1 00:00:00,150 --> 00:00:06,660 The literary conceit of the Dynasty is always that the president is eternal rather than just being a contingent moment. 2 00:00:07,020 --> 00:00:11,880 So the Habsburgs made these odd claims that they were descended from the Romans. 3 00:00:12,870 --> 00:00:16,800 The actual audience had an odd connection with the sovereign nations. 4 00:00:17,880 --> 00:00:24,990 The Romanoffs had a certain hadn't have a certain is this insistence on their connection to hear the news and so on and so forth. 5 00:00:25,500 --> 00:00:33,680 These are examples of a general tendency in monarchical systems to throw back what I think of as a kind of straight line to the past, 6 00:00:33,690 --> 00:00:38,999 a kind of vertical politics of history, when what you're trying to show is that there's an unbroken line from that. 7 00:00:39,000 --> 00:00:44,489 From an unbroken line. Not a problem here, but a number of things line, a dynastic line, 8 00:00:44,490 --> 00:00:50,670 a genealogical line from the past into the present, and therefore automatically, so to speak, into the future. 9 00:00:51,510 --> 00:00:55,290 Now, republics obviously challenge this. 10 00:00:55,570 --> 00:00:59,700 The concepts I want to try to introduce here and then try hopefully a little bit later 11 00:00:59,700 --> 00:01:05,730 to conjure with are the ideas of Republican and Democratic politics of history. 12 00:01:06,060 --> 00:01:09,690 What I want to try to claim in a very general way is that in the 19th century, 13 00:01:10,350 --> 00:01:16,620 as mass politics of various forms, challenged monarchies, challenged dynasties, in some cases overcame them. 14 00:01:16,950 --> 00:01:24,209 We see the emergence of of two different kinds, the politics of memory, both of which arise at about the same time, 15 00:01:24,210 --> 00:01:28,230 both of which still exist, and both of which have a lot to do with the nation. 16 00:01:28,620 --> 00:01:33,090 So there's what I would like to call the Republican politics of memory. 17 00:01:33,330 --> 00:01:39,120 Where were people who form republics, for example, a new one like the French, 18 00:01:39,570 --> 00:01:44,670 where people who were loyal to republics, for example, an old one but proportionately in Commonwealth, 19 00:01:45,600 --> 00:01:55,950 are no longer entirely embracing this notion of an unbroken vertical continuity into the past, since there's usually some kind of break, 20 00:01:56,160 --> 00:02:01,650 whether it's a revolution or whether it's the election of a monarch who presents a different family history. 21 00:02:01,920 --> 00:02:05,700 You can't rely passively just on continuity. 22 00:02:06,000 --> 00:02:14,160 There has to be breaks. And usually these breaks this is or have something to do with a social contract, a real social contract, for example, 23 00:02:14,170 --> 00:02:19,319 the Confederation of Warsaw for the Force of the Commonwealth and imagined social contract, 24 00:02:19,320 --> 00:02:21,960 for example, in Rousseau's justification for the French Republic. 25 00:02:22,200 --> 00:02:31,410 But in any event, something which involves a class of people out of time who who can break continuity and contract and transform things. 26 00:02:32,160 --> 00:02:41,520 Now, that Republican notion of the politics of memory is different from what I want to call the Democratic politics of national memory, 27 00:02:41,520 --> 00:02:46,110 which arises in about the same time by the Democratic politics of national memory. 28 00:02:46,350 --> 00:02:53,550 What I mean is the following. You can see that the people replace the sovereign in history. 29 00:02:53,940 --> 00:02:58,950 History is is is still about continuity. 30 00:02:58,950 --> 00:03:02,459 It's still about unbroken continuity. But the subject of history has changed. 31 00:03:02,460 --> 00:03:08,520 It's no longer an individual family. It is instead the people, the mass population as such. 32 00:03:09,090 --> 00:03:13,770 Now, these kinds of arguments from history can be used to confirm a republic. 33 00:03:13,770 --> 00:03:19,080 For example, Michel, they learned about France. They can also be used to challenge an empire. 34 00:03:19,680 --> 00:03:27,600 In the case, for example, of how Russia's great Ukrainian national history challenged Russian and indirectly Hapsburg rights to rule. 35 00:03:28,020 --> 00:03:36,400 If the subject of history is the people rather than sort of the family, then it follows from this that the people have a moral right to be in charge. 36 00:03:36,430 --> 00:03:43,050 So shifting the subject from from the monarch to the people is a methodological move. 37 00:03:43,660 --> 00:03:53,130 It's the beginning of what we call social history. Some people still practice, but it's also moral because it shifts the local contingency as well. 38 00:03:53,220 --> 00:04:00,760 It implies if it does not outright state that so far as the people are in charge of politics, something which is not quite right is going on. 39 00:04:01,390 --> 00:04:05,010 Now, the difference, of course, and I'm sure you've already noticed this, 40 00:04:05,010 --> 00:04:12,940 there's a profound difference and a profound source of challenge here, because we're is an old fashioned politics of history. 41 00:04:12,970 --> 00:04:16,980 Dynastic politics of history throws down the narrow line, literally a line, 42 00:04:17,700 --> 00:04:22,679 something very something something visible and black and distinguished from its surroundings. 43 00:04:22,680 --> 00:04:28,740 But very narrow social history or the democratic politics of memory is throwing down the road. 44 00:04:29,430 --> 00:04:35,280 History is not one person or one family. History involves thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people. 45 00:04:35,370 --> 00:04:40,710 In other words, it's vertical. It goes down goes down into the past, but it's also horizontal. 46 00:04:40,950 --> 00:04:44,150 It's a broad swath. It's something much larger. 47 00:04:44,190 --> 00:04:50,520 It's something much something much greater. And it's also reflective and interesting sort of way. 48 00:04:51,120 --> 00:04:54,960 It's very easy. I mean, you can try this at home with your own children if you have. 49 00:04:55,350 --> 00:04:59,250 It's very easy to invent history, which just involves one family. 50 00:04:59,750 --> 00:05:05,620 You can, you know, before you can go home and convince yourself and then your children that you're descended from greenness around us. 51 00:05:05,630 --> 00:05:11,270 It's not. But doesn't everybody do this? My kids like this. 52 00:05:12,680 --> 00:05:15,830 They like the walk, especially the that. 53 00:05:16,550 --> 00:05:22,340 It's fairly easy to engineer that sort of history because really all you have to do is educate the court, 54 00:05:22,340 --> 00:05:25,340 educate the children, cultivate a kind of myth around the court. 55 00:05:25,760 --> 00:05:34,460 But the interesting thing about the Democratic politics in America is that it not only involves everyone as as an object of history. 56 00:05:34,640 --> 00:05:37,790 It has to involve everyone is a subject of history. Right. 57 00:05:38,000 --> 00:05:44,299 So part of the democratisation of the politics of history in the 19th century is not just that. 58 00:05:44,300 --> 00:05:50,300 For example, Khodorkovsky says the people are the proper object of our historical history. 59 00:05:50,540 --> 00:05:54,300 It's also that the people themselves have to come to believe this. 60 00:05:54,920 --> 00:06:00,770 Right. The people themselves come to believe this. They become subjects as well as objects of history. 61 00:06:00,950 --> 00:06:07,309 That's the that's the idea. No, there's a certain tension is, of course, because there have to be people who are telling them this. 62 00:06:07,310 --> 00:06:12,110 People are convincing them of this, whether those people are teachers working for educational institutions, 63 00:06:12,380 --> 00:06:14,090 whether those people are national activists, 64 00:06:14,330 --> 00:06:18,950 is an irony here, because there's always has to be an elite which is passing on this Democratic version of history. 65 00:06:19,190 --> 00:06:26,090 But nevertheless, there's also another kind of irony about these stories about the Democratic politics of history, 66 00:06:26,420 --> 00:06:29,090 and that is that these stories have a certain end. 67 00:06:29,090 --> 00:06:34,400 And when they end, then you're faced with them, when you're faced with the difficulty of making up the story again, 68 00:06:35,030 --> 00:06:42,290 all of these national politics of history, these democratic politics of history tended to be structured in three parts. 69 00:06:42,530 --> 00:06:49,580 And as soon as I say what these three parts are, they'll be familiar to you. There is a long ago golden age when everything was terrific. 70 00:06:50,510 --> 00:06:55,610 There is the current period of fragmentation, partition, 71 00:06:55,610 --> 00:07:02,570 let's call it dark times through which the nation must pass in order to properly understand the sources of its own tragedy, 72 00:07:02,870 --> 00:07:07,100 in order to prepare itself for its renewal. And then there's and then there is the golden future. 73 00:07:07,370 --> 00:07:10,810 And the golden future is the restoration or the creation of the nation state. 74 00:07:11,240 --> 00:07:20,240 So there's there's a very nice logic to this because this because it simultaneously explains why it is that you are so wonderful, 75 00:07:20,240 --> 00:07:25,850 even though things are not right, which is the sort of basic human needs and things you get out from biographies every day. 76 00:07:25,930 --> 00:07:30,440 Right. There are reasons why things are going so badly for us, but they don't have to do with our own character. 77 00:07:31,280 --> 00:07:33,370 They have to do with dreadful external forces. 78 00:07:33,380 --> 00:07:40,310 But one day we will overcome them with the help of psychotherapy for in this case, with the help of a profound historical narrative. 79 00:07:40,460 --> 00:07:45,710 Right. So the third part of history is the part where the state is restored. 80 00:07:45,920 --> 00:07:53,000 And of course, once the state is restored, then then new face of politics, of the period of analysis, and these narratives are much less use. 81 00:07:54,050 --> 00:08:02,180 Which brings me to the question of how all this and Ukrainian politics of memory of Europe side by side, 82 00:08:02,590 --> 00:08:09,650 and how how they represented these Republican or Democratic challenges, how they related to to each other, 83 00:08:10,220 --> 00:08:16,430 you know, both Polish and Ukrainian nation builders and pioneers, the inventors, 84 00:08:16,430 --> 00:08:22,040 the entrepreneurs of the politics of memory in the 19th century were starting from a very similar place. 85 00:08:22,280 --> 00:08:27,740 They were starting from the legacy which they all knew they shared of the Polish, Lithuanian Commonwealth. 86 00:08:28,160 --> 00:08:34,160 We were we were all concerned with what they were going to do with this legacy of a state which had once been very powerful, 87 00:08:34,980 --> 00:08:39,920 which had once extended from the Baltic to the boxes, which in early 17th century was the largest state in Europe, 88 00:08:40,250 --> 00:08:43,760 which had won all sorts of interesting battles from Hailsham to Vienna, 89 00:08:44,690 --> 00:08:49,340 which also represented a certain interest in European political position to claim that it was a republic. 90 00:08:49,520 --> 00:08:57,170 For example, both Polish and Ukrainian nation builders in the 19th century had to grapple with this inheritance. 91 00:08:57,650 --> 00:09:01,970 And I want to mark this, by the way, in the 19th century, no one thought, 92 00:09:02,510 --> 00:09:07,520 as people sometimes do today, that you could simply do away with the whole inheritance. 93 00:09:07,520 --> 00:09:08,720 Right. And start afresh. 94 00:09:09,260 --> 00:09:15,799 You you had to start with the inheritance, transform it and manipulate it in some way so that it was useful for political needs. 95 00:09:15,800 --> 00:09:21,560 But you couldn't you couldn't dispense with it. And Ukrainians simplify that. 96 00:09:21,830 --> 00:09:29,360 What happens is that the the very real fact of the social oppression of Ukrainian 97 00:09:29,360 --> 00:09:33,290 speaking peasants under the Polish-lithuanian Commonwealth becomes a key concept. 98 00:09:33,650 --> 00:09:41,240 The Ukrainian people who really were in large measure peasants who really were in many ways colonised under, 99 00:09:41,240 --> 00:09:46,790 under, under that regime, they become they become the centre of a social, historical narrative. 100 00:09:47,450 --> 00:09:55,520 Also very real rebellions, rebellions of Cossacks, for example, in the 17th century against this sort of take on a very central class. 101 00:09:55,600 --> 00:09:59,540 This is true not just in the classical books. The but also in the poems of. 102 00:09:59,600 --> 00:10:09,280 Shevchenko. In both cases, the real problem is the Polish feudal order and the real source of historical morality and future political legitimacy 103 00:10:09,520 --> 00:10:17,080 are those masses of people who are oppressed by it and someday will bring the injustice to the Polish side. 104 00:10:17,590 --> 00:10:21,280 Things are different on the Polish side. Things are rather interesting and different. 105 00:10:21,880 --> 00:10:26,920 There are two basic ways of dealing with that legacy, that legacy of greatness. 106 00:10:27,820 --> 00:10:33,670 One way is a kind of Republican style, a nostalgia for the old, the grand, 107 00:10:34,660 --> 00:10:41,139 the the in its positive reading, the tolerant, the nostalgic Republicans of the late 19th century. 108 00:10:41,140 --> 00:10:48,310 Generally, people of the left make the claim that there are certain features of this republic which should be restored. 109 00:10:48,610 --> 00:10:52,810 For example, it was multinational. That was good. It was tolerant. 110 00:10:53,230 --> 00:10:56,130 That was good. It was colourful, intellectually interesting. 111 00:10:56,140 --> 00:11:03,760 All these things are good and it's fine for us, the people who wish to rebuild Poland to refer to these ancient examples. 112 00:11:04,660 --> 00:11:09,760 At the same time, there is another country and the Polish politics of general coming from the right, 113 00:11:09,760 --> 00:11:13,630 from people called the national Democrats, who take exactly the opposite view. 114 00:11:14,080 --> 00:11:19,479 They say that the Polish, Lithuanian Commonwealth was a hindrance, it was an oppression. 115 00:11:19,480 --> 00:11:26,680 It oppressed the Polish peasants, which is true enough. The peasants who are the future of our nation do not identify with it whatsoever. 116 00:11:27,430 --> 00:11:31,870 And by the way, its tolerance was a bad idea. Toleration was what brought it down. 117 00:11:32,080 --> 00:11:40,110 And intellectually, it wasn't that great. So it was a kind of complete rejection of this tradition in dialogue, of course, 118 00:11:40,120 --> 00:11:47,529 with the people who were nostalgic about what this means is that these two different positions about the politics of memory, 119 00:11:47,530 --> 00:11:49,180 about what memory should mean for the future, 120 00:11:49,600 --> 00:11:55,240 have different attitudes towards Ukrainians from the side of the people who were nostalgic about the republic, 121 00:11:55,720 --> 00:12:03,370 from the side of people who believed in toleration and the possibility of continuity inside of people inside the state, rather the ethnic nation. 122 00:12:03,580 --> 00:12:06,130 There was the possibility for Ukraine. Ofelia Right. 123 00:12:06,490 --> 00:12:12,430 If you think that a future Poland is going to include Poles and Ukrainians and Jews of the other Russians and Iranians and so on, 124 00:12:12,730 --> 00:12:17,440 then it's very possible for you to be Ukrainian while under certain conditions. 125 00:12:18,010 --> 00:12:23,020 Ukrainians have to understand that that restored state is going to be nevertheless a Polish state. 126 00:12:23,680 --> 00:12:31,510 So is a pretty important qualifier to this Ukrainian area. But it's the Ukraine affiliated as possible from the right. 127 00:12:31,930 --> 00:12:38,170 If you are displacing the politics of memory from the elite, from the republic on to the Polish people, 128 00:12:38,200 --> 00:12:42,999 onto the Polish peasantry, then Ukraine, Ophelia is is is much, much more difficult. 129 00:12:43,000 --> 00:12:46,660 In fact, what you have is a kind of rationally grounded Ukraine, a phobia. 130 00:12:47,200 --> 00:12:52,330 If it's true that the Polish nation are just the peasants, there's no particular reason to glorify them. 131 00:12:52,840 --> 00:12:56,710 We know that they're in a competition with other peasants, for example, Ukrainian peasants. 132 00:12:56,950 --> 00:13:03,790 And it's important that they win this competition, and therefore it's important that they develop a kind of natural sense of hostility towards 133 00:13:03,790 --> 00:13:09,910 others so that the politics of the of the way Poles and Ukrainians begin to interact. 134 00:13:10,380 --> 00:13:14,860 It has to do with these possibilities of Republican Democratic identification. 135 00:13:15,160 --> 00:13:18,450 On the Polish side, you see a Republican version. We're going to that. 136 00:13:18,460 --> 00:13:22,420 We're going to glorify the state and you'll see a Democratic version. 137 00:13:22,480 --> 00:13:26,440 We're going to try to make the people, the books of history on the Ukrainian side. 138 00:13:27,100 --> 00:13:32,320 Much more important is the Democratic version that that the people in the centre of history know. 139 00:13:32,440 --> 00:13:35,409 Ironically, you are, if you will, of course, be surprised to hear this. 140 00:13:35,410 --> 00:13:41,200 But ironically, the people who create that version with the interesting example of Savchenko really was a peasant. 141 00:13:41,590 --> 00:13:44,920 I would think in general, those people are themselves elites. 142 00:13:44,950 --> 00:13:47,470 In fact, in general, those people are often aristocrats. 143 00:13:48,280 --> 00:13:55,660 For example, under the statistic, the most important Ukrainian activist was not an aristocrat, but somebody who was a polish, of course, weren't. 144 00:13:56,740 --> 00:14:08,370 So so far what we have is a very nice and more or less typical story of the tensions within the politics of national memory. 145 00:14:08,390 --> 00:14:11,470 The 19th century, the story that I'm telling you thus far. 146 00:14:11,680 --> 00:14:14,770 You could also tell more or less about Germans. Yes. 147 00:14:15,190 --> 00:14:19,959 Or about about the Germans and the French that there's a tension within one story. 148 00:14:19,960 --> 00:14:26,020 There's a tension between the two stories where things get a little bit different in East European history and history. 149 00:14:26,020 --> 00:14:33,549 Politics is very Eastern Europe is in the 20th century where these very conventional national narratives and national styles of narrative, 150 00:14:33,550 --> 00:14:44,560 which are still with us, are challenged by a too overwhelming and largely successful and very different approaches to challenges to the national 151 00:14:44,560 --> 00:14:54,670 paradigm as such one from the Soviet side and and one from the National Socialists from the Soviet side in early 20th century, 152 00:14:55,360 --> 00:14:59,470 what we see is a kind of a kind of attempt to. 153 00:15:00,130 --> 00:15:08,320 Subordinating the past to to to the future in the Soviet Union, as was established in 1922. 154 00:15:08,650 --> 00:15:16,360 What's what's at stake here is the future. So you have a homeland which is established after the First World War 1919, 155 00:15:16,570 --> 00:15:20,650 which faces this basic problem that the national security has completed itself. 156 00:15:20,770 --> 00:15:25,660 There's a national state. What are you then going to do? Your national story is over. 157 00:15:25,930 --> 00:15:29,830 I mean, as we know ourselves, ends of history are always very difficult times, 158 00:15:30,160 --> 00:15:33,940 because once you go to the army, you still have to do the next day and make choices. 159 00:15:34,690 --> 00:15:40,360 That's the funny thing about the ends of history. The Poland has to get up in the morning, make choices in 1919, 160 00:15:40,810 --> 00:15:46,420 and what Poland does is a complicated mixture in its pedagogy and its foreign policy in every other realm of politics, 161 00:15:46,420 --> 00:15:51,550 and not between these Democratic and these Republican versions of the politics of the past. 162 00:15:52,120 --> 00:16:01,300 On the one hand, some Ukrainians in some parts of Poland are repressed largely on the ethnic logic, the logic of competition. 163 00:16:01,960 --> 00:16:08,020 On the other hand, other Ukrainians in other parts of Poland are propped up with policies of affirmative action, 164 00:16:08,080 --> 00:16:13,030 are treated as partners in the New Republic, are prepared for an adventure against the Soviet Union. 165 00:16:13,330 --> 00:16:16,990 Both the logic of both logic for a president at all, at all times. 166 00:16:17,680 --> 00:16:25,180 But the Soviet Union is where the real action is for Ukrainians, because the huge majority of Ukrainians find themselves in the Soviet Union. 167 00:16:25,600 --> 00:16:29,140 And so you guys, with the politics of memory, 168 00:16:29,410 --> 00:16:37,390 is extraordinarily radical and has most of its consequences focussed precisely on on on the war on trains themselves. 169 00:16:37,930 --> 00:16:44,880 One thing that the Soviet Union does in the 1920s is that it tries to create a national elite with tremendous success. 170 00:16:44,950 --> 00:16:49,000 By the way, Ukraine did the most impressive National League ever created. 171 00:16:49,010 --> 00:16:53,740 The Ukrainian history is that created by Soviet policies, affirmative action in the 1920s. 172 00:16:53,980 --> 00:16:59,190 When we look for the good novels, for the art, for the poetry, for the young bohemians who die young, 173 00:16:59,200 --> 00:17:03,700 they die young for different reasons than young bohemians, usually due to their story. 174 00:17:04,120 --> 00:17:08,470 Those people are found precisely in the 1920s in Soviet Ukraine. 175 00:17:08,920 --> 00:17:12,640 And they are modernists. They're Soviet modernists. 176 00:17:13,000 --> 00:17:14,980 Now, the problem with this, 177 00:17:15,250 --> 00:17:22,390 this kind of affirmative action in the Soviet Union was that it left open the possibility that modernism might go the wrong way. 178 00:17:23,050 --> 00:17:27,940 The hope was that if you give these people the future, they'll understand the Soviet future. 179 00:17:28,210 --> 00:17:36,610 But several of them tended to think that if there was a future, it was going to be rather a European future or a truly cosmopolitan world future. 180 00:17:36,790 --> 00:17:41,320 And so modernism didn't necessarily go as opposed to go the other way. 181 00:17:41,380 --> 00:17:49,390 So that's for the elites. The other way that the Soviet Union subordinated the past to the future was with its with this policy of modernisation. 182 00:17:50,560 --> 00:17:54,940 As soon as the Soviet Union established itself as socialism in one country, 183 00:17:55,000 --> 00:17:59,860 as a as a project which was isolated from the rest of the world, in which had to catch up with the rest of the world. 184 00:18:00,460 --> 00:18:02,230 The whole. The whole past. 185 00:18:02,470 --> 00:18:09,280 Well, what Marxist would have seen as feudalism essentially had to be accelerated so that it could reach the future more quickly. 186 00:18:10,060 --> 00:18:15,370 Overcoming what the Soviets saw as feudalism in Ukraine was an especially difficult 187 00:18:15,370 --> 00:18:18,549 and dangerous business and involved the collectivisation of agriculture, 188 00:18:18,550 --> 00:18:23,740 as I'm sure you know, in world starvation or something like 3 million human beings. 189 00:18:24,100 --> 00:18:30,069 And precisely this adventure, precisely the success of this venture is, is what defined, I think, 190 00:18:30,070 --> 00:18:38,110 the character of the Soviet Union as of January 1934 at the party Congress were taking over, which says that Stalin has created a second revolution. 191 00:18:38,380 --> 00:18:41,020 We have a kind of mastery of history. 192 00:18:41,530 --> 00:18:48,740 The past has actually, from the Soviet point of view, has been mastered and the future has been has been brought into line. 193 00:18:48,760 --> 00:18:52,060 Things are going exactly the way that they're supposed to go. That's the story. 194 00:18:53,160 --> 00:19:01,450 Now, I would claim, though, that over the course of the 1930s in the Soviet Union, there's another process. 195 00:19:01,450 --> 00:19:03,910 And this is an obvious point. There's another process which is at work. 196 00:19:04,540 --> 00:19:11,710 The great family in Soviet Ukraine is not part of anybody's politics of memory at the time. 197 00:19:12,160 --> 00:19:17,980 I mean, this is an important thing to notice that the most the most stirring and the most awful events can transpire. 198 00:19:18,250 --> 00:19:22,330 They can really transpire without becoming part of anyone's narrative at the time. 199 00:19:22,480 --> 00:19:25,600 It's a sort of tragic feature of the difference between memory and history. 200 00:19:26,050 --> 00:19:32,770 At the time, the famine was becoming nobody's politics of memory because it was because it was so overwhelmingly awful, 201 00:19:33,100 --> 00:19:40,840 because in general, people who were literate were dying first day. And of course, the Soviet Union itself had no had no intention of recognising it. 202 00:19:41,320 --> 00:19:47,310 Moreover, the family was linked organically to the great terror that followed one of the sources of the great terror. 203 00:19:47,530 --> 00:19:53,679 One of the arguments on behalf of the Greater Soviet Union was that the famine was somehow a conspiracy by outside agents, 204 00:19:53,680 --> 00:19:59,400 in particular Poles, which meant that in the great terror, the single bloodiest part was actually the Polish opera. 205 00:19:59,970 --> 00:20:04,680 In which around 100,000 ethnic poles in the Soviet Union were executed. 206 00:20:05,040 --> 00:20:11,400 That, too, became part of nobody's politics of memory because no one fully understood what was happening at the time. 207 00:20:11,700 --> 00:20:19,890 It's only now becoming an event in historical memory of Poles, because at the time 37 to 38, no one was able to discern exactly what was going on. 208 00:20:20,460 --> 00:20:21,780 Now, why we dwelling on this? 209 00:20:22,050 --> 00:20:32,670 I'm drawing on this because in some sense, amnesia at 24, forgetfulness at point A is the raw material of the politics of memory later on. 210 00:20:32,980 --> 00:20:38,160 But these events that I'm describing in the 1930s are, so to speak, purely historical events. 211 00:20:38,400 --> 00:20:42,690 They're not events in the politics of memory as such because they're not registered. 212 00:20:42,690 --> 00:20:46,500 They're not understood. Their nature can be clarified. Their extent is not known. 213 00:20:47,370 --> 00:20:52,170 But they do become very important for the politics of memory later on as as we will see. 214 00:20:52,770 --> 00:20:54,990 So my general point, though, 215 00:20:55,350 --> 00:21:03,540 is that these very traditional Republican or Democratic modes of dealing with the past are overwhelmed by a Soviet vision of the future. 216 00:21:04,110 --> 00:21:05,790 They are overwhelmed again. 217 00:21:05,880 --> 00:21:14,280 Oh, and that Soviet vision, the future generates, so to speak, raw material from what something similar happens with with the Nazis. 218 00:21:14,310 --> 00:21:19,020 Now, of course, the Nazi vision of the future is very different than the Soviet vision of the future. 219 00:21:19,170 --> 00:21:28,110 In fact, I'm simplifying a bit, not too much to say that what the Nazis were concerned about was much more timelessness than than history. 220 00:21:28,410 --> 00:21:33,300 If anything, their assault on history was more violent, more extreme, more consistent morality. 221 00:21:33,600 --> 00:21:39,330 And the Soviet one, because they weren't simply trying to force history along to catch up to where it should be. 222 00:21:39,660 --> 00:21:47,040 They were abolishing the notion of history as such. For them, the sequence of cause and effect of past and future was not so terribly important. 223 00:21:47,370 --> 00:21:54,749 What mattered was a racial struggle, which doesn't really require a history, requires a zoology, requires knowing who's up and who's down. 224 00:21:54,750 --> 00:21:59,070 Who's better is worse. There is no meaning to history decides the outcome. 225 00:21:59,220 --> 00:22:03,240 So therefore, there's really no meaning to history at all. There's just the struggle. Nothing runs small. 226 00:22:03,900 --> 00:22:12,660 And in this particular wilderness in the world, I'm sure all of you know, both the Poles and the Ukrainians are seen as subhuman intervention. 227 00:22:13,590 --> 00:22:18,820 And the Jews, who are a very important population in this part of the world, are seen as the source of everything. 228 00:22:18,840 --> 00:22:23,850 It was wrong for the Germans as well as the governing people of the Soviet Union. 229 00:22:24,450 --> 00:22:31,650 Now, this, as with as in the Soviet case, this in the short run, 230 00:22:32,250 --> 00:22:38,820 this sort of approach to the world and this sort of approach to the war on the eastern front cannot create memory. 231 00:22:39,150 --> 00:22:46,590 All it can create is history. So when, for example, the Germans tried to kill the entirety of the Polish educated classes, 232 00:22:46,920 --> 00:22:53,130 they're doing that in order to make Poland look more like the subhuman group of motley labourers. 233 00:22:53,140 --> 00:22:56,490 This was to already, always have been. They're doing it for that reason. 234 00:22:56,790 --> 00:22:59,489 That's not an event which is easy to process. 235 00:22:59,490 --> 00:23:05,490 Historically, Polish intellectuals had a hard time understanding where this was coming from, what it was supposed to mean. 236 00:23:05,500 --> 00:23:06,660 It was going to take a long time. 237 00:23:06,930 --> 00:23:13,200 Copying is the paradigmatic example of this, but the entire assault on the Polish intelligentsia is is a bit like that as well. 238 00:23:13,890 --> 00:23:20,640 This is generating raw material for future memory, but it's, so to speak, not in reading the politics of memory as such. 239 00:23:21,180 --> 00:23:28,320 Now, something very interesting happens here in the relationship between Polish and Ukrainian memory and I to return to that. 240 00:23:29,610 --> 00:23:38,850 It seems at first glance that the way that Poles, patriotic Poles and patriotic Ukrainians remember the Second World War, 241 00:23:39,210 --> 00:23:44,460 as all of these as these horrible experiences begin to be processed as time passes, couldn't be more different. 242 00:23:45,090 --> 00:23:53,190 At one level, the memory of the Second World War seems to be something where Poles and Ukrainians have exactly the opposite perspectives. 243 00:23:53,280 --> 00:24:02,730 Why? Because a Polish state existed and was destroyed, whereas Germans recruited many Ukrainians from that state to be their collaborators. 244 00:24:03,600 --> 00:24:05,669 And since Poles were losing the state, 245 00:24:05,670 --> 00:24:11,400 they were fighting against Germans insofar as they fought to get a state back because Ukrainians did not have a state. 246 00:24:11,580 --> 00:24:17,310 It was politically plausible, politically reasonable then to think that Germans might help them to build a state. 247 00:24:17,550 --> 00:24:24,120 So the politics of this seemed to be in opposition. And worse than that, there's an event that takes place in the Second World War, 248 00:24:24,420 --> 00:24:30,180 which seems to be the most extreme example of how national memory would be impossible to reconcile. 249 00:24:30,900 --> 00:24:33,360 And that is the ethnic cleansing of 1943. 250 00:24:34,230 --> 00:24:42,990 Over the over the course of the war, conditions were created in part of what happened in Poland that led to a campaign of massive ethnic cleansing, 251 00:24:42,990 --> 00:24:48,960 massive violence and killing by of Poles, by Ukrainian nationalists in 1943. 252 00:24:49,320 --> 00:24:54,300 And that particular moment, which was horrible, which I can talk about more if you're interested in the question and answer, 253 00:24:54,720 --> 00:24:59,160 that particular moment seems to be the moment from which Polish and Ukrainian memory. 254 00:24:59,270 --> 00:25:03,000 Must depart and. And never, never, never, never return. 255 00:25:03,020 --> 00:25:09,440 Never reconcile themselves to again. I want to claim, though, that what happens is a little more interesting than that, 256 00:25:09,800 --> 00:25:15,050 because in in both the Polish, this is going to seem subtle and maybe a little bit perverse, 257 00:25:15,050 --> 00:25:22,550 but I hope you'll see where it goes in the end in both the Polish and the Ukrainian recollections of the ethnic cleansing and of the war itself. 258 00:25:22,880 --> 00:25:26,390 It's the Democratic version of memory which is triumphant. 259 00:25:26,390 --> 00:25:30,860 It's the ethnic version of history. The triumphant people killed and eliminate in the name of ethnicity. 260 00:25:30,860 --> 00:25:38,330 People died because of ethnicity. That seems like an opposition, but it actually means that memory is happening in the same kind of mode. 261 00:25:38,660 --> 00:25:47,510 And I'm going to come to why that matters a little bit later on. Know what happens with the Soviet Union is crucial because remember, 262 00:25:47,660 --> 00:25:57,110 most Ukrainians who were alive in 1941 when one eastern front against most Ukrainians were alive and 1945 more comes to an end, 263 00:25:57,320 --> 00:26:03,500 are living in the Soviet Union. But in 1945, it's almost all of because the Soviet Union is extending to the West. 264 00:26:03,890 --> 00:26:09,440 And so what happens in the Soviet Union is incredibly important for what's going to happen to Ukraine memory. 265 00:26:09,740 --> 00:26:10,190 And again, 266 00:26:10,280 --> 00:26:20,000 making a large point very briefly and very roughly what happens in the process of the war is that the Soviet Union ceases to be about the future. 267 00:26:20,090 --> 00:26:24,110 Okay, I realise there are millions of people in Western Europe for him that can't possibly have been true. 268 00:26:24,350 --> 00:26:27,230 But I think in a fundamental way California as well. 269 00:26:27,380 --> 00:26:37,040 You know, fundamentally New York in Cincinnati, Ohio in a fundamental way, the reference point for Soviet Union, the Soviet Union changes, 270 00:26:37,310 --> 00:26:41,780 the fundamental reference point becomes the great parliament before it becomes the Second World War, 271 00:26:42,320 --> 00:26:48,590 it becomes an event of the past which is fundamentally different from a socialism which is going to arrive in the future. 272 00:26:48,590 --> 00:26:51,620 It's a different structure. It's a much more conventional structure. 273 00:26:51,830 --> 00:26:56,150 You have to remember the past and you have to remember it the right way. 274 00:26:56,510 --> 00:27:03,920 And I would say that from May 1945, this happens and immediately everyone has to account for it immediately. 275 00:27:04,640 --> 00:27:10,530 Political political correctness inside the Soviet Union depends upon the fact what you did, what you didn't do, 276 00:27:10,550 --> 00:27:18,530 what can be announced during the Second World War, and importantly in the new satellite states in Poland, for example, this is true as well. 277 00:27:19,130 --> 00:27:25,430 Suddenly, the politics of memory is all about correct interpretation of an event in the recent historical past. 278 00:27:25,640 --> 00:27:31,670 Now, to give a dramatic example from Poland, in order for Polish Communists to rule the country, 279 00:27:31,940 --> 00:27:38,270 they have to have a view of the Second World War, which is both correct from the Soviet point of view and appealing for the Polish mind you. 280 00:27:38,660 --> 00:27:45,200 And this is what leads us to the convenient notion, which is still repeated by historians in Poland to this day, 281 00:27:45,530 --> 00:27:49,760 that in Poland during the Second World War, three women Poles were killed and 3 million Jews were killed. 282 00:27:50,600 --> 00:27:56,390 If you reflect upon that for just a moment, I mean, what are the chances, honestly, that it would be 3 million to 3 million? 283 00:27:56,720 --> 00:28:01,520 It wasn't. It was about it was a total was about four and a half million to 3 million for the Jews. 284 00:28:01,520 --> 00:28:05,240 Is about rates a little bit higher for the Poles? It's maybe a million, a million and a half. 285 00:28:05,720 --> 00:28:11,840 And those figures were known at the time. And the communists who knew Poland in particular, Yahoo, Vermont, 286 00:28:13,010 --> 00:28:18,800 made the active decision to change the demography so that Poles and Jews died in the same numbers. 287 00:28:19,160 --> 00:28:26,729 Why? Because that makes it seem like the death and the suffering in the Second World War wasn't national, was part of a national. 288 00:28:26,730 --> 00:28:33,860 It was part of the general national experience. And that this thing, which we call the Holocaust, so to speak, didn't happen as a distinct event. 289 00:28:34,070 --> 00:28:38,510 What happened was something which happened to Polish citizens and this was acceptable 290 00:28:38,510 --> 00:28:42,830 to the Soviets because this is a minor key version of the general Soviet story, 291 00:28:42,840 --> 00:28:47,479 what happens in the Second World War, which is that whatever the Germans did, they were doing it to Soviet citizens, 292 00:28:47,480 --> 00:28:52,370 to peaceful Soviet citizens, not to Jews or to the other Russians, but to peaceful Soviet citizens. 293 00:28:52,940 --> 00:28:58,130 And the interest implication of this, a very important implication of this for for the politics of memory, 294 00:28:58,550 --> 00:29:03,860 is that communism, after the war, both in the Soviet Union, but especially in Poland, 295 00:29:04,730 --> 00:29:10,010 this is actually what subject is is is ethno communism from the very beginning, 296 00:29:10,640 --> 00:29:17,150 because it has no relation to the Second World War and because it has to do with ethnic terms and sort of speak democratic terms, 297 00:29:17,420 --> 00:29:21,860 it is ethnic from the very beginning. Ethnicity is built into it from from the very beginning. 298 00:29:22,820 --> 00:29:29,090 Okay. So this brings me to what happens to the politics of memory after the Second World War. 299 00:29:29,780 --> 00:29:34,010 And it seems to me that the very interesting story, the very interesting intellectual story, 300 00:29:34,340 --> 00:29:37,070 and one about which I think that the great bookstore has to be written, 301 00:29:37,550 --> 00:29:44,840 is the way in which the Republican version of national memory reasserts itself and 302 00:29:44,840 --> 00:29:50,480 begins to challenge the Democratic and the particular the place where this happens. 303 00:29:50,510 --> 00:29:53,210 I mean, this really happened inside the minds of two people. 304 00:29:53,240 --> 00:29:58,730 Julius Maciejewski in music, whether it's the place that this happened was was in Germany Harris School to attack. 305 00:29:59,280 --> 00:30:04,709 The general principle to attack going against not only the official propaganda of communist Poland, 306 00:30:04,710 --> 00:30:11,010 but also the general and perfectly understandable sentiments of Polish immigrants survivors around the world. 307 00:30:11,490 --> 00:30:17,129 Pretty much the notion that Poland was fundamentally a state and that the experience of the 308 00:30:17,130 --> 00:30:21,960 Second World War had to be processed in the terms most likely to help that state thrive, 309 00:30:22,170 --> 00:30:25,800 survive and regain independence in the future. 310 00:30:26,490 --> 00:30:34,610 Now, this this was a very, very important move that was made, and you're probably familiar with the particular ways that it was just being given. 311 00:30:34,610 --> 00:30:41,700 It's made this argument that rather than being concerned about the correct match between ethnicity and political borders, 312 00:30:41,700 --> 00:30:43,440 we accept the borders in the way they are, 313 00:30:43,950 --> 00:30:52,500 rather than being concerned with the very true, legitimate historical grievances between Ukrainians and Poles or Lithuanians and Poles. 314 00:30:52,740 --> 00:30:56,370 We put those aside and concentrate on the politics of regaining sovereignty. 315 00:30:57,300 --> 00:31:02,970 This was all this can all be seen as a kind of recovery of the Republican mode of thinking about the past, 316 00:31:03,480 --> 00:31:06,630 that the past has to do with the state rather than about the ethnicity. 317 00:31:07,050 --> 00:31:15,140 Now, this created an interesting possibility for negotiation with Ukrainian intellectuals inside the Soviet Union and outside the Soviet Union, 318 00:31:15,540 --> 00:31:20,940 because Ukraine intellectuals, especially those from Western Ukraine, were themselves undertaking a similar move. 319 00:31:21,630 --> 00:31:27,090 The ethnic concept of the past, which had been highly motivating during the Second World War, 320 00:31:27,360 --> 00:31:29,969 which had led to not just the horrors of ethnic cleansing, 321 00:31:29,970 --> 00:31:37,290 but also to a very impressive and long lasting resistance movement in western Ukraine, horribly destructive for everyone involved, 322 00:31:37,290 --> 00:31:46,080 but nevertheless certainly testifying to an amazing local dedication and courage that this had not worked out, 323 00:31:46,260 --> 00:31:49,410 and that one of the reasons it hadn't worked out was that this ethnic idea, 324 00:31:49,740 --> 00:31:57,570 the idea that the past that the past of the polity, the past of the people had to do with ethnicity was not working in most of Ukraine. 325 00:31:57,930 --> 00:32:03,629 So over the course of the 1950s, sixties and 1970s, many of the Ukrainians who we know as the dissidents, 326 00:32:03,630 --> 00:32:06,210 many of the Ukrainians who some of them came to power after 91, 327 00:32:06,600 --> 00:32:14,340 reframed the story so that it was less about the past of the nation, less social history, and much more about the past of the state. 328 00:32:14,520 --> 00:32:20,550 They began to think about Ukraine in terms of a civic identity, this identity, which is more and more predominant in Ukraine discourse today. 329 00:32:21,450 --> 00:32:26,549 What this meant in turn was that there was a possibility for discussion because, you know, 330 00:32:26,550 --> 00:32:30,660 the difference between one of the major differences between the Democratic and the Republican 331 00:32:30,810 --> 00:32:36,300 versions of the past is that the Democratic one is very difficult as a foundation for dialogue, 332 00:32:36,480 --> 00:32:40,350 because it leads to conversations which you have all seen, heard, taken hard, 333 00:32:40,350 --> 00:32:44,610 and where I say I suffer more, you say you suffered more, I say it was your fault. 334 00:32:44,610 --> 00:32:49,020 You say it was my fault. Right. That is what the ethnic understanding of the past leads to. 335 00:32:49,170 --> 00:32:53,010 And there can be merit to those discussions. There are certainly questions there that can be answered. 336 00:32:53,580 --> 00:33:01,230 You can count how many people were killed. That's a useful exercise, but it's that has a limit in terms of how far the dialogue can go. 337 00:33:01,740 --> 00:33:09,450 If the past is reframed in civic terms, then the questions become things like What was the problem that led to your state falling apart? 338 00:33:09,600 --> 00:33:11,640 What was the problem that led to my state falling apart? 339 00:33:11,670 --> 00:33:18,210 Are there things which we might do in common or even together, which would make it less likely that our states would fall apart in the future? 340 00:33:18,510 --> 00:33:24,330 That's the way that the dialogue shifted, at least in this particular conversation on the pages of Paris School Twitter. 341 00:33:24,810 --> 00:33:35,240 And this conversation was very relevant, extremely relevant in 1989 to 1991, because in this in this incredibly interesting period between 1999, 342 00:33:35,250 --> 00:33:40,800 when Poland had become a sovereign state and Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union. 343 00:33:41,220 --> 00:33:45,450 And here we see one of just the absolutely crucial moments in the politics of memory. 344 00:33:45,750 --> 00:33:48,270 Things could go very wrong during this period. 345 00:33:48,600 --> 00:33:53,880 Just to give you the example of Yugoslavia, things could things could go less wrong, but still rather raw. 346 00:33:54,390 --> 00:34:00,570 Czechoslovakia, in the case of in the case of Poland and Ukraine, what happens between 89 and 91 is extremely interesting. 347 00:34:01,290 --> 00:34:09,270 Polish foreign policy embodies, in a highly radical form, the civic politics of now. 348 00:34:10,500 --> 00:34:16,379 The Polish Foreign Ministry takes the position that it is going to treat Ukraine 349 00:34:16,380 --> 00:34:21,450 as a sovereign state and that it's going to recognise Ukraine's boundaries. 350 00:34:21,660 --> 00:34:24,570 Now, Ukraine is not a sovereign state, right? 351 00:34:24,840 --> 00:34:30,390 And those boundaries are, of course, created in a way which is highly controversial, involves taking half of Poland. 352 00:34:31,170 --> 00:34:36,030 If you were to have there were things to talk about with those guys if you want to talk about populations. 353 00:34:36,240 --> 00:34:43,800 If you thought about history as social history, right. If you were taking the Democratic view history, the rules, the goal was a topic, right? 354 00:34:44,040 --> 00:34:46,019 But if you take the civic version of history, 355 00:34:46,020 --> 00:34:51,180 if you're concerned only about the state and what you learned about preserving the state, it's not a topic. 356 00:34:51,450 --> 00:34:53,930 So the Polish Foreign Ministry took a radical I mean, 357 00:34:53,940 --> 00:34:58,940 an incredibly right that you go to all these things saying literally became a kind of mantra we're going to. 358 00:34:59,010 --> 00:35:01,910 Leave history to the historians, which is very flattering, of course. 359 00:35:01,920 --> 00:35:05,460 I mean, you want to know you want to believe that you have some kind of mission like, yeah, 360 00:35:06,510 --> 00:35:11,459 but but the truth is used so radically that I think it actually did affect the way things turned 361 00:35:11,460 --> 00:35:16,770 out in Ukraine in a way which is probably still relevant today because the civic business, 362 00:35:17,130 --> 00:35:21,090 it isn't just the nicer way of having a conversation in Paris. 363 00:35:21,360 --> 00:35:29,970 If you're Poland, you're Ukraine. The civic business has direct consequences for how national liberation movements see their problem in Ukraine. 364 00:35:30,180 --> 00:35:35,790 National liberation movements have always had at least two problems the Russian problem and the Polish problem. 365 00:35:36,180 --> 00:35:40,350 I mean, they've usually also had the Ukrainian problem or Ukrainian problems, 366 00:35:41,370 --> 00:35:46,019 but they've traditionally geopolitically there's there's the problem from the east and there's a problem for the West. 367 00:35:46,020 --> 00:35:51,329 And these interrupt because the Russians will direct you towards the Poles and the Poles will direct you towards the Russians. 368 00:35:51,330 --> 00:35:52,470 It becomes very complicated. 369 00:35:53,010 --> 00:36:00,090 In 1989, for the first time in the history of of nationality in national politics, there was only one direction of the problem. 370 00:36:00,720 --> 00:36:07,320 Ukrainian activists working from 89 to 91 were not worried that Poland is going to claim the wolf. 371 00:36:07,770 --> 00:36:12,959 We're not worried in general about Poland at all. In fact, tended to think in some rough way. 372 00:36:12,960 --> 00:36:14,610 Poland was on their side, was an example. 373 00:36:14,610 --> 00:36:20,579 And so that was something very new, arguably, that contributed to the end of the Soviet Union, because, of course, 374 00:36:20,580 --> 00:36:27,690 the tactics of the KGB was using in the Baltics, in the western Ukraine, was to direct national movements against each other. 375 00:36:29,070 --> 00:36:36,510 The KGB was, in particular trying to take advantage of the history of 1943 to make sure that Poles and Ukrainians couldn't possibly cooperate. 376 00:36:36,690 --> 00:36:38,849 But since the discussion had been framed not in ethnic, 377 00:36:38,850 --> 00:36:44,400 but instead of terms not a Democratic than a Republican terms, that didn't actually work itself out. 378 00:36:44,670 --> 00:36:50,100 So what I'm trying to claim is that this this, this, this, this turn in discourse, 379 00:36:50,100 --> 00:36:54,089 this possibility for a different understanding of the politics of memory, which is still the politics. 380 00:36:54,090 --> 00:36:57,030 It's still politics. It's still memory. It's it's framed in a different way. 381 00:36:57,600 --> 00:37:02,100 Has different has foreign policy implications, which may in this case have been rather significant. 382 00:37:02,640 --> 00:37:13,770 Okay. So what happens after Poland and Ukraine are both independent this period from 1991 to the present in Ukraine, broadly speaking, 383 00:37:14,610 --> 00:37:21,750 most of the things that Poles taken very seriously, like the ethnic cleansing in Bologna in 1943, 384 00:37:22,320 --> 00:37:26,910 like the loss of Polish territory in the old Soviet troops in 1939. 385 00:37:27,450 --> 00:37:33,060 In general, these things are not at all significant in Ukrainian discourse. 386 00:37:34,200 --> 00:37:41,610 These are West Ukrainian issues. But Ukraine is a very big country and for the most part of the things that the Poles find significant 387 00:37:41,730 --> 00:37:47,400 when they're in the ethnic movement and democratic mode are not that significant in Ukraine in general. 388 00:37:47,400 --> 00:37:52,680 What one sees in the Ukrainian politics of memory after 1991 are two kinds of pluralism. 389 00:37:53,370 --> 00:37:59,310 The first kind of pluralism is oligarchic pluralism, which is the kind of pluralism that Ukraine has in every sphere of life. 390 00:38:00,750 --> 00:38:05,520 That is different. Centres of power could favour different ideas of history at the same time. 391 00:38:05,820 --> 00:38:10,080 So unlike in other places, you do have a certain amount of discussion about the past. 392 00:38:11,010 --> 00:38:14,400 The other kind of frozen that Ukraine had was sequential prism. 393 00:38:14,430 --> 00:38:20,370 So when you Stingo comes to power, he advocates a different politics of memory in which the family is very important. 394 00:38:20,520 --> 00:38:23,760 When Yanukovich wins the elections, all of a sudden the family is less important. 395 00:38:24,060 --> 00:38:27,150 But there's nevertheless a kind of pluralism that happens to be someone. 396 00:38:27,150 --> 00:38:29,910 There's a difference of opinion which which which is visible. 397 00:38:30,420 --> 00:38:41,730 Now, when I say that Cohen is insignificant in Ukrainian debates about the past, I would of course recognise that there are some exceptions. 398 00:38:43,110 --> 00:38:46,860 One one recent exception, which I'm going to return to, is 1943. 399 00:38:47,250 --> 00:38:54,270 But I also want to point out that even though Poland seems to be strikingly insignificant in Ukraine's discussions of the past, 400 00:38:54,660 --> 00:38:58,229 Poland nevertheless pops up at certain crucial moments. 401 00:38:58,230 --> 00:39:05,100 I want to ask why, in 2004, in the middle of the Orange Revolution, it was the Poles. 402 00:39:05,250 --> 00:39:07,620 In that case, when your guest for tomorrow, Kwasniewski, 403 00:39:07,620 --> 00:39:14,850 other presidents who came and served as a mediator in 2014, it was about a small support scheme. 404 00:39:15,060 --> 00:39:20,550 The Polish foreign minister again, who served as the most important mediator in the middle of of the revolution. 405 00:39:21,120 --> 00:39:26,520 And there's this funny tendency for some of you who are paying close attention to my of notes where 406 00:39:26,790 --> 00:39:32,340 in the general critique of Europe by the by the activists on Maidan last year and this year. 407 00:39:32,370 --> 00:39:37,259 The general overwhelming and sort of heartbreaking critique of the European Union generally. 408 00:39:37,260 --> 00:39:41,880 There was an exception. That exception was Poland. Why is that how the how that came about? 409 00:39:42,300 --> 00:39:49,050 Where does that where does that come from? Now, I want to suggest that the place where that comes from is, again, 410 00:39:49,740 --> 00:39:58,860 the difference between this Democratic and this Republican notion of solidarity or this Republican and Democratic notion passed most. 411 00:39:58,950 --> 00:40:04,740 Days for the I think you can correct me in question and answer because I can tell that 28% of you reports. 412 00:40:05,100 --> 00:40:08,340 Most days, 28% of you are. 413 00:40:09,390 --> 00:40:17,820 And in most days, the standard way that polls feel about Ukrainians and at least this is what the opinion polls tell us, is suspicion and even fear. 414 00:40:18,000 --> 00:40:21,180 Indeed, for most of the 1990s, if you look back at the opinion polls, 415 00:40:21,690 --> 00:40:28,560 polls consistently said they were more afraid of Ukrainians than of Germans, which is rather which is rather interesting. 416 00:40:29,220 --> 00:40:37,470 And it has everything to do with the very real ethnic cleansing of the war and also the way that communist politics exploited that particular, 417 00:40:37,600 --> 00:40:43,710 particular fear. So in a kind of default ethnic mode, there's the polls do not generally. 418 00:40:43,740 --> 00:40:49,380 You can correct me again, but at least let's put it this way, sociologically, very little sympathy was registered. 419 00:40:49,950 --> 00:40:56,820 But nevertheless, in moments of high politics, like 2004 or more recently, this year, 2014, 420 00:40:57,120 --> 00:41:05,880 what seems to happen is that there's a shift in mentality from the ethnic, the democratically, it's history to the civic way of seeing history. 421 00:41:06,150 --> 00:41:09,960 So all of a sudden, the register, the armaments changes. 422 00:41:10,470 --> 00:41:17,400 So people who are who one day are criticising Ukrainians for not recognising that 1943 was a genocide, 423 00:41:17,950 --> 00:41:23,430 that literally the next day are campaigning for a much more active Polish policy to support Ukraine. 424 00:41:23,850 --> 00:41:29,370 And I think that has to do with the possibility that people can switch between modes that what 425 00:41:29,370 --> 00:41:33,480 I'm talking about when I say the Democratic and Republican version of the politics of the past, 426 00:41:33,720 --> 00:41:39,060 this isn't just different people. It's different modes which can exist inside inside the same person. 427 00:41:39,420 --> 00:41:44,760 And so I would I would talk to you as a claim, which I can't prove that what has happened in 2004. 428 00:41:44,760 --> 00:41:48,870 And what happened is that part of what's happening now is that in moments of crisis, 429 00:41:49,170 --> 00:41:55,440 Poles are capable of seeing Ukraine as a parallel state, as even a fraternal state to abuse a much abused notion. 430 00:41:55,680 --> 00:42:01,050 A state which is in a in a parallel position worthy of sympathy becomes worthy of support. 431 00:42:01,340 --> 00:42:06,810 Right. Worthy of sympathy because worthy of support. The sympathy follows a certain kind of logic. 432 00:42:07,920 --> 00:42:11,190 But I want to close with the thought that what is happening in the politics of 433 00:42:11,190 --> 00:42:17,520 memory between Ukrainians and Poles right now may involve something rather new. 434 00:42:17,880 --> 00:42:19,080 Something rather different. 435 00:42:19,410 --> 00:42:29,040 Something which goes beyond these two logics of of of the politics of the past, which come from the 19th century in general. 436 00:42:29,040 --> 00:42:33,810 I think it's fair to say that in conditions of independence in the last decade and a half, 437 00:42:34,110 --> 00:42:39,899 what's happened is that both of these logics have reappeared on both sides with with the end of communism and, 438 00:42:39,900 --> 00:42:41,790 of course, with the end of National Socialism, 439 00:42:42,090 --> 00:42:48,360 you see a very you see the resurgence of very familiar ways of talking about the past in general and on both sides. 440 00:42:49,050 --> 00:42:54,660 But I think, interestingly, something else, something new may be, in fact, happening. 441 00:42:55,080 --> 00:43:02,940 And I think that the novel thing is that events which are themselves rather recent, 442 00:43:03,600 --> 00:43:07,710 are suddenly being enfolded into both nations more, or to put in a different way, 443 00:43:08,240 --> 00:43:12,960 events which aren't from the 19th century and aren't from the thirties and forties, 444 00:43:13,000 --> 00:43:20,520 events which happened in communism or even in post communism are beginning to register to become central in the memory politics on both sides. 445 00:43:20,790 --> 00:43:26,820 And that is is having a certain kind of effect. Let me give you first what might seem to be just a minor example, which I think is very. 446 00:43:28,290 --> 00:43:34,770 If you're like me, you've been doing a lot of reading of press reports about the revolution and counter-revolution in Ukraine. 447 00:43:35,220 --> 00:43:41,190 You might have noticed that people writing in English and French and German most Western languages don't 448 00:43:41,190 --> 00:43:46,830 quite know how to describe those Ukrainians who are on the Maidan who then choose chose to use violence. 449 00:43:47,070 --> 00:43:51,360 It's an unbelievably, actually unbelievably opportunistic situation. 450 00:43:51,600 --> 00:43:59,630 And so opera that people one day will say activists, you know, and then the next day for, say, combat, or one day there's an activist. 451 00:43:59,660 --> 00:44:03,600 Next day they'll say terrorists. You know, they're describing, you know, the same the same people. 452 00:44:04,770 --> 00:44:13,110 If you read the Polish press, you notice that this problem does not exist in Poland because the Poles have the word they see this was a postal, 453 00:44:13,290 --> 00:44:17,310 it was an uprising, has brought industrial business and more skilled occupations. 454 00:44:17,490 --> 00:44:21,730 There's a word for someone who carries on a national uprising. That person is, of course, Thanos. 455 00:44:22,050 --> 00:44:25,230 And so if you read the sort of report itself, you can read about constancy. 456 00:44:25,230 --> 00:44:29,250 That category exists in Poland because that experience exists in Poland. 457 00:44:30,060 --> 00:44:33,930 And it and as you read, if you read again incorrectly, 458 00:44:33,930 --> 00:44:40,410 if you follow as you read that word persistently over and over and over again in the press as a description of what's happened in Ukraine 2014. 459 00:44:40,860 --> 00:44:46,480 It can't help but in some way make that make that thing which is happening in Ukraine, more claims, 460 00:44:46,710 --> 00:44:51,000 make it make it, make it more approachable, make it seem like something which is sympathetic. 461 00:44:51,180 --> 00:44:52,920 And of course, there are similarities. 462 00:44:53,250 --> 00:44:58,660 I mean, not so much with the actual facade of the 19th century, but I would say with the Warsaw uprising, that is the. 463 00:44:58,760 --> 00:45:04,700 Say it's a moment where people of very different politics are brought together. 464 00:45:05,010 --> 00:45:09,110 Right. And if you look at the Polish army, the Polish resistance in Nazi Germany, 465 00:45:09,410 --> 00:45:15,800 the people who are in the army have all kinds of different views, like all the things that you can say about the Maidan today. 466 00:45:15,870 --> 00:45:21,799 Most of the people also applied to the home army that you had men and women and people of different generations. 467 00:45:21,800 --> 00:45:23,420 You have people of different political commitments. 468 00:45:23,660 --> 00:45:28,910 You have people from different parts of the country who were unified because of what they saw as a national cause. 469 00:45:29,150 --> 00:45:32,780 Now, the Maidan was very much like that is still very much like that. 470 00:45:33,050 --> 00:45:39,110 And I think this notion of constancy, like this notion of a special national moment captures that as well. 471 00:45:39,650 --> 00:45:44,770 But there's something there's something that's maybe even more interesting going on in this march. 472 00:45:44,780 --> 00:45:49,400 We saw actually just wrote an article about this. And just your idea, as I said, to a close, 473 00:45:50,810 --> 00:46:01,070 the other thing which is which is recent and which is a bit similar and which I think serves as a kind of matrix onto which Poles can see consciously, 474 00:46:01,070 --> 00:46:05,480 have consciously or unconsciously what's happening in Ukraine is, is, is solidarity. 475 00:46:06,230 --> 00:46:08,420 Now, I don't have to prove this to you because of course, 476 00:46:08,420 --> 00:46:16,190 the way that the way one of the most compelling symbols in Poland is the old Solidarity banner. 477 00:46:16,640 --> 00:46:20,930 Right. But instead of the red and white with the same silver letters and blue and yellow, 478 00:46:21,350 --> 00:46:30,170 which is absolutely ambiguous from from a false point of view, I think that the resemblance is something more than accidental. 479 00:46:30,200 --> 00:46:35,329 I think what's happening is that his recent history, at least in Poland, 480 00:46:35,330 --> 00:46:41,159 in Ukraine, not everywhere, recent history is creeping into the history of Poland. 481 00:46:41,160 --> 00:46:52,400 The 1981 Solidarity Martial law is not so difficult to map onto the history of Ukraine in 2013 to 2014 Maidan external intervention. 482 00:46:52,670 --> 00:47:00,280 And I think something like that is is happening. I also think that there's a certain that solidarity, contentious as it is, 483 00:47:00,290 --> 00:47:05,720 as the tradition in Poland, opens the way for what will what Tim called it, the very end of his book. 484 00:47:05,780 --> 00:47:11,210 He cites Hannah Arendt saying that solidarity proved the human capacity to create new things. 485 00:47:11,510 --> 00:47:19,070 But it's a new kind of politics. It's not entirely captured by right or left, by by elite or mass, by conservative or liberal. 486 00:47:19,280 --> 00:47:25,549 It's something which is new. And that that notion that there can be new kinds of politics and special situations 487 00:47:25,550 --> 00:47:29,660 also seems to apply to Maidan and to be applied more or less under flexibly, 488 00:47:29,660 --> 00:47:36,620 at least by some poles, towards the impact. Now I'm posing with this note about things that are new because of course, 489 00:47:36,620 --> 00:47:41,870 there's another politics of history which is going on now in Ukraine, which focuses on the old. 490 00:47:42,380 --> 00:47:50,870 And I'm just going to just suggest what this might be and what I mean in the way that the Maidan reframed outside of Ukraine, 491 00:47:51,420 --> 00:47:57,370 opposed to, say, in Russia, in the means of mass communication, which are affiliated with one another. 492 00:47:57,620 --> 00:48:00,560 With Russia, you have something entirely different going on. 493 00:48:00,980 --> 00:48:08,680 And you have rather than this sort of complicated discussion, which I tried to lead you to, where there's a history of representation, 494 00:48:08,690 --> 00:48:14,480 there's a history of Poles and Ukrainians as Republican and Democratic, and the language solidarity idea. 495 00:48:14,780 --> 00:48:17,329 Instead, you have a very powerful, 496 00:48:17,330 --> 00:48:28,380 unsuccessful attempt to reduce this to the former categories and same war in in which what's happened what's happening is not a civil society. 497 00:48:28,400 --> 00:48:33,440 It's not a unification of different sorts of people. It's not resistance, legitimate or legitimate. 498 00:48:33,620 --> 00:48:39,139 It's simply fascism. Now, that has been I mean, I saw what you noted. 499 00:48:39,140 --> 00:48:40,070 We don't have time to talk about. 500 00:48:40,070 --> 00:48:48,700 What that has been is extraordinarily successful and not only inside lines of Russia, and it certainly is a politics of memory, 501 00:48:48,950 --> 00:48:54,650 the notion that the good people or the antifascists and the party political activists comes from somewhere. 502 00:48:54,710 --> 00:48:59,180 It comes from my conclusion that injuries and it's also a way of very powerfully 503 00:48:59,180 --> 00:49:04,790 dividing in a manichaean mind that the good the good from the good from evil. 504 00:49:04,880 --> 00:49:14,810 Essentially, what I like to close by suggesting is that one final thing that Poles and Ukrainians have in common, 505 00:49:15,050 --> 00:49:18,170 although and other people often don't share, 506 00:49:18,620 --> 00:49:23,270 is the recognition that fascism and anti-fascism is a politics of memory, 507 00:49:24,290 --> 00:49:32,240 that it's not some sincere and it's not some sincere or emotional or or historical reference. 508 00:49:32,540 --> 00:49:38,120 That fascism and anti-fascism is a politics and that it can exist in all kinds of combinations. 509 00:49:38,750 --> 00:49:40,970 So just to give you the most extreme example, 510 00:49:41,330 --> 00:49:47,090 a lot of the Russian politics in memory have been within the Ukraine has involved claiming that Jews are Nazis, 511 00:49:47,660 --> 00:49:53,910 which from a largely Western point of view is sort of, you know, either you don't register that it's happened, 512 00:49:53,910 --> 00:49:58,520 which I ask people, or you might scratch your head and say, Hmm, that's probably not. 513 00:49:58,590 --> 00:50:04,050 Likely from a Polish point of view, that sort of thing is totally familiar, right? 514 00:50:04,290 --> 00:50:12,840 In Poland, you have the spectacle in 1968 of the the Communist Party expelling Jews while while claiming that it's protecting them from reactionaries. 515 00:50:13,110 --> 00:50:21,200 You have the spectacle during solidarity of 1981 of of the party itself using ethnic nationalism in calling into 516 00:50:21,240 --> 00:50:27,870 the US Jews and calling them enticing but at the same time mobilising both of these things at the same time. 517 00:50:28,110 --> 00:50:34,950 That was the bread and butter of a certain communist politics of memory and that sort of thing is now coming out again. 518 00:50:35,400 --> 00:50:40,890 That is so strange. That is very strange, I think, for most people. So strange that I think we don't even notice. 519 00:50:41,580 --> 00:50:47,910 We don't notice that it's dead or we don't notice the contradiction and we are just sort of moved by it, but we don't really see what's going on. 520 00:50:48,360 --> 00:50:52,349 The thing that I think made it all that Ukrainians still have in common, and again, 521 00:50:52,350 --> 00:50:57,600 I invite you to correct me or to modify what I'm saying is the sense that that is also a politics of memory, 522 00:50:58,250 --> 00:51:05,970 that that is a rival kind of politics of memory, but that it's a politics and that one can think about it politically rather than in some other way. 523 00:51:06,570 --> 00:51:14,970 So that brings me to 2014. It brings me through the ideas of of politics, of memory, traditional Republican, Democratic. 524 00:51:15,390 --> 00:51:20,550 It gives people a certain evolution of how Poles and Ukrainians have interacted, 525 00:51:20,880 --> 00:51:26,100 where Democratic politics is harder, Republican politics is easier, and we may now be somewhere. 526 00:51:26,520 --> 00:51:28,470 So that's where I'd like to close. Thank you very much.