Timothy Snyder reconstitui a história da Ucrânia e desmente as deformações atuais da sua história

 Kyiv's ancient normality (redux) 

A little history can help us see through the myths 

Timothy Snyder 

Feb 21, 2022

Note to subscribers: today has been an unusually busy day for me, chiefly thanks to Ukrainian matters. Rather than keep everyone in the breathless present, I wanted to share a longer reflection about the past. In my haste, though, I made some typos, which I hope to have corrected in this version. Thanks for your patience. Another article from today, about the history of provocations, is here. And now for the essay, “Kyiv’s ancient normality.”…

More than a thousand years ago, Viking slavers found a route they were seeking to the south.  It followed the Dnipro River through a trading post called Kyiv, then down through rapids even they could not master.  They had slaves carry the boats, and left runes on the riverbank to mark their dead.  These Vikings called themselves the Rus.

The ancient domain of Khazaria was breaking up.  The Khazars had stopped the advance of Islam in the Caucasus in the eighth century, at around the same time as the Battle of Tours.  Some or all of the Khazar elite converted to Judaism.  The Vikings supplanted the Khazars as the tribute collectors of Kyiv, merging customs and vocabulary.  They called their leaders "khagans."

As the Vikings came to understand, conversion to a monotheistic religion could mean control of territory.  The pagan Rus apparently considered Judaism and Islam before converting to Christianity.  The ruler believed to have converted, Valdemar (or Volodymyr, who Russians, much later, called Vladimir), had first ruled Kyiv as a pagan.  According to Arab sources, he had earlier ruled another city as a Muslim.

Colorful this is, but normal.  Vikings contributed to state formation throughout Europe, at the cusp of millennial conversions.  Kyivan Rus was normal in its marital politics, sending a princess to marry the king of France.  Its succession struggles were typical of the region, as was the inability to resist the Mongols in the early 1240s.

Thereafter most lands of Rus were gathered by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.  This was in a certain sense also normal: Lithuania was the biggest country in Europe.  Kyiv then passed a civilizational package to Vilnius.  Christianity had brought Church Slavonic to Kyiv.  Created in Byzantium to convert Slavs in Moravia, Church Slavonic was then adopted in Bulgaria and in Kyivan Rus.  In Rus it provided the basis for a legal language, now borrowed by Lithuania.

Lithuania merged with Poland.  Ruled from Vilnius and then Warsaw in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Kyiv remained a center of European trends.  It was touched by the renaissance language question: ancient or modern?  In western Europe, vernaculars triumphed over Latin.  In Kyiv matters were as usual richer in complication: Latin came to rival Church Slavonic as an ancient option, and the Polish vernacular eclipsed the Ukrainian one among elites.  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the language question was answered by Polish.  It was replaced by Russian as the elite language in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  In the twenty-first, Russian has yielded pride of place in politics and literature to Ukrainian.  The language question found a typical answer.

Kyiv and surrounding lands were touched by the Reformation: Ukraine was in this sense typical, but colorfully so.  Elsewhere the Reformation pitted Protestantism against a revived Roman Catholicism.  In Ukraine, the dominant religion was eastern Christianity, or Orthodoxy.  But rich Ukrainian magnates invited Protestants to build churches, and incoming Polish nobles were Roman Catholics.  In 1596 an attempt was made to merge Orthodoxy and Catholicism, which led to yet another church, the Uniate, or Greek Catholic.

The religious wars that followed were typical, if intensified by an accumulation of factors.  The Ukrainian-speaking peasantry was oppressed in order to generate an agricultural surplus for Polish-speaking landlords.  The elite in the country spoke a different language and practiced a different religion from the bulk of the population.  The Cossacks, free men who had served as effective cavalry in the extraordinary Polish-Lithuanian army of the day, rebelled in 1648.  They took all of these Ukrainian causes as their own. 

Some northeasterly territories of old Rus followed a different pattern after the Mongol invasion.  From a new city, Moscow (which had not existed under Rus) princes gained authority by collecting tribute for the Mongols.  A new entity, Muscovy, asserted its independence as the western Mongol empire fragmented.  It first moved south, then east, in an extraordinary campaign of expansion.  In 1648, a Russian explorer reached the Pacific, as the Cossack rebellion began -- some seven thousand kilometers away.  The stalemate between Poland-Lithuania and the Cossacks allowed Muscovy to turn its power west and gain territory.

When Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy made peace, in the late seventeenth century, Kyiv lay on the Muscovite side.  Its academy was Russia's only institution of higher education, and its graduates were valued in Russia.  Kyivan churchmen told their new rulers that Ukraine and Russia shared a common history; that seemed to give them the right to tell it.  Muscovy was renamed the "Russian Empire" in 1721 by reference to ancient Rus, which had been defunct for half a millennium at that point.  Between 1772 and 1795, Poland-Lithuania was partitioned out of existence, and the Russian empress (herself a German), proclaimed that she had restored what had been taken away: again, the myth of a restored Rus.  In the late nineteenth century, Russian historians offered a similar story, one which downplayed the Asian side of Russian history, and the seven hundred years in which Kyiv had existed beyond Russia.  This is more or less the story that Putin tells today. 

In actual history, Ukraine never ceased to be a question.  A national revival began in the Russian Empire not long after the remnants of Cossack institutions were dissolved.  In the nineteenth century, its center was Kyiv. Bans on the use of the Ukrainian language in the Russian Empire pushed the revival to the Habsburg monarchy, where it was aided by a free press and free elections.  Ukrainian life continued in Poland after the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918.

After the First World War, Ukrainians tried to establish a state on the ruins of both empires.  The attempt was typical for the time and place, but the difficulties were extreme.  Ukrainians found themselves amidst an unenviable crossfire of Russian Whites, the Red Army, and the Polish Army.  Much of the "Russian civil war" was fought in Ukraine; by its exhausting end, the Bolsheviks needed some answer to the Ukrainian question.  That is why the USSR took the form that it did in 1922, a nominal federation of national republics.  When Boris Yeltsin removed Russia from the USSR in 1991, he signed an agreement with Ukrainian and Belarusian Soviet leaders, representing the official founding entities of the USSR.

Ukraine was the deadliest place in the world during the time when Hitler and Stalin were in power, between 1933 and 1945. It was seen as a breadbasket from both Moscow and Berlin.  Collectivization of agriculture led to a political famine that killed about four million people in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-1933.  A similar desire to redirect Ukrainian food supplies animated Hitler's war planning.  The first major German mass shooting of Jews, at Kamianats' Podils'kyi, took place in Ukraine.  The largest instance of the Holocaust by bullets, at Babyn Iar, was the murder of Kyiv Jews. 

Stalin and Hitler began the Second World War as de facto allies against Poland.  In 1939, they agreed that Poland would be divided and its eastern half controlled by the USSR.  In the end, those same formerly Polish (west Ukrainian) territories were added to Soviet Ukraine in 1945, as were some lands from Czechoslovakia .  Crimea was transferred to Ukraine nine years later.  In this way, the Soviet Union formed the boundaries of Ukraine, just as it formed the boundaries of Russia, and of all of its component republics. 

The histories of Ukraine and Russia are of course related, via the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire, and via Orthodox religion, and much else. The modern Ukrainian and Russian nations are both still in formation, and entanglements between them are to be expected, now and into the future. But Russia is, in its early expansion and contemporary geography, a country deeply connected to Asia; this is not true of Ukraine. The history of Kyiv and surrounding lands embraces certain European trends that are less pronounced in Russia.  Poland and Lithuania and the Jews are indispensable referents for any account of the Ukrainian past.  Ukraine cannot be understood without the European factors of expansive Lithuania and Poland, of renaissance, of Reformation, of national revival, of attempts at national statehood.  The landmarks of the world wars are planted deeply in both countries, but especially so in Ukraine. 

The history of Kyiv is, so to speak, normal in the extreme.  It falls easily into a normal European periodization.  The additional complexity and intensity of these typical experiences can help us see the whole of European history more clearly.  Some of these references are different, or absent, in Russia.  This can make it difficult for Russians (even in good faith) to interpret Ukrainian history, or the history that is "shared": the “same” event, for example the Bolshevik revolution or Stalinism, can look different from different perspectives. 

The myth of eternal brotherhood, now offered in bad faith by the Russian president, must be understood in the categories of politics rather than history.  But a little bit of history can help us to see the bad faith, and to understand the politics.

Novas recomendacoes bibliografias a quem precisa ler mais um pouco: Timothy Snyder

Nosso país, esta humilde republiqueta a centro-leste da América do Sul, está se aproximando perigosamente dos regimes iliberais, ou antiliberais, que estão surgindo na Europa e em outros lugares.
Alguns beócios até se congratulam com essa virada autoritária para a direita, passando a escolher como aliados os inimigos da democracia, dos direitos humanos e das liberdades em geral que pululam em diversas partes do continente europeu, mas que também podem estar se espalhando pelo hemisfério americano.
Continuando meu trabalho de assessoramento bibliográfico a quem precisa ler mais um pouco para não ficar repetindo bobagens – como o nazismo de esquerda, por exemplo, ou essa coisa que só a adesão beata ao Deus cristão define as identidades nacionais dos povos modernos –, coloco abaixo mais uma recomendação de leitura.
Se eu fosse um professor exigente, iria pedir resenha dos livros que recomendo como dever de casa, mas vou apenas fazer a recomendação bibliográfica.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 16 de abril de 2019

Na contramão da liberdade

A guinada autoritária nas democracias contemporâneas

by Timothy Snyder

Synopsis 

Em uma época em que a ascensão do populismo e do autoritarismo assombra a democracia, Snyder mergulha na história russa, ucraniana, europeia e norte-americana para entender como chegamos aqui.

Na contramão da liberdade é a tentativa de Timothy Snyder de entender o novo tipo de autoritarismo que emergiu de um conjunto de eventos interligados mundialmente, da Rússia aos Estados Unidos, em uma época em que a factualidade em si foi posta em xeque.
Essa vigorosa obra de história contemporânea é baseada em uma vasta pesquisa e atravessada pela experiência pessoal do autor. Costurando fontes em russo, ucraniano, polonês, alemão, francês e inglês, Snyder vai além das manchetes para expor a verdadeira natureza da ameaça à democracia e aos direitos individuais.
Cada capítulo é dedicado a um ano e a um episódio em particular — a volta do pensamento totalitário (2011); o colapso da política democrática na Rússia (2012); o ataque russo à União Europeia (2013); a revolução na Ucrânia e a subsequente invasão russa (2014); a difusão da ficção política na Rússia, na Europa e nos Estados Unidos (2015); e a eleição de Donald Trump para a presidência norte-americana (2016).

"Estamos rapidamente caminhando para o fascismo. Snyder nos deixa sem ilusões sobre nós mesmos." — Svetlana Aleksiévitch, vencedora do prêmio Nobel de literatura em 2015

"Uma análise brilhante e perturbadora, indispensável para entender a crise política que assola o mundo." — Yuval Noah Harari, autor de Sapiens e Homo Deus

NONFICTION

Are We Traveling the ‘Road to Unfreedom’?

By Margaret MacMillan

The New York Times Book Reviews, May 9, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/books/review/road-to-unfreedom-timothy-snyder.html?emc=edit_bk_20180511&nl=book-review&nl_art=&nlid=13125452edit_bk_20180511&ref=headline&te=1

THE ROAD TO UNFREEDOM 
Russia, Europe, America
By Timothy Snyder
359 pp. Tim Duggan Books. $27.

Historians of the first half of the 20th century take little pleasure in today’s renewed interest in their subject. We don’t like the parallels between the West then and now: the rise of intolerant nationalist right-wing parties; the loss of faith in democratic institutions and the longing for a strong leader; the demonization of minorities like Jews or Muslims; or the unwillingness or inability of democracies to work together.

We are living in dangerous times, Timothy Snyder argues forcefully and eloquently in his new book, “The Road to Unfreedom.” Too many of us, leaders and followers, are irresponsible, rejecting ideas that don’t fit our preconceptions, refusing discussion and rejecting compromise. Worse, we are prepared to deny the humanity and rights of others. In his chilling “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” Snyder explored the ghastly consequences of tyranny and the breakdown of human values and norms in the center of Europe.

The road to unfreedom, as Snyder sees it, is one that runs right over the Enlightenment faith in reason and the reasonableness of others — the very underpinning, that is, of our institutions and values. Recent examples, found around the world, demonstrate both how important conventions and mutual respect are as a way of maintaining order and civility — and how easily and carelessly they can be smashed. Just think of President Trump’s regular impugning of the loyalty of those who work for the American government, in the F.B.I., for example.

So many of us no longer care, as we should, about understanding ourselves and our pasts as complex and ambiguous. Rather we look for comforting stories that claim to explain where we came from and where we are going. Such stories relieve us of the need to think and serve to create powerful identities. They also serve the authoritarian leader who rides them to power.

Snyder makes a valuable distinction between the narratives of inevitability and those of eternity. The former are like Marxism or faith in the triumph of the free market: They say that history is moving inexorably toward a clear end. The latter do not see progress but an endless cycle of humiliation, death and rebirth that repeats itself. Not surprisingly these often draw on powerful religious iconography. Both, as Snyder points out, produce intolerance of those who disagree. By questioning the narrative’s supposed truth, you are removing yourself from the community of true believers.

Liberal democracy is being undermined from within, but not only from within. In addition to the general malaise Snyder identifies, “The Road to Unfreedom” also points to human agency — in particular that of Vladimir Putin. At home and abroad Putin has willing collaborators and “useful idiots,” as Lenin supposedly called them, who think Putin means well or can be won over. Yet the evidence is that Putin is ruthless in his determination to hang on to power and destroy those he perceives as enemies of Russia, a large group. He has used covert and not so covert means (think of the “volunteers” in eastern Ukraine who drove Russian Army trucks) to destabilize neighboring governments and to stir up dissent in countries from France to the United States. Within Russia, as recent elections illustrate, he bends the Russian people to his will through a mixture of coercion and persuasion. As Snyder says in one of his incisive comments, Putin’s dominance is based on “lies so enormous that they could not be doubted, because doubting them would mean doubting everything.”

To understand Putin, Snyder argues persuasively, you must understand his ideas. On examination these are a strange and toxic mixture of fascism, religion and 19th-century notions about race and the struggle for survival. His pronounced use of sexual imagery would also interest Freud. There is a stress on power and virility and corresponding fears of sexual nonconformity. Putin and his obedient press regularly attack gays and gay rights as part of a Western conspiracy to destroy Russia. When Ukrainians turned out in massive protests in 2014 against their corrupt pro-Russian dictator Viktor Yanukovych, the Russian press claimed that behind the organization there was an L.G.B.T. lobby and warned of a “homodictatorship.”

One of the key thinkers venerated by Putin and his circle is a hitherto obscure Russian fascist, Ivan Ilyin, whose views are absurd but terrifying in their implications. God, Ilyin says, made a mess of the world but fortunately there was one pure and innocent being — the Russian nation. Whatever Russia did, and does, to defend itself is legitimate. One day it will find its redeemer — inevitably a strong and virile man — and triumph. (As Snyder points out, there is an insuperable dilemma: What happens when the redeemer dies?) Wearing the mantle of the redeemer, Putin will wage war on Russia’s enemies: namely, his own citizens who want democratic rights; Ukrainians and other neighbors who want independent states; or the European Union and the United States because they offer the temptations of another way of life. Fortunately (this theory goes) both the great rivals are decadent and worn out and doomed to vanish, with some help from Russia, into the dustbin of history.

In 2013 Russia’s foreign minister unveiled an official “foreign policy concept,” which foretold a bitter competition for resources and space across the world. Eurasia would emerge as a “unified humanitarian space” from the Atlantic to the Pacific and at its core would be the great power of Russia. In the words of another of Putin’s favorite thinkers, Lev Gumilev, Russia possesses a vital energy, “passionarity.” Here we get into L. Ron Hubbard territory. Each nation in the world, as defined in the discredited 19th-century racial sense, is the product of cosmic rays. Since the Russian ray came late in time, Russians are young and brimming with energy.

Knowing relatively little about Putin’s private views or about who really has influence over him, it is hard to tell if he actually believes such stuff or whether he uses it as compensation for Russia’s many and manifest weaknesses. What is clear is that he is prepared to inflict as much damage as he can get away with on Russia’s enemies and he has had considerable success.

Snyder set out to write a book about Russia and its relations with Ukraine and Europe, but he found the trail led to Western Europe and the United States as well. Russia spreads false information, like the story — that never took place — of a German schoolgirl’s gang-rape by Muslims, or Obama’s supposed birth in Africa. It gives financial and other support to right-wing parties or, in the case of Britain, to those supporting the Brexit campaign. Putin no doubt sees it as payback, since the West promoted dangerous ideas about democracy and human rights in his own country. Russia has honed its cyberwar skills, shutting down communications and financial networks in Ukraine and Estonia and, now, as recent reports say, penetrating the systems that control American power stations. Surely, though, the reader wants to say, Snyder must be exaggerating and jumping to conclusions when he calls Trump “Russia’s candidate”? Yet it is unsettling that so many people near the president or his campaign have links to Russia and that the president himself has been so reluctant to comment publicly on Russia’s more egregious moves.

So what can the concerned citizen do about the decay in our public life? We must, Snyder says, keep digging for the facts and exposing falsehoods. As Thucydides, the father of history, said, “Most people, in fact, will not take trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.” We should mistrust one-sided accounts of the past or the present. “The Road to Unfreedom” is a good wake-up call. You don’t have to agree with all of Snyder’s conclusions, but he is right that understanding is empowerment.

Margaret MacMillan is the author, most recently, of “History’s People: Personalities and the Past.”

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A version of this article appears in print on May 13, 2018, on Page 11 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Gathering Storm.