Ukrainian Anti-Colonialist Marxism (1919-1923)
A Forgotten Legacy in a
Forgotten Colony. By Stephen Velychenko, Cxid/Заxад
(East/West)
2013
The Putin
Files In-depth interview with Julia Ioffe, Russian-American journalist,
about Putin's career. 1 hour 45 minutes PBS Frontline, October 27,
2017
Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: An Explainer
Responses to
common questions on day one of Putin’s war of choice. By David Klion, Jewish
Currents, February 24, 2022
Ukraine's Protracted Struggle for National Liberation To understand the
situation in Ukraine today, it is essential to understand Ukraine's history and
Russia's ambitions. By Rohini Hensman, The Wire, March 11, 2022
Facts Over Ideology, Peace Over War
At the time of the dissolution of the USSR, and Ukraine's declaration of
independence, in 1991, Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal (1/3 of that of the
entire Soviet Union) and signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In response, in 1994, the United States, the United
Kingdom, and Russia then signed the
Budapest Memorandum pledging to “respect
Ukrainian independence and sovereignty in the existing borders and refrain from
the threat or the use of force against Ukraine.” The Budapest Memorandum is
never mentioned by Putin’s apologists. His latest moves are in direct violation
of this signed treaty. By Terry Burke and Andrew Berman, In These Times, March 21, 2022
Timothy Snyder
Yale lecture series "The Making of Modern Ukraine," 46 minutes. Twice weekly, September through November 2022
(archived)
Class syllabus
A Biographical Sketch of Prof. Snyder
Bloodlands: Europe
Between Hitler and Stalin More on Central European history by Prof.
Timothy Snyder. 21 min video
The True Origins of
Putin’s War Interview with
Timothy Snyder, by Chris Hayes. One hour
We Are All Living in Vladimir
Putin’s World Now Journalists writing on international affairs in the 1920s and 1930s referred to
the era as postwar. They saw events through the prism of the Great War that
devastated Europe just a few years earlier. Historians writing today refer to
the same years as the interwar period, for the simple reason that they analyze
what happened during those years as part of the lead-up to the even more
destructive World War II. If only those journalists writing in 1930s Europe had
the clarity of hindsight. We should all have that clarity today. Russia’s
military aggression in Ukraine is one of those moments that impels us to
reinterpret our own era. What we called the 30-year peace that followed the Cold
War (tending to forget the wars in the former
Yugoslavia) has now ended. Future historians will look at these last decades, by
and large, much as they look at the interwar period: as an opportunity
squandered. By Ivan Krastev, The New York Times, February 27, 2022
Primer: Who are the Ukrainians?
The name “Oukraina,” appearing in the 12th century, described nebulous frontier
land beyond fortified borders. The writer presents detailed but concise history
of Ukraine since that time (and earlier), though his tangential mention of the
ruling elite of the Khazars converting to Judaism is
probably inaccurate. By David Buerge,
Post Alley, March 2, 2022
It's "Ukraine," not "the Ukraine" - here's why
The Conversation, March 9,
2022 (brief)
Ukraine not "the" Ukraine
By Marta Dyczok Western University (Canada), November 2024
(longer)
The Grand Theory Driving Putin to War The
goal, plainly, is empire, and the line will not be drawn at Ukraine. By Jane
Burbank, The New York Times, March 22, 2022. The writer is emeritus
professor of history and Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University.
The Nation
Ukraine Has Become A historical overview of the people's
movement in Ukraine. By Olesya Khromeychuk
and Sonya Bilocerkowycz, New York Review of Books, March 25, 2022
Conversation
of scholars on Ukrainian language, ethnicity, and nationhood
70 minutes. Yale University, March 25, 2022
Unless democracies defend themselves, the forces of autocracy will destroy them
For a
long time—too long—the custodians of the liberal world order looked away when
Russia “pacified” Chechnya by murdering tens of thousands of people. When Russia
bombed schools and hospitals in Syria, Western leaders decided that wasn’t their
problem. When Russia invaded Ukraine the first time, they found reasons not to
worry. Surely Putin would be satisfied by the annexation of Crimea. When Russia
invaded Ukraine the second time, occupying part of the Donbas, they were sure he
would be sensible enough to stop. With the third, brutal invasion of Ukraine,
the vacuity of those beliefs was revealed. The Russian president openly denied the existence of a
legitimate Ukrainian state:
“Russians and Ukrainians,” he said, “were one people—a single whole.” His army
targeted civilians, hospitals, and schools. His policies aimed to create
refugees so as to destabilize Western Europe. “Never again” was exposed as an
empty slogan while a genocidal plan took shape in front of our eyes, right along
the European Union’s eastern border. Other autocracies watched to see what we
would do about it, for Russia is not the only nation in the world that covets
its neighbors’ territory, that seeks to destroy entire populations, that has no
qualms about the use of mass violence. By Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, March 31, 2022
How Putin's Oligarchs Bought London The first generation of
post-Soviet capitalists had accumulated vast fortunes, and Putin set put to
bring the oligarchs under state control. He proceeded to run the state and
its economy like a Mafia don, through control of ostensibly independent
businessmen. The owners of Russia's biggest companies were forced to operate
as hired managers, working on behalf of the state. It wasn't their
wealth; it was Putin's. They kept their businesses by the Kremlin's grace.
By Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker, March 28, 2022 issue
The War in Ukraine is a Colonial War When Vladimir Putin denies the
reality of the Ukrainian state, he is speaking the familiar language of empire.
For five hundred years, European conquerors called the societies that they
encountered “tribes,” treating them as incapable of governing themselves. As we
see in the ruins of Ukrainian cities, and in the Russian practice of mass
killing, rape, and deportation, the claim that a nation does not exist is the
rhetorical preparation for destroying it. By Timothy Snyder, The New Yorker,
April 28, 2022
Our Hypocrisy on War Crimes
Much has been said about
US hypocrisy, and we won't belabor it. This article, however, frames the issue
well.
The US history of moral evasiveness around
wartime atrocities undermines the very institution that might eventually bring
Putin and his subordinates to justice: the International Criminal Court. By
Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, May 26, 2022
Secret Russian Police Reports on the Ukrainian National Movement
Vladimir Putin made his career in the secret police. Upon taking power in 2000,
he appointed many of his former KGB associates [siloviki]
to governmental positions. As a result, instead of having a government with a
secret police, Russia became a country with a secret police that had a
government. This
had profound implications for independent Ukraine, as meant that men with a
conspiratorial mindset would be determining policy towards a former imperial
possession that in their minds remained “a part of Russia.”
According to that conspiratorial perspective,
Ukrainian independence, and pre-1991 opposition to imperial rule, was not a
result of opposition to central policies caused by underlying socio-economic,
ideological and political issues common to all empires. It stemmed only from
foreign intrigues and russophobic malcontents. By Stephen Velychenko, August 4,
2022
Putin Says Ukraine Doesn't Exist. That's Why He's Trying to
Destroy It.
He repeatedly denied the country’s existence in pseudo-historical
essays
and
speeches.
He is just the latest in a long line of Kremlin rulers who have
tried to deprive Ukrainians of their subjectivity. For a man so
obsessed with history, he should have worked out that centuries
of unsuccessful attempts to destroy the Ukrainian nation show
that Ukraine very much exists. New York Times, November
1, 2022
Crimea: Ukraine's Other National Liberation Struggle
A
short history of Crimea, with links to earlier articles. By
Yevgeny Lerner, CounterVortex, August 15, 2023
NEW
A Short History of Russia and Ukraine
Seven maps that illustrate Vladimir Putin’s distortion of
history. The Economist, January 29, 2024 (Free
registration required.)
Books:
Timothy Snyder, The
Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus,
1569–1999
(Yale University Press, 2004)
Marci Shore,
The
Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution
(Yale University Press, 2018)
Serhii Plokhy,
The
Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
(Basic Books, revised 2021)
|
THE ROLE OF NATO EXPANSION
Goal is destruction of Ukraine": ex-defense minister warns west of
Putin’s aim Russia remains
determined to destroy Ukraine entirely and to "assimilate" its
citizens into the Russian Federation. The ex-minister likened calls
for Ukraine to make territorial concessions to international demands
in 1938 that Czechoslovakia give up Sudetenland to Nazi Germany.
Note that there is not one word about NATO being a motivation for
Russia's invasion of Ukraine. By Luke Harding, The Guardian,
September 8, 2023
When Havel Met Biden
Far from being a project of US imperialism, NATO expansion has been
a process driven by the small and vulnerable countries, which are
also the most fundamentally anti-imperialist ones, since their
continued existence is predicated upon their ability to deter
imperialist neighbors. By Oscar Clarke, Quillette,
August 29, 2023
Russia falsely claims to be the victim of Ukraine
The salient factor in the Russo-Ukrainian war is not that from “Russia's
perspective” NATO is perceived as a threat. The salient factor is that Russia
has formed a perspective in which other countries do not exist or do not matter.
Russia's moral failure - its descent into solipsism - is the salient *causal*
factor in this story. By Jamie Mayerfeld, University of
Washington, July 18, 2023
Not One Inch, Unless It Is From Lisbon to Vladivostok This
careful examination of recent history illustrates that the claim
that NATO expansion threatens Russia is an exaggeration. The title
refers to a Russian agenda, spoken by Putin himself, to swallow
Ukraine into a Russian empire that would stretch across two
continents. By Carl Mirra, Adelphi University (NY), December 12,
2022
The Myth of US Promise to Russia Refuting the contention
that NATO would not expand "one inch." By J.D. Everhard, April 6,
2023
"What Russia should do with Ukraine"
Published by RIA Novosti, a Russian state-owned news agency, this
article presents a detailed, explicit Russian statement of its plan
for conquering Ukraine. It does not once mention NATO as the reason
for Russia's invasion. April 3, 2022
There Is No Left Position That Justifies Putin's Attack on Ukraine In the first days after the invasion, it seemed like almost all that prominent
western left commentators could talk about was not Russia but NATO. The invasion
was wrong, they usually stated at the outset and then proceeded to focus on the
“real” culprit, invariably the West. Its guilt? That it had already expanded
NATO to the east, and that it not ruled out the possibility of Ukrainian
membership. It didn’t matter that NATO expansion was driven more by the east
Europeans than by Washington, which was originally quite divided on the matter.
Nor did it matter that NATO membership for Ukraine was hardly imminent, or that
in no scenario was a NATO attack on Russia imaginable. By David Ost, Foreign Policy in Focus,
March 31, 2022 |