Understanding Ukraine Past and Present: A Conversation with Jared McBride

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shocked and perplexed the world. UCLA Historian Jared McBride joins Then & Now for the third conversation in a mini-series examining this invasion through a historical lens. Professor McBride discusses the history of far-right nationalism in Ukraine from World War II until now, situating both Ukraine’s election of a Jewish president and Putin’s claims of “denazification,” within a historical frame. He also discusses the unique forces shaping and re-shaping Ukraine’s national identity throughout history.

Listen to the first two conversations in this miniseries, "Ghosts of the Past in the Russian Invasion of Ukraine," here. 

Transcript

Narrator 0:07

Welcome to Then and Now, a podcast by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. We study change in order to make change, linking knowledge of the past to the quest for a better future. Every other week we examine the most pressing issues of the day through a historical lens, helping us understand what happened then and what that means for us now.

David Myers 0:33

Welcome to Then and Now. I'm David Myers and I'm pleased to welcome Dr. Jared McBride, who teaches Eastern European history in the UCLA History Department. Dr. McBride is an expert on Ukrainian history, especially during the Second World War. He is at work on a book manuscript entitled Neighborly Violence and the Undoing of Multi-ethnic Western Ukraine, 1941-1944. Our conversation with Jared today is the third segment of Then and Now to explore the historical backdrop to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, now in its third week. The invasion has at once perplexed many who have trouble divining Vladimir Putin's intentions and unified much of the world in condemnation of the invasion with China as an important exception. To offer a new perspective on how we should understand how we got where we are in Russia and Ukraine, I'm delighted to welcome Jared McRae to that and now. Welcome, Jared.

Jared McBride 1:31

Thank you. Thanks for having me, David.

David Myers 1:33

So one of the most prevalent images of Ukraine is its killing fields, or in Timothy Snyder's term, bloodlands, that is to say, sites in which millions of people, Jews uh chiefly among them, were brutally murdered. So your work has focused on Ukraine in this darkest chapter of its history during the Second World War. Can you help us understand the array of forces in Ukraine then? How prominent were the Ukrainian collaborators with Nazism? And we're thinking here particularly of Vladimir Putin's discussion of denazification as a rationale for undertaking the war, with the echoes that it has of Ukrainian political activity during the Second World War. So can you help set the stage for our conversation about today by going back to that period?

Jared McBride 2:20

Sure. So almost an understatement to say that the Holocaust in Ukraine was certainly a catastrophic event. There were roughly 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine at the beginning of the war, at the beginning of, in particular, Operation Barbarossa, which is the invasion by the Nazis of the Soviet Union on June 22nd, 1941. And of those 1.5 million Jews by war's end, so roughly the liberation of Ukraine in 1944, there's only about 50,000 survivors from this community. And these 1.5 million Jews who were killed in Ukraine during the war represent roughly about a fourth of all people killed in Ukraine during the war, which was one of the most probably bloodiest locations during the entire Second World War. And some regions, in particular western Ukraine, where there was a higher concentration of Jews, in the region I look on in particular, Valinho, where there's about a quarter million Jews, the survival rate was as low as about 2% in some of these areas. So the majority of Jews in Ukraine who were killed in the Holocaust, so were killed in something that we now refer to as the Holocaust by bullets. This is mass shootings that were carried out by German forces, in particular the SS or a group called the Einsatzgruppen, and other German units as well, typically on the outskirts of the communities in which Jews had lived for centuries, often in plain view of their neighbors and anyone else who was in the area at the time, and often killed in groups of thousands or tens of thousands at once. Probably the most iconic or famous of these killings or infamous of these killings was the mass shooting at Babin Yar in September 29th, September 30, 1941, in which some 33,000 Jews of Kiev were massacred. So during the war, Ukraine is actually turned into a German colony. It's occupied by four different administrative units. The bulk of Ukraine is turned into Reichskommissariat Ukraine, which is effectively a German colony. Galicia, an important region in Western Ukraine, comes under the general government, which is another occupied German colony. And then other parts come under Romanian or Hungarian rule. So the Holocaust follows basically four main phases. And I'm going to focus on the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, which is where the bulk of the Holocaust happens in the region. First, in the summer of 41, we see a wave of pogroms that are going to happen predominantly throughout Western Ukraine, as well as some small-scale shootings that are going to be undertaken by German forces, often again with the help of locals. The second phase, we see a ghettoization process. So Jews will be ghettoized, not typically in the same way we think about in Poland or other parts of Europe, where we see these large, massive ghettos in cities, but often within their own communities, often without walls or even guards. And then into 1942 and 1943, we're going to see a second wave of mass shootings. And these are really the kind of final efforts by the Germans and their allies to remove the Jewish population of Ukraine. So these are these mass open air shootings. And then finally, a kind of a lesser-known phase is going to be tens of thousands of Jews who actually go try to join partisan forces or hide in the forests. And this is often for the last year or two of the war, which is just under extremely difficult conditions, try to survive. Now, in terms of local collaboration or the participation of local communities, we're going to see Ukrainians play an important role in all of these aspects or phases of the Holocaust. So when it comes to pogroms, and some of the most, probably one of the most infamous pogroms is in the Western Galician city of Lavieu during the summer of 41 and the immediate aftermath of the Nazi invasion. We're going to see opportunistic individuals, some gangs, which we may deem as apolitical, as well as nationalist groups involved in pogroms, and also some of these early killings. When it comes to the mass shootings, we're going to see auxiliary police forces. These are sort of local police forces, sometimes referred to as Schutzmanschaften, are going to participate in mass shootings and help carry out the logistics of these shootings. And then in terms of local governments, so we're going to see local governments at the state, city, and village level are going to help with the ghettoization process and a lot of the paperwork that's associated with the Holocaust, counting Jews, turning over lists to the Germans, and so on and so forth. And then finally, and then again, this is the probably the least studied aspect of the Holocaust in Ukraine, we're going to see the targeting of Jews who are hiding in the forests by both local police forces who are going to be often tasked with kind of hunting and rooting out Jews in the forest, as well as the Ukrainian insurgency, this nationalist insurgency is going to participate in the hunting down and murder of Jews who are hiding.

David Myers 7:01

So, Jared, what would you say motivated these local officials and forces, many elements of which you've just enumerated? Opportunism, fear, ideological affinity with Nazism, latent antisemitism, some of all these?

Jared McBride 7:18

Yeah, I would say it's a mix. And really, and this is part of the work that's been being done in the last decade or two on local collaboration in Eastern Europe, in particular in places like Ukraine, is really trying to delve into and take a closer look at local perpetrators and find out what's motivating them. You know, previously up into this time period, we tended to think more generally that this was could just be easily explained away just by anti-Semitism. Um obviously there's a rich history of anti-Semitism in the region, and that certainly did motivate some people to participate. We know that nationalist forces, who I'm sure we'll talk more about today, some of these nationalist forces had embraced far right-wing ideology, uh, promoted an ethno-nationalist uh ideology that excluded other people, other groups from the region. And we know that that certainly could have motivated some of their actions. But on the local level, in terms of pogroms and some of these other actions, we certainly see Ukrainians who don't harbor any ill-will towards their neighbors, who are serving in police forces to provide for their families. Um, some of them are doing so under threat from the Germans for potential deportation to Germany as slave laborers. Um, so there's really a myriad of factors that are going to be driving different individuals uh to participate uh in these actions.

David Myers 8:32

I want to talk about one of the figures who has a contested legacy, the far-right nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, who seems to me to belong to a kind of tradition of Ukrainian leaders who are reviled especially by Jews for overseeing either collaboration with grave enemies of Jews or actual uh mass massacres. And then here I'd go back to Bogdan Phalnitsky. Um one might also add uh a sort of a more complicated figure, Simon Petura, and then we make our way up to Bandera. So what was the worldview of Estepan Bandera and what are we to make of his legacy? I believe he is still revered by a good number of people in Ukraine today. And how are we to understand the sort of clash between uh historical research of the nature that you've just described and the memory that has been forged by Ukrainians?

Jared McBride 9:27

Sure. And and I think this can often be can maybe confusing to a lot of people who are new to the region or trying to understand some of these important symbols and a lot of the discourse around the Ukrainian nationalist movement. And you're right, in many ways, Bandera as a person has really become sort of an uh an avatar of Ukrainian nationalism in the 20th century. I would say uh both positive and negative, depending upon the direction you're approaching him from. So Bandera is comes from this region of Galicia, which is really the home to Ukrainian nationalism uh and Ukrainian national thought. Um, importantly, he's not part of this generation that had fought during the Civil War period, during some of these ill-fated attempts to create an independent Ukrainian state from 1917 to 1921. Uh, his father, who was a priest, had fought during this conflict, as well as others and his family. Um, so he's part of this younger generation that grows up in interwar Ukraine and the region that he's living in is actually occupied or is uh is under Polish rule at this time. And so he, like many others who are from come from families that are more nationally inclined, uh, are going to uh attend colleges in places like Lviv and become attracted to or join uh far-right wing movements like the Organization of Ukrainian uh nationalists. So he will join this movement in college, actually help participate in the assassination of a Polish uh official uh during the interwar period, um is tried and put in jail, and really kind of rapidly gains stature among this far-right wing movement, um, and then is, of course, let out in the days before the Second World War begins. Um, and by 1940, he becomes head of a faction of this organization of Ukrainian nationalists, the OUN. It becomes a more radical, uh, younger faction uh of this group that seeks to gain complete independence, right? Both from uh the Soviet Union as well as from the Poles. Um, its ideology in many ways, you know, borrows uh from fascist movements of the interwar period. There's the employment of the Fuhrer Princip, uh, there's other uh sort of trappings of fascist ideology, anti-Semitism is rife in the movement uh as well. Um, and he's really going to be uh really an important figure in this movement. Now, what's confusing about Bendera, I think, for many, and you often hear this retort when his name is brought up, Bendera actually spends the war in Sachsenhausen. So this question is how can Bendera be guilty of killing Jews or be himself somehow implicated in all this anti-Semitic violence? And so he ends up in Sachsenhausen because in the first week of the war, this organization is gonna declare independence in Lavieu. Uh, the Germans are going to crack down um on the Ukrainian nationalists who kind of gave them some false hope before the war that they might perhaps get independence uh through cooperation with Nazi Germany. This turns out not to be the case. Um his experience in the camp is, of course, not the same as others who are gonna find themselves in concentration and extermination camps during the war, and then he'll be released in 1944 towards uh towards the end of the war, uh, and then eventually lives out his remaining days in in West Germany, where he's uh eventually assassinated by the KGB uh in 1959. So his legacy is not necessarily one of being uh sort of directing the Ukrainian nationalist movement during the war itself and being uh say on the ground when a lot of the actions that are of contention today, uh the involvement of uh his organization in pogroms, the involvement of his organization in working with the Germans through 1943 to varying degrees uh throughout the country. Um, he's not necessarily directly tied to those actions. Actually, other figures in the organization are, but he really sort of he's really a stand-in, I think, for a greater understanding of the Ukrainian uh nationalist movement.

David Myers 13:13

So can you help us sort of make sense of the various strains of memory that are operating at the same time today or since that time? You have uh Jewish memory of Ukraine, which tends to cast uh its history in uniformly dark terms. You have Russian memory of Ukraine, and you noted that the KGB assassinated Bandera, regarding him as a collaborator, and that indeed was present in some of Putin's rhetoric about Ukraine today. And then you have Ukrainian memory, which presumably is divided between those who revere Bandera and those who see Bandera as representative of a kind of Ukraine that they would like to leave behind. So what what does that fabric of memory look like to you today?

Jared McBride 14:03

So yeah, I I would say there's probably three main actors if you want to, if you want to kind of untangle these memory issues in Ukraine. We can look within the borders of contemporary Ukraine. We can obviously look to the neighbor Russia, which is an important part of this story and has been a part of this story for the 20th century, and also the Ukrainian diaspora. So you can also look at this from a more global angle as well. I mean, I should say the Ukrainian diaspora, you can also look at the Jewish diaspora as well, and look at the in ways in which they kind of also act upon uh these memory issues in Ukraine. Um, so maybe just to take Ukraine itself first. I mean, very kind of bluntly, we like to kind of break up Ukraine into these regions, of course, with the usual caveat that we shouldn't just do, we're not, we're not trying to reify all these regions that everyone hold these views. Uh, but looking at these regions of Ukraine, understanding them historically and how they're tied to specific uh historical memory, I think is very important and helpful to understanding uh the country. So Galicia, which I've already mentioned a few times as this kind of heart of Ukrainian nationalism, the basis of this Ukrainian nationalist movement uh and the insurgency uh during the war, as well as this neighboring region of Volinya where this insurgent uh army fought the Soviets until the late 1940s and early 1950s, they tend to this day still hold very positive views uh of Bandera um and this insurgent army and the OUN. So I actually just looked at a poll from I think last fall. And in this region alone, we still have about 70% positive view of Bandera. Now, the country on a whole, we're looking at about a third, 32% see Bandera as a positive figure. And if we go to central Ukraine, regions again that were part of uh Soviet Ukraine from 1922 onward, um, tend to be a little bit more mixed linguistically. Here we see roughly a break, a similar breakdown between positive and negative views of Bandera. Uh, and then if we move to the east and to the south, which more sort of rusophone areas and areas where we see this quote-unquote Russian ethnic minority, something 15 to 20 percent, much more highly negative views of Bandera. And I think only about 11% in eastern Ukraine uh see Bandera as a positive uh figure. And of course, it's important to go back to the Second World War and understand that on one hand, you had people associated with this insurgent army, people associated with these efforts to create an independent Ukrainian uh state, while at the same time you had millions of Ukrainians who fought in the Red Army or who joined Soviet partisans. Again, not necessarily for ideological reasons, but simply because that's where their fates took them during the war. And so for many people whose family histories are tied to that struggle, whether it was losing family members, fighting for the Red Army in Germany or other places, um, many of their experiences are going to be colored by that particular version of history. And so we often see uh we often see some conflict right between these two versions.

David Myers 16:53

So alongside that very striking data point that some 70% in Galicia and western parts of Ukraine uh see Bandera in positive terms. Alongside that, what characterizes Western Ukraine? I mean, we know much less about it today because so much focus has been devoted to eastern Ukraine and southern Ukraine, southeastern Ukraine. We just heard of a Russian missile attack at an airbase near Lviv that focused attention on the West, um, certainly its proximity to Poland and the threat that that posed to a further escalation of the conflict. But what drew your attention to Western Ukraine and what about it is important for us to know?

Jared McBride 17:40

So, Western Ukraine, so I mean, originally, at least in my own research, I was actually in this actually, I think speaks to a larger understanding uh of the region. I was actually drawn to the region through my own research by focusing on a multi-ethnic village, a tiny little village of uh Czech citizens as well as Ukrainians who lived together and were actually killed and murdered together in 19 in the summer of 1943 by a German unit in what was an anti-partisan reprisal. Um, so you had this multi-ethnic population uh in this little tiny village who were murdered together during the war. And this is richly what brought my attention to this region. And so Western Ukraine and more generally Galicia and Valiny and other parts of Padolia had been this rich uh multi-ethnic, multi-confessional, multi-linguistic region for centuries, right? This had really been, if we kind of refer to Ukraine and more generally as a borderland, which is derived from the name, um, this is really the borderland part of this borderland country where you saw uh many different groups come together in this contact zone. And so this amazingly rich and dynamic uh history of interaction, I think, well, it interested me, and I think interests many, uh many different uh scholars. But if you go to the region today, and I would say the region is one of many contradictions, like lots of Ukraine today. If you go to the region today, it's obviously marked by absence, right? So you had a place that was, if you had been walking down a street in Lviv or Ivno or Lutsk a century ago, you would be here, you would hear Polish and Yiddish and Russian and Ukrainian and German. Uh, and you go to these places today, and they are homogenous ethnic Ukrainian uh places. So this really raises a lot of questions about the history and how we talk about the history and deal with the history uh of these regions, how that how that history is being told by Ukrainians as well as people from abroad uh like myself. There's also a lot of really fascinating and difficult questions about the memorial landscape and what to do with that history uh in the present in this region. And so I also think some of the contradictions come up here as well, because as I've mentioned, again, Galicia, this this heart of Ukrainian nationalism, uh, this place that was also the seat of this ethno-nationalist version of the Ukrainian nationalist movement that sought to exclude other minorities and other people from Ukraine. Um, and so it has that legacy. While on the other hand, this is the region today that most uh is most likely to associate with the West, that's most likely wants to be a part of the European community. And people visit Lviv and it's this wonderful, kind of picturesque um town. It has all this amazing culture, and it's a really a rich and vibrant place. Um so it has this dark history while also this kind of yearning to be part of Europe. And there's, I think, there's been a lot of difficult moments in this post-Soviet period of trying to come to terms with the past while also kind of charting out a direction for the future. And I happen to think those personally happen to think those questions are most fascinating for this Western uh Ukrainian region.

David Myers 20:35

Yeah, I mean, it's really instructive to hear you talk about Galicia as the as the center of Ukrainian nationalism in in light of the fact that Lavov, Lviv, Lemberg, you know, was renowned as this uh remarkable multilingual, multi-ethnic, multicultural place, kind of immortalized by Filip Sands in in his book In Swestro. And and yet the region embodies this this very contradiction. It prompts me to ask about Ukrainian nationalism itself. Many nationalisms in the early 20th century had far-right ultra-nationalist variants, but also liberal democratic variants. And I'm wondering whether that same degree of ideological diversity existed within the Ukrainian nationalist movement. One doesn't think of it as such, but is there kind of a liberal version of Ukrainian nationalism before we get to the current republic, which we'll we'll soon arrive at?

Jared McBride 21:30

Yeah, I would, and that that's a really good question. I would say in some ways yes and no, right? And so we obviously this region, as we've already talked about, was dominated by empires up until uh World War I. Uh so we sort of saw the germination of nationalist ideas of various kind of uh different groups who had yet to gain independence. So we saw the kind of uh in the late 19th century intelligentsia or sort of important cultural elites begin to kind of cultivate uh specific national identities and develop a certain form. Of nationalism, often at the time, of course, tied to ethnicity rather than some sort of larger civic identity. Although it's important to draw distinctions, it's not yet the variant that we're going to see in the interwar period, which is very much, again, colored by the fascist movement and other ideologies at the time. And really, it's really, I mean, in many ways, a tragedy, of course, these kind of questions in the, I would say, the direction of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. We really don't get to see what would have come of these earlier versions of Ukrainian nationalism due to what happens during this extremely complex and difficult period of World War I and the Civil War period, right? So we see uh ill-fated attempts to create an independent Ukrainian state, um, something called the Ukrainian People's Republic, uh, which in many ways was certainly a much, I would say, milder form uh of Ukrainian nationalism than what we're gonna see at later dates. This republic, of course, itself has uh a difficult history, one that's marked by uh pogroms uh committed by Petlora's uh troops, violence against minorities, while at the same time having a great diversity in the Rada at the time. Some 25% of the Rada, this Congress was made up of minorities in Ukraine. Um, so it's easy to wonder what could have been had there been uh an attempt at this time to create uh a Ukrainian uh state or republic, um, kind of based on maybe some of these more milder forms of the Ukrainian nationalist movement coming out of the 19th century. We don't get that because, of course, as we know, the story ends or well, the story changes in 1922, where Poland comes in, occupies all of Western Ukraine, and then of course the Soviets set up uh rule in central and in eastern Ukraine. And so Ukrainians are to many degrees sort of robbed of that autonomy or robbed of that moment to try and build something new from the ashes of these empires in the First World War.

David Myers 23:53

Yeah, could you share with us your thoughts about I mean, this is a huge question and could take up a whole podcast uh itself, but uh tell us uh your thoughts about the relationship between Ukrainians and Russians in the 20th century. We just mentioned one chapter of it. Um you also mentioned earlier that as you move further east, you're moving toward more Russified, Russophonic Ukraine. And one could imagine just an array of sensibilities, like a sense of confraternity, a sense of ethnic solidarity, a sense of fraticidal hatred, and many stations in between. It's unfair of me to ask, but you are Jared, and your expertise says Ukraine, so I'm gonna go ahead and do sure.

Jared McBride 24:34

Now this has been a popular question in many and a lot of the discourse so far. I've heard many of my colleagues try to answer this question in 30 seconds. So yeah, and look, in popular discourse and in scholarly discourse, you're going to see people come down on both extremes and somewhere in between. So I have we have scholars who will say that this was a relationship of colonial subjugation for the better part of centuries on end and a seamless transition of subjugation from the Imperial Russian period to the Soviet one. And then on other, you'll see, I mean, maybe not as many scholars, but some people kind of argue that you know this was largely an even-handed relationship of respect. I don't know. That's maybe a little bit of an exaggeration. And I would simply just point out, and this is uh in some of the great writing that's been coming out in the last few weeks, that have been echoed by other scholars, I really just point out some of the contradictions of this relationship, which I think are maybe the job of historians to highlight. So when it comes to this question of identity or Ukrainian identity, right? So by the time we get ourselves to the point of the early 1920s, right, this process of kind of nationalizing or cultivating or creating a very specific Ukrainian identity, right? We know that this starts from the upper echelons of society, from the elites and sort of trickles on down. This has not yet been the case for all of Ukraine or all regions of Ukraine. And interestingly enough, the Soviet project and the Soviet leaders during the 1920s are extremely concerned about nationalism, uh, and they've seen what it's done to other parts of Europe. They're well aware of how that played out during the during the revolutionary period and the civil wars. And so they want to some ways to kind of capture and harness the energy of nationalist movements from you know from the late 19th century and the early 20th. Um, now, of course, they're going to circumscribe it in a very specific manner, um, this kind of very well-known term from the period, national inform and socialist and content. Um, so they're going to really promote the Ukrainian language, uh, they're going to promote certain cultural idioms, they're going to promote uh Ukrainian culture and art. Um, but of course, the content has to be sort of situated within a Soviet or socialist way. So this is this is part of the story, and this is gonna ebb and flow depending upon uh the period in the Soviet Union, but this is certainly part of the story of really helping to kind of solidify and create a Ukrainian identity and concept of nationhood, even if it's not the one that many Ukrainians today want to identify with or particularly like its history, that's still part of the history of the Soviet project, whether we like it or not. Now, on the other hand, and that might we we want to maybe paint that as positive, I don't know, but but on the other hand, we certainly know that this Ukrainian identity and sense of nationhood also was used as a source of demonization, right? And so we saw, of course, a man-made famine in the 1930s that killed millions uh in Ukraine, um, not just Ukrainians, I'll add, but others who were living in Ukraine at the time. We saw Ukrainians targeted as Ukrainians for being Ukrainians during periods of the Great Terror, uh, and of course, violent repression of the insurgencies in Western Ukraine, I've already mentioned uh during the Second World War and afterwards, as well as people connected to these insurgencies. So millions of Ukrainians would would experience some form of violence or repression uh during various stages of the Soviet period, which they would at least associate or understand as being a part of being Ukrainian as to why they were as to why they were targeted in the first place. So these are just some some of the, I think, some of the um some of the important contradictions um that we'll see as a part, um, a part of this relationship, as a part, at least specifically to the Soviet period.

David Myers 28:04

Okay, I want to turn our attention to the post-Soviet period, to the current Republic of Ukraine, and really ask you to weigh in on a question that's been off-ass, but we very much want to hear your take on it. Um, and that is the significance of the election of a Jewish man, Volodymyr Zelensky, as president, and not just election, election with 73% of the vote. Something that would have made uh his Jewish forebears collapse in astonishment. What do you think this has meant both practically and symbolically for Ukraine? The election of a Jewish man as president of the post-Soviet Republic of Ukraine.

Jared McBride 28:47

This is a great question. I found I also found myself, I think, like many, thinking about this a lot over the last few weeks and obviously the last few years in general. I mean, in some ways, I mean in some ways I actually even turned my attention even to Obama's uh election, quite as a kind of way to help situate myself. And I mean, in some ways, right, we kind of we've asked, well, we asked ourselves a lot of questions about what Obama's election meant at the time and what it continues to mean. And so, even to your question, I mean obviously symbolically, I was extremely uh I mean it was amazingly important in what I think we were all perhaps in a state of shock at the time. Uh, and that symbolism may may pay, we would hope would pay dividends perhaps for generations to come, uh, and what that means to see uh to see a person like Obama in that position of power. Um, while at the same time, in terms of you know the practical and and near-term uh effects of what that presidency meant, uh I think are certainly up for certainly up for debate, as we've seen in recent years of what's happened in America. And so perhaps there's some interesting parallels there with the Zelensky question. And actually, maybe something that's worth noting too for listeners in the event that uh maybe it's informative, but you know, there's been a lot of discussion of Zelensky's Jewishness in the media and popular press these days. I mean, it's it's important to provide a caveat on this, right? So Zelensky often refers to his Jewish roots. And as a Soviet Jew, um, he, like many other Soviet Jews or Jews who had lived through the Soviet period or come from families of Jewish background, right? They often are not practicing Judaism. They often have little cultural or linguistic connection to this identity. Um so this is often why you hear this term roots rather than maybe making a direct reference to yourself as a Jew. Um, though, of course, this framing, we've actually seen some of this framing already change in the last couple weeks during the war. So, I mean, as Jews, we probably understand that, of course, having identity questions is very complicated and this is not unique to Ukraine, but I think that that part about uh what Soviet Jewishness means here is is important. In terms of the election, right? I mean, I I and this is also useful to think about who Zelensky is as a person, right? And and here, even there's probably another interesting parallel with Obama. I mean, his election probably says more about the political system, I think, than his Jewishness, or maybe his Jewishness is really rooted in him as being an outsider to the system, maybe in the same way uh of Obama's identity, right? And so uh I think the vote for him, the overwhelming vote for him, was in many ways a protest vote against the system as such in Ukraine. And also the kind of failures to really build upon the momentum and energies of the Maidan revolution. Uh, many Ukrainians were disillusioned with the political system, very angry. And so voting for someone who I saw referred to as the John Stewart of Ukraine was really seen as a sort of a protest vote, as a way to say that, you know, we're fed up with everybody within this system. And yes, again, the Jewishness could inform that outsider status. Um, but I think in many ways it says it probably, at least at the time, probably says more about the political system than it than it did about who he is. But that, I should say, doesn't mean, and we've seen this in recent weeks, that doesn't mean that moving forward, right, and and you've more kind of touched on this in your question, that doesn't mean that forward that this can't be a source for you know future relationship building and community building and rehabilitation of parts of Ukraine's past. It doesn't mean this can't be something to be built upon um in a positive way.

David Myers 32:12

Aaron Ross Powell Right. I suppose that's the question, and I think your Obama analogy is very apt because uh many people saw it as sort of a very significant moment of reckoning with America's racist past. And in similar terms, it'd be very easy to read Zelensky's election as you know a full or near full reckoning by Ukraine of its own criminal past. And what you're suggesting is that might be a mistake to assume that you know we've completed the process. We're at the very beginning of the process, and this is one first step.

Jared McBride 32:48

And it could be an important step. And as we know, or as historians, right, it may not, we may not necessarily be headed in the right direction, but we hope we are, and it's something it's certainly a step that can be used in the right direction, right? And so you have, again, the contradictions in Ukraine are are always so salient and at least I think fascinating. You know, there was a celebration for Bandera, I think in maybe 2019. So here you have a Jewish or a president of Jewish background, and then and then they're unfurling a giant banner of Bandera and in Kiev, right? So you have these things kind of existing in tension with one another and trying to, at least to somehow, at least to some observers in Ukraine and outside, to try to reconcile these and try to come up with a way to work to work through them. And and I think these, you know, we see these contradictions on Jewish issues throughout Ukrainian society. I mean, a lot of polling shows low levels of anti-Semitism. Uh we have Zelensky. Well, at the while at the other, on the other side of things, we know that there's been a lot of issues in academia to come to terms with the past, in particular the Jewish past. We know that there are far right-wing militias uh in Ukraine. We also in the, I think, in the kind of larger Jewish diaspora press, we hear about anti-Semitic vandalism of a lot of memorials in the country. So these are all things that are important and obviously meaningful depending on who you are and where you are in the world. But there's, you know, there's something to be worked through. It's something that needs to be at least on the agenda moving forward uh to build a more inclusive and and democratic uh Ukraine.

David Myers 34:13

As we move towards the end of our conversation, I want to sort of throw a kind of curveball at you to move our focus away from Ukraine per se and to Putin's Russia and and sort of ask you to pull out your crystal ball. Um, from what you know of him, and from what you know of Russian history, and from what you know of his view of Russian history, do you have any idea of what you believe his vision to be? Is it the reconstitution of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact, some new post-Soviet federation of Eastern Europe led by Russia?

Jared McBride 34:53

Yeah, that's that's a great question. And I think a lot of people who have uh seemingly thought that we had a good grasp on how he operates, uh w what animates him, what his short and long-term goals are. Uh, a lot of those people who probably know far better than myself uh have been pretty flummoxed in in in recent weeks, uh, given this just absolutely unbelievable decision to invade Ukraine. Uh, and we've heard a lot of rhetoric out of Putin himself, and then, I mean, obviously, and some others from the Russian government in recent weeks, and it just seems to be this kind of cascading list of rationales. Is it security concerns vis-a-vis NATO? Is there is this a part of a larger historical or imperial claim about territory and nationhood with Ukraine? Is this an economic issue of simply keeping Ukraine in Russia's orbit? Or is this sort of just some sort of general grudge or feeling of disrespect from the West? And I'll simply just say, I mean, or probably won't answer your question, but I'll simply just say, I mean, what I think has been very difficult about people trying to answer this question who know the region well, is that from that previous list of grievances or issues that I've just mentioned, choose whichever one you want and then try to explain how this war would solve any of them, right? And this is why it's been just so difficult to understand. Well, this is going the war is going to guarantee that NATO exists for another generation at least. Uh, you've done nothing but alienate uh people who may have been neutral or sympathetic to Russia in Ukraine, not to mention harden the beliefs of others who already held negative attitudes, right? Uh economically, this will push Ukraine towards Europe. And then what does this do to solve any kind of long-standing issues or grievances uh against the West? And so, in many ways, the war will seem to uh make all of the pre-existing problems or grievances or claims or concerns from Putin and the Russians actually worse. Uh, and so I it's really it's been really difficult to understand what the actual goals are here. We think that the goals may have been to simply knock out the Ukrainian government, install someone else, and then be able to have at least a little bit more uh political economic influence on the country uh in in the short and perhaps long term. Uh but now we're at a place where it seems that seems very untenable uh and and and the future is really is really open. Um but obviously I think I speak for everyone by saying we're really hopeful that there will be some secession of of fighting as as soon as possible So as a concluding question, and as we sort of make our way through the fog of war and encounter this disconnect between uh historical vision and actual uh solutions to the problems at hand, I'm wondering what you think we should learn from history.

David Myers 37:42

What does your expertise in Ukrainian history tell us about where we are today? What do you think are the most important things that we should know drawn from the past to help us understand what's going on today?

Jared McBride 37:54

Well, I think, I mean, one, we talk about the role of history in this conflict. I think it's important to understand uh the roots uh of the conflict. So we want to know what this relationship between Ukraine and Russia, what that's been over the short and the long term. And there's a lot of ways we can kind of periodize and cut this up. We want to understand about the real I think the relationships between these populations and among these populations, to understand. I I mean it's been it struck me talking on the phone with colleagues and others and even reporters and just the amount of people who say who talk about family members that they have across these borders or across these populations, right? That whether, you know, whether we can explain that through colonial subjugation or whatever you want to, however you want to explain it, but these are populations that have many shared histories, uh, good and bad. And understanding how uh these two peoples are connected and what could make for a better future, I think is really important. Um, and also I think maybe the kind of major uh task of historians over the last few weeks has been to really unpack the ways in which history is being manipulated, instrumentalized, or used by political actors in the present. I would also maybe add an aside here, it's important to keep in mind, right, that while authoritarian societies uh perhaps do more of this manipulation, but all I would say all governments engage in manipulation of history or into instrumentalization of history. And I think it's really important for us as historians to kind of remind everyone of that and then do due diligence uh when it when asked and try to kind of dig deeper into a lot of the claims that are being made. And then a final point, just to keep in mind that obviously history is not a magic key that unlocks all of the present and future uh for us, and you know, and be a little bit wary of people who um do delve into the history and try to draw one-to-one comparisons uh with the past and the present. So this question of reconstituting the Soviet Union or perhaps even some of the motivating factors of the Russian government. I think we need to be, I think we need to be careful about these kind of about these one-to-one comparisons. That shouldn't be the role of history here, it should be to kind of elucidate the past and help inform the future.

David Myers 40:02

Well, on that point, you've really productively complicated our understanding of Ukrainian history. Um, it's been a really uh rich and stimulating conversation. I'd like to thank you, Dr. Jared McBride, for making time out of your busy schedule. Thank you.

Narrator 40:18

Thank you for listening to Then and Now, a podcast by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. You can learn more about our work or share your thoughts with us at our website, luskincenter.history.ucla.edu. Our show is produced by David Myers and Maia Ferdman, with original music by Daniel Reichman. Special thanks to the UCLA History Department for its support. And thanks to you for listening.