In her 2008 book “Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History,” the historian Margaret MacMillan said national histories are constructed – by ordinary people, politicians or historians – for a purpose.
“History provides much of the fuel for nationalism. It creates memories that help bring the nation into being,” said Ms. MacMillan, who went on to cite the political historian Karl Deutsch’s famous critique: “A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.”
In July 2021, the Kremlin released a 7,000-word essay written by President Vladimir Putin that may have epitomized the way in which powerful figures use history to try to mobilize public opinion to achieve some goal. It is now all too evident what Mr. Putin’s goal had been.
In the essay titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” the aging autocrat argued that Russia and Ukraine “have not only common roots in language and faith but also a shared historic destiny,” according to Anna Reid, who deconstructs Mr. Putin’s historical distortions in an essay of her own in Foreign Affairs.
In this episode of History As It Happens, Ms. Reid, the former Kyiv-based correspondent for The Economist and an expert on Ukrainian history, said Mr. Putin carefully constructs a chronology dating to the 10th century in which an independent Ukraine never truly existed. It was either forcibly colonized by Western forces or under the suzerainty of the Russian empire.
“Ukraine only had statehood in 1991,” but a strong sense of Ukrainian nationhood, language and culture goes back several centuries, especially in the western third of present-day Ukraine, Ms. Reid said.
“But because Ukraine was divided – which was usually touted as its great weakness, this east-west division – it actually worked to its advantage through the 19th century. The western chunk, which was then under Austrian rule, enjoyed freedoms which the Russian [eastern] chunk didn’t,” she said.
Mr. Putin denies the existence of a distinct Ukrainian national identity, and he faults Lenin for creating a Ukrainian republic in the new Soviet Union in 1922 after the collapse of the czarist Russian empire amid war and revolution.
Listen to Ms. Reid analyze Mr. Putin’s shaky grasp of history by downloading this episode of History As It Happens.
