Ukraine's Dangerous Independence

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.7 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2022

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Months before Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine, he published an essay on the Kremlin website called "On The Historical Unity of Russia and Ukraine." In it, he suggested that Ukrainians don't really have their own identity — and that they never have. Historian Serhii Plokhii says that couldn't be further from the truth. The histories of the two countries are deeply intertwined, but Ukrainian identity is unique. Today, we explore that identity: how it formed, its relationship to Russia, and how it helps us understand what's happening now.

Transcript

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0:00.0	It seems like in Ukraine, it's one of those places where the past and present are almost
0:18.5	like, you know, they're not happening one after the other, they're almost happening simultaneously
0:22.8	in people's minds.
0:25.1	Because it's so present and so much of the conversation and identity today.
0:32.0	It is because history is a very important part of our identity, the personal history
0:38.6	or history of the group that we are associated with.
0:43.3	What you see today in Ukraine is really something that many other nations experienced.
0:51.5	It is a war for independence.
0:56.7	And the war for independence is very much about the formation of this new identity.
1:01.6	And for that reason, history becomes really very important.
1:06.9	And from that point of view, you're absolutely right.
1:10.2	The Ukrainians place themselves in that historical continuum, how they think about themselves,
1:16.9	about their country.
1:18.9	So history and not just today, but also their future, the way how they imagined their
1:25.3	future.
1:26.5	This things are really interconnected in the mind of many Ukrainians today.
1:38.1	Who controls the past controls the future.
1:41.0	Who controls the present controls the past.
1:44.8	This is a famous mantra from 1984, the dystopia novel by George Orwell.
1:50.8	It points to the constant evolution and tension around how we see ourselves in the continuum
1:56.0	of the past, present and future.
1:59.0	We are prisoners of the moment.
	...

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