 Thanks everybody for coming out. For those of you who have not been to one of these before, this is part of our Mary Teft-White Cultural Center talking in the library series, a series that was funded by an alumna from the University Mary Teft-White with the idea that we would have speakers from outside the campus community coming in, sharing their experiences, sharing their knowledge and hopefully inspiring people to other things in their life and to consider other worlds outside their own world. So histories are written by the colonizers, or so we often hear by the victors, a form of propaganda that often validates the assuming and consuming of a land and a culture, validating its aggression and justifying it, but also while developing one new historical narrative, it eradicates another, often a complete past lost to future generations. Sometimes this is done after the fact and sometimes, as I suspect we might hear today, it is part of a larger contemporaneous strategy, not so much a revision of history, but a rewriting of it that also intends to write the future. Through the talking in the library series, this term we have been focusing on propaganda and mis-induced disinformation as we have in the first year seminar. It is hard not to think about the calculated dismantling and reconstruction of one's own story by another person or state as being among the most heinous use of such tactics. Ones that in the end tell you that not only do you no longer exist, but that you never have existed. We are fortunate to have Liz Shefnaletkova here this afternoon to talk about how this is taking place in real time in Ukraine by the Russian propagandists. This is a long-standing civil society activist and researcher of higher education in Ukraine. Her research interests have focused on the academic profession in the post-Soviet state, a place where she has had long involvement beginning in 2008 as a student activist, later serving as one of the authors of the Ukrainian Higher Education Act, a consultant to various organizations on issues of educational reforms in Ukraine and as an evaluator for applicants for the Fulbite program and worldwide studies program in Ukraine. In 2014, after the Russian attacks on Crimea, Liz became involved with scholars at risk helping to monitor attacks in higher education and academic freedom in the region. Liz was in Ukraine when the war broke out, but able to leave in its early days and thankfully she and her husband are safe here in the U.S. where they currently live in St. Louis, something we may also learn more about. But the focus for today, Liz's talk, is the study of the challenges experienced by Ukrainian historians amid Russia's deliberate efforts to recast Ukrainian history, culture and identity to meet its political objectives and ambitions. And parenthetically, as Liz speaks, I would encourage you to think of questions you might have, as we will have time in the end for Q&A. So please welcome Liz Shekinly-Covat. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me and for your kind introduction. I'm going to hope to make it engaging, although maybe not necessarily a very familiar topic for many of you. I'm going to start by just telling you a little bit about myself. As Adam mentioned, I am Ukrainian as my whole family is. And I've been working on interviewing some of the Ukrainian historians as a part of my larger research project, which was very generously supported by the Ukrainian Educational Research Association. And at this time, particularly for Ukraine, this work is very enlightening because of many things that our country is going through. I've heard from Adam that some of you have been doing some of the digging about Ukraine and some presentations as a part of your assignments. I was wondering if anybody would be courageous enough to share just maybe one fact that you've learned that she thought was interesting, strange, surprising, anything that kind of caught your mind. Hey, my hand over there. The Orange Revolution protests and how that got the citizens they wanted, but then they are on that same president they fought for and they're kind of doing the opposite. Great. Great. So what was very surprising in English for them was if from the front of the project, they're starving up, they bring in their own style and it was such a tragedy. Yeah. A little more. Anybody else? Okay. Well, thank you very much for sharing. Yes. This was happened for 100 years after the creation. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. 100 years. Exactly. Yep. Yeah. The work didn't start with the actual invasions on the work that's going on for a few years. This sort of hadn't been, it just sort of being more attraction and attention in the past. Absolutely. You're absolutely correct. Thank you very much for sharing you all. We're going to talk about how the war started and the Orange Revolution and the topics such as a little more are very important parts of the conversation that we're having today. So I'm very delighted that that is something that, you know, kind of sparked your attention. I hope that's going to help keep you engaged. So I wanted to start by telling you a little bit more about my background. You can see right there on the map, the regular Google Maps screenshot, a little pin. That pin is located in a town called Starovsk. This is where I was born and raised. It's, you know, give or take 40, 50 miles, something like that from the Russian border. And as you can see on the map to your right, it is now occupied by the Russian troops. And it's very interesting because when I see Russian news or read, you know, the statements by Russian president, what I hear is I hear what they think about me. They think that because I speak Russian, as well as Ukrainian and English, I need to be protected from someone. I think that, you know, obviously, I just don't know, but I'm not real Ukrainian and Russian in my identity. And oftentimes what we can hear is that everything that is happening in Ukraine is a proxy war or Ukraine is a false state created by the West. Ukrainian government doesn't really make any decisions. So what I hear, I hear is that I have no agency. I hear that I don't influence anything. It's somebody in Washington and somebody else in Moscow who's going to decide who I am, what I am, where I come from and where I'm going. As you could imagine, that is not really the story that I want to hear. I don't want any of this to be a story of my life. Because as Adam mentioned, I was in Ukraine, for example, in 2014. I was on Euromaidan. I was organizing protests. I was working with other people who were there. We were all convinced that we have agency. We were all 100% convinced that we can decide where Ukraine is going as a state. And then of course, you know, when Russians have invaded Crimea and the Naskin-Luhansk region of Ukraine, we were told that we don't, right? So for many of us, you know, Russian disinformation and Russian propaganda is really not just about the propaganda overall, but oftentimes about our own identities. Because I honestly just don't think that speaking Russian makes me Russian, just like I don't think that speaking English makes me English. And when we think about why, you know, these narratives are coming up again and again, it is very important to understand that although nowadays we probably talk about disinformation and propaganda more than we have ever talked about it in the century at least, it hasn't been invented in the century. Disinformation has been very consistently applied by the Soviet Union in particular for a variety of reasons. And as I hope you will see throughout this presentation, what we are dealing with today is really a continuity of the events that have taken place, as you rightly mentioned, that started taking place over a hundred years ago, right? So I think that in order to kind of set the scene, I'm going to talk a little bit about this legacies of what I call Sovietization. And what I mean by Sovietization is I mean a bunch of different processes that have taken place after 1922 when the Soviet Union first occupied the territory of Ukraine. Because, as you rightfully mentioned, you know, 1918 Ukraine has declared independence from the Russian Empire was called Ukrainian People's Republic at the time. It had very little capacity internally and very little support externally to be able to really protect its independence in a way. And when the Soviet troops have taken over Ukraine, there were a lot of very interesting changes that had to happen in order for the Soviet Union to maintain its power over the years. I'm not saying that this is 100% unique to Ukraine. Don't think they take me wrong. A lot of these things have been happening in many other places, such as, for example, Baltic States after the Second World War, or Central Asian States. But I'm just more familiar with the Ukrainian context, so I'm going to be focusing on this. And the first thing to begin with, which provides us a very obvious example, you know, how what we see right now is a continuity of what has started 100 years ago as this way that disinformation plays into justification of aggression. And the way that this has been instrumentalized, for example, last century was by Stalin to justify invasion of Poland. So some of you may know from my history lesson in 1939, Stalin and Hitler signed a pact. Well, it was Molotov and Drebentrop who signed the pact on behalf of Stalin and Hitler to be clear. But their idea was basically that they're going to split Poland between the Soviet Union and Germany. And the way that Stalin has justified taking over Eastern Poland was by stating that this is not really Eastern Poland. Don't really believe that. This is Western Ukraine. So we're going to reunify Western Ukraine with Eastern Ukraine. And that was the justification for the Soviet troops to come into what was called Lvov at the time and other centers, which is oftentimes now part of Western Ukraine. There were many various, you know, cases like this throughout history. This is just one of the most obvious parallels that we can make between what is happening nowadays in Ukraine. One Russian leadership is saying that they're reunifying, you know, the Russian speaking population with other Russian speaking populations. And this is obviously not a new tactic. But the way to make this disinformation realistic is not just through the invention of these narratives. There's really a very kind of fascinating and complex dynamics behind how people and institutions are being transformed in order for this kind of disinformation to work. And one of the way that the Soviets have done it was through the, this thing we call binary thinking in academia. I'm sorry if I look at too technical. If I get too technical, you let me know, okay? But basically, what is binary thinking means? It's very easy to see the world in blank and white. There's no such thing as, you know, truth and half truth and quarter of a truth. The idea of the Soviet Union was that there's socialist scholarship and there's capitalist scholarship. So if you are producing your scholarship in Moscow or St. Petersburg or Kiev, and you're a communist, then your scholarship is superior because it's socialist. And if you are producing your scholarship somewhere else in Paris or, you know, some other place around the world, which is not communist but which is capitalist, then your scholarship is inferior because it's just capitalist scholarship. What that creates, that creates this very fascinating phenomenon when scholarship is judged not based on the quality of your argument but based on the ideological affiliation. And that automatically provides justification for censorship because that means, you know, that if one scholarship is inferior to the other, then whichever is superior can ignore whatever is inferior, right? So for example, in the Soviet Union, many of the Ukrainian scholars have not have access to any Western kind of publications, scholarly, but also even to pre-Soviet Ukrainian publications. So a lot of those academic works have been taken to the archives in Moscow and Leningrad at the time. And in order to get access to them, you had to get an approval from the Politburo of the Communist Party. And that would not, of course, be very easy to do, right? But the other thing that it also influences is the way that we ourselves think and the way that we are self frame our arguments, right? Because self censorship is a very big part of how the system is being maintained. So if you're functioning within this binary logic of socialist versus communist, black versus white, then you don't really want to use the arguments of the opposite side. Unless you want to criticize them. That was one of the ways in the Soviet Union you could get access to Western scholarship if you were really good at criticizing Western scholarship. And you could write a real big book on how somebody's capitalist scholarship is inferior. So it creates certain thinking patterns, right? It creates this kind of environment where you're constantly functioning within the dichotomy. We are constantly juxtapositioning things. You're constantly thinking in binary terms. And in that environment it's very hard to imagine, you know, the shades of gray in between the different radical sides. But then of course there are people who do not engage properly with that system. So in Ukraine we had thousands of intellectuals purged, for example, some people have been sent out of the country, some people have been murdered. And unfortunately, one of the things that people don't often talk about is that much of that has been possible because of the collaboration of other scholars with the communist regime. Oftentimes, especially in the 1930s, the way that purges have been happening was through some folks in the lower rank of academic profession wanting to make a career reporting on their supervisors or their senior colleagues. As there was this very special Soviet term, bourgeois nationalists. So that's a very dangerous term to be called in the Soviet Union. And then those people would, you know, be purged and their positions would get it open. But what those collaborators have not foreseen is that oftentimes those positions would not necessarily be taken by other scholars. Oftentimes, those positions could be taken by politically appropriate appointees, which essentially means that particularly in history, a lot of folks who came into academic profession who became historians and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic were not trained historians. They could have been absolutely fantastic, you know, communist party members, they could have been great workers on the collective farm. And getting a chance to become an academic, getting into academic training was a reward for their political loyalty. And what that does that creates an absolutely different system of incentives. When you come here to a university, you're probably used to your professors doing a lot of, you know, prior work in order to become experts in their fields. And when they come too close to you, you know that you can rely on what they know because they've done a lot of their personal research in order to teach you. Well, that is not the case when we talk about the former Soviet states. And this is very important because I'm just going to give you a hint of what's to come next. Those people who've been trained in the Soviet system. Most of the time have never left academic profession after the Soviet Union collapsed. The other couple of things, you know, that are important to remember here is also that communism, and especially the way it was implemented in the Soviet Union is very much about the collective and not about an individual. What that means is that there were whole systems created such as, you know, organizations of scholars that functioned in order to collectively suppress individual agency. Imagine you're in a class. Imagine you would hold that if somebody cheats in your class, you're all going to be held responsible. Obviously, you wouldn't want anybody to cheat right, you don't want to bear anybody's responsibility for anybody else's mistake. Well, that could be flipped in order to support political system. Basically, what collectives did in the Soviet Union, they ensured that if somebody steps out of the line, everybody who is in the same organization bears responsibility. So that way, peers, are you also your sensors. Also, you know, people who control you, you don't really have peers as your colleagues or peers as your potential partners. And after the Soviet Union collapsed. The question that was on everybody's mind is, if Ukraine is no longer a communist if Ukraine is no longer to tell it Harry and then how does the state go about regulating or doing anything really about academic freedom. And I have liberated here in quotes because what happened really was not that much of a liberation per se. What happened was that nobody just knew what to do next. And when people don't know what to do next. People tend to do exactly, you know, the opposite of what they used to do, or continue doing exactly the same which they used to do right. And this is what kind of happened in Ukraine and this is why, you know, the Ukrainian kind of context seems so weird right. We do a revolution once we get a president and then turns out we don't anymore. And we're like, you know, his opponent four years later. So in Ukrainian context. Normally there was no ideology formally, you know, the state was just a regular secular state, but the government said, we got to build the state. So scholars should help us build the state. Guess what that means. That means that from one opposite communism, people switch to a different opposite. We're not a communist state anymore, we're a nation state now. So in history, that has translated into people starting to rebrand themselves. Somebody who yesterday was a researcher of the history of the Communist Party. Today became the research of the history of Ukraine. A department that yesterday was a department of scientific materialism. I have no idea what that then is guys, just as confused as you are. Today, they're teaching world history or something along those lines, right. So names have changed very fast, but as you can imagine, changing content is not as easy as changing the name. And changing content is what scholars often talk about as deconstructing Soviet history or deconstructing Soviet legacy. I have a great quote here, this is exactly talking about followed more that we had mentioned before. Right, this is from one of my interviews, a person who in the 1988 year published a book called Socialist way of life of the Ukrainian Soviet peasantry and wrote that in 1932 and 1933 academic years, 96% of peasants and peasant children went to school. This is exactly the years when over four million Ukrainians started hunger. Imagine somebody wrote that 96% of them, percent of them went to school. And the same person, three years later, writes about holodomor as a genocide of the Ukrainian people, a radical form of changing your orientation as a scholar. And the reason that this happens, oftentimes, it's not because somebody has, you know, just kind of randomly realized that they were wrong their whole time. Oftentimes this happens because there's pressure, right. And in Ukrainian historical studies, there've been kind of three different directions where the pressure has been coming from, right. There's been this Soviet legacy that we've talked about quite a bit. And of course, you know, whoever has it wants to maintain the power influence that they have within the system. If you're a director of a research institute, you don't want to be fired, why do you want to be fired, right. So you're going to do whatever you can in order to maintain your influence. And there's, of course, sometimes a need to change your narrative for that. So you're going to, you know, some people have done that, some people have changed whatever they were talking about. But then there are also, of course, those who have truly, you know, themselves believe that there's a need to rejuvenate Ukrainian national project. And those people have very different perspectives. They are attempting to confront the Soviet legacy. They're attempting to confront the legacy of Russification. I don't know if you've heard that word before, but in very simple terms, you know, the policies of Kremlin for centuries have been to make Ukrainians speak Russian. And for many people, especially in larger cities, because in urban area, it's easier to homogenize people on the way. They had very limited knowledge of Ukrainian. And, of course, at the same time, you know, there's also this very large Western engagement, right, after the Soviet Union collapsed. In many instances, European countries and North American countries were very interested in engaging with the former Soviet states. In case of Ukraine, oftentimes this were people from the diaspora, right, people who have Ukrainian origins, Ukrainian background who wanted to engage. So that creates a whole different agenda for some part of the population, people who want to do reforms, people who want to change the way that things are run. And as you could imagine, these three really don't go along together very well. Right. There's really a lot of tension between those three things. And some of the tension is exactly along these lines of the dramatic thinking were things of black and white and academic freedom, which means that scholars and students should be free to explore different things. Right. They should be free to critically examine what is considered to be true. So who gets to choose the research topics in this context. Some of my interviewees have told me that when they were PhD students, when they were trying to pick what is their research going to be like, their academic advisors would tell them not to research specific topics because they were too politically sensitive. Right. And that is a certain legacy of self censorship that people were so used to doing in the Soviet Union. What theoretical and conceptual frameworks are you going to use in your research and teaching? Right. That's another question who gets to decide on this. Oftentimes, national government was very protective about deciding what gets taught, how it gets taught. And for example, you know, textbooks have been centrally chosen by the Ministry of Education, printed and sent out to schools and universities. This has changed dramatically, of course, after independence. And in history, a textbook by Professor Svetlana from Canada has become a basic textbook in history in the 90s for major Ukrainian universities. As you could potentially, you know, figure out from his last name, he's of Ukrainian origin and he's been interested in Ukrainian history for a long time. So, when we talk about these issues of methods of frameworks of, you know, topics, this is all about whether or not you have academic freedom, but not just academic freedom that is given to you by the institutions, but academic freedom that you give to yourself. Unfortunately, that is not always easy. Right. I have a different quote for you here from a young scholar who has shared how it was so confusing for his supervisors, for his senior colleagues. They were so used to self-censoring that they were constantly trying to figure out what is the state ideology now. What is the new dogma that they need to follow? What is the right narrative for them to talk about it? Coming back, for example, to the topic of Ho-Domor, there's this very interesting debate right now in Ukrainian historical community where some people say that we should be quoting 4 million as a number of victims and other people say we should be quoting 10 and a half million as a number of victims. And trust me, they don't get along with each other very well. They have different methodologies that they follow in calculating. So, this is one of the challenges for them to figure out because some of the scholars think that the bigger number they put on it, the more important the topic is going to become. Bless you. When you think about letting yourself have academic freedom, when you make that choice, I think it's important to acknowledge that that comes with the responsibility. We call that side of the responsibility oftentimes academic duty. And this is a concept that is not very much talked about. I hope you guys have heard about it. But we obviously often really enjoy talking about our freedoms, not so much about our responsibilities maybe. Because one of the challenges of the Ukrainian historical community has been that freedom has been interpreted in the absolute terms. What would that mean? That would mean that if I'm free, nobody can tell me what's right and wrong. If I think that 10 million is the right number, if you're telling me that's a wrong number, you're violating my academic freedom. And that has created this situation where there are competing narratives that are constantly exist in Ukrainian history. And those are not necessarily always critically examined. Oftentimes they're just left to be there, not to interfere with somebody else's academic freedom. But that is of course 100% irresponsible, right? Because that means that it's not just a number that may differ. That means that the whole kind of set of facts and events can be interpreted, not just from different perspectives, but with very different and oftentimes dangerous implications. So one of the ways to give an example of it is about whether or not you interpret the period of Ukrainian-Russian relationship as this mythical unity between Russia and Ukraine, which has been often used in Russian government's propaganda. Or do you interpret that as a form of occupation, colonization? And then if you talk about colonization, you know, who colonized who? That's a very complex discussion in the Ukrainian context because there's a lot of historians would argue Ukrainians themselves have been colonizers because after Russia has taken over, well, after Russian Empire has taken over the lands of the former Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Hanate, many of the Ukrainian peasants have moved from the north to the south in this way becoming the colonizers themselves. Right? So when the freedom is absolute, when there is no academic duty, then there is no way of discussing or no way of really trying to get to the some kind of formulation of what we think is true, because then we're in this kind of reality of, you know, nothing is true as everything is possible, as one famous author has said. Right? But what encourages people to take that responsibility? One of the things that I found which I thought was very interesting is that it was the crisis and the threat to the profession itself that it encourages people to take responsibility. And in case of Ukrainian historians, this has happened when several very high level, several scholars in high level position started saying things that didn't necessarily sound academically ethical. And it turned out that their dissertations have been plagiarized. It turned out that those comments could potentially discredit historians as a profession altogether in the Ukrainian context. And this is one the community of Ukrainian historians, so some of them have come together in order to protect the very legitimacy of their academic profession. So it seems that when people's overall careers are on the line, they're able to come together and to take that responsibility for what their field looks like and what is going on within their profession. Another existential threat, of course, is this massive disinformation about Ukrainian history that has been coming out of Russia. And as some of the Ukrainian historians have argued, this has changed the role of historians in Ukrainian context altogether. Because historians really turned from being this very academically focused people who work in the archives and write papers into much more publicly engaged than media savvy personas. Historians now need to talk to the public, some of them have started their own YouTube channels, because the level of Russian disinformation has gotten to the stage where it's become threatening for the overall social order more broadly. And of course, you know, that does not just, the word does not just encourage more academic duty, the word also restricts some of the academic freedom. And unfortunately, you know, what we see is that there are some very basic restrictions which you could probably easily kind of logically figure out. Right. So, for example, there are travel restrictions to the occupied territories, right. Well, it's not something that people probably want to do on a daily basis, but overall. There it is quite challenging for Ukrainian historians to get any access to the occupied territories. That means no access to the archives even where they're being saved. That means limited communications were called their colleagues. But there's also been a discussion of introducing more restrictions in Ukraine on using scholarship that has been published in Russia. By the Ukrainian historians because this has been seen as a way to reproduce Russian disinformation and Russian propaganda. And another issue that we are seeing, which is coming increasingly, you know, outside of the political domain, but more from the public domain, is that there are certain dominant narratives in the society. Public has certain opinions about how Ukraine history is, how Ukrainian history was, and they really don't like being challenged by academics. Right, so you can see a quote here about how certain Ukrainian nationalist organizations from the Second World War are perceived as fighters for Ukrainian independence and, you know, fighters against the Soviets. In public oftentimes really does not want to hear that any of this have committed any crimes because of the overall overarching positive narrative and the trauma that people are experiencing because of the ongoing war. One of the ways historians have responded to that is through the public projects. This is one example of a public engagement project that is run by Ukrainian historians it's called the League Bess from Russian liquidation of illiteracy it's a very Soviet term. And they publish articles, books, they do a lot of their work in Russian intentionally to be able to reach the other audiences. They lead public lectures they work with the Ukrainian Armed Forces and do various youth competitions and reconstructions to make history more interesting more engaging to get people to learn more of a history. But the problem with that kind of engagement is that from the perspective of academic profession, it's invisible. What I have here is a little chart from a research led by the colleagues out of Oxford that shows you how many papers, like how the district the district is the percentage distribution of papers published by Ukrainian scholars. And history is obviously in humanities, and you can see that in humanities the share of papers is close to zero. And what that means is that means that all of the scholars that we have in Ukraine and humanities are so engaged in public debates and helping the country to face you know this challenge of Russian disinformation that they really have minimum time to do their actual academic work. And that translates into the fact that there's very little research output on their end. Of course, some, some of them you know publish in Ukrainian, which is invisible to this chart because this is taken from out of Web of Science. But more broadly speaking, when historians are put into this position where there's public pressure for them to engage with the society more broadly. They face this tremendous choice, they could either do what society expects of them, or what their contracts and their bosses expect of them. And those are unfortunately in Ukraine right now, two very different things. I'll leave it at that and I ask if you guys have any questions or comments or if you want to, you know, share any thoughts. I think I was part of the presentation. I heard a story or a story on the internet about two brothers who went to Poland and then entered in for a chance to enter a program to go to the United States for about two years. It took them I think about two months or so to be drawn in. Do you think that's like a long time or do you think that's just like just about right. Honestly, I'm just not very familiar with that context or like, you know what kind of process that would engage require. So I don't think I can give you a good answer to that question I'm afraid. Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. They're here. But if that's just because of their like the different information that they have access to as they were being educated or there are other factors besides like the pressure. Would you clarify that I'm sorry I'm not sure about it. So the professor is not experts in the way. But you said they are here. Do you think there's anything like, do they, is there self awareness in that where they know that they're doing that. So, I guess, you know, the answer is it depends right scholarship would argue that. Oftentimes, you know, people do not see themselves as if they are, you know, lacking qualification in whatever field that they work in. So there's this colleague researcher out of Estonia who also worked for many years on the reform agenda in the post Soviet states. And his argument is that there's a certain, should I say, coming from the West towards the post Soviet states. So in the post Soviet context we're obviously very different from what you know you guys are experiencing our universities are very different the way you know information is discussed is very different the way that disparity has often been interpreted as deficiency. So oftentimes after the collapse of the Soviet Union, scholars from the West came to the post Soviet states and thought that, you know, oh, well your system is just not as good as ours, and you're just not as qualified as we are. But what researchers really argue is that that's not how faculty in the post Soviet states see themselves. They don't think that they're not qualified. They really don't think that their way of teaching is deficient. Although they still might lecture using the book from the 1957. It's an arbitrary number, you know, but we still do see those kind of situations where professors who have been in their position for decades, right. Because the, you know, faculty age overall in Ukraine is quite high up. I can't tell you for the universities it's obviously depends by the institution. Some scholars have argued that among researchers in the National Academy of Sciences the average age is 75. And the reason for that is because retirement benefits are very minimum in Ukraine. So scholars choose not to leave their job, even after their retirement age, and that essentially leads to this process of having a lot of professors who have been trained during the Soviet Union, who may not necessarily have access to other resources to change their approaches to still, you know, teaching what they were teaching or writing what they were writing. That is not the case across the board. Of course, there are a lot of scholars who have taken up the opportunity to, you know, develop the new research agenda or change their research agenda and done things very differently. But overall, unfortunately, because there is this phenomenon of what we call the culture of mediocrity, where, you know, there's 273 universities in Ukraine right now, I believe. Institutions of higher education, there can be colleges, there can be universities, but, you know, over 273. The admission process is not very competitive. And therefore, the kind of requirement, the teaching requirements and research requirements are not necessarily focused on kind of pursuing excellence and innovation and whatnot. Oftentimes, it's about just survival, right? So the universities have very little funding, so they're just trying to get by. Okay. I just have one more question. So I'm doing a project on Russian secret police, basically, this information by, you know, preventing scholars from writing and whatnot, back in the USSR. Do you have any sources that you could recommend me or just anything that you want from, instead of just, you know, typing at Google? So I think that, you know, there are a lot of interesting works that you can look into from the organizational perspective, you might want to look at the work of Alex Kurayev. He has written extensively about the experiences of Russian scholars in the Soviet Union, and he has written about the process of getting something approved to be published, right, how did it work with the one, this is the secret service inside of the universities, how did the whole process of getting things out looked like. But I think that you might, you know, also work now look into some other things I won't be able to tell you exact offers, but I think one of the interesting phenomenon with that we are seeing in this, you know, very strange form of Soviet Union is that there is really a lot of unofficial things, there are much better quality than the official things, right, so, for example, during the Soviet Union, one of the things that was very interesting was so called some is that, which means self published. So basically things that could be cleared, the things that have been censored, have been published illegally, and then copied and shared across the scholarly community. So some of those things, you know, maybe interesting in order to look into the things that are, and how things got out, even though you know they might have not been allowed to get out and officially. So this is a very hard question. I think that, you know, we as students and researchers can help to understand this much better, because this is one of the things that hasn't really been talked about a lot. All right. The overall idea of not taking responsibility is very popular in the former Soviet states, for one very simple reason, because the way the Soviet machinery worked. They were punished for their actions that did not align with whatever, you know, the Communist Party policy was at any given time. So that kind of, you know, translates into this undecisive mess of this lack of the ability to take responsibility. It's not necessarily something that can be easily fixed. Right. So, one of the things that could be addressed is of course, you know, how the overall academic system is regulated, for example. Right. So, these days, for example, you know, there are still processes that academics how to go through in order to get their syllabus approved in order to get their program plans approved. These are often still very prescriptive, very kind of Soviet style prescriptive things, which gives faculty very little space for that responsibility to begin with. Right. So one of the things that could be done is creating more of that space for responsibility and creating more of that space for horizontal engagement where, for example, syllabus are reviewed by other faculty members versus by somebody who is, you know, their boss. Right. So that could be one route to take another route to take could be, of course, thinking about ways that could build further capacity for responsibility. In other words, create environment where the people would be will need to take responsibility. Right. So, for example, one of the things that is being done right now is this transition. From so called I'm going to try and put in simple terms. Sorry about that. So for example, the way that the Soviet system controlled who gets to be a researcher and who doesn't. What was still in place in Ukraine for a couple of decades was that there were fixed committees of 20 ish people who would be so called responsible for deciding whether or not this or somebody's dissertation is of a good quality. What happens when you have a fixed committee of 20 people is that they cannot be all experts in whatever research topic that person is writing on, and those 20 people are not going to read the dissertation with the same level of accuracy. So you automatically put them in the position where some of them are responsibly going to do their job. And others are just going to be free writers, because they know that somebody else is going to read that work. And the way that Ukrainian government, for example, is trying to fix that is by saying, no, we're going to move into this very Western kind model, where you're going to have five people on your committee that those people are going to be experts in your field and they're all going to be required to Right. So they're intentionally putting the scholars in this position where they're supposed to take responsibility in a way, right. And I suppose, you know, over time, that could be one of the ways that that could take off, I hope. Yeah. So you said that you have done, you know, lots of work for academia and Ukraine. What would you say is the thing you're most proud of that you've done to help, you know, move forward academia on Ukraine. Well, I think it's a hard question for me to ask because I don't have an appropriate distance. I mean time different distance, you know, but from what it looks like right now. One of the things that I think has made the most impact was my efforts to have introduced virtual exchanges and collaborative online international learning to Ukrainian academia to put it simply. And it's the idea that you don't have to pack your bag and go abroad to have an international experience and to get involved with somebody who has a different perspective. I started doing it when I worked for American Councils for International Education would started doing training programs to train Ukrainian faculty to build partnership with their colleagues abroad. And to sync their courses with the courses of their colleagues abroad in a way that the students in two different classrooms in two different countries can have joint projects or join discussions, and that way get a little bit of a broader perspective on things. And that has helped a lot during COVID, because as you can imagine, nobody will travel anywhere, especially in Europe is they were very cautious about it. And that has helped a lot during the full scale invasion because male students and male faculty as you may have heard cannot leave the country oftentimes because of the martial law in Ukraine. There are male students in particular that is right now probably the most efficient way to get some sort of exposure internationally. And I think that matters because it exactly helps to challenge that kind of dogmatism that binary thinking you know that idea that the world is black and white. Because it's much harder to be prejudiced against somebody different when you met them when you talk to them and when you collaborated with them. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Two questions. You want them both with the same time. Whatever you think is best. Well, the first one is a question for your presentation that the area where you talked about the Soviet style. The Ukrainian scholars now are borrowing that to get information out. So you mentioned briefly that that they're also trying to reach for Russian speaking. So it's not just getting the right information to their own citizenry but also to the Russian citizen. So I'm afraid I'm not sure they want to reach Russian audience they want to reach Russian speaking audience that's how they frame it. You know it doesn't limit it to just Russian speaking Ukrainian audience. I think that they've been intending to make it a little bit broader is when you say Russian speaking that pretty much includes everybody you know who used to be a part of the Soviet Union. So the question is, I mean I've changed it a little bit but the same question is, what is the risk of that becoming propaganda, particularly with people who have had, you know, been under a system of propaganda. So deep embedded in, in the way they know the world, even if they are trying to. Yep. The risk. I mean the risk of that becoming. They call it the risk of becoming it counter propaganda. Right, which is just a fancy way of saying, we are at risk of creating propaganda of our own. And there is a very wide spectrum of thoughts on this matter, I'm afraid. It's, I doubt that Ukrainian historians will ever reach any kind of consensus around this issue, which may be a good thing because you know as long as debates are going, people kind of keep themselves in check. Some scholars argued that this is counter propaganda already that this is political that this is not scholarship and this historians should not engage in it. Others has argued that not engaging in addressing, you know, Russian messages, it's irresponsible is about creating an ivory tower pretending that academics are not related to the society where they belong. Considering that much of the, you know, Ukrainian higher education is used to be funded from the public money right from the state budget. A lot of squirrels or scores made an argument that if you only do your academic research if you don't give back to the society that why on earth are you even being funded by the state. So, there's no to polarizing views and there's everything in between pretty much with people saying that they experienced pressure sometimes they sometimes, you know, get messages from their leadership and their institutions. That some topics or some messages might have, you know, need to be formulated in a very specific way or some topics might need to be dealt with. They're conscious they're trying to be reflective they're trying to be self aware to avoid just creating a different kind of propaganda. It's not entirely possible. I don't think so I think that a lot of this discussions and you know, tensions that we see right now show that it's, it's not possible right so one of the very recent examples for example was that one. You may have seen this Ukraine's President Zelensky went to the Canadian Parliament he gave his speech at the Canadian Parliament, which resulted in a very, very big public discussion in Canada because one of the guests invited to that meeting in the parliament was a great warrior in the Waffen SS Galicia Division and he is ethnically Ukrainian obviously that was a Ukrainian SS division has that has been formed by the Nazis. And, of course, many people saw this as a certain indirect support of Nazism and anti Semitism, and they demanded that this has, you know, has to be people have to apologize. I think Canadian speaker of the Parliament eventually resigned, but this has not gone that easily in Ukraine in Ukraine. This has caused a lot of public discussions about, you know, that legacy of World War two, and what hasn't what hasn't been done. And unfortunately, some scholars who were courageous to, you know, put forward at more nuanced perspective, I would call it a more nuanced perspective because, you know, it's a complex topic. There is decision about Waffen SS by the Nuremberg Tribunal. This decision does not imply every single member of that particular division is responsible for the Holocaust. But that nuanced kind of perspective, unfortunately, is not always welcome. So some historians have taken that as an opportunity to attack that particular individual researcher to attack her publicly, you know, on mass media in social media. So there's obviously this tension and kind of danger, as you mentioned, of, you know, people, professional academics becoming sort of propagandists of a certain perspective. Yeah. So number two, I'm shifting my second question a little more related. As someone who grew up being you, as someone who grew up in a state that was at least had the tentacles of propaganda built into a battle. And for those of us here, who are living in a culture now that's, as you mentioned, there's so much conversational propaganda disinformation, and it becoming a factor of life here. What's your advice for how to, how to manage that, how to combat that, how to not succumb to it. I don't know if it's an entirely in advice, but I can tell you what I do. Every single time when I catch myself thinking that something is simple. I try to take a 10 seconds pause and think how it could be so much more nuanced and complicated than I actually think it is. Because we, you know, tend to prefer for things to be simple and clear and logical and well explainable in very simple terms preferably right. You know, like 15 seconds Instagram video or something that would be an ideal format right. The sad reality is the world doesn't work that way the sad reality is there's always nuance there's always more to the situation that what we can see because our perspective is limited. So we're able to step take a step back to give ourselves time to look into what a different perspective might look like right. That usually helps me right. And I don't know if it helps everybody but I feel like you know, this is something that I've learned to do over the time, because I haven't mentioned that but I honestly don't even know how many history books have changed when I went through school. I started school in 1997 and I completed school in 2007 so after the Orange Revolution that has been mentioned before, for example, and you know that the whole kind of understanding of history and things as they are have been changed several times during that period alone, so I'm kind of into talk about, you know, what I then studied in college and etc etc. So, I just think that, you know, a world is nuanced the world is complicated. And if we don't want to be victims to disinformation we have to accept that and stop looking for the simple answers and simple solutions, unless of course you know you're looking for an instruction to air fryer than it's somewhere right there. Thank you for being here and sharing all this information. Thank you for having me.