Timothy Snyder: Hitler and Stalin Today: Class 5: What is Ukraine?

Ukraine has to be at the center of a class on Hitler and Stalin, because it was at the center of both men's mental worlds. Each of them saw Ukraine as the key to a global transformation: be it the Stalinist plan to collectivize agriculture and build industry, or the Hitlerian plan to treat Ukraine as a breadbasket. In both cases, hugely ambitious ideologies found their axial point in a certain place; and in both cases, the attempt to transform Ukraine led to mass death. Between 1933 and 1945, the most dangerous place in the world was Ukraine. All this, as I seek to show in the lecture, was the latest stage in an ancient history. Ukraine has been less a crossroads and more a source of human innovation for centuries and millennia and indeed tens of thousands of years. Ancient history associated with Mesopotamia, Greece, or Rome very often only makes sense in connection with lands that are now Ukraine. With the globalization associated with modern history, Ukraine became for the first time an object rather than a subject of history, as its special position at the connection of steppe and salt water became less important, and as empires with global reach sought to base their power in its resources. Readings: • Yekelchyk, "Historical Roots of Modern Ukraine". • Snyder, "The War in Ukraine is a Colonial War," The New Yorker, April 28, 2022. --- Timothy Snyder holds the inaugural Chair in Modern European History, supported by the Temerty Endowment for Ukrainian Studies, at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. He is also a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and the head of the academic advisory council of Ukrainian History Global Initiative. To see other videos in this course, please click on this playlist link: https://bit.ly/3SLpx4d Follow Professor Snyder: snyder.substack.com @timothydsnyder (Twitter/X; BlueSky & TikTok) @thetimothysnyder (Instagram) Learn more about the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy: https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/