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This is On the Media's Midweek Podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, we mark a grim milestone, the three-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Days before the war began, Russian President Vladimir Putin recited an old essay on the, quote, historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians, wherein he rewrote the
the past. And this week started with President Putin quoting Lenin in saying that Ukraine was a fake country created by Lenin. President Putin laying out his case that Ukraine is always part of Russia, historically, cultural, ethnic, religious ties.
that go way back in history, that it's not a real country. It is naturally part of a bigger Russia. A notion featured heavily on Russian news to justify the war. Because Kiev is the mother of all Russian cities. But this is not new fiction. In fact, Mikhail Zygar has traced it back at least as far as the Middle Ages.
He's a Russian investigative journalist and founding editor-in-chief of the independent Russian TV channel Reign, suspended for its war coverage and now based in the Netherlands. He's also the author of the book War and Punishment. Actually, when I spoke to him back in 2023, he told me that the history starts in a Europe that would be familiar to fans of Game of Thrones, with empires and religions vying for power and for land.
My mission was to start writing a completely different version of Russian history because unfortunately we have never had any kind of history of Russian people or peoples of Russia. It has always been written by official historians who were serving the state and they were much more propagandists than historians.
Your book explores seven myths about the relationship between Ukraine and Russia. We won't get to them all, but we'll start with the most crucial one, probably, unity, which was penned in a paper called Synopsis by a German monk 300 years ago.
A myth of the unity of Slavic nations is very new. It was created only three centuries ago by that German person named Innocenti Gesell. So how does Gesell's chronicle read? It starts from the creation of the world, then goes all the way to Noah and Moses and the first princes of Kievan Rus. According to that chronicle, direct descendants of characters of the Bible
The first statehood was created in Kyiv, but then the grandsons of grandsons of the first Kievan princes moved the capital of unified Rus to the city of Moscow. He draws that imaginary line that unifies old Kyiv with new Moscow. You say Gazelle's synopsis went on to be used as a textbook.
It was one of the first scientific texts on Russian history, and Enikente Gizel could not have foreseen that, but Peter the Great loved it, and it was used by all the official historians. Actually, it was the main source of the information for most Russian historians in the 18th century and the 19th century till the 20th century.
Okay, so stay with the era of Peter the Great when the Ukrainian leader or hetman Ivan Mazepa was navigating two different empires, Sweden's and Russia's, now rapidly expanding. How did Mazepa become a symbol of betrayal? That would be the second myth that still resonates today.
During that period, Ukraine has become part of the Russian Empire, and he was considered to be one of the very close military leaders to Russian Emperor Peter the Great. As Mazepa always considered himself to be first
Ukrainian leader and only then ally of the Russian Tsar, when the situation for his homeland has become really dangerous, he has chosen to switch sides and ally with Swedish emperor. And that symbolic choice is still considered for many years to be a symbolic betrayal of
by Russian historians. At the same time, for Ukrainian historians, on the contrary, he chose his own people and his own nation. And he might have been a traitor if he had chosen Peter the Great, but not his people. And right now, during the current war, it's associated with Ukrainian words, zrada. That means betrayal, a very important political term in today's Ukraine.
that moral dilemma of Ivan Mazepa. It's always raised when a politician or an activist has a choice between real interests
of his nation and possibility of some political alliance. And it explains so much because in the last year or so at various international cultural events like the PEN conference, which stands for the freedom of writers, Ukrainian writers simply won't appear on the same stage with Russians, even if those Russians are dissidents and at risk and opposed to Putin's war.
I never understood until you explained the idea of Zorada why Ukrainians would shun those Russians.
Ukrainians blame not only Russian government and not only Vladimir Putin, but Russia as such and all representatives of Russian culture. Ukrainians blame Pushkin as well as Joseph Brodsky, Dostoevsky or other representatives of Russian culture claiming that they were imperialists. That's a very important idea for me because I think that we won't find common grounds before we address all those issues
And we cannot, as Russian writers, Russian intellectuals, we cannot say, don't touch Pushkin, he's sacred, he's our everything. That would be just blind. We should reconsider all the mistakes and crimes of Russian culture as well.
And we are not the first. A very symbolic example is, for example, Kipling, who has written the infamous poem about... White man's burden. Yes, and Jungle Book is not cancelled. It's still loved by kids all over the world. But this particular concept of Kipling is widely discussed and is denounced by British intellectuals and by British historians today.
And we must do that. We must get rid of our historical myths and of our sacred cause, including Pushkin or Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn. You want to just get rid of Dostoevsky?
No. You mean that we have to understand that he's a creature of his time? We should read him in full. And if he was terribly wrong, we must find courage to admit it and to say it. You liken the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko to Frederick Douglass because Shevchenko was basically a serf
who happened to become the greatest Ukrainian poet, liberated at the same time as Frederick Douglass ran away from slavery to New York City and liberated himself.
There are no parallels in history, definitely, but there are rhymes. And different countries were facing very similar political and social process. And serfdom is a form of slavery. Serfdom in Russia was abolished the same year as the American Civil War started.
And Taras Shevchenko is the first writer who used classic traditional literary Ukrainian language because before him Ukrainians could reach the highest positions in Russian cultural elite or political bureaucracy. They could have become members of government or chancellors.
with only one condition: if they abandoned their Ukrainian background and started speaking Russian. So Shevchenko, even after being liberated and even after he had become one of the most popular artists in St. Petersburg, he never stopped writing in Ukrainian, and he has become a moral example.
It's interesting, though, how many Russians suggest that Ukrainian is actually just pigeon Russian. The words look alike, they sound alike. How do you address the language issue or the language myth? A lot of Russians, and we know that Vladimir Putin is one of them, consider Ukrainian not as a real language, but as provincial Russian.
Unfortunately, all those people don't know anything about Ukrainian literature or the history of Ukrainian language. And they don't know, for example, the history of Russian authorities, especially in 18th and 19th and 20th century, to suppress the usage of
Ukrainian languages. Ukrainian books were banned. The education in Ukrainian was permanently banned. So, yes, that's a real historical tragedy. And it's funny that the language that does not exist was banned and still exists today.
even after all those centuries. Another myth you address is the myth of Lenin. Putin's claim before invading that Ukraine was an invention of Lenin's. You write that an independent Ukrainian state was formed in spite of Lenin. Oh, yeah. It's important to say that
After the collapse of the Russian Empire, Mikhail Khrushchevsky, who was the spiritual leader and the head of the first Ukrainian parliament, had an idea about Ukrainian autonomy. And he was, interestingly enough, a historian. And his book, The History of Ukraine, Rus', played a role in establishing Ukraine as a modern state.
He's still considered to be probably the founding father of the political Ukrainian nation because he was the first author to write the academic history of Ukraine. That was written in 1898 and it was the first impactful response to the history written by the monk Gazelle.
He was successfully trying to prove that Giselle's concept written in synopsis was fake. So how Ukraine became the independent state back in 1918? In October of 1917, there was a Bolshevik coup in St. Petersburg, and Russia had become a communist dictatorship.
And that was a catastrophe for all the democratic movements in Russia and in Ukraine. So after Lenin has become Russian dictator, there was no other choice for Ukrainian authorities and for Khrushchevsky, but to proclaim the independent Ukrainian state. So it's really ridiculous when Vladimir Putin says that Ukraine was invented by Lenin.
Khrushchevsky was interrogated by the Soviet secret police in the 30s. Historians arrested in the Soviet Union were called wrecker historians by the government. So the Russian government has always been extremely sensitive to how history is depicted.
That's the curse of Russian history, that it has always been very close to the power. All famous classical historians were always appointed by the heads of state and were reporting to the emperors or to the secretary generals. Nikolai Karamzin, probably one of the most famous Russian historians of the 19th century, was reporting directly to the emperor Alexander I.
In the 20th century, Stalin himself was editing the official version of the Communist Party history. So yes, it was absolutely clear for Russian leaders that they have to create
the version of Russian history that proves they deserve to be in power. It should explain why Russia needs to be the empire. That was very clear for me that the moment when Putin started to build his ideology around his version of Russian history and to justify the current brutal aggression
In the epilogue, you write that imperial history is our disease and that future generations of Russians will, quote, not tread the same path if we, their ancestors, bear the punishment today.
So if imperial history has been the problem, you're turning to a revision of that history as the solution. Yeah, that's true. We have never had a proper people's history of Russia, and that's the right time to start writing it.
And if in history Russian army or Russian leaders have committed war crimes, they should be named this way. We should know everything about history of peoples of Russia, history of Siberia and how Siberia was colonized, history of Far East, history of Urals, history of North Caucasus, all the neighbors of Russia and confess to ourselves
and apologize to all other nations which have become victims of Russian imperial history. Have you been following the fight here in America over history? How to teach it? How to advance it? How to reckon with it? You know, the debate about history in America is an inspiration for me.
Because I think that every time we add another historical narrative to the traditional one, that's the way out. For example, I love the African American Museum in Washington, D.C., because it adds another very important narrative there.
missing in the traditional version of American history. And I think that the more historical narratives a nation adds to its perception of history, the better. And that's the way I hope Russian historians will proceed. Mikhail, thank you very much.
Thank you. That was a pleasure talking to you. Same here. Mikhail Ziger is the author of the book War and Punishment, Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine.
Thanks for listening to the Midweek Podcast. On this weekend's show, we'll be asking all the right questions about the new deputy director of the FBI, right-wing podcaster Dan Bongino. See you then. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
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