1 Opinion You can’t understand the war in

2 Ukraine without knowing history

3 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/22/timothy-snyder-ukraine-russia-
4 war-history/

5 Timothy Snyder is the Levin professor of history at Yale University and the author
6 of “The Road to Unfreedom” and “Bloodlands.” His updated audio edition of
7 “On Tyranny” includes 20 new lessons about Ukraine.

8 Teaching a lecture class on Ukrainian history last fall, I felt a touch of the surreal.
9 The war in Ukraine had been going on for half a year when I began. A nuclear
10 power had attacked a state that had given up its nuclear weapons. An empire was
11 trying to halt European integration. A tyranny was attempting to crush a
12 neighboring democracy. On occupied territories, Russia perpetrated genocidal
13 atrocities with clear expressions of genocidal intent.

14 And yet, Ukraine was fighting back. Ukrainians resisted the nuclear blackmail,
15 scorned the vaunted empire and took risks for their democracy. At Kyiv, Kharkiv
16 and, later, Kherson, they beat back the Russians, halting the torture, the murder and
17 the deportation.

18 We were at a historical turning point. But where was the history? The television
19 screens were full of Ukraine day in and day out, and the one thing any viewer
20 could say with confidence was that the commentators had never studied Ukraine. I
21 heard from my former students, now in government or in journalism, that they
22 were glad to have taken Eastern European history. They said that they were a little
23 less surprised than others by the war; that they had more reference points.

24 The contrast between the historical importance of this war and the lack of
25 coursework in history reveals a larger problem. We know too little history. We
26 have designed education to be about technical questions: the how of the world.
27 And solving everyday problems is very important.

28 But if we deprive ourselves of history, everything is a surprise: 9/11, the financial

29 crisis, the storming of the Capitol, the invasion of Ukraine. When we are shocked
30 out of the everyday but have no history, we grope for reference points, and become
31 vulnerable to people who give us easy answers. The past then becomes a realm of
32 myth, in which those with power generate narratives most convenient to
33 themselves.

34 Russian President Vladimir Putin told a story about the past that had nothing to do
35 with history. Russia and Ukraine, according to him, were conceived together in a
36 ruler’s baptism a thousand years ago. They shared the same culture, and therefore
37 should be ruled by the same person. If anything else seemed to happen, it was not
38 really history. Should Ukrainians not believe that they were Russians, this was the
39 nefarious work of outsiders. Putin not only said such things; he had memory
40 laws passed to prevent Russians from being challenged by history, and even had
41 the word “Ukraine” stricken from textbooks.

42 As logic, this is circular; and as politics, it is tyrannical. If I can claim that

43 Canadians are Americans because they speak the same language, or because we
44 share a common history, that would strike us as an idiotic reason to order an
45 invasion. When a dictator claims the power to define other people’s identity, then
46 the question of their own freedom never arises. If identity is frozen forever at the
47 whim of a ruler, citizens soon find themselves without choices.

48 As we observe where this logic led Russians, we begin to question the validity of
49 such stories. But it shouldn’t have taken such an obvious atrocity for us to doubt.
50 Until recently, far too many commentators were happy to go along with Putin:
51 Russia and Ukraine were somehow eternally alike, people who spoke Russian were
52 somehow Russians, culture as defined by a dictator was destiny.

53 It was surreal in a different way when millions of people joined my class online.
54 Americans had recognized that something was wrong with the Russian myth but
55 did not how to fill the gap. It was heartening to hear, in the thousands of emails I
56 received, that the gap could be filled by history. It was a lively semester; history
57 was getting the students thinking. When we think historically, we recognize that
58 political communities rise and fall, and that human choice — including the
59 perverse choices of militarist tyrants — is always part of the story. We get better at
60 taking in events as they come. We are awakened to the experience of others. For
61 me personally, it was touching to hear from Ukrainians, including soldiers on the
62 front line, who were listening to the class online.

63 Ukrainian history makes today’s world make more sense. Our entire Western
64 civilization trajectory, from the Greeks forward, is clearer if we understand
65 that Athens was fed by what is now southern Ukraine. The fantastic history of the
66 Vikings becomes still more so when we understand that they founded a state in
67 Kyiv. The age of exploration takes on a new dimension when we recognize that
68 Polish and Russian powers made their empires by pushing east into the Eurasian
69 landmass, where they ultimately met in Ukraine. The age of empire is completed
70 by Nazi and Soviet neo-imperial projects, both of which had their focus in Ukraine.
71 That horribly bloody confrontation made Ukraine the most dangerous place in the
72 world during the totalitarian era of 1933 to 1945. That and the Russification that
73 followed have made the story of Ukraine difficult to tell, including for Ukrainians.

74 Until now, that is. Practically everything I said in my lectures came from the work
75 of Ukrainian historians. Yaroslav Hrytsak, one of the best of them, has said for
76 decades that Ukraine will survive once a new generation comes into its own. This
77 has now happened, not only in my own field, but in journalism, civil society,
78 business and politics. Ukraine is different from Russia thanks to its distinct history,
79 including the history of these past 30 years, since the end of the Soviet Union.
80 While Putin has pushed his country into the quicksand of myth, Ukrainians — with
81 their votes, their protests and their defiance — have pushed their way into a
82 confident sense of who they are.

83 As they make history, they remind us that we need history to understand them
84 better, to understand this war better — and also understand ourselves better. Like
85 the Ukrainians, we are living through a historical turning point. Like them, we will
86 need to learn history and defy myth to make it to a democratic future.