratically elected with a sizable margin, uh Volody Mirzalinsky, is himself Jewish. This is a first in Ukraine's history. So it's one thing to try to derive political leverage from something that happened 70 or 75 years ago. And it's very different to say that that's simply repeating itself now. I myself regard the justification for this invasion that Ukraine needs to be denazified as delusional, as a farce. I also think the charge that there is either a reality or a plan to commit genocide against ethnic Russians in Ukraine is also delusional. And if I were playing hardball against Putin, I would remind him that over a million Soviet citizens defected during the Second World War into the Vlasov army, which was cooperating with the Nazi onslaught against Stalin. So Ukraine is not the only place where there were Nazi collaborators. And even today, Ukraine is not the only place where there are neo-Nazi fascist and skinhead groups. The Russian Federation has its own. And I really don't think we want to be setting a precedent where any country that has a neo-fascist movement needs to be invaded in order to stop that movement.

David Myers 18:11

Ben, I know this is a hard question to answer, an impossible question to answer, but do you sense that Putin believes these claims about uh the uh ubiquity of Nazis uh in Ukraine in leadership positions? And can you tell us how pervasive such views are in the broader Russian public?

Ben Nathans 18:32

The views have certainly been amplified uh for quite a few years now. And the truth is that most Russians get most of their news from television, and television is thoroughly under the control of the Kremlin. So I certainly can't tell you what Russians as a whole believe, but they have been bombarded with the propaganda that Ukraine is a neo-Nazi state and that is uh either committing or threatening to commit genocide against ethnic Russians. Does Putin himself believe this? This question comes up a lot. I'm tempted to answer by saying it doesn't matter what he believes, what we should really be paying attention to is what he's saying and what he's doing. But if I were forced to speculate, I would say I think on some level he does believe it. And like all of us who are human beings, he is eminently capable of combining uh what he believes with what he needs to believe. Uh, you know, they say human beings are reasonable creatures because they can come up with reasons for everything they do. I think that Putin feels so strongly about the glory of Russia's defeat of Nazism and is so intent on resurrecting the moral strength of that role, the moral achievement of defeating absolute evil in the middle of the 20th century. And that is Russia's crowning glory, you know, whatever your position on what's going on now. I think he is so dedicated to that vision of Russia as anti-Nazi that it has simply bled into his thinking about all kinds of topics. And if you know, if you'll allow me a brief detour, I witnessed this in a way that was very close to the bone about a decade ago. As you may know, I participated in designing the Museum of Jewish History in Moscow, which opened in 2012. Putin was a sponsor of that project from start to finish, and he appeared at the opening ceremony of the museum in the winter of 2012. And one of the things that he uh referenced in his speech there was that this museum should remind the world that the Soviet Union rescued untold numbers of Jews from the Nazi onslaught and that it was today a bulwark against anti-Semitism in Ukraine. And when I heard him say that, I thought, oh boy, here comes the politicization of the museum that I feared might happen, even though we needed his sponsorship to get that building up. But again, Putin has been, if if you pay attention or you were paying attention to what he's been saying, he has been very consistent in this line. This is not something he just pulled out of the hat to justify this war. He's been saying this for years and years and years.

David Myers 21:18

Okay, I want to shift gears just a little bit, um, staying with the theme of denazification, and ask you to put on your hat as a very distinguished student of Jewish history in Eastern Europe. Um, and just uh reflect on the arc of Ukrainian history, a site that has been filled with murderous assaults upon Jews, extending back to the mid 17th century, the infamous Khmelnitsky massacres, and then, of course, the pogroms in the late stages and aftermath of the First World War that have recently been chronicled by a number of historians, including most recently Jeffrey Weidlinger. And then, of course, the bloodlands of Ukraine in the Second World War. And fast forward to the present when a Jewish person is elected as president. How are we to make sense of Ukrainian history through the lens of Jewish history? I'm curious to hear how you see that arc. Is it sort of an arc of an ascended, triumphalist, progressive movement that offers up a glimmer of hope in an otherwise gloomy world, or something more complicated than that?

Ben Nathans 22:23

Jewish historians are very good at studying the rise of anti-Semitism, where it comes from, how it's mobilized, how it's reinforced, reinvented. And there are times when it appears to me that the only thing that registers on the radar of Jewish historians is increases in anti-Semitism. I know of very few people who have actually tried to study in a scholarly way how, when, and where anti-Semitism decreases and declines. This is a much trickier object to investigate. And I myself do not have answers for this. What I can say is that something uh kind of unexpected has happened, not just in Ukraine, but in Russia and in Poland and in the Baltic states, which is that this uh murderous legacy of uh not just state-sponsored but popular violence against Jews that is uh so seared on the memory of the 20th century seemed to have set out on a new course and uh made possible forms of mutual respect and coexistence that just seemed out of the question 50 or 100 years ago. Some people would say, you know, cynically, yeah, that's because they succeeded in killing most of the Jews or having them emigrate. And so there's so few left that the entire problem has been recast in a way that just is trivial compared to the the actual problem of coexistence between Jews and Christians and others in these areas. But something really has shifted, uh, not just in Ukraine, but in in surrounding countries. I don't think it's part of a progressive arc of history. I do believe it's all reversible because let's face it, everything is reversible. Uh, that's what the attack on Ukraine has showed us. But here again, Putin cannot be reduced to a cliche. I would go so far as to call Vladimir Putin a Judaiophile. And there are some biographical reasons for this stemming from his childhood. Uh, I mentioned that Putin was an eager and early sponsor of the Jewish Museum in Moscow. And more generally, the form of Russian national pride, and one might even say nationalism, that he has promoted and fostered for the last 20 years has been remarkably free and purposefully free of anti-Semitism. This is highly unusual. This is not your garden variety of Russian nationalism. And one of my questions for myself that I often ponder is when Putin eventually leaves the scene for whatever reason, biological, political, or other, what will the next version of Russian nationalism look like? Because the default setting is not Putin's version. And this is something, again, that very few people have read about or written about because we've been so consumed with this sort of demonic version of Putin. But the absence of antisemitism and the presence really of phylosemitism is an un really undeniable part of his political worldview.

David Myers 25:34

It's such a complicated worldview. It includes phylosemitism, it includes a deep sense of grievance over the loss of Russia of the Soviet Union in the Cold War. It seems to contain by uh virtue of your references to the Ukrainians and Belarusians as blood relatives of Russia, kind of neo-Pan-Slavism. And one point that you've made elsewhere is that there may also be an element of angst and dismay over the final stages, the terminal stages of the disintegration of the Russian Empire, uh, sort of the ultimate dismantling. And that's a very th there are many different pieces moving around in that historical worldview that add up to, at some level, a political vision. What is that political vision? To what is Putin aspiring, do you think? Is it a union of Russia, Ukraine, and Belorussia, uh, a kind of more modest version of the Soviet Union? Is it a return to the glories of the Tsarist Empire? Is it the republic of nationalities of the Soviet Union? What do you think his goal is? For someone who has thought so much about the past, has he thought a lot about the future and laid out a carefully designed vision?

Ben Nathans 26:56

If he's laid out a carefully defined vision or designed vision, uh, he hasn't made it public. And my answer to that question would have been different a year ago. I think up until about a year ago, my image of Putin was more or less of someone who is cautious, a sober calculator of risks and benefits, and someone who was a political realist and fundamentally a conservative political realist. He didn't make use of opportunities to annex or otherwise recolonize Belarus uh when he could have. He was sort of playing his cards carefully. And I think he was doing something roughly similar with Ukraine. And what is so shocking about the developments of the last week and this full-scale assault on Ukraine, which, as you know, is larger than France and has 44 million re uh residents, citizens, what is so shocking is that uh it really has caused me to question whether uh either Putin has changed or my image of him was fundamentally wrong. That he he seems much less uh cautious, much more reckless um recently than he did before. Um if he were to try to resurrect the Russian Empire at its maximum extent, just so we're clear about what that would mean, he would have to annex uh Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, much of Poland, all of Ukraine, all of Moldova, portions of Romania, as well as all of the stands Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, uh Dagestan, etc. That would be absolutely insane. And I I even now uh having been chastened by the the latest version of Putin's uh reckless behavior, I find it difficult to believe that that's what he wants to do. Then again, I have no idea what his game plan vis-a-vis Ukraine is. Does he really think he can occupy a country this large and this determined to resist? I just don't see how that's gonna work. I really don't. And I don't see how uh Russians, citizens of the Russian Federation, in the long run are gonna support a policy that involves significant casualties on the Russian side. They may bomb some of the most historic churches in Kiev that are associated with the founding of the state over a thousand years ago. I mean, the price of this invasion could be extraordinarily high. Even before we mention the sanctions and the seizure of Russians' foreign currency reserves and Western banks, I just don't understand what he thinks the situation on the ground is going to look like in six months or a year. I really don't think he has some kind of crude plan to resurrect X or Y, you know, the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire. I think he's more tactical and strategic than that. Let me just remind readers though that when the uh listeners, excuse me, when when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, uh an essay came out from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the dissident writer who exposed the Gulag Archipelago, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. Solzhenitsyn wrote an essay called How to Rebuild Russia. And unusually among Russian nationalists, he stated immediately up front, let the non-Slavic republics go. They need to find their own way. They're not our people, we have no business ruling them. He advocated, however, continuing a federative system that would retain the links among Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. So again, Putin is not way out on a limb here in thinking that the Slavic territories of what once was the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union belong together historically, strategically, culturally, maybe even morally.

David Myers 31:11

Well, on that note, I'd like to thank Professor Benjamin Nathans for joining us on this episode of Then and Now. Uh, it's really been uh immensely illuminating. Thank you, Ben. Thank you, David. Pleasure to talk to you as always. Welcome to Then and Now. I'm your host, David Myers, and I'm pleased to welcome J. Arch Getty, distinguished research professor of history at UCLA. Arch Getty is a renowned scholar of Russian and Soviet history, author of many books, and expert on one of the darkest chapters in Russian history, the reign of Stalinist terror in the mid-20th century. Professor Getty is here on this two-part episode of Then and Now to explore the history of Russia, Russia's and Vladimir Putin's view of the past, and the country's relationship with the West, all as backdrop to Russian's ongoing invasion of Ukraine beginning last week. This invasion has at once perplexed many who have trouble divining Vladimir Putin's intentions and unified much of the world in condemnation of the invasion, with China as an important exception. Part of the challenge is that Russia, its history, culture, and politics, remains a mystery to the West. And so, to help us demystify this past, we're pleased to have Professor Arch Getty with us as our guest. Welcome to you, Arch.

J. Arch Getty 32:38

Thanks for inviting me, David. It's a pleasure to be here.

David Myers 32:41

Great. So let's jump right in. How do you think a textured historical view of Russia and Ukraine helps us understand the current situation? What do you think the key historical points are to bear in mind?

J. Arch Getty 32:54

Well, this history goes way back, at least as far back as the 17th century. Ukraine was always on the border between Russia and Western Europe. It was a point of contest uh in the 17th century between Russia and Poland. Later on, it becomes a point of contest between Russia and Germany. Its misfortune is geography. It's a big flat place, offering no natural barriers to invasion or counterinvasion. And as one historian pointed out a long time ago, Ukraine is the gateway to Russia one way or another. It's also the gateway out of Russia. So it's always been a contested point. And uh ever since Catherine the Great annexed it officially and formally in the 18th century, it's been regarded by Russians as a kind of a buffer zone.

David Myers 33:55

And how distinct, therefore, is a Ukrainian sense of national identity from the perspective of Ukrainians and from the perspective of Russians? Because one of the claims that Putin has made is that basically Ukrainian Ukrainians are part of Mother Russia.

J. Arch Getty 34:12

Yeah, that's um that's of course an arguable point, a contested point. Uh it may be useful to remember that Ukraine was never an independent state except for about three years after the Russian Revolution. Uh, and therefore, when they became independent at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, they are in search of a national identity. They're looking for a usable past. And Russians have always seen Ukrainians as little brothers. In fact, one of the old slang terms for Ukraine among Russians is little Russia. They're always regarded as sort of wannabe Russians. And the more Ukraine tries to establish its own national identity, especially these days, the more it runs up against these Russian paternalistic stereotypes. There has been a sense of Ukrainis, at least since the 18th century, in literature and culture in that part of the world. But national unity has always been national independence has always been frustrated.

David Myers 35:23

You know, one of the most striking things about the run-up to the invasion was the narrative, the historical narrative that Vladimir Putin constructed, articulated, and then declaimed uh before the world. Um I'm wondering if you can help us understand what went into making that. And in particular, what was most relevant for him, do you think, in constructing that uh very strange narrative? Was it Imperial Russia, sort of restoring the glories of the Tsars? Was it Soviet Russia recalling the glory of the once powerful Soviet Union? Is Putin attempting to claim both of these and reclaim them? Or is there something else going on here? He clearly has a very well-developed, thick sense of history. But what are its components and what are its what are the origins of it?

J. Arch Getty 36:13

Well, in my opinion, a lot of what he said uh about this, about Russia and Ukraine being one people, the Slavic Brotherhood motif is sort of in the same category with his claim that Nazis are in charge of Ukraine. This is demonstrably false. It's it's embarrassingly false, and it's generated, I think, on his part, purely for domestic consumption. Uh it's to sort of put Russians at ease that the incursion into Ukraine is in fact the historically right thing to do from a national point of view, from an ethnic point of view, even. Uh I don't happen to believe that he himself believes any of this. Uh he is inventing a history, using a history, but it's a history that's grounded sort of in Russian popular culture, if you want to think of it that way. I think, in my, in my opinion at least, what Putin is after here is not so much annexing Ukraine. What he's interested in here is the is the age-old Russian goal of a buffer state between uh Russia and the West. Um, you know, ever since ever since Charles XII invaded Russia, Ukraine in the 17th century, it's been one invasion after another from the West. Sweden, Poland, Napoleon, World War I, World War II. There's a kind of an ingrained historical mentality here that danger comes from the West, that there at any moment a new Western candidate could come charging across this flat plain and invade Russia. Uh so whether you're a Tsar or a commissar or a president, you always define Russian security, national security, as needing a buffer zone. That's what the Warsaw Pact was about under Stalin. That's what Catherine the Great's occupation of Ukraine and then Poland was about. It's about a buffer state against the fear of Western invasion. That I think is what Putin seeks here.

David Myers 38:22

I mean, there are two ways, I guess, to see it. One could see it as sort of a very justified uh claim on the basis of this long tradition of invasion. One could see it as delusional based on a kind of deeply ingrained paranoia, or one could see it as something in between.

J. Arch Getty 38:39

Well, I th I think that there's there are elements of of all of those things. Um, you know, it's not paranoia if they're really out to get you, as they say. And there have been multiple invasions from the West uh over time. I don't think he worries about Ukraine being a democracy. I don't think he cares one way or another. What he wants, I think, is a Ukraine that is non-aligned and non-hostile. He wants a kind of what's been called Finlandization, um, the model for post-World War II settlement, in which the Soviet Union could have occupied Finland but chose not to, and didn't really care what kind of government the Finns had as long as it was not in a military alliance with the West, as long as it was not hostile. I think that's the reason why he has had boots on the ground uh in the separatist part of Ukraine now for a couple of years, not because he wants that territory necessarily. I mean, annexing territory in Ukraine, even in the two provinces, is a is a real kettle of fish. You never know what's going to happen. It can be more of a burden than an advantage. He has had boots on the ground in Western Ukraine and in Crimea simply to tell the West, look, uh, I'm here. Uh you can't do anything with Ukraine without my say-so. And from his point of view, the West has been unwilling to negotiate a security arrangement that makes Russians comfortable with some kind of non-threatening border. And I think, therefore, his invasion of Ukraine is a kind of an outburst, a way to say to the West, look, you haven't been willing to talk to me about NATO expansion. Uh I'm frustrated. This is now you're going to have to take me into account.

David Myers 40:35

Right. Though it seems, at least on the basis of highly preliminary evidence, that the invasion may have the opposite effect in driving Ukraine and Finland and other countries much closer into the NATO world than he perhaps had wanted.

J. Arch Getty 40:49

Aaron Powell I think that's absolutely right. I think he's made a real blunder here. Which speaks, I think, to his sense of desperation here, a desperate way to assert the idea that Russia is a great power. It's a sign of that desperation that he's resorted to these drastic measure, which I think is going to fly back in his face and bite him, to use a horrible mixed metaphor. I think it has made already NATO more unified than it ever was. It's going to make the Ukrainians even more Russian than they ever were. Plus, there's a possibility, and you know, this is changing day to day, the possibility that he could be bogged down there militarily and unable to withdraw even if he wanted to.

David Myers 41:38

Yeah. Can we go back a little bit in time to the mid-20th century and the trauma of the Second World War for Russians and Putin in particular? Um I was wondering if you could just help us understand how triggering that was, both the threat of a massive invasion uh from the West and also the specter of Nazi fascism, uh, both of which seem to figure central, at least in Putin's rhetoric and the construction of his historical narrative. What place does that play? I remember when I was in Moscow in 1995, being very struck by older veterans proudly wearing their ribbons. Liberation from the tyranny of fascism is central to Russian collective memory and national psyche. What about Putin and how operative do you think that memory was for him?

J. Arch Getty 42:28

I think it's important for him. Again, it's dangerous to speculate about what's going on in his head, but he lost relatives in that war. His parents were subject to privation and starvation and the siege of Leningrad. But more than just Putin's sort of personal reaction, unlike the United States, unlike even Western Europe, the memory of World War II is huge, and it remains huge. Not only because of the scale, 27 million people dead, not only because of the scale, but because of the sort of flush of victory. The idea that we beat the Nazis when nobody else could. So uh there's a kind of a continuing mixture of trauma and pride, I think, about World War II. And it's still alive. Um school kids in Russia, even today, you know, have have speakers, old people come in with their medals and talk to them about World War II. Uh people still get up on the metro and give a seat to a veteran. It is still uh sort of historically in their face as a part of a present memory. Whether or not that influences Putin, uh it certainly influences his audience. And he is playing to a domestic audience here uh in lots of ways with the Slavic Brotherhood stuff, with the fear of Nazi stuff, and now with the memory World War II. Which he conjures up, uh, see what happens when we don't stand up to the West.

David Myers 44:05

Yeah, I mean that's a question. How much does he play to the domestic audience? Because he completely controls it. On one hand, on the other hand, I read today that eight to nine percent of the Russian population was supportive of the invasion. So on one hand, there's little support, and on the other hand, it doesn't really matter because uh it would seem, and I I may be mistaken, he controls uh the media as well as the spigot of uh open public opinion. So how important is the domestic audience for him?

J. Arch Getty 44:38

Uh I think it's pretty important. Um yes, he controls most of the media, not all of it, by the way. There's still a big part of the print media uh in private hands. But in the age of YouTube and Facebook, his ability to control things is is much less than it would have been a generation ago. We know that hundreds, if not thousands, of people have already been arrested for demonstrating against the war in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Um as the economic sanctions tighten down, I think he's going to get less and less of a sympathetic audience. Now, working against that is the patriotism thing. We have to support our boys at the front and all of that. But his ability to control things, I think, is it's easy to exaggerate it, I think. Uh I noticed just the other day when he did his performance before the Security Council in this gigantic ballroom. And in fact, it was a perfect place for it because it used to be a dance floor in Zara's times. So he decides to perform the Security Council there in order to get their sage advice and permission about whether to recognize the two provinces. And everybody goes around the room saying yes, saying yes, but he gets to the guy who controls foreign intelligence, the foreign part of the KGB, a fellow named Norishkin. And Arishkin went off script. He said, Well, I'm not really sure about that. Putin has to dress him down, and Putin is visibly flustered here. This is an important KGB veteran guy, part of his coalition. If he goes off script, you can imagine what other members of the elite might be thinking. Even today, uh, one of Putin's oligarch allies, a man named Dedepaska, who owns aluminum basically, uh, in Russia, he went on public media on television saying, okay, uh, who's gonna pay for this? At the time when we freeze Russian assets in foreign banks, who's gonna pay for this? That is really off script from an important member of the elite. So I think we can we can overestimate his control of things. He is aware, I think, that he has an elite coalition to maintain. And if cracks appear in that, it might be extremely difficult for him to get his way unopposed. I think he's worried about it.

David Myers 47:15

I'm tempted to ask how significant domestic public opinion was in encouraging uh the Soviet Union's retreat from Afghanistan, or was that just an entirely different world where the Soviet repressive mechanism didn't allow anything out? Whereas in today's world of social media, it's just much harder to contain.

J. Arch Getty 47:41

There was an organization uh put together, the Mothers of Soldiers, which started out as as a trickle and eventually became a flood because boys were coming back from Afghanistan either in coffins or maimed or wounded. That built up into a kind of a almost a juggernaut that even Brezhnev had to take into account. That's one of the reasons why when Gorbachev had the chance, he pulled out immediately because there was domestic pressure. It's indicative, I think, maybe, hopefully, that mothers against the war, mothers for Russian soldiers has reappeared on the popular horizon. Uh they are an extremely powerful group, by the way, because everybody likes grandmothers. Everybody likes mothers. It's one thing to arrest uh some 20-somethings demonstrating in Red Square, it's another thing to crack down on grandmothers. Uh therefore, this kind of resistance is something that keeps Putin up at night, I think.

David Myers 48:48

And just going back to sort of the way he understands the past, how operative would you say is the sense of shame of having lost the Cold War and seen uh the dismantling of the Soviet Union for Vladimir Putin and those around him? Uh some have uh analogized it to the sense of national indignity that followed Germany's loss in the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles and the War Guild Clause. Is that a fitting analogy?

J. Arch Getty 49:18

I think it is uh in in in a couple of ways. Uh in one sense, Russians are extremely patriotic people and always have been. Therefore, the the loss of the Cold War, the loss of status hits them really hard. So that is a significant thing for Putin and and for his audience, but it also has a kind of uh an interesting psychological effect. One of my graduate students a couple of years ago said that what happened to Russia when the Soviet Union broke up was like post-traumatic stress syndrome. All of a sudden, they are their familiar status in the world is kicked out from under them. They've been subjected to an enormous stress, both economically and in terms of political collapse as well. Therefore, symptomatically, they they react with anxiety, uh tendency to overestimate threats, an inability to tell big problems from little problems, a kind of a psychological malaise. Now, you don't want to necessarily use the tools of psychoanalysis uh for an entire people, but there is a sense there of disorientation about their place in the world. This disorientation, possibly, provides fertile ground for those who, like Hitler in Germany in the 1920s, make the case that they have been betrayed or stabbed in the back or have lost status and need to regain it. So it's not only a sense of patriotic losing face, possibly, but a sense of disorientation. The remedy to which is? Oh boy, that's a good question. Um The remedy, I think, uh to treat Russians as if they were important people, even if we don't believe it. I mean, they they are powerful folks, as just asking a Ukrainian. They are powerful people, and therefore it doesn't hurt to flatter them a little bit. And it may gain us all kinds of advantages and points if we go out of our way not to insult them. Just casual remarks, like when Obama said that they were now a second-rate regional power. True, absolutely true, but it caused such a backlash among the Russian population that it seems like there was no advantage in doing that. I think a lot of what Putin wants is recognition that Russia is an important place. He wants to be treated uh as equals uh with other countries. Now, that is not necessarily the same thing as wanting sort of hegemonic great power control over Eastern Europe, but I think one possible antidote to this malaise, to this loss of face, to this uh sort of dangerous Weimar-Germany syndrome, uh, that something has to be fixed, an antidote to that is simply treating them as equals. And this this plays into another thing, um their attitude toward the West in general, historically.

David Myers 52:38

Yeah, could you tell us a little bit more about that? I mean, uh it seems that it's a a deeply fraught, mutually contemptuous relationship, often but not always. Um there, of course, were periods of great romance. Russophilia on the Western side, um, you know, the French-speaking court of Catherine the Great, you know, the possibilities of enlightenment, Western style enlightenment. So the pendulum had swung in a different direction than the pole of antipathy. How has that pendulum moved back and forth, or has it pretty much been lodged on one side of the spectrum at the pole of antipathy and misunderstanding?

J. Arch Getty 53:16

I'm not sure it alternates so much as it is a sort of simultaneous love-hate relationship, uh, a kind of um two things at once. Just to tell you a story, I had a landlady in Moscow, uh, and I rented a place from her. And uh one night I pointed out that, well, Russian culture, I mean, the opera comes from Italy and the music comes from France, and and the poetry comes from German romanticism. She didn't speak to me for a week after that because I had stepped on her idea that Russia was unique and important. At the same time, she wore Western clothes, her kids had Western CDs, she learned English. So Russians admire and imitate really Western culture in lots of ways. Pop culture, fashion, music, things like that. While in the next breath, or even in the same breath, they're apprehensive about our intentions toward them. So I think it's a simultaneous love-hate thing. Russians are fond of drawing a distinction between what they call evil leaders and good people. They make this distinction about themselves, too, by the way, that governments are bad, the politicians are bad, the West is dangerous because of its politicians, but at the same time, the people are good. The culture is good, the culture is something we can mutually deal with together. So there's there's fear of the West, hatred of the West, and love of the West at exactly the same time, simultaneous, in the next breath, really.

David Myers 55:01

So, as a concluding question, if you were designated chief historical advisor to the President of the United States, what would you be advising him at this point?

J. Arch Getty 55:13

Um I would be advising him that you gain a lot of points with respect, uh, without necessarily conceding anything. A whole lot of this hopeful dialogue will have to do with the way things are said, as much as what is actually said. I think uh one step toward getting out of this crisis is recognizing that Russians have security concerns. That's not the same thing as saying they're right to fear NATO, but they do fear NATO, and that in itself is a factor to be dealt with. Uh they are not convinced, by the way, by NATO's claim that it's a purely defensive alliance. Uh they don't believe that. Um they're constantly talking about NATO bombing Serbia back in 1999 when Serbia wasn't threatening anybody. So I think, you know, one step toward getting out of this is talking to them as if they were equals and recognizing that they have concerns that can be addressed creatively without it being a kind of a football game with a winner and a loser.

David Myers 56:29

Right. Well, it's always illuminating and enriching to speak with you, Arch, especially when it deals with Russian and Soviet history. Thank you so much for being on Then and Now.

J. Arch Getty 56:38

Uh it's a real pleasure talking to you, David. Thank you.

Narrator 56:46

Thank you for listening to Then and Now, a podcast by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. You can learn more about our work or share your thoughts with us at our website, leskincenter.history.ucla.edu. Our show is produced by David Myers and Maia Ferdman, with original music by Daniel Reichman. Special thanks to the UCLA History Department for its support. And thanks to you for listening.