Timothy Snyder in Kharkiv: A Conversation about Freedom - with Volodymyr Yermolenko
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Timothy Snyder came to Kharkiv on September the 8th, 2024, despite regular strikes on the city by Russian bombs, missiles and drones. Our conversation was focused on freedom and values, which are the key topics of his latest book, On Freedom, published on September the 17th. You're listening to the podcast by Ukraine World and its series Thinking in Dark Times. My name is Volodymyr Yelmonko. I'm a Ukrainian philosopher, chief editor of Ukraine World and president of PEN Ukraine.

Kharkiv is Ukraine's second largest city, located some 40 kilometers from the Russian border. The city is hit almost daily by Russian glide bombs, missiles and drones, mostly hitting civilian buildings and causing casualties among civilians. Despite this, Kharkiv remains one of the key centers of Ukrainian cultural life. Our conversation took place in an underground shelter to ensure safety against possible Russian attacks.

For safety reasons, the audience was carefully selected by invitation without public announcements. Despite the dangers, about 100 Kharkiv artists, writers, journalists, students and university instructors came with many of them contributing questions.

Before we start, let me remind you that Ukraine World is brought to you by Internet Ukraine, one of Ukraine's largest media NGOs. Ukraine World is a multilingual media about Ukraine. You can support our work at patreon.com slash ukraineworld. You can also support our volunteer trips to the frontline areas at paypalukraine.resistinggmail.com. You can find these links in the description of this episode. So, let's start. My first question to you, Tim, would be what is the meaning of Kharkiv for you?

Kharkiv is a place that is in very much, of course, proximity to the Russian troops right now. But for me personally, it is one of the capitals of the Ukrainian culture today. What is the meaning of Kharkiv for you? We will speak English here because yesterday I was in Lviv

And I was speaking Ukrainian the whole day. And it was, so to say, Ukrainizing Lviv. But I think Kharkiv needs to Ukrainize itself. Therefore, I will speak English here. But everybody in Lviv now are speaking Ukrainian. And this is very good. OK, English, English, English.

I'm funnier in Ukrainian. My jokes in English are not that good. I was being ironic about Lviv, right? You know that I didn't really Ukrainize Lviv. Yes, right, okay. So Kharkiv is much more important to me than Lviv. Lviv for me is a wonderful place that preserves Ukrainian culture when necessary.

That has been the historical role of Lviv in the late 19th century during the period of anti-Ukrainian laws in the Russian Empire. Lviv, Lviv, Lemberg was very important as a place for Ukrainians from the Russian Empire to come. And also because of Habsburg laws, which enabled a free press and free elections and so on for a few decades,

L'Auville was very important. But Kharkiv is more important to me, much more important for three reasons.

The first is that if you're looking for the origins of the Ukrainian national movement, you find them here in Slobodna Ukraina, in Kharkivstina. That's the origins of the Ukrainian movement, the origins of the romantic movement of recalling the Cossacks and recalling Rus is actually here in what's now northeastern Ukraine.

And the second reason, which you all know better than me, and many of you work on this quite actively here, is that Kharkiv was also a century ago, not just the political center of Soviet Ukraine, but the cultural center of a very important Ukrainian national revival. The 1920s and 1920s are the most important period in Ukrainian culture.

for me except for the period since Maidan. So I think that the ten years since Maidan are more important, but the 1920s are extremely important. In the 1920s, of course, that national renaissance was Kharkiv. And of course there are individual figures from Kharkiv, especially Shevelov, who are very important for me. But the third reason is that I think for the last 20 years or so,

I have been saying that the future of Europe is going to depend upon what happens in, I called them at the time three Russian-speaking cities. I wouldn't say that anymore. But the future of Europe is going to depend on what happens in Minsk, Kharkiv, and Dnipro. Like that ring of cities, which way those cities go is going to determine the way the rest of the continent goes. And we can talk more about that, but I still believe that.

One of the metaphors about Ukraine, very popular metaphor, is a metaphor of borderlands. And you can look at Kharkiv, you can look at Zaporizhia, you can look at Dnipro in this metaphor. But what is problematic for me in this metaphor is that it just says, okay, there are borderlands that is meeting of different cultures and there is something provincial going there. Maybe there is, you know, clash of empires.

Now what I think more and more is that what's happening on the borderlands, what's happening on the front line is actually the center of what is happening throughout the world. And you're just saying that. And I'm very often telling to my foreign friends that what Kharkiv is to Ukraine, Ukraine is to the rest of Europe. Would you agree with that? So I have a different problem with the borderland metaphor, which is that

it normalizes or equalizes or neutralizes the countries on either side of the border. So if you say that something is a borderland, you're saying, well, there's one land and then there's another land and then there's a border. But sometimes the one land and the other land are actually very different. And I think that is fundamentally what we're talking about in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict today.

So the reason why for me Ukraine is important for Europe

and for the world has to do with the kind of society that Ukraine is as a whole. And therefore, Kharkiv is important because Kharkiv is one of the places the war is being fought. And Kharkiv, as you say, is edgy. Will it become, is it part of this larger society? So I broadly agree with you, but maybe for different reasons.

But I want to make it, I also want Volodya to make a different point, which is that every place is a borderland. There are no places that are not borderlands. Like Kharkiv is a borderland in the sense that there is a political border very close to here. But there are, if you look at any map, if you look at the map of Europe, any place can be a borderland. Pretty much any place is in some way a borderland in Europe.

And that's the other reason why I've also kind of grown tired of the borderland metaphor. And in my own thinking about Ukraine, what I've been trying to do is explain something else, which is that I think Ukraine is indispensable historically to understand the major trends of European and global life.

And in that sense, Kharkiv is essential because you need Kharkiv to understand Ukraine. But the larger historical point is that I think sometimes the most important places are pushed to the margin rhetorically precisely because they're so important. And I think that's in a way what has happened with Ukraine. Your most French book is about freedom.

and it's going to be published on the 17th of September. And when Natalka asked Timothy in our minivan what will be the first presentation, you joked that this is the first presentation in Kharkiv. But the story about this book, and we followed it in the last two years, is that you felt it very much necessary to write it in Ukraine.

And as far as I understand, you finished it last year on a trip from Kyiv to Hel. Can you explain to us why it is so necessary to write a book in English about freedom in Ukraine? My basic idea about freedom is that it's not an abstraction. It's not something that you can be absolutely correct about.

My basic idea about freedom is that it has to do with the variety of possibilities that we might have on the basis of the values that we affirm. And if you think about freedom like that, and I think we'll talk a bit more about it, but if you think about freedom like that, you have to write the book in contact with other people. So I wrote the whole book as a series of logical arguments.

And then I realized that that didn't work. And so I added a lot of elements from my own experience. And then I realized that was helpful, but not enough. And that I had to take the book and confront the book with various situations, one of which was the war in Ukraine. So the war in Ukraine was very important for me because it

It's, for me, the most important thing happening in the world, but also because Ukraine happens to be the place where people are speaking about freedom. It was very difficult. I mean, as soon as the first time I've been to Ukraine four times now since the war started, and I started talking to Ukrainians about the war in February 2022, and freedom was a constant theme.

and not just a rhetorical theme, but people were of course risking their lives, losing their lives for some idea of freedom. So one of the confrontations that I had to have was with people in Ukraine. Because going back to what I said, freedom is the kind of thing which involves listening and not just telling. And so I needed, I can't listen to everyone, but it seemed important to listen to people in Ukraine.

I will ask a few more questions and then I'm asking you now to think about your questions so that we spend as much time in dialogue as possible. What is important for me in your idea of freedom in your book is that first you don't say that freedom is doing whatever you want and second you don't say

something that some deeper philosophical concepts are saying that for example freedom as Sartre will put it is a kind of a force of denying something that exists so and and there is this form of negativity which you find also in in Anglo-American thought is this idea freedom from so

You think about freedom in terms of values. You think of freedom as a capacity to choose a value that is important for you. And when somebody chooses this value, for example, the value of national pride or national identity or the value of solidarity, a person sticks to this value and fights for it.

So in a way, being free is also tying yourself to something bigger than you.

In my understanding of freedom, values are real things. And for example, the national pride is a good thing. Solidarity is also a good thing. Loyalty is a good thing. But during our life,

we have moments when there are contradictions between these good things and therefore we have to make a choice. And because of these choices we become different people and therefore

Freedom is becoming a strong character. One irony of all this is that Volodya is making a very important point. Freedom isn't about doing whatever you want, because if it is, then somebody else can make you do anything. A free person sometimes only has one good choice, because all of the other choices that you made between contradictory values

left you to be the kind of person who can only see one right thing to do, right? So someone who is not free can always run away, but someone who is free sometimes can't. Maybe my last question: you are criticizing very much the way how freedom is perceived in the West.

And this is a very important thing for us and strange thing because in this country there is certain stereotype that the real freedom is somewhere there in genuine democracies. But you're now arguing that the real freedom is somewhere here in Eastern Europe. And your heroes are also, of course, the great Western thinkers but also people like Václav Havel, Adam Michnik, or Marislav Marinovich or others.

What exactly in the conception of freedom you find here in Ukraine now?

I will first start with an idea that there is a mistake to think that freedom is somewhere. There is no freedom in Constitution, there is no freedom in history, there is no freedom in the West, there is no freedom in capitalism.

It is an illusion, big illusion to think that freedom is somewhere. The second point is very important, which is related to Ukraine. If freedom is negative,

I can rebel but I cannot create. And freedom is always a process of someone's creation based upon values, based upon what I think is good. So, to answer the question, if freedom is positive, that means that

certain kinds of commitments lead you to situations where you have to sometimes take risks. And those risks can be smaller or larger, but there will always be a risk. Even the most happy, wealthy, prosperous person in the middle of America, if that person is going to be free, they're going to say things and do things that upset people around them. There's always going to be some risk, some discomfort,

And if you don't feel that discomfort, then you're not a free person. In Ukraine, this is perhaps clearer than in other places because the bodily risks that people are taking are greater. The second point is that if freedom is positive,

Freedom exists in future. And when Ukrainians speak with me about freedom and about occupation and on the de-occupied territories, they were speaking primarily about the future.

And the problem of the Russian occupation of their lands was that it is now more difficult for us to get to this future. And this is a very important lesson. Another point.

why Putin is always speaking about the myth of the past. There is no freedom there. And if one tyrant can define the past, there will be no freedom. But if there are citizens who have diverse visions

of the future, of various futures, there will be freedom. There can be freedom. And this was very important for me because in my country people think about the mythologized past instead of thinking about possible versions of the future.

Mr. Snyder, first of all, thanks for coming to Kharkiv. I think everyone in this hall is much appreciated for this. We all welcome you. And my question is, besides the fact that Ukraine is now a great example of fighting for freedom, what else can we bring as a society to the Western world? What can we teach you?

So, thank you for the welcome to Kharkiv. I forgot to say, answering Volodya's very serious questions about Kharkiv earlier, that one reason that I came here is just that I like Kharkiv. And it's been seven years since I've been here and that's too long. And so, regardless of the war and everything else, I just wanted to come to Kharkiv.

I'm just, I'm going to make one, there are many things, but I'm going to try to make one very general point. I think the central political problem of the 21st century is what to do after empire. And there are some bad answers to this question. One bad answer is have more empire, which isn't the Russian answer, maybe the Chinese answer. Another bad answer is

rebel against empires, but then do exactly the same thing that empires did on a smaller scale. Another bad answer, which is the American answer much of the time, is pretend that you never were an empire and continue to have all of the political problems that arise because you can't talk honestly about your own past. The world is looking for a good answer about what to do after empire.

And I think the Ukrainian version of the state is interesting in that respect. Because Ukraine, we don't have time to go into it now, but Ukraine has a very, very long history. I mean, the history of human civilization on these lands, very long and very interesting. And you have this accumulated reserve that allows you to do a kind of pluralism

which is not imperial but also not anti-imperial, which is maybe just maybe its own thing. And so that I don't have quite the words for it yet, but I think finding an answer to what to do after empire without getting stuck in empire one way or another, I think Ukraine may be showing us something about that.

Mr. Schneider, we are really grateful for this meeting and your coming to Kharkiv also. We spoke about freedom, but maybe we can speak also about safety. For example, in our contemporary art center, Yermilov Center has opened a new exhibition, "Sense of Safety". What does it mean, safety, for you in contemporary context? What does it mean to feel safety and how freedom and safety related to each other?

There's a long tradition of opposing freedom and security, and I think this is a complete mistake. I think it's claiming that freedom and security are in opposition to one another is politically very convenient, because if I can make you scared and you believe that you have to give up your freedom, then I can take away your freedom.

But I think in reality, freedom and security or safety, as you put it, almost always work together. So for example, for a child to grow up to become a free person, it helps a lot if that child has a sense of security. For people to make choices that are truly free,

it helps them a lot to be surrounded by supportive friends with whom they can speak so they can feel like, "I know what I'm actually doing here." Fear is a great enemy of freedom and the people who don't want us to be free try to make us afraid in general. And so I tend to think that the process of making us safe

is also a process of making us free. Whereas the process of making us frightened is generally the process of making us unfree. So I don't know, I have a feeling that you're thinking about all this as more sophisticated, but this is how, for me it's actually a big part of the book that freedom and safety work together rather than our opposing forces.

Thank you for an opportunity to ask a question. And I would like to thank Mr. Snyder for today's meeting. And my question is, which interests me as a future historian, because Ukrainian history is facing lots of tasks today.

The question is what should be our attitude to Ukrainians who were serving the Russian Empire and the Soviet Empire? And isn't it an example of the lack of freedom of choice and freedom? Being a historian is not as much fun as people sometimes think it is, because to be a historian means trying to understand other people. And that's not easy.

If you want to try to understand Ukrainians, so your question was about just the Russian Empire, but there are many variants of this question. If you want to understand why Ukrainians collaborated with Russian imperial authorities, you have to get inside their minds. You can't start by condemning them. That's very easy. I mean, as a person, you can do it, but as a historian, you can't.

And it's very important that historians don't. Because if historians start by saying, I know what's good and I know what's evil, you end up with a very naive and fragile sense of good and evil. And you end up not being helpful to your fellow citizens. So if you want to understand people you don't like, you have to get yourself into a situation where you believe you've actually understood them.

And so being a historian, it's not like private life, right? Like if I don't like somebody in my private life, I don't have to try to understand them. I can just ignore them. But I wrote a whole book about Hitler and I did it. I mean, I wrote a book about Hitler trying to understand his ideas from the inside because that's the only way to do it.

And when we do that, we have to try to respect our readers and that we're helping our readers to understand things. I'm not saying that there is no good and evil. There is. What I'm saying is that as a historian, there are certain values that you apply. And those values include consistency, empathy, self-reflection, the ability to change your mind.

those are the values of a good historian. And when you realize those values, you're doing good in a certain way. It may be that when you are a husband or a soldier, there are different values, right? But it's very important also for the whole country that, and it's important for every country, that historians be historians.

And that if you're going to write about people you don't like, that requires more effort, not less. Not least because we are all going to be tested. And if we begin from the premise that we're better than those other people, we'll fail the tests. But if we begin from the premise that we can understand how other people failed, then there's some chance that we'll help ourselves not to fail.

So I wish we could have a longer discussion about this because there are many aspects to this question. Thanks. Thank you for informative answer, Mr. Snyder. On behalf of the entire Karazin community, we thank you for today's lecture. We'll be glad to welcome you to our university.

Thank you very much for this meeting. And Mr. Snyder, the question is: how do the political freedoms correlate with the economical freedoms? Is there any correlation between the two? Do you think there can be a state in which economic freedoms are limited?

for the sake of the political freedoms which are implemented and vice versa, a state in which political freedoms are limited while economic freedoms are unlimited. I have to start the answer from a different place because I don't believe in economic freedom. I also don't believe in political freedom. I just believe in freedom.

And freedom, as far as I'm concerned, concerns only human beings. I mean, maybe also aliens and orangutans and dolphins, but freedom only concerns creatures like us. So I don't, this is an unusual position, but please listen. I don't believe that there's such a thing as a free country. I don't believe there's even such a thing as free speech.

I believe there are free people, but that it takes a lot of work to create free people. And so my view is that the one thing that legitimates a government is action that allows people to be free. And that means that given that we are the vulnerable creatures that we are, given that we have the many needs that we have,

And given that some of those needs can only be met cooperatively and even over generations, government is the thing which, if done right, gives us a chance to be free. That's how I see it. So I don't see a clash between government and freedom as such. What I see is freedom as the highest or freedom as the value of values.

and government is legitimated insofar as government enables human freedom. So for me, the categories of political and economic freedom don't matter because I'm concerned with people. And once I'm concerned with people and I realize that the only way for us to be free is for us to cooperate in certain ways, then in my view, that becomes the legitimation for government.

So my question will be: when you ended speaking about freedom, you started to speak Ukrainian. Thank you, that was really cool. So speaking from this side, what do you think about not the nation, maybe society?

with one language and maybe two or three main languages, can it protect itself in media, like now in the war, or can it build its future with the same value as the nation with a monolanguage, with one language? So my question about the language in the society, its importance.

I think the situation matters a lot. So I'm coming to you from a country that has zero languages, right? The United States has... English is not our language. It's England's language. So we have, in a sense, we have no languages. That's by way of saying...

a language can be natural to a person without it being natural to a land, you know, no language is really natural to a land. And it's also by way of saying what follows from that is that I think one always has to be respectful of the reasons why people speak the languages that they speak and

I think one has to be very constructive about language. So for me, like, reading different languages is, or speaking them, is certainly a source of freedom because it helps me understand other people. It gets me into times and places I wouldn't reach otherwise. So there's that. But part of the situation is also, is also protecting the state itself, as you're suggesting. And there are situations where

states need to define themselves one way or another. So let me use the example of France. When I first moved to France, I thought many things about France were funny, like, for example, all the vacations that they took. But now I believe they were right about the vacations. And I also believe they're right about their language policy. So they're very careful. Their concern is English.

and the French state acts to make sure that French films exist, and the French state acts to make sure that French music exists, the French state also acts to make sure that French bread exists, I think that's fine. I think that's okay. And these decisions have to be applied case by case. But I would put it this way. If it's legitimate for France to be concerned about

the overwhelming power of Hollywood, then it's legitimate for Ukraine to be concerned about the overwhelming power of Russian media and the messages that Russian media brings.

For me as a human being, the renaissance of the Ukrainian language is very good. Because there are some things that are easier to express in the Ukrainian language.

than in other languages. And sociologically, it is a very interesting process. And I'm glad that there is more and more Ukrainian language in Ukraine.

But it is a personal issue. Timothy, good evening. We are very glad to meet you in Kharkiv. Personally for you, how do you explain your interest in Ukraine? It is not that easy to understand yourself.

but to understand and interpret yourself in front of a big number of people it is even more difficult so i returning to what i said to to volodia i think the central questions are often the ones that seem marginal so i

I wasn't interested in Ukraine because I'm Ukrainian or my wife is Ukrainian or my mother is Ukrainian or my aunt is Ukrainian. I was interested in Ukraine because I thought I needed to understand Ukraine to understand the most important themes of the 20th century. And I'm interested in Ukraine now because I think the same is true of the 21st century.

So, in a way, it's very selfish. Like, I find Ukraine contains the topics which I think are the most important. So, that's as far as I'm going to go. I'm very glad to meet you in Kharkiv, a frontline city. Your presence here is impressive. I would like to ask you, as a historian, as I graduated from the

and i'm very glad that most of the questions which were here were asked by the students from the historical department and there are my colleagues historians who are here my question is how often do you have direct conversations direct dialogue with

professional historians and if these dialogues these conversations are easy and I mean primarily Ukrainian historians in Ukraine do you have direct conversations with the Ukrainian historians and if they are easy to hold yes of course

And they are as easy or as difficult as with other historians. And this is how it is and this is how it should be. It would be very strange if all Ukrainian historians would agree with me in all the questions. For example, there is a very hot and interesting debate

about colonialism.

not all Ukrainian historians or maybe even no Ukrainian historian agrees with me on this issue. Which doesn't mean that I'm not right. And a day after tomorrow I will organize in Kiev a big conference mostly of Ukrainian historians.

And thanks to Ukrainian historians, I became a historian whom I am. And it is also a question about freedom and about language, because it is very good for me that I can freely read in Ukrainian.

and therefore I can learn about Ukrainian historiography directly. And it is very important that the next generations of Ukrainian historians could read in English, in German, in Polish. But my interactions with Ukrainian colleagues is very similar to my interactions with colleagues from other countries.

I would like to join the words of gratitude for your visit and for this meeting, which is wonderful. My question is not about the past, but about the present and the future. And about Kharkiv, because people in Kharkiv like speaking about Kharkiv.

I would like to come back to the point which was at the beginning of our meeting about the three cities on which the destiny of Europe depends. Minsk, Kharkiv and Dnipro. I will now omit Minsk because Minsk is lost today.

You have come back to Kharkiv after seven years and you now see what is happening and how the city looks like and what is happening during the war. And in my perception, and I think I'm not alone here, there are two worlds which are now in Kharkiv. There is an underground Kharkiv, the cultural city, and there is a city above the ground in which there are shelling and there are destructions.

And this situation looks like probably depression with hope or hopeful depression.

And my question is, what do you think about the future of Europe, seeing at one of these key cities? So, I mean, it's nice of all of you to thank me for coming to Kharkiv, but all I did was sit in a car that Volodya drove. It was very easy. And I should thank all of you for coming here, and I'm very glad to have this opportunity

actually a very cool place to have this discussion. And it recalls for me the idea of freedom, really, because in order to be free, we have to have a sense that we're more or less safe, more or less. And in order to be free, we have to be able to have a discussion together. So this is a very good question, and I can't answer it very well because I've only been in Kharkiv for

seven hours or so. I've been in the Oblast for half a day. But the city obviously looks very different. And I read about Kharkiv every day. I think depression and hope are natural partners. They go together in a natural way. I will say that much. I think that, so I think that Kharkiv, let me put it this way.

I was first in this city about 30 years ago, and the change since then has been quite dramatic. The change since 2017 is also very noticeable. Cities can change quite quickly. I think Volodya is right that, like, let me put it this way. When I started working on Ukraine,

People always wanted to tell me, well, the most important place is Lviv. And I would say, no, no, not Lviv, Kiev. Kiev is the most important place. Kiev, Kiev, Kiev. And now, of course, I mean, but for the last 15 years or so, I've been saying, no, it's not Kiev, it's Dnipro, it's Kharkiv, right? And in those 15 years, Kharkiv has changed a lot. And I think Kiev, like, this war is an eastern war and a southern war.

And what happens in the rest of Ukraine depends on how people in the south and the east above all. And the people in the south and the east have behaved, I mean I'm not going to say everyone has behaved well, that would be unrealistic and wrong. But people in the south and the east have behaved much more courageously and with much more solidarity than I think all outside observers.

expected. I don't think Minsk is lost. Like it's lost for now. It's lost for now, but and it's a very understandable that Ukrainians would give up on it. But in the long term, I don't think Minsk is I don't think Minsk is lost just for the record.

Good evening, Mr. Snyder. Thank you that you really got into the car which drove you here. And thank you that you are sharing your reflections and ideas with us. As far as I understand, this war has been made possible because of the imperfect character of the international security system.

The international system has led Putin to get Donbass and Crimea. And this is a challenge for the whole international security system. What should be this international security system?

and do you think that the world can live without wars and if yes what steps the international community can take to achieve this my big utopian ideas about world order have to do with things like first of all moving away from hydrocarbon forms of energy

such as gas and oil because these allow the accumulation of wealth, including the creation of regimes like the Putin regime. And my second big idea about, um, about world order has to do with wealth itself, that it's, we're, we're, it's, it's,

It's unsustainable for a few American families to have as much wealth as the rest of my country. It's unsustainable for a few dozen people to have as much wealth as the rest of the world in general. So there are underlying problems. The third one for me would be the shape that social media takes.

I think social media tends to drive us towards more radical politics and away from democracy. For me, those are the underlying issues. For the time being, I think that the international order that we are supposed to have, the one with states and borders, is worth preserving. And it has the virtue that, in principle, everyone has always agreed to it. And a lot of our problem is

with Crimea, beginning with Crimea, is that we allowed narratives about the past to undermine what was supposed to be a very clear set of rules about the present. So, I mean, what Putin says about the past of Crimea is ridiculous and wrong.

But even if it weren't ridiculous and wrong, we can't let stories about the past allow us to make exceptions about the rules of international borders. Because once we do that, as we see in Ukraine, the process then continues. Crimea, Donbass, you know, and then the whole country. Mr. Snyder, Professor, first of all, I would like to thank you for your activity as a Ukrainian ambassador in the world.

for your promotion of Ukraine, its history, its culture in your lectures, during conferences, other meetings. For that you are sharing information about this war, its consequences that we see and possible consequences in future. Kharkiv is still beautiful. We see, we know it.

It's alive and this meeting is one of the proofs, but it's also damaged. So my question was very similar to the ones asked before. And now I want to ask you, kindly ask you, to give us an example

and inspired example of cities that were reborn after the end of military conflicts. Or probably in your opinion, the life and future of Ukrainian front line cities are unique. Thank you very much. So I want to take this opportunity to say that

the rebuilding of Ukrainian cities is something where this so-called international community has a big role to play. And I think if you're Kharkiv, it's very important to try to find ways to make contact with Western states and with Western non-governmental organizations because, and some of you I know are already doing this,

But the rebuilding is going to have many sources and many levels, and it's not going to be just America giving Kyiv money and then Kharkiv gets rebuilt. Kharkiv will be rebuilt in a hundred ways if it's rebuilt, and that requires a hundred connections with a hundred institutions, larger and smaller.

What I've been, in the U.S., I've been trying to explain to my own government that the reconstruction process has to be local and regional as much or more than it's national. The place that we have to find partners in the regions and in the border zones, as you say. This for me is just very important because I really worry that we're going to get reconstruction wrong because it's all going to be

government to government. So cities that are reconstructed, look, Paris destroyed itself on purpose. The Haussmann destroyed Paris and then rebuilt it. So the Paris that we know and love is a result of the French deciding to destroy the middle of the city and rebuild it in a different way. This happens. And after the Second World War, European cities were rebuilt, some better and some worse. So

I tend to think, and I don't want to be understood as saying that something good comes from this war, but what happens historically is that states that are destroyed have a chance to build themselves into the future. And I tend to think that much as we all love Kharkiv, there were aspects of Kharkiv that could have been better organized.

And there are Soviet parts of the way Kharkiv was planned that I think could be usefully corrected, right? So examples of cities that were rebuilt, I mean, the capital of my country, Washington DC, was burned down by the British and now it's beautiful. During that same war, Americans burned down the city which was then known as York, now is known as Toronto, and it was rebuilt and it's one of the best cities in the world.

Tokyo, which is to my mind a city which is so wonderful that it actually belongs on a different planet. I mean, I don't feel like my American cities even vaguely compete with Tokyo. But Tokyo was largely destroyed during the war. So there are lots of examples of cities that come back from war in a different form and in a better form. That does happen. It can happen. applause

This was a podcast by Ukraine World, a multilingual media about Ukraine. My name is Volodymyr Yermolenko. I'm Ukrainian philosopher, chief editor of Ukraine World and president of Pan-Ukraine. This was a recording of our conversation with Timothy Snyder in Kharkiv on September the 8th, 2024.

Let me remind you that Ukraine World is brought to you by Internet Ukraine. You can support our work by patreon.com slash ukrainworld. You can also support our volunteer trips to the front lines at paypal.ukraine.resisting.gmail.com. You can find these links in the description of this episode. Stay with us and stand with Ukraine.