 OK, welcome, everybody. Welcome to this year's Joan and Henry Katz lecture. This lectureship is held in memory of Joan and Henry Katz' longtime supporters of the Bennett Center here at Fairfield. And it's now made possible thanks to the generosity of David and Debbie Zief. I think we've all been watching the current Ukrainian crisis unfold with real mixed feelings, a sense of horror at Russian aggression, a sense of elation with each Ukrainian victory, and probably a real sense of confusion when it comes to the Jewish dimension and the ostensible Nazi dimension to all of this. It seems rather absurd, actually. And a few scholars are as capable of addressing absurdities as Professor Marci Shor. She's one of the most talented and vivid commentators on Ukraine today. Professor Shor is an associate professor of history at Yale University, a regular visiting fellow at the Institute for the Wissen-Schofton mentioned in Vienna. She is the translator of Mikhail Bovinsky's wonderful Black Seasons and author of Caviar and Ashes. Most recently, the Ukrainian Knight, an intimate history of revolution. Her essays have appeared everywhere, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Atlantic. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for her current project, which is entitled, Phenomenological Encounters, Scenes from Central Europe. And today's talk is entitled, I need ammunition, not a lift. Jews and the Ukrainian question at a time of war. Please join me in welcoming Professor Marci Shor. Oh, let me, can you guys hear me if I take this? Otherwise I couldn't stand behind the microphone, like I'm supposed to. Excellent, thank you so much to Glenn for inviting me. Heather and her parents for coming and all of you for coming out on a cold night. I'm really happy to see so many students here. This is a lecture I never would have imagined myself to be giving a year ago. It's been a brutal year. One of the themes of this lecture is going to be the unexpected. And as Glenn said, the role of the absurd and the role of the surreal. And I should first say, as a matter of full disclosure, that I'm not a neutral observer in this war. I'm not Ukrainian. I'm not Russian. I come from an American Jewish family in Eastern Pennsylvania. But I have spent my whole adult life studying Eastern European history and running around these places. And so these are my friends and colleagues who are being slaughtered. And in some ways, the world is really divided into people you know personally and people you don't know personally. And it's not that one can make a moral case that the lives of people you know personally are worth more than the ones you don't know personally. But it's true that when you know people, you can't really maintain a distance. So I'm not going to pretend to have a kind of distance that I don't have. I've been following this more intensely. I mean, I've been writing about it as a historian and as a commentator, but also somebody who is not neutral and detached and somebody who is kind of living in constant terror from my friends and colleagues there. I'm going to start with Isaac Bobble. And I'm going to start with a very pecan't Isaac Bobble quote, which hopefully will not be too offensive. I didn't write this. Isaac Bobble did in his Odessa stories that he wrote in the early 1920s. If you haven't read Isaac Bobble before, hopefully this will at least inspire you, especially those of you who are student age to pick up Isaac Bobble. Isaac Bobble is a Russian language Jewish writer born in 1894, was then purged by Stalin in 1940. So this is I'm going to quote a famous Isaac Bobble character, Reb Ariyalib, of his Odessa stories. And Reb Ariyalib says in one of these Odessa stories, this is an oft quoted passage, so some of you may have heard it before. Forget for a while that you have glasses on your nose and autumn in your soul. Stop quarreling at your desk and stuttering in public. Imagine for a second that you quarrel in city squares and stutter on paper. You are a tiger, a lion, a cat. You can spend the night with a Russian woman, and the Russian woman will be satisfied. Eastern European history is very rich in stories of the non-Jewish Jew, the rootless cosmopolitan drawing on the epistemological advantages of marginality for flashes of brilliant insight. And for any of you who have studied European intellectual history or have come across Ludwit Fleck, Freud, Isaac Deutsche, Georg Lukach, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Kafka, Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobsen, Wilhelm Reich, Alexander Watt, Paul Solan, Theodor Dorneau, the intellectual benefits of liminality, of existing on the margins between different cultures have been one of the highlights of European Jewish history. They rarely, though, going back to the Isaac Bobble passage, completely compensated for what was a stereotypical deficit of masculinity. And I'll read you a couple more quotes here. One is, I couldn't resist, from Shala Malachem's Tevye the Dairyman. And many of you who haven't necessarily read Shala Malachem have probably seen Fiddler on the Roof. I'm happy to talk about Fiddler on the Roof later, have some questions. Since it's 1894, the Yiddish writer Shala Malachem's Tevye the Dairyman, Tevye here is speaking to Shala Malachem as the slightly fictionalized narrator. I never told you if they smashed my windows. Well, as a matter of fact, they didn't, because it was decided to leave that up to me. They're your windows, Tevye, said Yvonne, and you might as well smash them yourself, as long as those damn officials can see that there's been a pogrom. But Tevye asked no questions. If he's told to keep moving, he does. Today, upon Shala Malachem, we met on the train, but tomorrow may find us in Yechupets, the next year in Odessa, or in Warsaw, or maybe even America, unless that is the almighty looks down on us and says, guess what, children? I've decided to send you my Messiah. And one more, and this is from another series of stories by Isaac Bobble, the Red Cavalry stories that are set during the Polish Bolshevik War of 1919 to 1921 and published in the early 1920s. It's from a story called My First Goose. And the narrator in this story, who is a Jewish Bolshevik, is approaching the commander of the 6th Division, who asked whether he can read or write. And Savitsky, the Jew, says yes, he could. In fact, he graduated in law from University of St. Petersburg. And then the commander says, so you're one of those little powder puffs with spectacles on your nose. So the stereotype image of the emasculated Jewish Yeshiva boy who stutters and wears glasses and no Russian woman would ever be interested in has been a long time trope of Slavic Jewish literature. And the Zionists in the Bolsheviks, in their own way, tried to resolve the masculinity problem with guns and tractors. Most famously, the Zionist Max Nordau at the Second Zionist Conference in Basel in 1898 proposed a Muskeljudentum, a kind of muscular Jewishness or a muscular Judaism, a way for the emasculated, nerdy Jewish men to finally become real men. And I preface what I'm about to say, this, because there are layers and layers of irony in the story I'm going to tell. Because we're now a century plus 25 years after Max Nordau proposed muscular Judaism and 125 years after Pogromchik's chaste to Shalom Alechem's Tevye the Dairyman from the Pale of Settlement in present-day Ukraine to the Holy Land. A century after Isaac Babel was writing his Odessa stories and his Red Cavalry stories. And today I want to bring you back to where those stories were set, now 100 years later. I'm going to bring you back to February now of this past year. And there are Russian troops gathering on the border between Russia and Ukraine. And nobody really knows what they're going to do. And journalists keep asking us, well, is Putin going to invade? Is he going to invade? And I kept saying, I don't know. I have no privileged epistemological access to what's going on in Putin's head. It seems to me that the answer to that question exists in the mind of one man. And I have no privileged epistemological access to it. On the 19th of February last year, I got a phone call from Slava Varkarchuk, who some of you may know, and if you don't know, you should look up after this lecture. He is a Ukrainian rock star. His band, Ocean LZ, is probably the most popular post-Soviet band in the post-Soviet space. He's my generation. And Slava called from Kiev on February 19. And I said, Slava, what's going on? Like, what's the atmosphere like in Kiev? And he said, well, Marcy, it's kind of like this. Imagine a synthesis of what it must have felt like to be in Florida in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis and what it must have felt like to be in, say, Poland, sometime between the Munich Conference of 1938 and the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939. It's something like a combination of those things. We don't know what's going to happen. On February 21, Putin gave a somewhat crazed speech saying to Ukrainians, hey, you want decommunization? I'll show you what decommunization really means. And then I really started to panic because he seemed much more unhinged to me than he had seemed eight years earlier. He seemed much less the master chess player and much more the kind of character in a Shakespearean drama, aging man facing his own mortality might decide to blow up the world. And then on February 23, that Wednesday, and the troops are still being amassed at the border, and I had a friend, a former student and a historian of Soviet Union who's actually in the hospital undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. And she and her mother came literally right from the hospital to my kitchen. And this is Wednesday night, the 23rd, and said, have you heard Zelensky's speech? And Volodymyr Zelensky is the president of Ukraine now as he was then. And he's also a Jew, which is part of this lecture. And she said, have you heard his speech? I mean, she had listened to this undergoing chemotherapy. And I said, no, I haven't. She's able to listen to it right now. So I'm sitting there with my friend and her mother in the kitchen. And she's playing this speech just a few minutes that the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is giving in Russian, addressed not to Putin and not to the Russian government, but to ordinary Russian citizens. And I had been an agnostic about Zelensky before this. I didn't have strong feelings one way or the other. The reviews were mixed. And I listened to this. And I was stunned. It was so human. And he said, he said, I'm not addressing Putin. I'm addressing the Russian people. Please don't do this. Don't do this. Is this really what you want? Do you really want to come here and kill us? Because we don't want to kill you. And if you come here and you try to kill us, well, we will defend ourselves. We will look you in the eye. You will see our faces, not our backs. But please ask yourself, is this really what you want? If it's not what you want, then please tell Putin, this is not what you want. I don't believe this is really what you want. And it was, for me, it was an extraordinary moment. And it was so intimate. I mean, it was the kind of address that only a native speaker could have given to another native speaker. I mean, the fact that Zelensky was a native Russian speaker gave it that weight. I mean, it was so personal and so authentic and so unpolitical. And I thought they can't possibly. They won't possibly. And then hours later. The Russians invaded Ukraine very suddenly during that night between that Wednesday and that Thursday. And there were only three times in my life where something happened that was just on a world historical scale that was just so horrific that I felt paralyzed. I mean, once was being in New York on September 11, 2001. And the second was being in New Haven in November 2016 when Trump won the election. And the third was sitting in front of the computer and watching the news that this war had begun and not being able to believe that it actually happened. And there's this suddenly, there's line of tanks. I mean, they're actually trying to take Kiev. And there's this line of parade of tanks heading to Kiev. I know a lot of people in Kiev. And I mean, later, you know, people who, military analysts said, you know, that kind of line of tanks, the way they stage that invasion, you don't stage an invasion of a city like that unless you're really quite certain that it's gonna be over in three days and you'll be having a victory parade. And I thought, well, that's very strange because I don't know anything about military anything. And I didn't know whether or not Putin was going to invade, but I was really quite certain that if he did, the Ukrainians would fight. I was working on this piece for the Wall Street Journal in the week before the invasion, the editors kept saying, is he going to invade? Is he going to invade? I kept saying, I don't know. And they said, but you're sure Ukrainians will fight? If he does, I said, yes, I'm sure. They said, how do you know? I said, I just know. Anyone who has ever spent half an hour in Kiev would know that nobody in Kiev was going to be happy to see the Russian army. So I thought, how could it be that like Putin just thought he was just going to send these tanks into Kiev and take Kiev because nobody was gonna happy to see them? But there was a sense that the rest of the world felt too, I think the rest of the world did not think, certainly the Americans did not think that anyone in Kiev was gonna be happy to see the Russian army, but they did think it was a fate to complete. And that there was realistically no way that the Ukrainians could last more than three or four days. And even friends and colleagues of mine who were the most devoted to supporting Ukraine felt like, okay, now we should start thinking about what the world is going to be under Russian occupation because there's no way. And Putin sent out hit squads, first and foremost to assassinate Zelensky to assassinate the president. And the Americans offered to evacuate him and help him set up a government in exile. And that's when he gives that famous answer. He's like, hey, I need ammunition, not a lift. And then on the night of February 25th as Russian forces sought missiles into Kiev, Zelensky, who is being tracked by these assassin squads goes out onto the streets in Kiev with four other leading figures of his government and he steps out into the darkness. And he shoots this selfie video, which is just several seconds. Good evening, everyone. The leader of the faction is here. The head of the presidential office is here. Prime Minister Shmogol is here. Podolayak is here. The president is here. We are all here. Our soldiers are here. The citizens are here and we are here. We defend our independence. That's how it'll go. Glory to our defenders, both male and female. Glory to Ukraine. Slow. So this moment, I was hoping to find a version where you could, I thought I had a version where you could hear in the original side and quite pull that off because it was dubbed. But the moment where Zelensky totally crazily goes out onto the streets and exposes himself and takes that selfie video and says, I, the president, am here. I understood watching it that this was a historic moment, you know, that whatever happened next and however well he held up or didn't hold up, that this was an existentialist moment, that he made the decision to stay. He made the decision to take this risk. And that line, yeah, president tut. You know, I, the president, am here, was going to become legendary. I always tell my students that every time there's a revolution or a government change in Eastern Europe, people are always renaming streets. When Americans decide to take down monuments or change the names of buildings, we always act like we're the first people who ever thought of that. And you couldn't possibly change the name of a building or take down the monument. I'm like, come on, we do it all the time. Every time the government changes, you rename anything. And I was always like, when I've known people have been on these renaming committees, there was a lot of renaming that went on in the 90s, a lot of renaming that was going on in 2014 after the revolution I'm about to talk to you about now. And I was like, you know, I realize it's none of my business, but better to just avoid people. People are never as perfect as you want them to be. I mean, someone may have done something good, but something not so good, you can always dig up the things that aren't so good. I mean, there aren't really perfect people in the world. There aren't really heroes the way we want them to be. Let's go for Raspberry Street, Bois and Berry Street, Apple Street, you know, flowers, trees. Like, people are always a bad bet. But I tell my students that, well, there aren't any perfect people who will hold up under scrutiny. There are moments. There are moments, there are decisions, there are actions. And this was one of them. When Zelensky steps out on the street and says, I, the president, am here. And this guy, Zelensky, who I'm going to tell you about in a moment, he, 27 years ago, was the winner of the Ukrainian version of Dancing with the Stars. You can pull this up on the internet. He's a comedian, an actor, performer. And now he's giving Zoom speeches every day to European parliaments in a green army t-shirt. And he was, is a fantasy of Muskel Judentum, of muscular Jewishness beyond what Max Nordow ever could have, have dreamt of. So, so how did we, how did we get here? Before the war, I was really, as I said, I was an agnostic about Zelensky. I mean, among my Ukrainian friends and colleagues, nobody was wildly enthusiastic about him, but nobody was categorically damning either. I, he had, he had emerged seemingly from nowhere. Ukrainians knew him as a performer, a comedian, an actor. And he was very much a phenomenon of post-Maidan Ukraine. And I wanna, I wanna take a couple minutes here and tell you about the Maidan, which is a revolution that happened eight years ago now, because that was one of these turning points in history. And without that, that element of the story, what's happening today doesn't really make sense. So, Ukraine had been kind of languishing for quite a long time after it gets independent somewhat by default in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. More or less under kind of post-Soviet, you know, apparatchiks and corruption and oligarchy. In 2004, there was a presidential election between two victors, Victor Yanukovych and Victor Yushchenko. And the very short version of that story is that Victor Yanukovych was like your post-Soviet gangster type, you know, who had been, had various convictions for robbery and assault and comes from the Far East, from the Donbass. And was kind of close to, relatively close to the Kremlin. And Yushchenko seemed to be the westward-looking, enlightened European-looking candidate. And it was kind of a nasty campaign and Yanukovych's team poisons Yushchenko with dioxide. It turns out not quite enough to kill him because some doctors rescued him, but enough that his face was kind of grotesquely disfigured. And then they cheat in the elections and there's widespread election fraud. At which point Ukrainians come out on the street in protest. They come out to the square called the Maidan, which is a central square in Kiev, in 2004, November 2004, and they are there for three weeks and they freeze and they demand free elections. And remarkably, they win. The elections are done over in January 2005. And this time Yushchenko always declared the winner and everybody is very happy and they go home. And the short version of that story is you can probably guess, is that not everybody lived happily ever after and for various reasons, Yushchenko turns out to be a disappointment and very quickly there's infighting among his team and a falling out with the prime minister, Yulia Timoshenko. And he turns out not to be the Messiah figure everybody had hoped for. And then there's another kind of retreat into corruption and despair. And in the meantime, Yanukovych, who seems so thoroughly discredited, not only does he lose, but it's clear that he tries to poison his opponent and he cheats on the elections and he's nakedly, unapologetically a gangster and you think he could never possibly come back, but he's still kind of like hovering in the background. And he decides to hire somebody to kind of help him with a makeover. And it turns out that maybe not in Ukraine, but in America we have this little boutique industry for gangsters with presidential ambitions. And so he hires this guy in Washington who has little boutique industry for gangsters with presidential ambitions to fly over to Kiev and play golf with him and give him a new haircut and adjust his clothes and teach him some television tricks. And personally, I didn't see a big difference but other people apparently did because in 2010, Yanukovych comes back this time to legitimately win the 2010 elections. At which point he rewards his Washington consultant with the boutique industry with a $20,000 jar of caviar. That guy's name was Paul Manafort. Some of you may have heard of him because later Yanukovych is gonna flee the country and Manafort's gonna be out of a job and we know what he does next. I don't know what one does with a $20,000 jar of caviar but apparently this is. Anyway, so there's Yanukovych who is now like the gangster president of Ukraine and he's being his usual self but he is nominally holding out this carrot that he is leading Ukraine perhaps someday in the distant future towards European Union integration. And there's an agreement by November, 2013 that is an association agreement with the European Union due to be signed by Yanukovych on behalf of Ukraine. It's not a fantastic agreement. It doesn't promise at the end of the day that even if Ukraine does everything right that the European Union will accept Ukraine but it's a sign of goodwill. It's a foot in the door. It's a gesture that Ukraine has intentions of moving towards the rule of law and instituting the kind of reforms that would allow it to become part of Europe and a sign that if everything goes well Europe is potentially opened to receiving Ukraine. Now at the 11th hour apparently under pressure from Putin on November 21st, 2013, Yanukovych suddenly changes his mind and says I'm not gonna sign. And at that point there's kind of widespread devastation. Especially among younger people, especially among students, especially among people basically exactly your generation who felt like their future was suddenly stolen from them. All of the opportunities and possibilities they might have were suddenly whisk away. And still nothing might have happened. Had not this 32 year old Afghan Ukrainian journalist named Mustafa Nyem posted on Facebook on November 21st, 2013 a little message in Russian saying hey guys, let's get serious. If you're really upset, come out to the Maidan by midnight tonight, likes do not count. And as a historian I really paused on that sentence likes do not count. Because that's a sentence that would have made no sense before Facebook. I mean for you guys like eight years ago was probably a very long time ago and like but for me it was like yesterday. And likes do not count which 15 years earlier would have meant nothing now is going to become a revolutionary slogan for the 21st century. People come out to the Maidan that night. Mostly students, mostly young people. They're not interested in language politics. They're not interested in ethnic politics. They're not interested in the opposition political parties. Their slogan is Ukraine is Europe. That's it, Ukraine is Europe. They wanna be part of Europe. They hold hands, they sing, they play music. They freeze on this square. They're there for about nine days. Totally peacefully. Demanding that Ukraine have a chance to be part of Europe. They call themselves Euro Maidan. After about nine days, apparently again under pressure from Putin, Yanukovych decides it's time to put an end to this. He decides that he's gonna send his riot police out to brutally beat up the students. Not enough to kill them, but enough to terrify everybody so that the parents pull their kids off the streets. And that's the moment when he miscalculates. Four in the morning, he sends out his riot police to brutally beat up the students. But now what happens is that instead of pulling their kids off the streets, the parents join them there. And then you go from having had several hundred, maybe 2,000 people on this square in the center of Kiev to a day and a half later, you have over half a million people on the streets of Kiev. No one has ever seen this many people on the streets of Kiev. And now they're not just shouting, Ukraine is Europe. Now the slogan is, we will not permit you to beat our children. And that was when Euro Maidan just becomes Maidan. And it becomes a revolution about something much more than European Union membership. It becomes this impassioned revolt against brutality, against tyranny, against the sense that we are just play things of the regime, that we are being treated as objects and not as subjects. And for the next months, the Maidan becomes a whole parallel society. People live on this square. Within 48 hours after this act of violence, you have massive kitchens set up. You have clothing exchanges. You have people are cooking soup in huge cauldrons. They're making tea, they're making coffee. There is an open university, there's a library, there's a stage, there's a piano. There are medical points. There's a whole parallel world that comes up on this Maidan. A whole parallel society in which people are living as if they were free people in a free country. People are living in this parallel society the way they believe one should live. And all through the winter, the violence increases. And Yanukovych's regime is capturing activists, kidnapping them. Sometimes their bodies are found tortured and frozen in the woods. And you can just, you can feel it. I mean, you can feel the tension building. In November, nobody who came out to the Maidan thought, I'm gonna die there. And by the middle of January, it had changed. And by the end of January, you could feel it almost palpably, even from a distance. And I was watching it live stream from Vienna. You could feel that something had shifted and a critical mass of people had made a decision that they were willing to die there, if need be. And then you were just kind of waiting in terror for the end game. Which came in February, 2014 with a sniper massacre on the Maidan and over some hundred people were murdered by government-sponsored snipers. And Rodek Czekorski, the Polish Prime Minister, flew over to Kiev to negotiate a ceasefire with Yanukovych. I won't go into the details because I wanna get back to Zelenski. But the short version of the story is that within 48 hours after the ceasefire, Yanukovych flees across the border to Russia. And so suddenly, there's this kind of vacuum. So the revolution has been victorious, but people are mourning the dead. And there's kind of no government in place. And Putin sends his so-called little green men to take over the Crimea at a moment when Ukraine doesn't really have a functioning government, doesn't have a functioning army. And then he sends Russian tourists across the border to instigate separatist rebellions in various parts of the South and Eastern Ukraine. And the short version of that story is that those separatist rebellions actually gained traction only really in the Donbass, this far Eastern post-Soviet, post-industrial mining region. And a war simmers there, has been simmering until February 2022. There were about 15,000 people killed before this full-scale invasion of February and between a million and a half and two million internally displaced people who fled their homes there. After Yanukovych fled, there was an interim government and there were new presidential elections held and this guy Petro Poroshenko wins the elections. He is also an oligarch. He's famous for having a chocolate factory or various chocolate factories, they call him the chocolate king. And he was seen as the best of the worst. You know, not as brutal as Yanukovych, but still an oligarch, not particularly inspired. Maybe he had some good intentions here and there. But nobody was in love with him. Some people were more hopeful, some people were less hopeful. Slava Varkarchuk, my Ukrainian rock star friend, was under a lot of pressure then to run for the next presidential elections, which were held in April 2019. And Slava vacillated for a long time. I'll spare you that whole story too. And many people were hoping he was going to run. I was not really on the side of his running because he didn't really want to be president. He really loves being a rock star. And he's great at being a rock star. And the thing about being a rock star is like you watch him come out on that stage and like he comes out on that stage with such love. And you can please everybody. Like you come out on the stage and people love you and they want something from you and you give it to them. And you give it to them with no moral compromises. It's like a win-win situation. Like I knew it wouldn't be like that if you were president. There wasn't going to be that win-win situation that you get coming out on stage and he's so good at being a rock star. Anyway, he vacillates. He's under a lot of pressure. There's a sense of who else is going to do this. We don't want another oligarch. We've got to get ourselves out of oligarchy. Who has the resources not to be corrupt? And kind of at the last minute he says, no, I'm not going to do it. And then this comedian named Volodymyr Zelensky says, OK, I'll do it then. I'll run for the presidency. And the thing that had been going on with Zelensky is that Zelensky was a performer. I said he was in Dancing with the Stars. He plays music. He's a comedian. He's an actor. And he had this very popular serial, which you guys can all go watch on Netflix. It's dubbed in English now. And the serial is set in post-Maidan, Ukraine. And it's called Sluganaroddo. It's called Servant of the People. And it's a kind of political satire comedy. Like imagine, if you guys remember when John Stewart was in The Daily Show, so like The Daily Show with John Stewart, blend that with Seinfeld. It was like that kind of level of political satire. And the story is that there's this 30-something-year-old high school teacher who inadvertently gets elected president of Ukraine. And he's very earnest, if somewhat bumbling and a little awkward. And he really does want to get Ukraine out of oligarchy and out of corruption. But you kind of strip away one layer, and there's another one. And you strip away one. How do you possibly, like there's no the absurdist layers of corruption? And he doesn't really know, like, what do you do? And so he hires his old friends from high school because they're the only ones he really trusts, even though they don't have any political experience. But at least he knows they're honest. He hires his ex-wife as well because he knows that she's honest, even though she also doesn't have political experience. It's kind of fantastic political satire. It's funnier if you kind of understand what was going on in post-Maidan Ukraine. Everybody is well-intentioned. But they're like excavating layer after layer of kind of absurdist layers of corruption. It's not slapstick comedy. But he comes out. He's the guy who's playing the guy who inadvertently becomes president on television and is bumbling his way through. And now suddenly, at the last minute, he decides to run against Poroshenko. And he's a Russian-speaking Jewish comedian from this small city in eastern Ukraine. And he wins with 73% of the popular vote, which has never before happened in the history of Ukraine. People are just blown away. This came out of nowhere. And it's very post-modern, this kind of blurring of the boundary between television and reality. The thing that he's playing in television actually ends up happening. My husband later, recently, was in Kiev. And he had a long conversation with Zelensky. And one of the things he asked him was, how did you know political experience? I mean, what are you drawing on? How did you know anything about politics? And Zelensky, the actor, said, oh, it's all in Shakespeare. But I think he was actually quite serious about that. And if you watch the show, you'll see that he's quite smart. I mean, smart in the way that John Stuart is smart in that kind of very sharp, satirical, ironic sense. Zelensky sworn in May 2019. July 25, 2019, there's this phone call with Trump, with the American president, which you guys may remember because it's going to lead to the first impeachment. And here he is, like the new president, the comedian who becomes president. The most powerful person in the world is now telling him, we want you to launch this purposeless and unethical investigation of Hunter Biden. Otherwise, we're not going to give you this aid package that we have, which is kind of particularly important because they're still fighting this war in the Donbass with these Kremlin-sponsored separatists. And he demands that Zelensky investigate, and Zelensky kind of demors. And this leads to Trump's first impeachment trial, which is the moment I think most Americans first heard of Zelensky. There's a kind of fantastic New Yorker column by Yoni Brenner about imagining the reaction of Zelensky and his team to this phone call. And I'll just read you a little quote here. So Zelensky says to his advisors, so what's the protocol for this kind of situation? And his advisor says, you mean when the leader of the free world demands incriminating evidence about the son of his main political rival while dangling an urgently needed $391 million aid package, all as the eastern third of our country is being occupied by the same ruthless autocrat who almost certainly helped said leader get elected in the first place? Zelensky. So you're saying there is no protocol. Advisor, you're a quick learner, sir. So Zelensky gets himself into the situation where he has to kind of deal with fascism and its both truth form not only to the east, but also to the west. And then he becomes the star of Putin's narrative that Kiev has been taken over by a Ukrainian Nazi coup that the Maidan was a CIA-sponsored Nazi coup and that Ukrainian Nazis were coming east to massacre all the native Russian speakers. And now that the government of Kiev led by Zelensky is a Nazi government and the Kremlin is going to launch a special operation to denazify Ukraine. Then an Italian journalist then questioned Putin's Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov about the logical contradiction between the fact that the Ukrainian president is Jewish and he's also ostensibly the Nazi leader. And Lavrov responded that there was no contradiction. I mean, after all, Adolf Hitler had Jewish origins as well. And when Zelensky was asked about this, he says you really can't take seriously what Russian politicians say, like if you really take it seriously, you might as well go hang yourself. There's a, which reminded me of the Yiddish proverb, your health comes first, you can always hang yourself later. And one thing I want to point out here about Zelensky is that cast into this the most spine-curdling high stakes role, he holds on to his sense of humor and this kind of appreciation for irony, which is not easy to do when you're in this kind of post-truth inferno where people are being mutilated and slaughtered in reality for reasons that are fiction. I was stunned at the beginning of the war at how well he was rising to the occasion. I mean, seemed inconceivable. And my brother, who I should say has my second brother, my middle brother, has nothing to do with Ukraine or Eastern Europe and is an opera composer who has spent his whole adult life working with music and musical theater. And he said to me, he's like, oh no, I'm not surprised because it's what any good comedian should be able to do. If someone throws something at you, you've got to be able to improvise. Somebody is coming at you in some insane way, you've got to have that ironic distance. You've got to have that slightly ironic distance that allows yourself not to get pulled into that memetic relationship. So the crazier the Russian propaganda got, which is like insanity inducing for anything, Zelensky kept responding with this kind of humor. And so like the Russians just became more and more insane, we're gonna denotify you. Oh, okay, well, we had to attack because NATO was gonna attack us first. Well, we're gonna restore the empire as it existed under the time of Peter the Great. Well, you're all Satanists. Well, if you don't do what we want you to do, we're gonna radiate the whole world. Or we're gonna prevent the grain from shipping to Africa and we're gonna starve you all. And in fact, Putin's propagandist Margarita Semyonovna at Russia today actually got up at the Petersburg Economic Forum on television. And she actually announced publicly, see, I'm not dead, I'm not gold. All our hope is in famine. All our hope is in famine, like you blackmail the whole world, but we're gonna starve all of Africa, we're gonna starve all of Asia. That's the kind of thing that historians used to imagine. You spend months, if not years, digging around in archives to try to find that slip of paper where someone actually admitted to something. Now they're just broadcasting it on television. We are gonna starve everyone unless you do what you want. And Zelensky's team is responding to that and he's like, look, we've got a mind-sniffing dog. Our mind-sniffing dog is named Patron. So you guys keep setting minds everywhere. Oh, we've got our mind-sniffing dog. And you know what? He moonlights as a comfort dog for children who have been shelled and have lost limbs and are in hospitals and he goes and visits them. And you know what else? He's got his own Twitter account and to chill out he does yoga at night. So Namaste, everyone. I mean, you just do respond in this way that's not mirroring the other guy at all, which is just a kind of extraordinary thing to watch and also like for those of you who have studied philosophy, it's, you know, Andre Bergson, the French-Jewish philosopher from the 20th century has this whole theory of laughter. That laughter is the thing that like wakes you up. That allows you not to get pulled into this kind of sleepwalking, you know, automatic mechanized way that people tend to live. Okay, so let me say a little bit more about, I haven't been looking at the time, which is always a mistake because there's not a clock in here. Let me say a little bit more about Jews. There are a lot of irony and aversions in the story that's happening now. The history of Jewish-Ukrainian relations is quite dark for those of you who know that history. There is a history of pogroms. There's a history of Nazi collaboration. There's a history of Ukrainian accusations of Jewish collaboration with the communists, which were not always entirely unfounded. I'm happy to answer questions about that later. There are many American Jews, including my own family, a couple generations back, you know, who fled pogroms in Ukraine and whose family members, my great-grandparents, you know, were slaughtered by Ukrainian pogrom chicks. The Maidan marked in various ways a kind of coming-of-age moment for the country. You know, and a moment of overcoming boundaries. Most dramatically, for me, was between the parents and the children, this overcoming of edible rebellion, but also between the workers and the intellectuals, between the Christians and the Jews, the Orthodox and the Unite Christians, the Ukrainians and the Jews, the Russian speakers and the Ukrainian speakers. It was the moment of a creation of a civic nation in a way that hadn't existed before, but was, lately, coming into being. One of the couples I interviewed for my book on the Maidan is a couple very active in the Jewish community, Lena and Leonid Finberg, who come from, you know, who are Kievan Jews from a long time back. They were in their 60s then, I guess they're in their 70s now. And when I was interviewing Lena, who is a physician about what they did on the Maidan, she said, journalists kept asking me, how do you feel as a Jew on the Maidan? And she said, this question was very funny. I mean, the same way I feel as a Jew when I'm at the train station or like when I'm at the beach, I mean, how am I supposed to answer that question? And when the little green men came to take over Crimea and when Putin started to instigate this war in the East, her husband, Leonid Finberg, was one of the leaders of the Jewish community who wrote this open letter to Putin. And it said, among other things, Vladimir Vladimirovich, we highly value your concern about the safety and rights of Ukrainian national minorities. But we don't wish to be defended by sendering Ukraine and annexing its territory. Right now, after Ukraine has survived a difficult political crisis, many of us have wound up on different sides. The Jews of Ukraine, as all ethnic groups, are not absolutely unified in their opinion. But we live in a democratic country and can afford difference of opinion. They have tried to scare us with Bandera followers, and Bandera was a far right-wing leader of Ukraine at the time, the 30s and the 40s, and fascist attempting to rest away the help of Ukrainian society. They've tried to scare us with Jewish pogroms. Unfortunately, we must admit that in recent days, stability in our country has actually been threatened, and this threat is coming from the Russian government, namely from you personally. You just tell you another anecdote. One of the most fantastic interviews to come out of this time was with a young rabbi named Natan Khazin, who was in his 30s at the time of the Maidan, and he is a Kievan Jew who had emigrated to Israel years earlier. He's an Orthodox rabbi, not ultra-Orthodox, but Orthodox. He served in the Israeli Defense Forces. He served in Gaza. And after he was serving in Gaza for a while, his friends and Kiev started to write to him and say, hey, it's a war zone there. Like what are you doing? Come back to Kiev. Things are nice now in Kiev. This is a couple of years before the Maidan. Look, we've got a beautiful synagogue. Everything is going well. It's much more peaceful than it is in the Middle East. And so Natan Khazin comes, he's a rabbi from Odessa. He comes to Kiev. And when the Maidan gets started, he feels like it's not his thing. I mean, he's part of his own community. But then after those brutal beatings on the Maidan at the end of November, he kind of goes out there in December to kind of just check out what's going on as an observer. And he meets a bunch of guys who are getting ready to storm a government building. And he's like, yeah, so what's going on? And they're like, oh, well, we're getting ready to storm this building. And he says, okay, well, yeah, what's your plan? Well, turns out they don't have much of a plan. And he says, well, you know that in order to successfully storm a building when both sides are equally armed, you need three times as many people on the storming side as on the defending side. Well, it turned out they didn't have any idea. But they quickly figure out that he knows something about this. And soon he's commanding their operation. And then he's kind of leading a division on the Maidan. He breaks the Sabbath for the first time because he's defending civilian lives. He says, in the beginning, I didn't tell anyone when I was a Jew, but then I started to take off my cap and tell people. And everybody called me brother. And he and other Jews who were active on the Maidan started to call themselves Zid al-Banderah, which is a kind of untranslatable word meaning yid banderaite and involves playing on a kind of pejorative term for Jews and bandera, which was this far right-wing anti-Semitic Ukrainian nationalist reference. And many of Bandera's followers while Bandera himself was in prison during the Second World War took it upon themselves to murder Jews. And these Jews during the Maidan calling themselves Zid al-Banderah to embrace that label demands extremely cultivated fondness for irony and this kind of self irony or this kind of can we kind of step back and look at something with this kind of ironic distance has become a theme. When I went to Dnieper Petrovsk in 2015, I met the physicist Pavel Kazan there who was one of the Jewish activists and he had a Zid al-Banderah banner in his office which was fusing the Ukrainian trident with the star of David. And he was one of the people from civil society who was organizing prisoner exchanges with the separatists in the Dombas. And he said, you know, I know we're talking to gangsters. I know we're talking to people who can't be trusted. I know we're talking to people who are torturing other people. But what I take from Judaism is the sanctity of every individual life. And so if we can save a life and bring home a Ukrainian, I'm willing to talk to anybody. I wanna show you a clip. Pavalo is now fighting at the front but he wanted me to show this to you. This is actually in Hebrew. My name is Pavalo Kazan. I'm a member of the Ukrainian army. In my region, I'm still a member of the enemy. When Russia attacked us, I went to fight. We are not only fighting in Ukraine, but we are fighting all over the world, together and at the same time. So that's Pavalo today, or very recently. Saying, I'm Pavalo, I'm a lieutenant general in the Ukrainian army. In my professional life, I'm an environmental scientist and engineer. He's a physicist. He works on clean energy. When Russia attacked us, I went to fight. We are fighting not only for Ukraine, we're fighting for the whole enlightened world together to the very end. The rabbis in Kiev, in Odessa, in Dniepero, have all mobilized on behalf of Ukraine. I have a feeling I'm talking for too long, so I'm going to just read you a couple more things. There have been some fantastic interviews with rabbis saying, my grandfather left Nuremberg for Palestine to survive. The Nazis, now I'm bringing Jewish children to Germany to save them from Russia. Can you believe it? Odessa has been the best place after Israel for a Jew to live for the past three decades. Then Mr. Putin comes along and says he wants to free me from the Nazis. He starts killing what we have accomplished. Please, Mr. Putin, don't liberate me. Then a Jewish art curator in Odessa says, Putin wants to save me, a gay Jewish, Russian speaking man living in Odessa from Nazis, please. I want to kind of, in conclusion, tell you that my friend Emilia Glazier, who has done a lot of the work on translating poetry and looking at Ukrainian literature after the Maidan, that Ukrainians have been re-imagining identity since the Maidan. And incorporating an element of a very conflicted Jewish past into that identity has been very important for that. And it's been quite remarkable. There are a couple of books I'm going to mention. One is Katya Petrovskaya's book, Maybe Esther, which is a very creative, Katya is my generation. She's from Kiev. She grew up in Soviet Kiev. She's from a Jewish family. And she is writing about her attempt to discover what happened to various members of her family and who they actually were. Her paternal grandmother, Rita, her Rita's brother was killed as an infant in the 1905 pogrom of Odessa. His head was smashed against the wall when Rita was seven years old. And she saw this. Her great aunt and her maternal great-grandmother were killed in Babiar by the Nazis. And Babiar is a raven where 33,000-plus Jews were killed by the Nazis with some Ukrainian collaborators in just two days in September, 1941. And Katya writes in this book that her great-grandmother Anna was killed in Babiar, although my parents never used the word killed. They said, Anna is lying in Babiar. They found it painful to ponder the question of originators of the deed. For them, the events assumed mythic proportions no longer accessible to us mere mortals and incontestable occurrence that could not be subject to human scrutiny. Now Katya in her adult life married a German and is writing from Berlin. Her parents remained in Kiev. Her father died a couple years ago. Her mother was still there at the beginning of the war. And I'm just gonna show you a little bit of a video her mother made for Katya. This is Katya's mother, Sviatlana Petroskaya at the beginning of the war. Oh, sorry. I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit here. I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit here. I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit here. Hey, that's Katya's mother. So Katya wrote this book, which is an extraordinary book in German, which is not her native language. It was translated into English and it was then translated into, her native language is Russian. It was translated into Ukrainian by Yerko Prohasko, who's an extraordinary translator from German, who is translated from German from Polish and also from Yiddish, including the work of the Yiddish poet, Deborah Fogel from Lviv, which came out just a few years ago and is part of a certain kind of renaissance of Jewish culture or of an incorporation of Jewish past into a more cosmopolitan Ukrainian identity. And I was texting with Yerko the very first days of the war and our language is Polish, we speak in Polish. And I said, Yerko, is there anything, is there anything I can do for all of you? Is there anything else I can do? And he texted back and he said, he said, Virgic, he said, believe, please, believe. And I'm not a Christian, I'm not a believer, I'm an Anarchistic Jew and we don't know where all of this is going to land after the war. But I am a historian and I know that anything is possible. And a hundred years after Shala Malachem and Isaac Babel wrote of the timid tailor, Matalcombe Zoil and emasculated Yeshiva boys and Bruno Schultz painted hunched Jewish men, sometimes crawling on the ground, being shunned by coldly enticing women and pogrom chicks chased Tebia away from the Ukrainian lands to the Holy lands. Jews are making the pilgrimage from Israel back to Ukraine in reverse and Israeli IDF veterans are training Ukrainian soldiers and Hasidic Jews are wearing traditional Ukrainian shirts called Vishivankas under their Tefillin and as Europe hovers at the edge of a third world war, a Russian speaking Jewish comedian accused of being a Ukrainian Nazi has stepped into the role of Winston Churchill. So we're there, any doubt, we now know there is no such thing as the end of history life. Life just goes on filled with nothing but surprises. Thank you. So I think we have a little time for questions but I'm gonna lead off with one which has just been burning for me and then we'll pass the mic around and my question is where's the anti-Semitism? Every Ukrainian nationalist movement I've studied has had such a strong, strong aspect of anti-Semitism and suddenly with Maidan, the Orange Revolution, doesn't seem like there's any real anti-Semitism driving this, can you have any explanation for this? Where did the anti-Semitism go? People are too busy. There is a far right in Ukraine and there is a far right on the Maidan is just very small, is numerically very small and the far right that ran in the elections that Poroshenko won in the parliamentary elections, they were getting one to 2%, not enough to get into parliament. I mean, this is kind of in comparison to the far right in Austria and France and Germany that are getting 10, 15, close to 20%. So it's there but it's very marginal. I mean that in some ways the miracle of the Maidan, especially for the people I know, was this notion of can we become a civic nation? Can there be a notion of Ukrainian identity that is by choice, that is not based on ethnicity? I mean when the war got started, it was just the horrific brutality and the killing and Slava, the rock star Slava who was immediately running around to all the most dangerous places trying to keep everyone's support up and he's texting me and saying, Marcy, you have no idea how happy I am. I said, Slava, how's this possible, how happy you are? He's like, it's not because we've already won but when I see how we're finally coming together as a political nation, like finally being Ukrainian is about values. Finally it's about a choice. We have come out of this. There is this hope that we are now going to transcend this dark past. Now I'm not an idealist, I mean I thank you. Nasty stuff tends to come back but it's a moment of hope and there has been, both in academia and in literature and in social life a kind of reimagining of what Ukrainian identity is. In this little video that Pavlo recorded was part of a larger forum of Ukrainians from various kinds of ethnic, racial, minorities, mixed backgrounds, speaking Arabic, Georgian, Armenian, Farsi, whatever they're speaking, reaching out and saying I feel now that this is a country that there's a place for me. And it's, partially it's support for the Ukrainian effort in the war but partially it's the irony that Putin's justification for this war was this denazification. That there has been this, this story was that the Maidan was a CIA sponsored Nazi conspiracy and Ukrainian Nazis were coming to the east to murder all the native Russian speakers and maybe here for not for Glenn's benefit but for the rest of your benefit I should explain that Ukraine is a bilingual country. People generally speak Ukrainian and Russian and Ukrainian and Russian is a bit like Spanish and Portuguese. So distinct languages but related. So you might grow up having, using one more actively and one more passively but everybody can basically switch back and forth. Is general as you move west, Ukrainian is more dominant as you move east, Russian is more dominant but anyone who had ever spent time in Ukraine certainly like in my lifetime would not believe that anybody was going to kill anybody about speaking one language or speaking the other language. So this idea that Ukrainian Nazis were coming east to murder all the Russian speakers that then turns into the story about, oh there was a Nazi junta, there was a Nazi coup in Kiev. I should add for continuing our little Paul Manafort thing. So literally the same troll factory in St. Petersburg that produced the story of Maidan CIA conspiracy that turns into that we need to denazify Ukraine is the same troll factory that produced the story that Hillary Clinton was kidnapping children for purposes of child pornography, holding them captive in the basement of a pizza place in Washington and that story eventually kind of evolves into the QAnon conspiracy. So like literally the same trolls, IT guys in Petersburg. I don't have any questions. I know I threw a lot of stuff at you, sorry. It's more than I thought it would be. How do you see the war ending? This is a million dollar question. I know, I wish I knew. People always ask me what's going to happen next and I'm always saying the thing about historians is that best case scenario, we can tell you what already happened. I mean I have thoughts but I have no like in particular inside knowledge. What I do think is that Ukrainians will fight to the end. I think they will fight to the end. I think they are, that existential decision has been made. I think they believe they can win. But the other thing is, and there was a very good piece by my Ukrainian journalist friend, Natalia Gumanyuk who's been fearlessly as usual reporting on this war for the very beginning. And one of her early pieces last spring, I can't remember either Rolling Stone or The Washington Post or The Guardians, that's the three main places she usually writes for in English. She was like, let me explain to you why Russian terror is not going to give us an incentive to surrender. Because the places under Russian occupation have just been so gruesome. And their occupation has been such a reign of terror. And everywhere that they've been using the most kind of horrific electrocution techniques, to torture civilians, to mutilate people, to chop off limbs. And Natalia is like, the thing is that this kind of terror doesn't make people inclined to negotiate because it just shows us what will happen if we surrender or if we surrender territory. Because from the point of view of other countries, you're like, can't you give up some of this land here? It means Severo Donetsk, who needs Severo Donetsk, right? Like it's a little place nobody's heard of, like surely that land can't be that important. But Natalia is like for us, it's not land, these are people. These are people and you don't have a moral right. If you're the president, you don't have a moral right to abandon those people to this reign of terror. So I think they will fight to the end. What I'm waiting for desperately, and I know it's not just me, is what will happen in Russia. I think Putin's regime has to fall. And I think that's the kind of thing that will seem impossible until the moment it happens and then it will retrospectively seem to have been inevitable. And I'm compulsively checking the phone and waiting and hoping. Yes, but then on the Russian side, is it gonna get worse or better? It's an excellent question. I'm terrified of that as well. Now I was, and I mean earlier I thought, my feeling earlier was that it's such a vertical system that if Putin drops dead, there will be a moment of chaos. Whether that moment is 72 hours or whether it's three weeks. And I'm like, I have to believe that there's some kind of a plan for how to take advantage of that moment of chaos. I mean now I look at what's happening with Prigoshin, with some of these other competing oligarchs. And in particular this guy, Prigoshin, who has his own private mercenary military that is particularly gruesome and savage. And you're like, God, could you get any worse? Maybe you actually could. I mean as hard as that is to imagine. Anything is possible. I mean the thing about being a historian is that you don't know what will happen, but you know what can happen. And you know the realm of the possible is much faster than most people think it is. So there is unfortunately no guarantee that what's gonna happen next is gonna be better. And even so I feel like we're desperately waiting and hope that Russia is a big country. If there's finally a moment where something turns, anything's possible. The American government has made it very clear that we're willing to give military aid to Ukraine, but we've joined a line, and now we, the government, a line in the sand, we're not gonna give them the air superiority. Now judging by all the personal, the casualties that civilians are taking, because again, Russia is bombing civilian targets. And I know you may not know the answer, but since you have contacts, how do you sense not the official position of the Ukrainian government, but the actress person on the street, that they resent the unwillingness of the American government to give them the aid that clearly could stop these? I mean if we had sent planes over there probably in a relatively short period of time, we could stop this indiscriminate bombing over civilian targets. So the question is, and I don't know if you know the answer, but do you sense that the Ukrainian people understand the unwillingness of the American government to cross that line? It's a good question. I think like, yes, they're resentful, yes, they're also grateful, yes, they're frustrated. Like all of those things are true at once. I think they really believe they can win with the right equipment, but they're also, they're in it to the end. I mean, what has happened in these places that are occupied is so gruesome that they will continue to give their lives. Nobody wants to live under Putin's neo-totalitarian regime, but yes, there is a frustration that they have not gotten in particular the air support. There's a frustration that they have not gotten these long range, high precision missiles. They're more, this is very anecdotal, and I think they're more accepting of the, we won't let them use any kind of American equipment to attack any supply lines actually within Russia, which is kind of historically speaking like a weird rule in a war. Like Russia's attacking Ukraine, but Ukraine can't attack across the border into Russia. And that's been, nobody kind of wants the war to escalate. Now, the whole idea of well, we don't want to provoke Putin into an escalation is a kind of also that's, I mean, this assumes that there's some weird rationality when clearly we're not in the realm of the rational. You know, once you're, my 12 year old son keeps saying, but it's a war. It's a war and he's not following rules. So why is there this idea that there are rules? Well, nobody wants there to be a nuclear war. Well, how do you know? Yeah, no, it was very like when, I mean, I went down to Washington in September. My colleagues asked me to go talk to senators about these long range high precision missiles. And I couldn't believe, like I've never even let my kids have a squirt gun. When my son was nine and he begged and pleaded for a Nerf gun for his birthday, I said, absolutely not. Like we will have no weapons, no fake weapons, no toy weapons. Like, you know, I'm pacifist, you know, and now like, here I am sitting on Capitol Hill saying, you don't understand, you must send long range high precision missiles immediately. I never would have imagined, like look what things that are surreal that I was in this situation. I was like, I was like the whole way on the train, I was talking to friends and colleagues and former students who are now in the Ukrainian military and running military strategy. Like some of these people like, I taught history and philosophy too. I like, they read Kant with me. They read Kolkowski. They read Milosz. They read, like, and you know, and now they're doing military strategy and I'm trying to like, and I'm also texting with former students of mine who are in the American military who have like, you know, who are like, okay, Marcy, like let me, I'm gonna give you a cheat sheet where I explain what all the weapons do. Like it's like the Cliff Notes version, okay? So I'm gonna like, just imagine this and I'll write, like I'll send you a little picture. Like, yeah. I mean, I like, if it were up to me, I would give them the air support, but like, I'm not an, you know, I'm not an unbiased observer. No, there is a lot of frustration because they think they could do it if they have the equipment. So I think we have time for one more question. I'm assuming that most of the young generation or the college students in Russia are enlisted in the Army. But what would you say is a sentiment going around over there with the people that are not enlisted in Russia or has like media manipulated their viewpoint or perspective of the invasion? It's a great question. It's the question we've all been tearing our hair out about. They say, you know, Russia is a big country and it had been moving towards this neo-totalitarian space, but the war starts and it's much more radically cut off than it was before. See, you know, suddenly there's no Facebook, there's no Twitter, the last independent news outlets or quasi-independent, the radio station, the doge or the television station, Ekol Moskvy, Novaya Gazeta, everything was immediately shut down. You know, and so the information space definitely became very quickly much more of a bubble. You know, as for like the what are people really thinking question, you can still communicate with the, like I went, you go from like, I messaged to what was it, to what's app, to signal, to telegram, like trying to get, like trying to see like, you know, what are your Russian friends still willing to respond to, like what seems sufficiently encrypted? And I've noticed that like they're, you know, the Russians will still use, at least if they're talking to me, telegram if they really feel like it's encrypted. Certainly the people who are in the cities who are more well educated, if you use a VPN, you can get access to everything. They know what's going on. Do most people know what's going on? I mean, there was a massive brain drain in the first days of the invasion. There's this very moving piece that Masha Gessen wrote and I think it was the New Yorker about she was in Moscow, you know, on February 24th and she's like, and she watched as almost all of her friends packed up their whole lives in a bag, you know, within 48 hours and just took off. Or like it's over. And then when Putin started to mobilize for conscription, just recently, hundreds of thousands of draft aged men fled the country, which you can't really hide. I mean, so clearly people don't want to fight, you know, in the war. There's a lot of resentment against that. There's a lot of sense of if all those people fleeing the country were actually out on the streets protesting, then the thing would end. The Ukrainians are very resentful, obviously, but they're also resentful towards the Russian opposition because they feel like they didn't fight hard enough. I mean, that's the really wrenching thing for me. I mean, one of my friends said to me, this summer, a Bulgarian friend, he said, you know, Marci, like the Ukrainians have a right to condemn all Russians, including the opposition. The rest of us don't have that right. We're no braver than they are. And I, like, I'm very empathetic to my friends and the Russian opposition because I feel like I would be no braver. And most of them are much braver than I am. You know, they, you know, people have either gone to prison or they've gotten beaten up, you know, or they've had to flee the country. You know, it's one of those, it's like on the Maidan, what, what, where is that mystical moment where you get a critical mass and you hit the tipping point, right? Like if you get a few people on the streets, they beat everyone up and throw them into prison. You get a thousand people, they beat everyone up and throw them into prison. A hundred thousand. Well, once you've got a million, at some point something turns. But how you get that to happen and how you get a society that has been kind of demobilized that has been treated very, like that has been, it has this kind of ingrained passivity. And the most revealing thing to me about Russian, you know, society, if any kind of generalization can be made about a country of 144 million people. And obviously there's huge variation in that. So a sociologist friend, a social psychologist who is originally from Soviet Kiev, she's my generation. She studied in Petersburg and then has had her academic career in the German speaking world. And she was after the Maidan doing sociological interviews in Russia. She's a native Russian speaker. And she came back, she said, you know, one of her questions was, how do we prevent something like Stalinism, Stalinist terror from happening again? And when she came back, she's like, Marcy, not only did people not have an answer, they did not understand the question. She's like, for them, Stalinist terror was like, she's the term in German, naturgavalt. It was like a violent act of nature. It was like a tsunami, you know, or some kind of, you know, huge rainstorm. Like you can't stop the rain from coming. I mean, best case scenario, you have an umbrella in the closet. But what are you supposed to do? And I feel like that in some ways, for me, the key split between Russians and Ukrainians, if you can make any kind of generalization, is not language, it's not ethnicity. There are many Ukrainians who are of Russian ethnicity. You know, many Ukrainians who feel more comfortable speaking Russian. Many families that are split on both sides of the border. But there is, there has been, and especially in the past 30 years, there's been a very different kind of political culture. You know, and a developing sense of agency, you know, in Ukraine. And if you take it through a kind of post-colonial lens, you can say, well, there's a kind of master slave dialectic where the colonizing power, Russia, actually provoked an emergence of subjectivity on the part of the colonized. You know, where they themselves, the colonizers are still thinking of themselves as objects and not as subjects of history. But yeah, it's a great question.