Vladimir Putin’s justification for his aggression towards Ukraine is rooted in his (twisted and faulty) understanding of the past.
History, after all, is a weapon in this conflict. “Our wisdom as historians comes from the fact that we already know how things turned out,” he says.īut soon he began to change his mind. To write such a volume would be “to go against the basic principles of the profession”. At first, he says, he resisted the idea of a book about the invasion, produced during the invasion. It is not usually interrupted by grief for a family member killed as a result of those still-unfolding events. History is normally written from the calm, distant purview that a scholar attains when chaotic events have resolved themselves into some recognisable shape or pattern. The book ends with an afterword that pays heartbreaking tribute to his cousin, killed in October near Bakhmut. He describes how he dressed carefully, that first morning, putting on a shirt and a blazer for a visit to some archives – “to show that I was collected and prepared to carry out my duties, whatever they might be”. By the time he called her, she could already hear the pounding of Russian artillery. Aside from anything, his sister and her family were in Zaporizhzhia, the south-eastern city where he’d grown up.
One email from a Harvard colleague, with whom he’d been discussing the prospect of an all-out invasion, hoped he was OK.
He begins The Russo-Ukrainian War, his new book, by recalling the moment he picked up his phone and checked his emails, early on 24 February last year. However, his latest project is anything but conventional historiography. Plokhy, 65, is a genial presence – calm, expansive, gently humorous, not given to grandstanding – exactly how you might imagine and want a history professor to be. There are globes on every surface, and antique maps of Ukraine hang on the walls. Now Plokhy and I are speaking by Zoom – me from London, he from his home near Harvard, where he is professor of Ukrainian history. I did, and it unwound 2,500 years of complex, fascinating and often tragic events, all the way from Herodotus’s accounts of the ancient Scythians to the Maidan protests in Kyiv a decade ago. Second, that it was absolutely necessary to read Serhii Plokhy’s 2015 book The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. First, not to miss the delicious coffee and pastries you can find in Kyiv (which is a wonderfully reassuring thing to hear as you head off towards a conflict). B efore my first reporting trip to Ukraine, one of my seasoned war correspondent colleagues had two pieces of advice.
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