Video: Timothy Snyder talks about what makes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a colonial war
The bustling neighbourhoods at the heart of cities throughout the ages
Michael E Smith writes: All cities have neighbourhoods. This may not sound like much of an observation, but it is in fact a powerful claim for archaeologists of early cities. We now know that neighbourhoods are the only true urban universal – a feature found in every city that has ever existed, past and present. Other seemingly ‘urban’ traits, from streets and big buildings to markets and specialists, are absent from many cities and urban traditions. But neighbourhoods are playing…
The war in Ukraine is a colonial war
Timothy Snyder writes: When Vladimir Putin denies the reality of the Ukrainian state, he is speaking the familiar language of empire. For five hundred years, European conquerors called the societies that they encountered “tribes,” treating them as incapable of governing themselves. As we see in the ruins of Ukrainian cities, and in the Russian practice of mass killing, rape, and deportation, the claim that a nation does not exist is the rhetorical preparation for destroying it. Empire’s story divides subjects…
The core of Putin’s weakness
John Sipher writes: In a recent discussion with New Yorker editor David Remnick, Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin put the recent invasion in historical context. According to Kotkin, “What we have today in Russia is not some kind of surprise. It’s not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern. Way before NATO existed—in the nineteenth century—Russia looked like this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a…
Democrats, you can’t ignore the culture wars any longer
Jamelle Bouie writes: Almost 60 years ago, the historian Richard Hofstadter described what he saw as the true goal of McCarthyism. “The real function of the Great Inquisition of the 1950’s was not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies or prevent espionage,” he wrote, “or even to expose actual Communists, but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Communist issue itself.” Likewise, in a much more recent…
Taking decolonisation beyond Eurocentrism
Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven writes: With the publication of Orientalism in 1978, Edward Said would become one of the most influential scholars of our era. The book transformed the study of the history of the modern world, as it offered insights into how racist discourses created and maintained European empires. As much for his political activities, Said and his work attracted a number of Right-wing critics, most notably perhaps Bernard Lewis. Less well known in the West is Samir Amin, the…
In Russia’s war on Ukraine, historians and history are on the front lines
RFE/RL reports: Ukrainian military intelligence reported on March 24 that Russian occupying troops in the country were confiscating books and other materials that the Russian government has deemed “extremist” — primarily books about Ukraine’s Maidan revolution, the war against Russia-backed separatists in parts of eastern Ukraine, and studies of Ukraine’s struggle for independence. “The occupiers have a whole list of names that cannot be mentioned [in the titles of books],” the service wrote, listing such figures as 17th-century Cossack leader…
History stokes Putin’s imperial dream of a ‘Greater Russia’
Samuel McIlhagga writes: The Russian invasion of Ukraine has become an exemplary instance of the use of historical ideas to justify invasion. Whereas U.S. President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq was couched in abstract rhetoric about “the power and appeal of human liberty,” Putin has resorted to esoteric historical arguments to explain his choice to invade. Putin, in his information and propaganda war, has repeatedly used certain imperial tropes that make historical claims about how Russia should be…
Putin’s 20-year advance to war in Ukraine — and how the West mishandled it
The Wall Street Journal reports: In Ukraine, President Yushchenko was struggling to fulfill the hopes of the Orange Revolution that the country could become a prosperous Western-style democracy. Fractious politics, endemic corruption and economic stagnation sapped his popularity. Mr. Yushchenko sought to anchor Ukraine’s place in the West. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2008, he met with Ms. Rice, by then the U.S. Secretary of State, and implored her for a path to enter NATO. The…
Putin is making the same mistakes that doomed Hitler when he invaded the Soviet Union
John Blake writes: Russian President Vladimir Putin often evokes the Soviet Union’s epic defeat of Nazi Germany during World War II to justify his country’s invasion of Ukraine. Yet Putin is committing some of the same blunders that doomed Germany’s 1941 invasion of the USSR — while using “Hitler-like tricks and tactics” to justify his brutality, military historians and scholars say. This is the savage irony behind Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine that’s become clear as the war enters its…
Mystery warriors made the fastest migration in ancient history
Science reports: The Avars, mysterious horse-riding warriors who helped hasten the end of the Roman Empire, dominated the plains between Vienna and Belgrade, Serbia, for more than 2 centuries. Then, they vanished without a trace. Scholars have been searching for their origins ever since. Now, archaeological and genetic evidence reveals the Avars were migrants from Mongolia—and their migration was, up to that point, the fastest long-distance movement in human history. The Avars had no written records. Grave goods and historical…
Autocracy can destroy democracy
Anne Applebaum writes: In February 1994, in the grand ballroom of the town hall in Hamburg, Germany, the president of Estonia gave a remarkable speech. Standing before an audience in evening dress, Lennart Meri praised the values of the democratic world that Estonia then aspired to join. “The freedom of every individual, the freedom of the economy and trade, as well as the freedom of the mind, of culture and science, are inseparably interconnected,” he told the burghers of Hamburg….
Putin has no good way out. That really scares me
Thomas L. Friedman writes: If you’re hoping that the instability that Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has wreaked on global markets and geopolitics has peaked, your hope is in vain. We haven’t seen anything yet. Wait until Putin fully grasps that his only choices left in Ukraine are how to lose — early and small and a little humiliated or late and big and deeply humiliated. I can’t even wrap my mind around what kind of financial and political shocks…
The historical background to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine
Rohini Hensman writes: Russia was not the only country to occupy Ukraine in the 20th century; the Nazis, with their own genocidal agenda, also did so. Timothy Snyder argues that Nazi policies, which referred to Ukrainians as Afrikaner or as Neger – including the Hunger Plan to starve millions of people in the winter of 1941, the Generalplan Ost to forcibly transport or kill millions more thereafter, and the “final solution” to exterminate the Jews – were centered on Ukraine;…
5AM Kyiv is bombed
Nataliya Gumenyuk writes: For years I have been reluctant to compare any dictator to Hitler, or any war to the second world war. The comparison, to me, seemed exaggerated, even vulgar. But what other analogy is there? With no reason, in an act of pure madness, an old-fashioned air assault has been inflicted on a neighbouring country. I said that to my Russian colleague, and tried very hard not to show how my voice was trembling. She asked for forgiveness…
What Ukraine means to Ukrainians
Anne Applebaum: Dear God, calamity again! It was so peaceful, so serene; We had just begun to break the chains That bind our folk in slavery When halt! Once again the people’s blood Is streaming … The poem is called “Calamity Again.” The original version was written in Ukrainian, in 1859, and the author, Taras Shevchenko, was not speaking metaphorically when he wrote about slavery. Shevchenko was born into a family of serfs—slaves—on an estate in what is now central…