Our online speaker series continues TODAY, September 26, at 3:00pm ET. PLUS: We’ll have an announcement of a new initiative to keep the conversation going! Free and open to the public, please share. If you’ve missed any of our past episodes, all are recorded and available on our YouTube channel here.

Serhii Plokhii, Harvard University, “The Return of History: The Russo-Ukrainian War Through the Eyes of a Historian”

Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the start of the largest European conflict since the end of World War II came as a shock to the world at large. Putin’s de facto declaration of war on Ukraine, delivered in conjunction with his official recognition of the independence of the puppet states created by Russia in eastern Ukraine, was dubbed a history lecture, and few observers outside Russia could make sense of it. How important have been the misuse and abuse of history in the perpetration and justification of this war, and what are the actual historical causes of the conflict?  The lecture will provide answers to these and other related questions by tracing the origins of the newest European war and explaining the reasons for the return of the Cold War to the very same part of the world where it ended thirty years earlier.

Serhii Plokhii is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. A leading authority on Ukraine, Russia, and Eastern Europe, he has published extensively on the international history of World War II and the Cold War. His books won numerous awards, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best English-language book on the international relations and the Ballie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction (UK). His latest book, Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters was released by W.W. Norton in US and penguin in UK in May 2022.

Please come and please encourage your friends, students, and colleagues to attend. All can easily register to attend through any of the links in this message where you can find more information about the series of events or directly at this Zoom registration link.

Sincerely,

Steve Barnes

 

The Program on Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Mason University Presents:

"Russia's War on Ukraine in Historical Perspective": A George Mason University Online Speaker Series

 

Mondays 3:00-4:15 ET September 12-November 28, 2022

You can find detailed descriptions of each event and speaker here.  


 

 

 

On February 24, 2022, drawing upon a variety of demonstrably false historical analogies, Vladimir Putin ordered a mass invasion of Ukraine, extending a war that had been ongoing since 2014. Ukrainians have suffered horrific crimes at the hands of the Russian invader, but Ukraine has inspired the world through its remarkable resistance and resilience. How can an understanding of history help us make sense of this earthshaking event?

When we try to understand the present, we always call upon our knowledge of the past in a variety of ways—through a search for origins, through historical causal explanation, through historical analogy, and through an exploration of the politicized use and misuse of history by contemporary political and cultural figures. Often we only implicitly draw upon history to understand the present, but how do we explicitly build our base of historical knowledge and use it to understand current events?

What is Ukraine and how did it come to be the object of Putin’s violent obsession? How do Ukraine’s history and culture help us understand the rise of this nation and their resistance and resilience? How does the history of European imperialism, nationalism, and post-colonialism help us understand Ukraine's post-Soviet independence? Can military history or the history of international law help us understand this war? What historical analogies are appropriate to our understanding of this war? Through this series, our audiences will come to better understand Ukraine, Russia, and the events that shook the world in 2022.

You can find out more about this series here

 

 

Steven A. Barnes

Director, Program in Russian and Eurasian Studies

President, Southern Conference on Slavic Studies

Associate Professor of Russian and Soviet History

 

George Mason University

 

https://rest.gmu.edu/people/sbarnes3