Power Lines Season 1 Episode 2 Bonus
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Jakub: Hello Power Lines subscribers. Welcome to your bonus episode of Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World.
Anastasiia: My name is Anastasiia Lapatina.
Jakub: And I’m Jakub Parusinski.
Anastasiia: For this week's bonus episode we wanted to give you an extended version of last week’s interview with Ukrainian historian and writer Olesya Khromeychuk.
Jakub: We wanted to start our series by exploring Ukraine’s history as a background and foundation.
Olesya’s interview provided a great view on how Ukraine was shaped, from it’s long period of statelessness, during which the country continued to develop despite the fact that it didn’t have formal borders, to the role that various people from the cultural space and intellectuals and writers played in forging the modern nation of Ukraine.
Anastasiia: I loved interviewing Olesya because that idea of statelessness that you mentioned, Jakub, is something I never thought before. This idea that statelessness can actually be a strength and not a weakness and that’s something that Olesya brought up, so that was fascinating.
And for those who don’t know who she is, Olesya is an academic who grew up in Lviv, that’s in Western Ukraine. And has taught the history of East Central Europe at various top universities, including the University of Cambridge and University College London.
But she has done so much outside of teaching too, of course, she’s currently the director of the Ukrainian institute in London. She’s also been involved in Ukrainian language theatre adaptations, and recently published a fascinating and honestly heartbreaking memoir: The Death of a Soldier Told by his Sister, which came out in September this year.
In this extended interview, you’ll hear us go deeper into topics like the Cossack myth, the various repressions Ukraine faced under the Soviet Union, and the elements of nationalism that have long fed into Ukrainian culture.
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Anastasiia: Okay now that we’ve asserted our Ukrainianness we can continue doing this in English.
So, the goal of this episode is to just go through some basic Ukrainian history because the majority of out audience is English speaking from the West and knows very little about Ukraine, which is very understandable.
So, I wanted to begin with a belief that I’ve encountered a lot when I’ve spoke to people in europe, people in the US, it’s that idea thatbefore 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine wasn't really a thing.
No one saw Ukraine as this distinctive state that has actually been trying to assert itself for centuries and decades before that. Is that true?
Olesya: I think if it’s a yes or no answer you know what my answer will be: no it’s not true for sure. But I’d like to start with something slightly different and that’s another misconception that is related to this, which I think we should tackle before we even go to the history side of things.
And that’s this idea that nations with long traditions of statehood should be taken more seriously than so called “ahistoric” nations. We are used to the fact that somehow statelessness is perceived as weakness. Now I would like to disagree with that, especially in relation to Ukraine.
It is precisely the lack of statehood, the fact that historically, Ukrainians have lacked statehood and fought for it so much, and the imperialist repression that shaped Ukrainians into the nation that they are today. Into defiant nation, defiant in the face of repressive occupation from the outside, from the occupiers or the imperial centers.
But also, defiant in the face of authoritarian tendencies that might emerge inside the country as well. The nation that is resilient, that knows how to self-organise, and also, the nation that can be united, that comes together, regardless of its differences because they know that they only have themselves to count on.
We should accept the fact that statelessness for Ukrainians is actually a strength, it’s something that shaped us into what we are.
I mean we could go as far back as we want. We could go back to the fifth century or so when the first mention of the ancestors of Ukrainians, appears.
But I would urge us, when we think of Rus here, of course, we should embrace it as part of our heritage, but we should also remember that we are talking about a polity that is entirely different from a modern nation. And we should resist the temptation of applying modern ideas of national identity to those people of Rus. I'm not sure if it's helpful to read history backwards.
If we talk about the meaning of historical periods then of course the period of Cossacks is very important, especially the mythology around the Cossacks, is very important for Ukrainian understanding of statehood, the traditions of electing your leadership, as opposed to always obeying the Tsar that is imposed on you. The idea of freedoms and rights and so on, that mythology is extremely powerful in the shaping of Ukrainian identity.
Anastasiia: Could you talk a bit more about who they were and what they were doing in these lands?
Olesya: The really nice way that I heard the Cossacks referred to was by Rory Finnin, he refers to the Cossacks as Ukrainian cowboys. The sort of, in charge of these frontiers, the wild runaway peasants, runaway serfs, in pursuit of freedom.
But also frontiersmen, feared by imperial centres, both the Russians and Poles tried to subjugate them, tried to control them, tried to create alliances with them and so on.
Of course they are very romanticised in Ukrainian mythology, and that’s not always very helpful.
But going back to your question, another important thing to mention in terms of this idea of statelessness is something that shapes us is the period when Ukrainians begin to become aware of themselves as Ukrainians. And that's already the 19th century.
And here this idea of national awakening, is developed not by politicians because there isn't a Ukrainian state. But by intellectuals, it’s developed by writers, by poets, by authors.
I don’t know what it was like in your household but definitely in my household and every household I went to as a child, there were three portraits there: Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko and Lesya Ukrainka. And if you think back to the Maidan, those were the three prominent portraits adapted to revolutionary symbols.
And that’s not surprising. That poets, writers, become those who shape imagination of Ukrainian nation. And then the next generation, based on this imagination, is able to will the nation into being.
Anastasiia: Which is why it’s so tragic that every time there were waves of repressions, a huge part of the repressed were the writers and the artists and those people who were imagining Ukraine to become what it is.
Olesya: Because they are the powerful ones. The words create an idea that people hold onto and then shape into political manifestos.
And that's the next stage, the stage when the empires collapse, the stage of what is known in Ukrainian history as Ukrainian Revolution.
Now, that expression is not necessarily something that people in the West are familiar with. And the period between 1917 and 1921 is known in the West, usually as the Russian civil wars.
But of course, things happened outside of Russia too. And a lot happened in Ukraine in that period. State building projects were competing against one another, and they were so diverse, from monarchy to anarchy.
That was the period of Ukrainian Revolution. This was the period of intense state building. Ukrainian People's Republic known by its Ukrainian acronym UNR, emerged in this period. It was short-lived. It didn't last very long.
Anastasiia: And why was that?
Olesya: For very complicated reasons. And one of the reasons I would suggest is, we sometimes think of it, I think unfairly as a failed state. Now, we need to ask ourselves what those leaders were hoping to achieve. Did they fail in our objectives? Perhaps not.
But one of the reasons I think why it didn't last very long is because as is so often the case in Ukrainian history, the territory of Ukraine was perceived as a buffer zone. It was perceived as a buffer zone. And I think Ukrainian state building aspirations was sacrificed to the support of a stronger Poland at the time.
So, the buffer zone between The Red Threat of the Bolsheviks and Europe proper. Europe proper began with Poland essentially. So, that's one of the reasons.
But what I was trying to say was, what it did achieve, The Ukrainian People’s Republic, is I think it achieved an irreversible process. The process where Ukrainians understood that western and eastern lands of Ukraine can be united into one state, and they can perceive themselves as citizens of that state. And that they are very distinct from Russia and from other neighbours as well. That they have their own separate political identity.
And that is something I think that is in place very much today. And eventually, the Bolsheviks defeated the UNR, the Ukrainian People's Republic. But they still had to understand, they had to realise that autonomy is extremely important for Ukrainians. And they had to grant it, and they granted it in the shape of Ukrainian Socialist Republic.
So, Ukraine and Ukrainians did not appear in 1991.
Anastasiia: It wasn’t created by Lenin, or by Russia, or…
Olesya: Lenin had to recognise that it existed, and that's why the Ukrainian SSR had to come into existence as well.
And also, in 1991, I think something else that I think people don't quite realise is that 92% of Ukrainian population supported the Declaration of Independence in the national referendum, 92%, even in Crimea. And 84% of the electorate took part in the vote. And that’s 32 million people. And a week later, the Soviet Union collapsed.
So, you know, it’s obvious that the will of the people to be independent, to no longer stay in this forced union of republics was very clear at that time.
And I think it's really unsurprising that Putin has spoken about the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest tragedy of the 20th century, not the Second World War, which he does like to discuss a lot about, not the Holocaust, but specifically the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Because that was the time when these republics and these nations drifted away from the Imperial Centre, and that was the time when it became absolutely obvious that the power of that imperial centre, of the leadership, collapsed. It was no longer relevant.
Anastasiia: Another thing that I've encountered while discussing Ukraine with people, and you don’t even need to start these conversions you just hear them on a daily basis, is this idea that Ukraine and Russia are “brotherly nations”. And that this war is like “a messy divorce”.
I've heard that from academics in the West. You see this all the time. And Ukrainians every single day scream their lungs out, explaining why that's not right. And of course very often we’re just dismissed because we are biased and emotional.
But, now that we have this completely safe Ukrainian space to discuss this, let's explain to people why exactly we're screaming our lungs out when people say that. What’s wrong with that statement? Why are we not “brotherly nations”?
Olesya: Okay. Let's begin with being emotional because there's absolutely nothing wrong with being emotional when we discuss Russia's war in Ukraine, which is extremely brutal and causing so much pain, devastation, and death.
I think it's odd not to be emotional when we talk about these things. It has been something that I noticed and my colleagues noticed as well. When the Ukrainian voice, whether that's someone who's an expert on Ukraine or you know, a displaced Ukrainian or someone in the military is invited, they are expected to be emotional, and not expected to be rational.
And their voices are followed by an “objective”, and I'm here pointing to inverted commas, “objective”, non-Ukrainian specialist. Let's just accept the fact that being emotional is absolutely understandable and natural and indeed perfectly normal in this situation.
Now coming back to your question of “brotherly nations”, I don't like family analogies, not least because they tend to be gendered. So, if you look at this messy divorce, who's the wife? My work on gender in wartime really helped me understand a lot of dynamics that are happening.
If we have to use an analogy, I think I would use an analogy of an unruly neighbour that bursts into your house, uninvited, takes your possessions, destroys some of them, threatens your life, and then says that he does all of this out of love. That’s probably a closer analogy.
The portrayal of Russians and Ukrainians as brotherly nations was popularised in the USSR, because the Soviet leadership had to accept the existence of Ukrainians as a separate nation. They could no longer do what the imperialist Russia did, sort of portraying so-called “little Russians” as just another tribe.
They had to accept that they were a separate nation with very separate identity. But at the same time, they tried to manage, control, restrict state building aspirations. They could only go that far.In allowing this expression of separate identity.
And one way to do that was to present Ukrainians as younger brothers. And of course, what do you have to do with a younger brother? You have to educate him, you have to subjugate them, and you have to manage and control him.
But really, I think the purpose of that claim is really to suggest that we're, somehow, one nation.
And I have heard so many well-meaning journalists over the past six months, ask me, “So, tell me, what is the difference between Russians and Ukrainians?”
I struggle to answer that question in the same way as I would struggle to answer a question if someone asked me, “Tell me what's the difference between France and Germany?”
And more so than say Canada in the US or Scotland and England, because at least the latter, they have a shared language, whereas Ukraine has a different language and when Russians say, “Wow, it's just a variation of the Russian language”-
Anastasiia: That's not true.
Olesya: Well, switch to Ukrainian and speak to them in Ukrainian and see if they understand.
I think what I'm trying to emphasise here is that, of course, Ukrainians share cultural traits with Russians, with Poles, with Belarusians, with all of their neighbours. And that's what happens in every country. You have a lot of things in common with your neighbours.
But the crucial thing for Ukraine is that it's always been inherently multilingual and multi-ethnic. And even though Stalin deported the Poles and the Crimean Tatars, vast Jewish population essentially perished in the Shoah during the Second World War.
Ukraine continues to be very diverse, and it continues to be very proud of its diversity. And the Russian government has put a lot of effort into presenting this diversity as division.
And sadly, the international media has picked up on this, adopted this sort of myth of seeing Ukraine as divided rather than diverse, but they've been proved very wrong since the 24th of February. Ukrainians, Tatars, Roma, Greeks, Russians being led by a president of Jewish origin, putting up really fierce resistance. In defence of their civic nation, civic political nation.
In defence of their right to speak freely in any language that they wish to speak in. And we see that civic patriotism really flourishing at the moment, I think. In the last six months of full scale invasion, people of all nationalities, political affiliations, social backgrounds, they all come together to defend statehood because statehood means protection of rights.
And if you fight to protect your fellow citizens rights, You know that you're also fighting to protect your own rights.
I also think that what Ukrainians are doing at the moment, essentially making the world reconsider the meaning of nationalism. And it's not surprising that we’re used to thinking about it in very negative terms because the 20th century has presented us with examples of nationalism that were very harmful.
But what we’re seeing now is not nationalism based on ethnic affiliation. It is an appreciation of a civic political nation, and that's one of the lessons I think the world can learn from Ukraine.
Anastasiia: I would often say that we need a new definition. We need to redefine what nationalism is in this sort of context, because I think it's a completely different phenomenon and it's more of a matter of survival.
Olesya: It'll help us to think differently about what political nation is versus nation based on ideas of shared blood.
Anastasiia: Let's talk a bit more about the repressions that Ukraine has had during the Soviet time. That's probably my favourite part of our history paradoxically, because despite all of these various waves that we have and keep having, we still always persevered.
I even have a tattoo devoted to it. I have a tattoo of the letter Ї. And I got it because I had a period of my time when I was obsessed with the topic of Samvydav. And I remember reading about it and there was this story, this anecdote, that because of course there were no Ukrainian typewriters, our Samvydav authors had to use 1 instead of Ї because there was no other way to write.
And that just seemed so annoying to me. I was like, “This fricking letter, didn't get spotlights.”
Olesya: I know this is no comparison, but I get annoyed daily when Microsoft Word changes or underlines all my text in Ukrainian because it thinks it's Russian.
Anastasiia: Yeah. Yeah. If you Kyiv or Odessa or any other, or Dnipro, that's gonna try to change it into the Russian spelling.
Olesya: Actually mine doesn't change it anymore, so there you go. It’s learned something.
Anastasiia: Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, this was all a lead up to us discussing Holodomor, and then the deportation of Tatars and all of those, really traumatic experiences we've had during the Soviet era.
Olesya: Yeah. I mean, it's really sad that these episodes of trauma that have been so vital for Ukrainians are so poorly understood in the West.
I mean there’s better and better awareness now. And I think that relates to the fact that Ukrainian voices have not been, not just listened to, but have not been taken seriously.
They've often been so much quieter than the voices coming out of Moscow. And that's not because they haven't tried to be louder, but I think it's also about those who listened, who do we listen to?
Why was it during the Maidan protests that I so often, and at least at the beginning, encountered reporters reporting from Moscow about what's happening in Kyiv and not from Kyiv? And the same was true in the early months, if not years, of Russia's aggression in Donbas.
So, it's this idea of not hearing the stories that come out of Ukraine and not giving them a platform, not trusting Ukrainians with their knowledge of history.
And I have taught the history of East Central Europe and usually, the USSR, for the last 10 years or so in different British universities. I taught two modules on Ukraine. And in both cases, they were in universities that already had provisions for the study of Ukraine.
Otherwise, Ukraine just falls between the cracks. It's not studied when you study Russian history, it's not studied when you study East European history, it's sort of invisible. And for that reason, we don't know about the Holodomor. People around the world, simply don't know what it was. They don't know that millions were killed in man-made famine by Stalin in the 1930s.
Of course, the same applies to the horrendous deportations of the Crimean Tartars. Very few people, I think, realise that not only were they brutally deported, accused, of one mass collaboration during the Second World War, but they were also not allowed to return to their homeland until the late eighties, early nineties.
For so long they were not even able to move back. And when they did move back, it was a struggle to stay.
And of course, after 2014, the same thing started again. They were being targeted by the new occupying authorities. And that's why it's so important to amplify their voices and to speak about these issues and I’m very grateful that you’re doing that. Precisely that.
Anastasiia: Okay, well, let's talk about a charged topic, which is the topic of language. I grew up in a Russian-speaking family. We're all from Kherson, from the south.
Very few people spoke Ukrainian around me. My distinct memory is being in school in Kyiv, it was a Ukrainian school. That's how I learned Ukrainian.
Everyone was by default Russian-speaking. And then there was this one girl who only spoke Ukrainian, and everybody knew who she was, because she did.
Now that I think about it, that’s ridiculous. Because this was already during the Maidan time (when Maidan happened, I was a baby, I was like 11 or 12). So, this was during Maidan, and it was still so bad. So, what's behind this kind of peculiar situation we have with language? Why is it the thing that we constantly talk about, constantly fight about? Why?
Olesya: You told me your story, and I'll tell you mine.
I come from Lviv, totally Ukrainian speaking family, and a completely Ukrainian-speaking region. And I went to school in 1991, so I wasn't a baby during the Maidan. Now I'm showing my age.
But in 1991, Ukraine was already independent. And actually, Russian wasn't even taught in my school anymore.
But I grew up bilingual, because I was surrounded by Russian absolutely everywhere. Russian is widely spoken in Ukraine, all ofUkraine, because of the systematic russification of the population of Ukraine. And this russification happened in the Russian Empire and it continued in the USSR.
It was handled differently: in the Russian Empire, you had laws banning Ukrainian language publications in order to prevent the development of literary life.
In the USSR, it was done differently, speaking Ukrainian would diminish your career prospects, and for that reason, it’s really not surprising that a lot of people chose to switch to Russian, at least at work, at least professionally, in order to improve their career choices.
And so, Ukrainian language and not Russian language has been threatened historically.
This started to change, with the Maidan Revolution and onwards, because the Ukrainian state also started to invest more into the development of Ukrainian language: textbooks, books, translations. But also, music, entertainment, dubbing blockbusters into Ukrainian, and not just buying the Russian versions instead.
But as is often the case with Russia, this sort of flourishing of Ukrainian language products has been weaponized by misinformation campaigns. And so rather than acknowledging the damage that's been done to the Ukrainian language by imperialist policies, be it the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, the Russian leadership started to talk about Russian language being threatened in Ukraine.
Of course, I think it's very important to point out that Russian speakers find it difficult to speak Russian in Russia, not in Ukraine. That's where expression is threatened. Full stop.
Since we're discussing misconceptions, Russophone speakers are so often assumed to be Russians. And I think that's one of the major misconceptions and something that the Kremlin, I think has tried its very worst to popularise as well.
But as all of these myths propagated by the Kremlin, this one backfired as well. And it backfired when the so-called “Russian world” arrived into russophone cities by shelling civilians, predominantly russophone civilians. Kharkiv, that is predominantly Russian speaking, that has been shelled every single day since the start of full-scale invasion.
So a campaign that pretends to liberate Russian speakers, backfired big time. And for me, the most symbolic moment of that is the Ukrainian soldiers telling the Russian warship where to go, in Russian.
And I also really appreciated that now, you know that phrase that has become the kind of ubiquitous slogan of Ukrainian defiance, is spelled in Ukrainian, Ukrainian transliteration.
So it's of just a wonderful, typical Ukrainian moment when things merge and conflate and become their own.
Anastasiia: You said that the campaign backfired. It just also showed the real truth of what it was, and the truth was that this was never about language.
Olesya: Absolutely. Of course, it revealed more of the lies that were being spread by the Kremlin and this full-scale invasion.
This misunderstanding of Ukraine as a multilingual nation deprives it of agency, I think, around the world. It's really important for us to keep explaining to people that multilingualism, bilingualism, is a resource that we celebrate and that we use very effectively.
And it's particularly important to explain it to nations that are monolingual.
But we need to keep explaining that. And we need to keep explaining that russophone Ukrainians are not Russians, just as Scotts, Canadians, Australians and other English-speaking nations are not English. And if you said that they were… Oof. I think you’d upset a lot of people. So, yeah, we just have to ensure that Russia stops weaponizing our multilingualism.
Anastasiia: There are some Ukrainians who say this kind of wave of Ukrainianisation that we're going through, that it's kind of, not necessarily fake, but that it's like almost too much because, “Why should we care that much? It's the Kremlin who wants us to care, but we actually should just not care to be defiant” and that, “There's so many Russian speaking soldiers who are dying for this country”.
And I remember seeing one discussion in which the person who disagreed with that said, “If you are lying in a trench, and someone from the outside addresses you in Russian versus in Ukrainian, your reaction is gonna be extremely different.
So when you are there and when you're fighting, it’s literally one of your defence mechanisms, is surrounding yourself with your language.
Olesya: Yeah. And also we've seen these memes and jokes about words that are extremely difficult for Russian, Russian speakers to pronounce. And that's one way to weed out potential saboteurs, using our multilingualism to our advantage.
But as a Ukrainian speaker, I don't dare tell russophone Ukrainians what language they should choose. It's up to them to choose the language, and I truly believe that more and more people will choose Ukrainian from now on.
Anastasiia: And they are, and many of them are doing that out of their own initiative, and that's fantastic.
So, we just celebrated our Independence Day, but it really feels to me like all of these celebrations are just another milestone in this long road to achieving independence because it feels like we aren't truly independent.
It's so, so sad that we've had thousands and thousands of our ancestors die fighting for us to get it. And here we are a hundred years later, still doing the same freaking thing.
Olesya: Yeah. There’s this idea that somehow, we got it easy in 1991. That we didn't have to fight for it in 1991, therefore, we had to fight for it since, and especially now.
I don't agree with that. I don't think it was achieved easily because I think that would be insulting to all those people who did spend decades, if not centuries, fighting for Ukrainian statehood in lots of different ways, from hunger strikes and protests, and being thrown in jail, to singing carols in Ukrainian at Christmas time in secret and passing on that identity to the next generation.
And also the role of the diaspora is so huge. I mean, they continued to pressurise the governments when the Soviet Union was still around, you know, to recognize the abuses of power and mistreatment of the population and the recognition of Ukraine.
Anastasiia: And there was also another revolution before we gained our independence, which I wanted to talk about because even people in Ukraine, not a lot of them know.
Olesya: Exactly the Revolution on Granite you're probably referring to. So, the 1990s, student protests, hunger strikes, but also even episodes that are even less known, such as minor strikes in the nineties and localised demonstrations.
Essentially Ukrainians are very good at making their voices heard. We’re pretty patient, but when our patience is tested we take to the streets and we stand for our rights.
But when you say, “We’re just fighting for the same thing again”, I think we have achieved independence. It’s there. And you and your generation are the best proof of that.
We have this generation of Ukrainians that do not remember firsthand, do not have experience of the Soviet Union. They don't have the habit of keeping their heads down. It’s not part of their nature. They’re free citizens, they're free citizens of a free state. And we see that really prominently now.
Every time I come back I’m a bit of an outsider, so I can see the changes probably a bit more than people who are inside the country. And these tendencies are getting stronger and stronger, I think all the time, especially now, because the price that we're paying for this freedom is extraordinarily high.
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Jakub: Thank you for subscribing to Power Lines. Your support helps us make this show possible, so we really appreciate it.
Anastasiia: Power lines is a partnership between the Kyiv Independent and Message Heard. It was produced by Bea Duncan, Harry Stott and Talia Augustidis. The executive producer is Sandra Ferrari. The theme music is by Tom Biddle and Alfie Godfrey.